Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the purpose of the 'Wine & Dine' podcast episode?
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. Yep, no radio station today. Got some changes going on that I want to talk about real quick before getting into the stories, but first, a quick moment to welcome and thank new patrons. To see how you can get rewards like shoutouts and early commercial free access to episodes, please check out the donation tiers at patreon.com slash creepypod. Okay.
Some of you might have seen it mentioned on social media, and others might have seen on the podcast player that Creepy is no longer a part of the Bloody Disgusting Podcast Network. We're officially now with the new Be Afraid Podcast Network. As I would like to stay ahead of things and not let people speculate about this, there is no ill will between me and Bloody Disgusting.
I love Bloody Disgusting.
Chapter 2: What changes were announced regarding the podcast's network affiliation?
I did before we were with them, and I do today. There is no question the impact that BD has had on the horror community, and I'm grateful to have been a part of their company for these last eight years. Nothing has changed that. I still think Megan Navarro is the single best movie critic out there, someone whose opinion on horror I hold in the highest esteem.
That said, I had an opportunity to take on a new role, and I went with it. I have officially taken on the role as the head of podcasts for the Be Afraid Podcast Network, a part of Dread Central. This is an opportunity for me to work more behind the scenes on the business of podcasting, while still hosting and running Creepy. Sorry, can't get rid of me that easily.
Although I'm sure I'll still get people asking me if I'm leaving the show. This was an opportunity that I just couldn't pass up. And I'm so excited to bring what I've learned as a podcaster to dread and be afraid. To help grow their new network and do what I can to help other podcasters have the same amazing opportunities that I've been so fortunate to have.
I mean, you all have heard my journey through the years, right? It's out there and available to everybody. It's been a roller coaster, but it's been an amazing ride. And I really do hope more and more podcasters get to experience the same things I have. Which is also why I'm not at the radio station right now. I just don't have the time at the moment getting things up and running.
However, I did make a deal with the radio station, and I'm going to honor that. So I'll still be there on Wednesday nights as we keep going through the old archives. But honestly, I'm glad to be able to step away. I'm sure the last few weeks or more, my emotional state has seemed a bit erratic. And I'm fairly sure that working at the station has been a contributing factor.
But that's not your problem. And technically, it's just a problem for Wednesday, John.
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Chapter 3: What is the story behind 'Wine and Dine' by Bianca Riddle?
Sunday John, on the other hand, is just excited for this new phase of things. But first and foremost, my main focus is still this show and bringing you all the best stories we can. So please keep those submissions coming in, particularly stories from a male or gender neutral POV so the gents on the show don't get too lonely. Okay. Let's get to the things that started it all.
First up, a grocery shopper chronicles the slow unraveling of a world facing a food crisis, where shortages, misinformation, and everyday routines gradually transform the world around them. From writer Bianca Riddle, Creepy Presents, Wine and Dine. Iowa farmers have started implementing sawdust into their livestock's diet.
Alcohol adverts are still legally barred from showing actors drinking their product. Avian influenza outbreaks led to the slaughter of all inventory and the bleaching of walls. Pressure cooker recalled after claiming the lives of 13 across the US and one influencer in Beijing who built her brand around from scratch baking with Western kitchen appliances and other gadgets purchased abroad.
109 Days Before As a personal grocery shopper, you've become an expert in spotting pre-rot. The sign's white fur is about to sprout, trailing across the shoulders of strawberries, green hairs, black fuzz. The sweet and sour vapor of red meat as it over-oxidizes before the promise date stamped on the label. You can get a hint of it underneath the cellophane. Browning, graying, pungently raw.
Day in, day out. Fruits and vegetables softening, preparing to sit in their own wet. Bruises forming pockets of mush under thin rinds and skins. Tasty craters of expiration to cut around, eat around.
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Chapter 4: What themes are explored in 'The Bends' by PicklesPickles125?
You have a sensitivity to it now that almost puts you off food entirely. All the handled slime from packaged chicken, the vinegary starch from potatoes once they spoil. You think of a world in the distant future in which people of your profession have evolved beyond their stomachs. The non-eaters. The ones that feed from sunlight and nothing more. Do as the plants do.
The sci-fi fantasy goes nowhere. It's ridiculous. You think, food is so nasty I'll never touch it again. But you do. Quite often. When lunch rolls around, you're set. Can't overcome your body's need. September, by earth, wind, and fire, is playing as you survey the fatty white marbling of the porterhouse steaks on the shelves, behind the invisible cold curtain.
That dome of chilly air that keeps everything fresh. Last summer, when the afternoons hit record highs, regulars were pressing their hands to the back of the wet walls that shower the leafy produce to cool down. They congregated on the floor waiting for the next misting cycle.
The out-of-towners, and it's obvious who they are, didn't entirely gawk, but you could tell they were jealous of bringing their decorum with them, carrying it over state lines. You want to make sure your clients get the most out of their purchase, that they know, that you know their dollar needs to stretch. That they have a buffer of reasonable neglect.
Ingredients for dinner don't necessarily have to be cooked tonight. Life happens. Fatigue means things sit in the shopping bag, in one of the fridge drawers. You're not supposed to freeze meat twice. Despite that, you've done it numerous times. Let something thaw, realize you had been too ambitious, naively trusting in your morning's bandwidth to carry on well into the evening.
Would make spaghetti and meatballs another day. From the icebox to defrost in the microwave, back again. You have an emotional support drink that sits in the infancy to the shopping cart, swaddled to stay upright in the nest of your sweater. You pick it up now to sip and poke at the slush with your straw as you watch two men set up the seafood case.
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Chapter 5: How does the narrative of 'The Bends' unfold?
Level out the ice they shoveled before setting out stainless steel trays on the angled flatbed. Crab legs are the exception. They get buried in the ice chips like plants. Long, red succulents that smell like seawater and meat. The raw peeled shrimp, in a way, looks embryonic. Gummy clumps of indecent nakedness. Undone-ness and shameful vulnerability.
If you were a shrimp, you'd be humiliated to be seen without your shell. You'd be between the fingers of some well-dressed socialite saying, God, smother me in something and eat me fast. This is embarrassing and I'm cold. That's how your imagination goes. It passes the time, but it rarely makes you forget you're at work.
You always start with a, hate to ask so early, but you need a butcher or deli associate or baker to fulfill an order. It feels inconvenient to ask someone to do their job. Too soon to request an 8 o'clocker to perform their duties at 8.10. 8.15. Where's the fire? You have a sort of alliance with the workers, a divided loyalty between you and the sir or miss you're fetching for.
You understand the pound of roast beef being finely shaved won't be eaten this very hour, and you say as much to the employee while on their way to receiving tennis elbow from working the handle. The blade stays put. The meat gets pushed. The platform gets adjusted a notch when someone complains about the thickness of the cut.
You try not to think about being shrunk down, running from a blade so fine and sharp it looks like the waterline of a clear lake. Silver. No, blue. No, black. Exactly the right shade to hide something. A body. An aquatic monster. It's possible half of all intrusive thoughts are violent.
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Chapter 6: What are the key elements of 'Do Not Light This Candle' by Michael King?
You can't help but imagine mishaps that turn bloody or being on the receiving end of a horrible accident. 60% of household injuries happen in kitchens. A grocery store is just that, one massive kitchen. The building wakes up at 5, though the lights never go out. You can see them all the way from the terrace of your apartment up on the hill. A string of lights above the blooming dogwood.
The Savers Emporium. A proper daunting high-rise. A capitalism hole-suck. Some of the levels don't have windows. It creates time blindness, like arcades. Everyone's guilty of looking, self-conceiving to buy, losing an hour, in the checkout lane unlocking a card or moving money from one account to another. This place has everything.
You can indulge in a footbath on the fourth floor, have your circadian rhythm realigned on the tenth, and get your tires rotated in the parking lot. One-stop shop in Town Square. All that's missing is a chimney for a crematorium. Maybe an inferno to burn all the bags turned in for recycling. Because you don't believe they actually follow through. How can they when people keep mixing in garbage?
Sometimes you think of your shit intermingling with someone else's shit at the landfill. Maybe your trash has befriended another's trash.
Maybe they got married and you're a grandparent to a few ungrateful waste babies because the we of humanity still hasn't learned how to bust up mass, completely disappear it other than disintegrating it and tearing a hole in the ozone or blasting it into space. So occasionally you think about the inanimate objects growing sentience and multiplying as the humans do.
And sometimes you shut your brain up and you drink your $6 coffee. The data shows the pollution you personally have a hand in is non-existent to that of a billionaire. It must be sad for everyone. The first time a person realizes they're on a metaphorical hamster wheel or elliptical or trapped in an Escher painting.
The Sisyphean plight isn't exclusive to retail work, but you do have to wonder when you jump in to give a fellow shopper directions quicker than the employees. When this is your third lap around the store on a slow day and the evidence that you were here previously is marked by the shelf space you've created. The manager on the third level of this gilded cage goes by Mike.
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Chapter 7: What warnings are associated with the candle in 'Do Not Light This Candle'?
Not Michael, but sometimes Mike-man by the milk delivery guys. He has a dry, nihilistic sense of humor that you like, despite not always catching which parts are sarcasm. He's paid more, but he's another cog and he knows it. One time you caught him shopping on his day off, up on the 20th looking at putters, wearing a t-shirt that read, The world's on fire, shut up about it.
The script on the back saying, The world's on fire, ask me about it. Neither of you mentioned that the air this high up gets thin and influences your purchasing power. You left with a 12-pack of golf balls, never having played. Not having much to hit them with, other than the heat-colored flat back of a frying pan. Why did you get them?
More importantly, where did you put the receipt so you can return them? Secondhand unintentional learning. Rum pairs well with vanilla. Tomatoes can be fermented into wine. Blue laws and religious observance. Beer has more rights than wine or hard liquor. A response comes through as banter on the top of your phone screen.
You once again have to remind one of your customers that you can't purchase any wine today when they insist, any burgundy will do. Since you're in one of the Bible Belt states, you can't buy wine on Sundays. Alabama, Tennessee, Oklahoma, all dry states. No booze, do not pass go.
Get your nicotine fix, your sugar fix, your... I could be a millionaire from this one ticket and it'd be so different because I'd be nice to people and share my winnings fix. Your adrenaline fix. Go up to the 29th floor, where you're just barely conscious enough to sign the waiver to paraglide down to the garage. Ironically, there's a directory framed inside the door of each bathroom stall.
Every week there's a new floor gutted, replaced with a Coming Soon Liquor Barn sticker. There are now four sprinkled between 29 stories of thrifty, trendy places, like the all-leather Crafted Goods Shop, in a place that only sells lamps and light fixtures, and a yarn and textiles spot with dump bins that tempt you to stick your hands in, up to the elbows. Yak, llama, alpaca.
Tickles between your fingers like velvet spaghetti. If you ever started a garage band, maybe you'd call yourself that. Velvet spaghetti.
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Chapter 8: What are the final thoughts shared in this episode?
After your shift, when you have time to mill around, you buy a manual vegetable chopper. You could've sworn you already have one, but since you can't immediately recall where it lives in your kitchen, you get another. Besides, this model is slightly different. That, you're sure of.
You don't think about the summer you were at your nana's house and accidentally took the tip off your finger using hers. You don't think about how trace amounts of blood still live on the blade despite the dozens of vinegar baths since. You don't. 82 Days Before Most of us have to eat food, even if it's doing something to us. Is it fair that they can hand out poison?
There's a viral trend right now, letting ice cream sit out overnight, filming the bowl of sludge you find in the morning. There it is. Preservative oils and pig fat. A soggy clump of a thing. Dumpling adjacent, as opposed to milk soup. First water gate, now frozen dairy dessert gate. There's a margin of lie that's allowed within the nutrition chart.
Calories reduced in misleading percentages of fructose. Companies that substitute mango pieces in real fruit-peach-flavored yogurt to cut manufacturing costs. Take a trip abroad and you won't find red dye or ice cubes, and they cut back on red meat. More chickpeas and black bean salads. Also, you shouldn't drink from a water bottle you've left in a hot car. On and on. You know these things.
Know what's good and bad for you. But the options are limited. The system works against people. The organ battering stuff is what's cheap. You know that organic produce never looks spectacularly fresh because it decomposes on a natural timer. You've noticed there's no more organic. Sure, there's the packaging, which led to repackaging.
Caught glimpses of it from the tiny windows and the swinging doors that led to the backroom storage and walk-in cooler. Barry's moved from one plastic prison to another. Everyone's happy with what they believe they're paying for. You had a dream recently, involving a muddy farm, miles away from anything else. The type of place that implied you were completely alone.
Along the rows of crops, there were these metallic semicircles. Half hula hoops stabbed into the wet earth, fine mesh netting draped over their arcs. Nothing like a bomb shelter, but in your mind, it was sturdy enough. He lied still in the bed of frilled lettuce while every bug known to man blotted out the sun and chewed through the veil.
They had bloody mouths, both pincers and teeth, squared off like humans. The noise, the clacking of their tiny teeth that belonged to porcelain dolls. anatomically correct from the shoulders up, pin-sized nostril holes, hollow ear canals too, large enough for a curious spider to burrow.
You hear grasshoppers with their loud buzzing, a different kind of omen, a death rattle, a Geiger counter for something else. The social aspects. Maybe. Maybe. Mike's chipper today. He passes you on his morning store walk, makes a reference to a movie you're just old enough to get, but you admit you've never seen it. He rattles off a few more, testing your pop culture knowledge.
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