Some call it the Witching Hour, that deathly creep time, after midnight, between 3 and 4 a.m. when the world holds its breath. Some say it’s when spiritual energy peaks, a mockery of the holy trinity at 3:33 a.m., making it ripe for unholy rituals and ghostly visitations. So if you wake up suddenly around then... you're not alone. Something might have stirred you. Or someone… First, The Dead Eat Last Followed by its in the walls Finally in our last story, too late to turn back Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is the Witching Hour?
Hello, I'm Blair Bathory, and this is the Something Scary Podcast. Thank you so much for being here. Whether this is your first time or you're one of the brave souls who join us every week. Some call it the witching hour, that deathly time that creeps up after midnight, between 3 and 4 a.m., when the world holds its breath.
Some say it's when spiritual energy peaks, a mockery of the Holy Trinity at 3.33 a.m., making it ripe for unholy rituals and ghostly visitations. So if you wake up suddenly around them, you're not alone. something might have stirred you or someone. First, the dead eat, followed by it's in the walls. Finally, in our last story, too late to turn back.
And thanks again for following my journey in Cannes. I really appreciate everybody that watched on the live and kept engaged. I really appreciate it. It was a big opportunity for me and I'm really excited to see what happens next. So, wanna hear something scary? Dead Awake The dead don't need to eat, but sometimes they do anyway.
Chapter 2: What happens when the dead eat?
Like this story inspired by Lego Boy, based on a Hong Kong urban legend in honor of Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month. It happened in December of 1989. Late one night, a restaurant in Kowloon received a call for delivery. The customer ordered four portions of beef chow fun. That amount wasn't unusual. Maybe a late-night group of mahjong players or shift workers needing dinner.
Nothing seemed out of the ordinary. The kitchen rushed the order, and soon, the delivery man set out with the bags of steaming food. The address led them to an aging apartment complex tucked behind a wet market. When he reached the unit, he knocked once. Then again, no answer. He called out, louder this time, and pounded harder. After a long minute, the door creaked open, just an inch.
A hand, pale and slow, slid cash through the narrow gap. The customer's voice came through next, quiet and raspy. No face, no eye contact. Leave it by the door. Just the instructions and a lingering silence. The delivery man hesitated. Something felt strange. But the money was there, and the food was hot. He set the bag down and left without another word.
Back at the restaurant, the night wrapped up as usual. The boss counted the earnings before closing, verifying that everything matched the night's orders. But as he sorted through the bills, something stopped him cold. Mixed among the crisp Hong Kong banknotes was a piece of ghost money. Josh paper traditionally burned for the dead to spend in the afterlife.
It had the texture of cheap tissue and bore the face of the Jade Emperor. The boss frowned. Maybe one of the kitchen boys was playing a stupid prank. He gathered his staff and asked who'd slipped the funeral offering into the till, but none of them confessed. They looked just as confused as he felt, unwilling to make a scene. He tossed the ghost money aside and let it go.
The next night, the phone rang again. Same order, same voice. Four portions of beef chow fun. The delivery man reluctantly returned to the same apartment. The exact scenario repeated. No answer at first. Then a sliver of a door opening. Money sliding out. The whisper of, leave it there. This time, the delivery man studied cash more carefully. Real currency. Fresh bills.
He even held it under a streetlight before returning it to the restaurant. But when the boss counted the money that night, another piece of Josh paper stared up at him. Now he was angry. He called his staff again, demanded to know what was tampering with the register. But the delivery man swore that what he'd been handed was real money. The bills were crisp.
He even remembered the serial number starting with J5. The boss didn't believe in ghosts, but he wasn't stupid. Something was wrong. He made a decision. The next night, if that customer called again, he would deliver the food himself. And sure enough, the call came. Same order, same voice. The boss packed the food himself and went out into the cold night.
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Chapter 3: What is the story behind the ghost delivery?
When he reached the apartment, he tried to peek through the crack in the door. He could barely make out shadows, movement behind the frosted glass. But still, no one let him in. Just the same slow slide of money, the same raspy voice. "'Leave it.' He did, but not before inspecting the bills carefully.
This time, he set the money aside in a separate envelope and tucked it into his coat pocket, away from the rest of the restaurant's earnings. When the night ended, he took the envelope out and examined the contents again. The money had changed. The Hong Kong currency was gone, replaced with more ghost money, crinkled and faded, with ash smudges on the corners.
He had taken his eyes off of it all night. Now truly disturbed, the boss went to the police. The authorities accompanied him to the apartment the next morning. They knocked several times, no answer. One officer noted a foul smell drifting from the hallway. Eventually, they forced the door open. Inside, four corpses lay sprawled across the living room floor.
Each was in a different stage of decomposition. The air was thick with rot. Majan tiles were still arranged on the table, and a half-eaten meal, beef chow fun, sat cold nearby. The forensic team arrived quickly. Initial estimates put the time of death at over a week earlier, but something didn't add up. The bodies had undigested food in their stomachs that was no more than two days old.
Dead people don't eat. It got stranger. The ghost money the boss had brought in, it bore fingerprints from multiple people. The boss, the delivery man, and somehow the four deceased individuals. The restaurant's phone records confirmed the calls, but the apartment's line had been disconnected for over 10 days. There was no sign of an outgoing or incoming call from that unit.
Neighbors were stunned. None of them suspected anything was wrong. They swore they heard the clack and shuffle of mangjong tiles well into the night, every night. But they never heard any voices, no laughter, no footsteps. Just the mechanical rhythm of tiles being played by invisible hands. Word spread fast.
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Chapter 4: What do the police find in the apartment?
The police downplayed it, claiming it was likely a mix-up in time of death or evidence contamination. But the press got hold of it, and soon headlines screamed of ghost delivery on Temple Street and dead mahjong player while waiting for chow fun. The restaurant shut down a month later. No one wanted to eat there anymore, not after what happened.
The delivery man quit, moved to Canada, and refused to speak of it again. But in Hong Kong, the story lives on. Some say the souls of those four gamblers couldn't let go of the living world, not until they settled their last game. Others say the boss made a deal without knowing it. And the Josh paper was a payment meant not for food, but passage. Because the dead still get hungry.
And sometimes, they still remember your number. Would you deliver to the same address if you knew no one inside was alive? Like I mentioned at the top of this podcast, we are excited by the response of our Two Senate Horror Story Challenge. We decided last month during our weekly meeting that we should start doing some of these, and they are really fun.
And our head writer just knocked out one that day and lit the fuse. And now we're getting lots of them from all of you. To those of you who want to send one in, send it to me at somethingscaryatsnarl.com or you can drop them in the comments on Spotify or YouTube. What makes you scared? It's something I always think about. Is it the location, the sounds, the smells, or the time of day?
Do scary things happen when you are alone or with someone else? For me, it's the unknown and things that go bump in the night that we don't really know what it is. So I'm always thinking what's lurking in the shadows.
Können wir. Platt machen, ganz machen, neu machen, Mut machen, gut machen, besser machen?
Können wir.
Und Karriere machen?
Na klar, können wir. Was du aus deiner Zukunft auch machst. Wir können alles, was kommt. Das Handwerk.
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Chapter 5: Who keeps calling at 3:30 a.m.?
But she left that all behind, college, career, logic. Still, when the call came again, same time, same number, she answered. There was no voice at first, just breathing, deep weight, too close. Then, as if dragged through static, I found you. She hung up. The phone slipped from her hands, hit the carpet with a muffled thud. That morning, she searched. 3.30 a.m. Call unknown. Number breathing.
The forums were buried deep, their designs dated and patched together. One thread mentioned a series of calls that started the same way. Always 3.30. Always breathing. Always ending with that phrase. I found you. A woman in one post had replied, they keep calling until you speak back, until you say something personal. The thread's original poster hadn't logged in for years.
Their profile read, last active unknown. The next night, Veda turned off the Wi-Fi. She powered down the phone and left it on the kitchen counter. At 3.30 a.m., the house phone rang. There was no reason it should work. Her grandmother hadn't used it in years. The cord was frayed. The provider contact long cancelled. Still, it rang once, twice, a third time. She didn't answer.
On the fourth, it stopped. Silence returned. And then something stranger. A knock. But not on the front door. on her second floor bedroom window. No ledge, no tree nearby, just open air and something pressing gently against the glass as though testing it. Veda froze. The knock came again, calm, rhythmic, as though whatever was out there knew she was awake. She didn't look. She didn't move.
The next day, she went into the attic. She hadn't planned to. Something just pulled her there, among the dusty boxes and forgotten linens. She found an envelope marked Ishmael. Inside was a black and white photo of a boy with pale eyes, standing in front of the house. He looked about 13. On the back, in her grandmother's looping script, he sleepswalks sometimes.
Behind him, in the attic window above, a shape was barely visible. When she looked again, it wasn't there. Veda hadn't heard of him. When she asked her mother, their response was clipped. Ishmael was my uncle, her mother said. Disappeared when he was a kid. They thought he ran off. Your grandmother always said he was taken. By who? Her mother hesitated. She never said.
Just warned us, if you hear them at night, don't answer. The calls became nightly, even when the phone was off, even with no power. Sometimes it was the ring, other times, a voice from the dark corners of the room. Once again, it spoke through the vents. Each time, the message was the same.
Veda started sleeping with salt at her windows, a circle of chalk around her bed, old protections, old fears. The house didn't care. One night, the lights went out exactly 3.30. No flicker, just darkness. Her phone, still on the kitchen counter, lit up by itself. There was a photo displayed, blurry, grainy, a boy standing at her bedroom door, pale eyes, bare feet. Then the door creaked open.
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Chapter 6: Why does Veda feel watched in her grandparents' house?
The next morning, she called her cousin Mateo, a carpenter, asked him to reseal the attic, reinforce the windows, anything to make the house forget her. He agreed, but paused before hanging up. Tia always said the house was paper thin. He said, like the veil here never closed properly. Veda didn't ask what that meant. She knew.
The final night, she lit every candle she could find, set mirrors in every room, placed iron nails on the windowsills. She sat in bed and waited. She wouldn't sleep, wouldn't blink. At 3.29, Veda swore the mirror was breathing. fog blooming and vanishing on the glass. At 3.30, it cracked down the center, like something trying to come through. Her phone lit up, screen fractured but working.
A voicemail played without her touching it. It was breathing again. But this time, a second voice whispered beneath it, not to her, but about her.
She knows now. She saw me.
She said my name. Rita pressed her phone to her ear. Who are you? She whispered. A long pause. Then softly.
You called me.
She dropped the phone. It landed screen up. The call was still live. She stared. And for a moment, in the reflection on the cracked screen, she wasn't alone. When the police arrived two days later, the house was quiet. No signs of forced entry. No signs of struggle. Just a single, unlocked door to the attic. Its hinges creaking softly in the wind. Veda's phone sat on the nightstand.
One missed call. Free 30 a.m. There was a voicemail, two seconds long, breathing.
Then... Another one will answer.
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Chapter 7: What secrets does the attic hold?
One night, Nathan and I were woken up by Levi screaming. We looked over and saw a tail shadow of a woman with slicked back hair pulling him by the feet. He was kicking and crying. Half of his body lifted off the bed. The second our mom walked in, the shadow disappeared. But we know what we saw. There were strange things too.
Nathan once caught on camera going into the playroom, turning the TV to static, then falling asleep. He had no memory of it, and I remember waking up in the same room with no idea how I got there. We moved out a month later. Sometimes, I wonder what would have happened if we had stayed a little longer. Sometimes it's not the place that's cursed, but the choice you make when you get there.
It started with a dumb push notification. Warning. Approaching an active spiritual site. Proceed with caution. Lewis snorted. Another clout-chasing horror app. His cousin Mateo had sent it over last week with a skull emoji. And a bro tried this out at night. LOL. Supposedly, it used GPS to detect Latin American legends. Just like La La Lona, El Cuca, and of course, La Ma La Roja. That one stuck.
The name curled around something in his memory, half-formed and sour. His abuela used to mutter it after too much wine, fingers twitching at her rosary. If you see her at the crossroads, don't stop. Don't look. Just keep driving. Luis had laughed then. Now he was alone. Halfway down a forgotten road outside Albuquerque, the city lights long behind him.
The desert stretched wide and empty, too quiet for midnight. The sky was too big, the kind that made you feel like something could drop out of it and nobody would hear you scream. Another ping. You are near La Mala Roja. Crossroads ahead. Do not stop.
He turned the volume down and tried not to glance at the map, but the GPS had started acting weird, recalculating constantly, spinning him in loops. The delivery address kept changing coordinates. All roads led here. Then up ahead he saw it. A fork in the road. Old pavement, cracked and uneven. flaked by dead brush and rusted fencing. No lights, no signs, and in the center of the fork, a shape.
Human, maybe, still as a scarecrow, wrapped in black, with hair so long it looked like it was being held down by gravity. Louis slowed without realizing. He blinked. She vanished. Then something brushed his window, too fast to see, too real to ignore. He flinched back. She was there, outside, inches from him.
He couldn't see her face, but he felt her watching, felt his stomach drop, cold fingers tugged behind his eyes. He hit the brakes, the car jerked sideways, tires biting gravel. When he looked again, gone. But then came the sound. Click. The back seat light turned on. She was inside. Click. Lewis scrambled out of the car, leaving the engine running, heart smashing against his ribs.
He ran without direction, lungs aching, rocks biting through his sneakers. He didn't stop until he saw headlights, faint and flickering like a dying candle. An old man in a dusty Ford opened the passenger door without a word. Luis got in, shaking. Neither of them spoke. The radio hissed static. The dashboard smelled like cigarettes and dried flowers.
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