Chapter 1: What are the chilling statistics about road trips and missing persons?
130 million people take road trips every year. 15,400 of them are never seen again. Have you heard the story of the passenger that's been circulating online lately? A young couple set out on a van life trip, but a few nights in, they came across a brutal car accident on the side of the road. I'm not talking about a typical crash. Something about this was off.
And there's one detail that keeps coming up. The car they found had three deep scratches carved into the side. Not dents. Scratches.
Chapter 2: What unsettling details emerge from the couple's van life trip?
They stopped, they saw it, and then they left. But here's where things got strange. Not long after, creepy things start happening. They began to feel like they weren't alone in the van. Like something followed them from that road. People online have started connecting it to something they're calling the passenger.
Supposedly, it attaches itself to anyone who encounters it and marks their car with three scratches. And once that happens, it doesn't let go. If these reports are true, this couple didn't just witness something on that highway. They carried it with them. From Andre Overdahl, director of Autopsy of Jane Doe, comes Passenger. Only in theaters May 22nd. Get tickets now. 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. The horrors persist, but so do we, right? Have I said that before?
You know, I've been doing this for quite a while now, and sometimes I still feel like I'm new. Like I'm just some kid learning to walk again. Not that I was anywhere near being a kid when this all started, but still. I don't know if it's been moving this to the radio station or what that's made things feel different for me. I'm guessing it feels different for some of you too.
And not just those of you who've been around since those early days of Russian Sleep and Ted and Candle Cove and all those classics that I loved so much I just wanted to record and be a part of in some way. Then at some point things changed. Not bad change, just change, like all things do.
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Chapter 3: How does the concept of 'the passenger' connect to the couple's experience?
but sometimes they change more than we're ready to handle. I don't know. I'm sorry. Sometimes I wax poetic all alone in here. It just feels different than recording in my closet under the stairs at home. Sometimes it's like... It's like this isn't even my voice anymore. Okay, I'm sorry.
This is one of those moments where it would be good to be able to cut out bad takes instead of this stuff going out over the airwaves. Fortunately, I don't think that there's many ears out in Minnesota farmland listening to me at the moment. Anyway, let's get to this week's stories.
First up, after a devastating head injury leaves her memory fractured, a woman begins uncovering disturbing clues about her past, along with an unsettling connection to a hidden diary and a long-forgotten killer. From writer Jen Frankel and narrated by Alicia Atkins, Creepy presents What We Dig For.
You knew what you were by the time you could spell the word mendacious. You were a killer. Out in the back lot, out in the sun, the earth off-gases a potent smell of wet grass. I take the time to orient myself, to memorize the way back to the house. The doctor, what was her name, said that my memory will be erratic, temperamental even. I've learned what that means in practice.
I don't always know what I've done in the last few hours, and I don't always remember how to get where I want to go. If I stare hard at the dirt track leading back to the house through the sunflowers, though, I'll remember the way, at least for as long as I require to get home again.
The doctor also says that I'm lucky to have survived a catastrophic head injury with my personality more or less intact. She told me one of her patients woke up as a blank slate. She knew her name and retained her memories, but who she was, her personality, was just... gone. Her only choice was to wander through her life as a stranger to herself. For me, it's the memory.
Erratic and temperamental barely begins to describe it. I can cry at the drop of a hat, but I also seem to be more cautious, and that feels like an improvement. Any personality changes are strictly for the better. For the erratic part? Well, I know I share a birthday with Ted Bundy, but I had to look up who he was online.
Then I had to look him up again the next time his name popped into my head, because I'd forgotten I'd read it the first time. Which might have been the second or fiftieth time, for all I knew. Despite not being able to match the name to the person... I do, however, remember every detail about his crimes and his victims. I remember every one of their names.
The ones they had connected to him, at least. I can run down the list of victims as if I was reciting the alphabet. And it wasn't just him. The path is a little slippery where it starts to dip toward the creek, muddy with the viscosity of melted chocolate. I have to catch myself, and that's when I see the white lump in the underbush. Except for the misstep, I wouldn't have seen it.
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Chapter 4: What themes of memory and identity are explored in 'What We Dig For'?
I was a killer. I found the hidey-hole when I was nineteen and drunk, the family on vacation without me. I tripped over a loose board I'd never noticed before in the back hall just outside the living room. The offset of its corner was less than a centimeter, and if I'd been sober or just picking up my feet, I'd never have fallen. Funny, that. The way I have literally tripped into discoveries.
First the diary, and now the skull. It took me almost a week to find the board again, once I sobered up. My memory was always a little temperamental, like all my memories are now. These days I can't even dream of drinking because of the medication for my headaches, and what feels like drunkenness is just a combination of neurological damage and drug-induced brain fog.
Then I found the board not by tripping on it, but because it creaked where no creak had been before. My fall must have shifted it just enough to let it speak. I'd used first a kitchen knife, and then a baby crowbar from Dad's basement workshop to pry it up. I'm not even sure I know why I wanted to, just that the compulsion to do so was strong.
I noticed that this board, apparently alone of all its neighbors, had no nails holding it in place, just the tension of the other boards around it. Later, I'd learn that there was a way to step on it at just the right place to pop it up without any tools, but that was years later, when I owned the house myself. Under the board, in the space between the floor joist, was the diary.
It seemed wrong to take it anywhere. To my room, to the den, to the back lot by the creek where I went to get away from everyone else. So I sat against the wall and read. The script was a lot like my own. A midpoint between cursive and printing. No one does cursive anymore, but I'd learned it in the last days before its obsolescence.
Someone younger than I might not have been able to read the bloody thing. The way that analog clocks are an unreadable mystery to kids who grew up on digital time. The diary began, You knew who you were by the time you could spell mendacious. You were a killer. I was hooked. It took me weeks to digest the whole thing. I'd made a ritual out of turning its pages.
A series of rules to extend and fetishize the experience. One. Only lift the board when no one else is home. 2. Only read in natural light or by candlelight. No electricity can touch the pages. 3. Tell no one about the diary. 4. Always put it back just the way you found it that first day.
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Chapter 5: How does the protagonist's head injury affect her perception of reality?
His name was Bertrand, and he killed people. Maybe I should have been embarrassed by how much I loved the way he wrote. His facility with words sometimes made me forget the sense of them. He used long words I vaguely knew but often had to look up. 5. Make an inventory of unfamiliar terms, and look them up after the diary is replaced, and only then...
I increased my own vocabulary in imitation of him, thrilling when my teachers noticed my elevated prowess with the language, shamed when I received a piece back and couldn't remember what a particularly juicy term meant. Soon, I had Bertrand's killings to add to my catalogue of Bundy's crimes. Janie, in a frosty January. Jill, left by the banks of a river in another state.
Anwar, beaten to death just because, outside a roadhouse under a full moon. The diary was in second person, something I'd never seen done before. He described everything he did in detail, minute and exacting detail. But the style let him hold himself outside his deeds. He was an observer the same way I was.
And sometimes, I could all but feel him sitting next to me as I read, his breath in my ear. Read. Know. Remember. Remember. The skull is stubborn, or the earth holding it is jealous of losing it. I end up back at the house, remember the path, remember the direction, three times for different tools before I land on that same small crowbar I'd used all those years ago to remove the loose board.
I wave to the neighbor, his property just over an acre from ours, from mine. His face is a blur at this distance, but I can see him lift a hand in response. I guess if I actually get lost on the way back to the house, he might be able to help me. If I remember he exists at the seminal moment.
Back above the creek, I'm finally able to shift enough of the surrounding dirt, dislodging the roots that had grown through its eye sockets and ear holes, to remove it from its grave entirely. It's packed full of hardened earth, clay-like in texture. I have to take it back to the house with me cradled under one arm because my hands are full of tools that need returning to the basement.
On the porch, I sit it on a cinder block with the crown of it pointed down and begin to saturate the insides with water. I make new rules, the way I had more than a decade ago. 1. Never a flood until a trickle fails. 2. You will give up your secret in your own time. 3. This is not a task. It is a meditation on the meaning of life and death.
I was 28 when I came back to live at home when the markets crashed and I lost my job. More than that, I lost my career.
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Chapter 6: What is the significance of the hidden diary in the story?
And then I lost my desire to find another. Living with my parents was inconvenient and embarrassing. Despite the intervening years, returning to their roof and their rules ignited every rebellious teenage instinct I thought I'd grown past. We fought. All the time. I shouted at them, which was new. Before, I'd always hidden the way I felt and tried to blend into the sofa, my bed, the walls.
Both of my brothers and my elder sister returned too. And of course, Alicia, still the baby at 20, was still living at home while she went to school. It was Alicia that made me look at the diary with a new set of eyes. We'd been close as little girls. Almost a decade apart in ages, but temperamentally similar. We both liked to be alone, and we were okay being alone together.
The slope by the creek where the sun could keep us warm while we were hidden from sight of the house was our private club, where we would go with books or origami paper or markers, whatever had captured our current interest. Sometimes we remained alone. More often I'd arrive to find her there, or she'd show up while I was engrossed in something.
We were more than comfortable to be together in silence, which was a relief in a house with so many kids and so much chaos. When I returned as an adult, Alicia was more sullen, the way Mom had always told me I was at that age. I never recognized it in myself, but maybe you have to be on the outside to appreciate attitude.
She talked to me as if everything was an imposition or an inconvenience, and she had an annoying habit of speaking of herself in the third person. Somehow, that put me in mind of the diary for the first time in years. It was almost as hard to find a time when I was alone in the house as it had been when I was younger, but I waited for my chance.
The board still creaked to mark its place, and it still tilted up out of its cradle when I set my boot down in just the right way. I could see the book in the shadows of the recess. But I only crouched down at first, not reaching for it. A smell of mustiness rose out of the hidden space, and with it came memories. Of Bertrand, the enigmatic writer. Of the things he wrote about doing.
Of the oddness of the second-person structure of his entries. Of things I'd done, or meant to do. You must be extra careful tonight because she's seen you and noticed you watching her. So, when you commit to your plan, there is no room for a second attempt. If you don't finish it, she will tell someone who you are and what you tried to do. You can't leave your fate up to her discretion.
If she sees you at all tonight, she must be ended by the time you leave. I started writing my own diary in second person as well. The first page began, "'You went to the party in Lisa's dorm room tonight, intending to get laid, no matter who you displaced to get a man into your sheets.
You made sure that you not only looked and smelled amazing, but that you imbibed just enough before heading over to take off the edge of your scruples.' Not that you weren't committed, but you did want to give yourself every advantage, didn't you? My diary goaded me on to reckless behaviors. I see now. In a competition I created in my mind between me and Bertrand.
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Chapter 7: What horrific events unfold in 'Patient 313'?
I can't look down at them because of the brace around my neck, but when I rub my fingers together, they're sticky. No one else. I hear the cops say. Or maybe it's a question. It doesn't matter. When I wake up again in the hospital after the three weeks, I'm the only surviving member of my family. They found my diary while I was in the coma. Second person, like Bertrand's.
But they seemed to have very little doubt that I'd written it about my own actions. If you're capable of this, why wouldn't we believe that you caused the accident on purpose? Because, I tried to explain, I didn't hate my family. I didn't need to manipulate them. I didn't want anything from them at all. Just what they gave is a matter of course.
Yes, I got mad at them, but I didn't want them dead. Yes, I wrote horrible things about Alicia in the past few months, but I didn't want her dead either. It wasn't until the accident investigators had gone over the scene about a million times that the verdict came in. I was innocent of wrongdoing. Alicia, in the car behind, had rear-ended my vehicle on that cold, wet road. Why she had?
No one could say for sure. There was fog, but I didn't remember if it was bad at that moment. There were tire marks that indicated that one or both of us had used the brakes. No indication that she had accelerated to hit me from behind. And no evidence to suggest either of us had wanted for it to happen. The house was mine, free and clear. No mortgage.
There was no runaround to see when I popped up the loose board and took out Bertrand's diary. I couldn't stop hearing Alicia's voice enumerating the daily list of my faults, giving me a running commentary of my previous actions from the moment I passed through the door to my room to the moment I shut it in her face. Now, all I wanted was to hear her bitching at me, just to have her there.
She could have stored my memory, like a human external hard drive for what I didn't have the personal capacity to remember. Her voice was in my head when I sat down with my back against the wall, the way I used it all those years ago when I first found the diary and opened its cracked cover. And for the first time, I saw. This was not Bertrand's diary.
This was the diary of someone who was watching him. This was the diary of the man who knew Bertrand's secrets. The skull is clean now, and I'm so very curious about the patterning on the inside of it. I'd always thought of skulls as smooth and empty, but the texture of the interior is like an endless fingerprint.
All crenellations and channels where blood vessels used to feed the brain that once lived here. I don't know much about the history of this farmhouse before it came into the possession of my family. We bought it when I was around 13, so depending on when the diary had been written, Bertrand could still be alive. He could still be killing. Who are you? I asked the skull.
Before I realized that Bertrand was the subject of the diary, but hadn't written it himself, I would have thought it was one of the victims I'd read about in its pages. Now, I wonder if it could be the diarist himself. I take the skull to the sheriff's station that afternoon, derelict in the urgency I should have felt upon its discovery, and feeling stupid for having unearthed it.
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Chapter 8: What mysterious changes occur with the speckled rock in 'The Speckled Rock'?
I made sure that he knew if I acted strange to grab me and pull me along as needed. I learned quickly how he earned that name. He only ever responded to anything with grunts of affirmation or disagreement. We met at an entrance. The cameras went dead, and the hum of electric current fell silent.
After a thumbs up, we crossed into Lambda Sector and waited for the sun, since the darkness beyond the fence was far more dangerous than on our side. White flames bobbed and danced between the trunks of trees, as if there were a party of revelers with strange torches chasing each other through the woods. Sam looked at me and shook his head and pointed to the ground. Don't look, got it?
I said, and looked down at the gravel in front of me. I could still see them, though, in my periphery, and could hear the faint tinkling of chimes. Focusing on the stones, I tried to hum and tune it out, but even they were becoming peculiar. A water-smooth bit of quartz rolled a few inches, and smaller gray stones shifted, joined by another, and another.
Soon the stones were all shifting and changing to form something, a face. 313 grinned up at me with a smile made of gravel, and I heard the whispers of her voice. I kicked the stones, startling Sam a bit, and looked up at the pink sky. Her voice was all threats and promises of pain, but I tried my best to ignore them as the sun came up.
The flames receded into the woods, the sound of chimes going with them, and then Silent Sam and I began walking. We passed through the veil, neither of us flinching since we were both used to it. Sam watched me, though, used to folks falling over from the wave of vertigo that went with crossing it. He nodded, and we continued down the gravel road.
I knew where I was going and only needed him for protection and to help if I was hallucinating. The labs were half a mile within the first wall, the wall that used to mark the border of the sector. I wasn't sure why it expanded and didn't know if anyone knew. The anomalous activity inside the sector was the subject of more scientific interest than anything else in history until it expanded again.
We thought it was stable after the first two times it expanded in pretty close succession, but after ten years, it jumped a third time. That jump halted most of the research, but not all. Lives were lost, but people are still convinced that Lambda Sector holds miracles. I didn't know, especially now as 313 messed with my mind, trying to find ways for me to cause my death.
I couldn't blame her, though. She didn't have a good life. I read the files on 313, even though I wasn't supposed to. She was taken into custody after her parents were killed in front of her. Apparently, her father found out she had some kind of gift and used it to cheat at illegal poker. This made him lots of enemies, and they caught up to him.
But the men who killed her parents both ended up killing each other afterwards. This caught the attention of Dr. Isaac, who was a firm believer that humans were evolving. He tried to hone her powers through every method he could think of, but the only thing that worked was sensory deprivation. At first, it started with tanks. She could find people anywhere in the nation.
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