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Chapter 1: What is the premise of 'Some Body to Love'?
No. This is Creepy. A podcast dedicated to sharing the most famous, chilling, and disturbing creepypastas and urban legends in the world. Whether these stories truly happened or are simply fabrications is for you to decide. These stories may contain graphic depictions of violence and explicit language. Listener discretion is advised.
Hey everyone. Before we get to today's stories, I just wanted to send out a quick thank you to all the writers who saw our story submission call on social media and sent in stories. The call was for male POV stories, as we only have a few left. And before that, it was for female POV, so it makes sense we go back and forth like that.
Just as a reminder, our submissions are always open for male or female POV, and we love when the POV is gender neutral so any of our narrators can read the stories. And thank you to those of you who have already been sending in 31 days of horror stories. The sooner we can get those in, the better.
And I do want to make sure that any writers out there who haven't had luck getting their stories accepted don't get too down on themselves. I know it doesn't feel great to have your story passed on, but we just can't accept all stories, even if we'd love to be able to take everything that gets sent our way.
Creepypod.com slash submissions outlines what we're looking for, and even then, sometimes it just doesn't seem like a good fit. That's not a knock on the writing. It's just if we think the story fits with how we do the show. So please, keep writing and submitting.
I still very clearly remember how it felt to get my first story accepted from No Sleep, and it still remains one of my favorite parts of podcasting, getting to pass that feeling on to others. You got this. Oh, and a quick shout out to No Sleep, who just passed their 15th anniversary.
I think that I've talked them up enough in the past, but if not, and you haven't listened to No Sleep, come on, go check them out. Okay, enough of this old and improved John who's positive instead of, well, what I have been. Let's get on with horror.
First up, in a strange world where people can leave their skin behind, a lonely abandoned skin sets out on a desperate journey to find a body that will truly love and need it. From writer Heidi Hinda Chadwick, narrated by Risa Montanez, Creepy Presents, Somebody to Love.
Getting into and out of your skin was something all children had to learn at some point. Alongside learning how to use the toilet, tie your shoelaces, and blow your nose, it was all part of growing up. To begin, you struggled. You were clumsy. You got your arms stuck. Your flesh got all twisted and out of shape. It hurt, too.
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Chapter 2: What happens in the story 'Gooseflesh'?
Sure, there was room for refining. but it was adequate enough. Still, there were those children who hadn't quite mastered it yet. The same ones who would accidentally wet themselves during class, or who looked dirty and smelled bad, their clothes old and frayed and ill-fitting. The other kids cruelly pointing at them, sticking gum in their hair and laughing.
In high school, there were other matters to contend with, such as puberty and breasts and hairs and hormones and pimples. And sex. If you were lucky, you had parents who educated you with the basic knowledge of how you slipped off your skin in order to be intimate with someone else.
They would teach this without emotion, factual and practical, not taking into account the slithering of self-consciousness or the squirm of wanting to be desired by the other. The first time you had been intimate with another, you hadn't known what you were doing. Neither of you did.
You fumbled and groped and when it came to stripping off skins, you were shy and horny and did so in such a hurry that you'd made a mess. There was blood everywhere, handprints, footprints and butt prints all over the cream furnishings at his house.
The next day, you were both shamed for making such a scene and, as punishment, had to scrub and clean and wash away the evidence of your evening, right in front of angry parents. What you didn't know was that these adults remembered their own first times, and how awkward they were, too. How much of a mess they had made.
Though some would say that that's what dark blankets are for, or that's why you should put down plastic sheeting first, or that's why doing it outside in the woods was preferable. But no one said any of this to you. Instead, they just watched you clean up with pursed lips. By the time you reached adulthood, you had it sussed.
And besides, there were other issues to contend with, such as making money to pay the bitch of a landlady who never repaired the leaking tap, or your brother who couldn't look after himself properly and was living in that place with the bars in the windows and nurses and visiting hours.
Also, the groping hands of your boss that you spent far too much time avoiding while working 9-6 at the job that you were very indifferent to. But you had a secret, something that made all of this daily heaviness fade away into insignificance altogether. At night, when all was quiet and everyone was sleeping, you would slip out of your skin and go running.
Along the streets, under orange lamps, weaving in and out of shadows. Through the park, feeling the soil and the grass against the bare soles of your feet. Across the roofs of buildings, leaping for a moment, suspended in the space between, before the wind found its way through the fibers on your back. You weren't meant to do this, though. To slip out of your skin for no reason.
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Chapter 3: What is the narrative arc of 'Reborn'?
A body it could cling to and know that it was safe. A body that wanted it, unlike its current owner. The skin dragged itself around the bushes that hugged the side of the house. Upon occasion it could feel bits of itself being caught upon a branch, and as it moved, it could feel little slithers of its flesh left hanging from these places.
No mind, it thought, its intent becoming more defined as it approached a window that was not fully closed. Perhaps it was meant to be shut, as it was only open a crack. Maybe it was to air the kitchen, as that was the room the skin saw as it peered through the glass.
Though it was barely open, without bones or muscle, the skin found that it was able to squeeze itself through the opening, landing with a thud, which sounded like raw meat being dropped into the large porcelain kitchen sink. All was quiet in the house. The clock on the oven flashed 217 in neon green, illuminating the skin as it pulled itself over the edge of the sink and onto the counter.
It took a few moments to draw itself back into shape. One arm was longer than the other. Bits of flesh on its torso had been pulled and cut, and its edges were frayed and raw. It was tired from such exertions and for a brief moment considered going back and waiting for you to return. But it had come too far now, and the ache for a body to be loved by was stronger.
It dragged itself towards the stairs. The carpet, a cream-colored short pile. As the skin pulled itself up the stairs, the carpet acted like a sandpaper upon its flesh. It hurt the skin, and this time the sting of its tears fell on each step until it reached the landing where it paused.
If it had a heart to wrap and protect, then it was certain that that heart would be beating very fast right now. But it didn't. Not yet, that is. It chose to enter the first room that it came to because the door was slightly ajar. In the shadows of the dark, with only an orange light from the street illuminating the occupant, the skin could see that the bed held a sleeping person.
It crept nearer, until it could lift itself to take a closer look. The child was about eight or nine years old, sleeping peacefully, hugging a large gray and pink rabbit whose eyes were large and shiny and staring directly at the skin. With panic, the skin fell to the ground and dragged itself under the child's bed.
It lay there for a time, even considering sleeping here for the night, for the room was cozy and it was tired, and the child sleeping above made it feel safe. But it remembered why it was there, and pulled itself back out from under the bed, and with a lingering glance towards the sleeping child, left the room. That body was too small.
And besides, the bunny was never going to let anyone as close to the kid as it was. The skin needed to find a bigger body that didn't have anything keeping guard, which is exactly what it found in the next room it went into. The girl in the bed was older. It could tell that by the length of her in the bed.
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Chapter 4: How does the story 'Some Body to Love' explore themes of identity?
You were joking, surely. It wasn't too long after that that you began your nighttime running. The skin decided that this was the perfect body for it to have and to hold forever. You can be damned, it thought, if you don't appreciate me. This will be my home now. By now, the moon was fat and full and visible, lighting up the room so that the skin got a clearer view of the sleeping girl.
It felt warm towards her already. An open closet caught its eye, just as it heard the sounds of footsteps followed by a yawn and a door being opened and closed. The skin dragged itself towards the closet, which was stuffed full of clothes and boxes and teddies, and squeezed itself into a space between two large backs. These felt soft, and it wasn't long before the skin fell asleep.
The girl's alarm went off at 6.30. With such swift movement, that meant she'd done this many times before, she'd hit the snooze button. This happened three more times before a voice broke the repetition with a yell that they were leaving in ten, and to get your ass up now.
The girl did so, though her eyes were not yet fully open, and she grabbed the clothes that were piled on the chair and left the room. But the skin was hungry.
It hadn't occurred to it that once the dawn rose and you had returned from your run, all breath and bright eyed and muscles pumped and visibly pounding with fresh oxygenated blood, that the first thing you did after slipping back into you was eat. The skin didn't mind that it could feel the remnants of sweat and the particles of dust and the night coating you.
For in that instance, as soon as you ate, it felt revived once again. Safe, too. That you hadn't forsaken it forever. That you and it belonged together. That you were needed, cared for, and loved. The skin lay in its crumpled heap in the closet for another hour, making certain that the house was empty of life.
It crawled its way out, leaving a trail of pus along the pile of stuffed animals that were now to be spending the rest of their very long lives in the darkness of that closet. The girl was too old to play with these anymore, and yet she was too young to release her attachment to them just yet. The skin felt faint.
If you were to catch sight of it, you would be alarmed to see it looking peaky and pale and with a slight dampness to it. It looked clammy, feverish. Promising itself that it would come back tonight and claim the girl's body for itself, the skin knew that it needed to be fed. It needed a home. And so it set off once more. This time, it was trickier.
For a start, it was the daylight hours, and people were walking on the sidewalks and driving their cars through the streets and hanging out chatting with each other. It looked impossible for the skin to maneuver in any way without being seen. For a while, it stayed behind the large bushes in the front garden of the house, watching.
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Chapter 5: How does 'Gooseflesh' challenge perceptions of nature?
The skin felt sweaty and clammy and itched in all sorts of places. It realized, too, that it couldn't think straight. Its mind was hazy. It felt like it was still dreaming even though its eyes were now open and staring up at the gray sky above. Its lips were dry, and its mouth felt strange and furry and tasted unpleasant as if the man hadn't brushed his teeth for a very long time.
It thought of you, and how meticulous you were with caring for it. How you would brush your teeth and apply all sorts of magical potions and lotions onto you, ones that felt so good to feel. You made the skin feel loved. This body didn't seem to love you whatsoever. And with that thought, it started to panic.
The man had brought his hands up to the sky, turning each slowly back and forth, looking at the skin, all taut and so tight that it had become translucent, so much that you could see the bones and muscles beneath. It was beautiful in a way, all purples and lilacs and ivory. And for a brief moment, it appeared that the man thought so too.
That was until the skin felt its mouth begin to open wide and an awful sound came out of it. The man stood up, or at least he tried to. Because the skin was so tight, and smaller than he was. It had contorted the shape of him, and he wasn't able to stand properly.
He fell back down and curled himself into a ball, and the skin hurt itself making a deep sobbing sound, not unlike that of an injured animal. This wasn't working. and the skin really was not enjoying being with this body. It wasn't the loving embrace and feeling of comfort that it was after. This wasn't the right body after all.
It began to slip off the man, who by this point was rocking on the ground. As the skin uncovered itself from his face and slipped off his body, leaving behind a trail of pus and streaks of blood, he became silent. It was too much for the man. He froze, which made the skin's job easier. Once it had slipped completely off of the man's body, it lay beside him.
The man's eyes were so wide that all the skin could see was a pale yellow where his white should have been, staring at the skin in pure horror. It wasn't surprising, really. The skin was not in a good state. It had been stretched, its insides scratched and sore. It didn't even really look like skin anymore. More of a misshapen lump of its former self. The skin, for its part, felt sad.
It imagined you driving by and picking it up lovingly from the side of the street and placing it back over your body with words that soothed, with promises to never leave you again. But this was not going to happen anytime soon. Besides, no one knew where it was, including the skin itself.
Yet it knew that it did have to get out of there for it could hear the other two men beginning to murmur and call out the man's name. The man, who by now, was completely paralyzed on the spot. For a moment, the skin feared that he was dead. But no. He would blink every now and then, and there was a spittle forming a trail down from the side of his mouth and onto his beard.
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Chapter 6: How does 'Reborn' depict the afterlife experience?
And next, a reclusive retiree investigating a strange winged corpse near her mountain cabin uncovers a hidden species whose existence challenges everything she believes about identity, transformation, and the natural world. From writer Jen Melatoris and narrated by Megan McDuffie, Creepy Presents Goose Flash
In a ditch where the road met the dirt drive up to the cabin, an impossible corpse lay half-eaten and shining with frost. Naked femurs threaded through the sledge clumps, but much of the body was intact and lightly dusted with last night's snow. The face was buried in mud, dark hair matted over bare, death-blue flesh and appendages rather like wings.
Human arms with gangrene black fingers and a thick coating of flight feathers, the dark brown of a Canadian goose, scaled up to human size. Dad loved that cryptid shit, and I could imagine one of his society journals crowing about the Goose Man of Whistling Gap. I nudged the body with a muddy boot, expecting plaster or feathers to flake away, but the corpse remained as it was.
I crouched beside it for a moment, trying to find the seams that would prove it was a hoax and weighing whether to call the cops or animal control. Penny didn't like it. She snuffled once at a darkened hand, grumbled a low bark at me, and then trotted away, waiting for me to follow her. That decided it. No need to break its peace with the stomping feet of authorities of any flavor.
Let it lie, the best policy in the Appalachian backwoods. I whistled to Penny and set off across the snowy slope toward the forest opposite. Penny sprinted on ahead, eager for a smell and a dig and a piss. Deer season had long ended, and the spring hunt would not start until April, so Penny and I refilled the deer feeders and then went for a hike.
Dad had taught me everything he knew of deer hunting. "'Consolation for the son he had not gotten, unsure what else to do with the daughter he had. "'And all the while, I could not explain what I thought I might be to him or Mom. "'These were things I wanted to be for both of them, and things I wanted to be for myself that always seemed incompatible with that vision.
"'In the solitude of the cabin, my what no longer haunted me so closely.' Penny and I only visited the house sporadically until I hit retirement, when I decided I would rather keep Grandpa's old, rotting cabin than my tidy city house. Two weeks after the movers had dropped off the last boxes, the place finally felt like home.
Town was a twenty-minute drive into the valley, and the closest neighbor was a mile off. I could live without the pressure of others' eyes, and I pulled down every mirror that reminded me my body was an unsolvable alien thing. All I needed to do, when closing night threatened to throw my face back off the windows, was draw the curtains. I made new ones myself on Mom's old sewing machine.
After dinner, I tongued at the hoax corpse's possible flaws like stuck food. I couldn't believe it was real, but a dreamy part of me wanted such a hybrid body to be possible. To set my mind at ease, I excavated boxes of Dad's stuff from the disorganized piles of basement detritus and hauled them into the kitchen.
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Chapter 7: What are the overarching themes of this episode?
The stairs tumbled away below me, and I screamed as my hip cracked on stone. The beast stumbled and skidded past me, yelping as it crashed down the stairs. Limping, I ran. Bones crunched beneath my boots. When I heard the monster rise again, I veered out of its path. The air was freezing, tearing my throat and stabbing my bare skin.
Then my eyes, starved so entirely of light, glimpsed a whisper of moonbeams. I followed that blue glow, weaving through a cavern filled with hoofbeats and wingbeats and the baying of mountain geese. I tripped on a deer carcass and put my hand through its ribcage as I caught myself, but Bone splinters speared my palm, but I could only roll off it and away.
Oh, suddenly, before the door, I threw myself into the passage and left the shrieking chaos behind. As I sprinted back to where loyal, obedient Penny awaited me, I could think only of that strange god and its eggs. By the time we brought the goose corpse home, I knew what I planned to do. Dad had taught me how to mount deer heads.
Several that we had made together still watched me from their places on the wall. I couldn't have Penny around, though, and she deserved better. I called a neighbor up on the ridge who had known Dad. She has a Christmas tree farm with lots of space to run. I said I needed to go to the hospital in the city and asked if she could take Penny until I got back.
I gave her 500 bucks and a list of Penny's commands. It would be a good place for my sweet girl to grow old, and I didn't cry until I had closed the cabin door behind them. Then I worked. I stored the corpse in the barn, where the cold would keep it just this side of freezing. To maintain the skin's freshness, I would flay it in chunks as I needed it. I started with the shoulders.
The elation that sparked in my blood as I worked my knife underneath the first feather follicles was so intense I felt high. I had many years of practice on deer, and the skin parted smoothly from its flesh. I stared at those sheets, lightly oozing blood thickened by cold, with a pride never felt before. The first cuts from my own body were much worse.
I had curved needles, thread, and an expired bottle of Vicodin, but I could not have prepared for the pain. My first cut, tracing the curvature of my shoulder blade, was wobbly and uneven. I could barely twist my arms around enough to reach my back and had to watch through a system of reflections as my blood splashed the bathroom tiles. Drawing my skin from my body was relief and agony.
With every strip of slippery hide that I cut, I freed myself a little more from the prison of a shape I hated. But I struggled to focus and even to maintain my grip. I made it through half of one shoulder before I passed out from pain and blood loss. When I woke, I set the knife to myself again.
I blacked out twice more before I even began sewing, but I needed to be able to knit bare flesh to bare flesh. so that when it healed, the skin would be truly mine. I lost all time. Several nights came and went, and I grew hungry and ate several times more. Perhaps it was a week. When I was done, I took as many pain meds as I had in the house and slept.
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Chapter 8: How can listeners submit their own stories to this podcast?
As I pass the shop fronts that line our village's main street, I look at each one but see no reflection. I am a mere shadow, and I will soon be home. I hope that my family still miss me, as I have missed them. The images of my wife's loving smile and the sweet, innocent face of my daughter draw me forward step by step
And as I reach the front door to our cottage, I know we will finally be together again. Forever.
For more information on this podcast, including how to submit your own story for consideration, please visit creepypod.com. You can also follow us at CreepyPod on social media and YouTube. All stories told on this podcast are done so through Creative Commons Sharealike licensing or with written consent from the authors.
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