I Was Forced to Shovel Snow Alone Next to an Abandoned House at Christmastime

On Christmas Eve, a teenager shoveling snow beside an abandoned house with a deadly history becomes convinced that Death himself is watching from its darkened windows—and waiting to collect.

Ho ho ho, kids! If you like the stories Santa is telling, tell your friends and family about the Spooky Santa podcast so they can listen too! 

STORY AND MUSIC CREDITS/SOURCES…
”The Carol Singers”: https://tinyurl.com/s978sjj
“The Sock Puppet”: https://tinyurl.com/wgrpaog
“The Tell-Tale Scarf” by Judith Graves: https://tinyurl.com/wkp7uu6
All music used with permission of the artists. Spooky Santa theme by Midnight Syndicate (http://amzn.to/2BYCoXZ). All other music by Nicolas Gasparini (http://bit.ly/2LykK0g).

I always make sure to give authors credit for the material I use. If I somehow overlooked doing that for a story, or if a credit is incorrect, please let me know and I’ll rectify it the show notes as quickly as possible.***Spooky Santa™ and Weird Darkness® are creations and trademarks of Marlar House Productions and Weird Darkness, LLC. Copyright © Weird Darkness, 2023

"I have come into the world as a light, so that no one who believes in me should stay in darkness." — John 12:46
https://weirddarkness.com/ChristmasChores
#WeirdDarkness #ChristmasHorror #HauntedHouse #GhostStory #HorrorStory #Creepypasta #ScaryStory #HolidayHorror #Paranormal #TrueScary

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Because most most meat spooks was scary Nosti. Hello again, children,
It's Santa with another edition of the Spooky Santa podcast.

(00:26):
You'd better watch out, you'd better not cry, you better
not pout, because I'm here with some scary stories. In fact,
I have three more holiday tales to raise your goosebumps.
Today I'll share a spooky Christmas story about a wealthy man,
a sickly daughter, a cold winter, some angry villagers, and

(00:49):
a mysterious Christmas present a sock puppet. If you or
your parents are a fan of Edgar Allan Poe, well
you'll really like the last story I share, called the
Telltale Scarf. But first, it's a scary story for Christmas
about a kid whose father and grandfather go from door

(01:10):
to door begging for money. It's based on an old
horror story by Bernard Capes called The Vanishing House. My
version of the story is called The Carol Singers. And remember,
if you want to write a scary story of your own,
you can email it to letters at Spookysanta dot com
and I might read your story in an upcoming episode.

(01:33):
Now bolt your doors, lock your windows, turn off your lights.
Pour a mug of Hot Coco and come with Spooky
Santa for another holiday shiller. My first story is called

(02:03):
the Carols Singers. My grandfather was a drunk and my
father was a drunk, but I never touched or drop.
There's a reason for that. When I was young, times
were hard, and I grew up poor. My grandfather and
my father never did an honest day's work in their lives.
Granddad wasn't good for much, but he played the clarinet

(02:26):
like an artist. He taught my father how to play
the accordion. Every Christmas they would gather a group of
their friends and they go door to door playing Christmas music,
singing Christmas carols, and begging for money. Afterwards, they'd all
go down to the pub and spend it on alcohol.

(02:47):
Well one Christmas Eve they brought me with them. I
was too young to play an instrument, so they handed
me a triangle and told me to strike it every
now and then. The night was dark, the snow was falling,
and a cold December wind cut through us like a knife.
We kept our heads down and trudged through the snow

(03:07):
in the sleet. Eventually, my grandfather stopped and said, this
looks like as good a place as any. We were
outside a big mansion decorated with Christmas lights. My father
knocked on the front door and we began playing some
old Christmas carols. The door of the house swung open,
and in the dim light, I saw a young woman

(03:29):
standing there. She was holding a tray of glasses in
her hands, and with a smile, she picked up a
glass and held it out, inviting one of the men
to drink. My grandfather rubbed his hands together with glee
and took the glass. Just then I looked up and
in the window above I saw a face peering out
of the shadows, a face that was hideous beyond words.

(03:53):
I looked back at the woman in the doorway, and
her face was also hideous. Before I could stop him,
my grandma put the glass to his lips and he
knocked it back with one big gulp. Oh dear, said
the woman in an eerie, childish voice. You've drunk blood, sir.
With that, the door slammed shut. My grandfather stumbled backward

(04:16):
and the glass fell from his hands. It shattered with
a deafening crash, and he collapsed into the snow. I
don't remember much after that. All I recalled is waking
up in the light of dawn and finding myself lying
in the snow as well. The other men were also
lying all around me, just waking up themselves. My father

(04:38):
got to his feet and rubbed his head. The woman
had disappeared, and the house was boarded up and abandoned.
All that was left was a dark red stain in
the snow where the glass of blood had broken. My
grandfather lay there in the snow beside it, his face
all purple and swollen. He was dead as a doornail.

(05:02):
We hurried home that morning and called the police. They
picked up my grandfather's body and brought it to the mortuary.
My father told them what had happened, but they didn't
believe a word of his tale. They said the house
had been vacant for over one hundred years and he
must have been drinking. But after that night, my father
was never the same again. He never let another drop

(05:26):
of alcohol touch his lips, and I made sure that
I did the same. My next story is called the
sock Puppet. Many years ago in Ireland, there was a

(05:47):
wealthy man who lived in a very small village. He
owned every single plot of land surrounding the village, and
rented them out to poor farmers and a tidy prophet.
The man lived in the biggest house in the village
with his lovely wife, his two young, strong sons, and
his small, sickly daughter. He was kind to all of

(06:09):
his children, and he treated his wife like a queen. However,
in business he was ruthless and cunning. He made a
lot of money by charging the villager's high rent and
treated all of his tenants as if they were slaves.
If any one of them was behind on their rent,
even for a moment, he would throw them out of

(06:30):
their houses without a moment's notice. The villagers hated the
rich man and despised his cruel and miserly ways. He
often threw lavish parties, inviting only his friends and family,
and living like a king, while the poor villagers had
to scrip and safe just to keep their bellies full.

(06:51):
All they could afford was a meager diet of bread
and potatoes. One year, there was a potato blight and
all the crops were affected. As winter set in, the
villagers were starving to death. The rich man paid no
attention to the troubles of his tenants, though, and he
responded by raising the rent. Then, as if that wasn't enough,

(07:14):
he threw a Christmas party for his friends and family,
where they enjoyed an enormous feast and drank sarcastic toasts
to the plight of the starving tenants. That night, one
villager arrived at the door bearing a gift. He said
it was a Christmas present for the rich man's daughter.
The girl opened the present and found a sock puppet inside.

(07:38):
The villager said he had knitted it himself and asked
if he might have some food in return. The rich
man handed the villager one single solitary potato and sent
him on his way. Although it was a hideous old
rag of a sock puppet, the daughter seemed to love it.
She named the sock puppet Charlie and put it on

(08:00):
her hand, showing it to everyone at the party. That night,
after the party was over, my father was going to bed.
He paused at his daughter's bedroom door, and he looked
in on her. She was fast asleep. Just as he
was about to leave, something disturbed him. The sock puppet
was still on her hand, and its plastic eyes seemed

(08:23):
to be staring right at him. He ignored it. And
walked out, thinking he was just imagining things. That night,
as the rich landlord and his wife slept in their bedchamber,
they heard a knock at the door. It was their daughter, Mama, Papa.
Charlie says, he needs to speak with you. She said, Well,

(08:44):
they saw their daughter walk in and blood was dripping
from one of her hands, and the sock puppet was
on the other staring at them both. Charlie already spoke
with Jacob, and Michael said, the daughter moving his sock
puppet's mouth as if it was speaking. Now, he must
speak with you. For weeks, the rich man's house lay

(09:07):
eerily silent. The villagers saw no candles in the windows
and no smoke from the chimney. Eventually they decided to
check in on the family, and what they discovered shocked
them to their very core. In the living room sat
the two brothers, both strong young men, and they had
their heads twisted off and placed in their hands, as

(09:30):
if the heads were puppets. The same had happened to
the parents, who were found dead and decaying in their beds.
The most disturbing sight of all, however, was the little girl.
She was sitting in the corner of the bedroom. Her
severed head balanced upon one hand, smiling sweetly with their
eyes wide open. On the other hand was the sock puppet.

(09:54):
Due to her rigor mortis, her arms were sticking out,
and it seemed as if the two hands were speaking
to each other. Just recently, a family moved into that house.
They moved to the country because the family doctor said
it might help their sick daughter recover from her illness.
And everything was fine until one night when the mother

(10:15):
heard the daughter calling out to her. Before the mother
opened the door, she heard her daughter talking. She peeked in,
and the girl was fast asleep. What did she need honey,
asked the father. When his wife returned, the mother paused
before speaking. I have no idea, she said. The poor
little thing must have been talking in her sleep. Do

(10:38):
you know where she got that awful, ugly sock puppet?
She was wearing it on her hand, and it almost
seemed like it was staring straight at me. And now
my final story is called the Telltales Scarf. Here's the story.

(11:04):
A blood red glow flickered out of the corner of
my eye and stopped me cold, about a foot from
the front door. What on earth. I sucked in a
sharp breath, and I jerked my head toward the eerie light.
I jolted as I met my own gaze in the
ancient mirror. Mom insisted it was a near priceless antique

(11:25):
and an impressive sample of Victorian era craftsmanship. She'd said
that so many times. I hadn't memorized, but Dad and
I joked that she'd probably bought it to the Halloween
store during the end of the season's sale. It was
that creepy. I leaned forward and stared deeper into the
cloudy glass. It took a second, but I finally figured

(11:48):
out the mystery. The glow was a twisted reflection of
our Christmas tree standing in the corner of the living room.
It's red and green lights pulsed in time to a peppy,
crisp Carol. I let out a strained laugh, which became
more of a strangled scream as a thick ball of
brown and orange wool blasted toward me from the hall.

(12:11):
I caught it just before it slammed into my face. Creptastic.
If I hadn't stopped because of that rotten mirror, I
would have been long gone before Mom caught up with me.
Don't forget your scarf, Isaac. She waited, arms folded across
her chest as I grudgingly wound the too long, too itchy,

(12:32):
too homemade to be cool. But Mom was so proud.
I had to wear it scarf around my neck. I
looped the thing around my neck at least five times,
but the ends still straggled down my back, reaching my waist. Happy,
I asked through a mouthful of wool, and then I
stepped outside. Mom nodded with approval. Now you won't catch

(12:55):
your death. She was all smiles, but her words echoed
in my head. Catch your death, your death. Ten minutes later,
I worried she might be right. If death was looking
for somebody to catch, I was pretty much the only
soul crazy enough to be outside, away from the warmth

(13:18):
and safety of custom built homes, hot cocoa, and last
minute gift wrapping. Plus, it didn't seem like a homemade
wolf scarf would offer me enough protection to evade death's grasp.
Across silver bullets, holy water, Now those objects could have
been real life savers. Dread snaked up my back, tagging

(13:40):
along with the cold night breeze. It was happening again.
I could feel him watching me, the gruesome grim Reaper himself.
It had been that way for days, a strange awareness
that I was in the grim Reaper's sights. This time
he watched me from the Samsons second window. Tucking my

(14:02):
head low, I focused on the job at hand, shoveling
the sidewalk that divided our house and the old Samson place.
It wasn't easy thanks to a huge snow dump earlier
in the day. I was up against knee high drifts,
and now that horrible feeling of being watched. I was
just being paranoid, like with the mirror. Sure the mirror

(14:26):
was ancient and could have graced Vladi Impedaler's castle wall,
no questions asked, but it wasn't cursed or haunted. Nothing
watched me from inside the weather glass, and no one,
especially not Death himself, stood by the Samsons upstairs window,
glaring down at me with such a nasty, heavy stare.

(14:47):
I wanted to drop my shovel and bolt for the
safety of my house. No, everything was Christmas card perfect,
in a faint glow of multicolored lights, edging icicle trimmed rooftops.
Nothing was wrong or strange or even vaguely out of sorts.
Even the dark gloom that surrounded the Samson Place was

(15:09):
normal for that house anyway, because the Old Samson Place
was empty, abandoned, border line condemned. Not a living soul
had been inside for years and years, well not since
way before I was born. I'd grown up hearing stories
about the house next door. The chatter started every October,

(15:31):
and it didn't stop until after Christmas vacation. Every town
had one good haunted house, or it wasn't a town
worth living in. Dad said they were always stories surrounding
neglected things, and probably not a bit of truth to
any of them. There was the story of the little
girl who lived in the old Place back in the

(15:52):
nineteen fifties. People said she fell down the staircase and
broke her back. She had been sneaking downstairs to open
Christmas presents before her parents woke up. Or the man
who was hired by another one of the house's previous
owners to string Christmas lights on the place's oak tree.
He died tangled in the lights. The owners found him

(16:15):
swinging from one huge, bare branch like the one that
spanned both our properties. Arching over the sidewalk. Later it
was discovered that he'd been stealing money from the electric
company where he worked. The house was one big wooden
pile of payback. My feet slipped out from under me,
and I gasped, teetering like a lopsided snowman about to

(16:37):
lose his head. I thrust the shovel into the snow
and stayed upright. Huh, must have been a patch of
black ice. The last thing I needed was a broken
bone keeping me from playing hockey. Still, that icy patch
seemed to come out of nowhere, and when I scanned
the sidewalk, I couldn't find it again. I swallowed a

(16:59):
lump of irrational, totally unfounded and utterly overwhelming fear. Hmm,
maybe it was death coming to catch me. A gust
of wind threatened to suck all the air from my
lungs inside my mittens, my fingers shook. I gripped the
shovel like I meant it, like any second I'd heave

(17:20):
it into the air and fight something or someone off.
Get it together. I willed myself back to work, but
I didn't move an inch. I crouched there over the shovel,
froze it in place, while every muscle in my body screamed,
why are you still here? Run? But my dad would
only tell me to go back outside and finish the job.

(17:44):
So I'll dig in my heels, finished as stupid, shoveling
as fast as I can, and then sip Grandma's world
famous hot cocoa until we opened our presence in the morning.
That's it, think happy thoughts, go presence. Bare branches of
the towering oak that obscured most of the Samson House

(18:07):
creaked and groaned nearby in the darkness, like a body
swinging on a rope. No, not a body, just the wind.
It's the wind, that's all. My pulse pounded so hard
it throbbed in my ears. The freeze my mom chanted
to Katie when she had night terrors. It cut through
my racing thoughts. Take three deep breaths, then three more,

(18:31):
and you won't be scared of that. I'm sure. I
dragged air slowly into my lungs. So what if it
was something a mom told her freaked out five year old.
It worked. It pushed back the fear and let logic
back in. Ah. My muscles relaxed and my heart settled
to a dull thud under my ribs, I cut deep

(18:53):
into the snow with the blade of the shovel. Best
not to think about why the old Samson Place was
still empty, especially when I was the only one out
on the street shoveling our sidewalk in the dark, because
God forbid any of our soon to arrive company set
foot on the white stuff like we could escape it.
Worsts winter on record, and we had to host Christmas

(19:17):
Eve dinner for my aunt, uncle and my cousin Mason, Mason,
who I bet would never be told to do chores
on Christmas Eve, Mason who always ate more than his
share of Grandma's Christmas butter tarts, the one she made
special for me, Mason, the star player on our hockey team.

(19:38):
Well not anymore, not since a grin pulled at my lips,
stretching the wool scarf wider over my face, not wider, tighter,
too tight. I jerked upright, dropping the shovel with a
thwack against the freshly exposed concrete. I pulled at the

(19:59):
sk but it only tightened, like a hangman sliding the
noose into place. I craned my neck, looking over my
shoulder the wind must have lifted one end of my scarf.
The wool had snagged on a lower branch, a branch
that looked eerily like a hand reaching out for me.
The scream that erupted from my throat was muffled by

(20:22):
the scarf. My nostrils flared, sucking in air, and I
tugged at the wool, Though my mittens kept me from
getting a good hold. I ripped them off, yanking at
the scarf, at the smothering loops round my neck, and
the thick layers wrapping my mouth. Nothing worked. The scarf
and a life of its own, and it wanted mine

(20:42):
to end. Tires crunched on the snow, I was vaguely
aware of a car approaching. They were almost here. Mason
was almost here, Mason who couldn't play hockey for the
rest of the season because of his broken arm, Mason
whose spot on the team went to me after the accident,
making me the top scorer. Oh, the house had the

(21:07):
wrong idea. It didn't need to call in its good
friend's death. Not this time. It had been an accident.
Everyone agreed. It wasn't my fault. I spun this way
and that using my weight against the branch's hold on
the scarf, but its woody fingers fletched closed into a fist.
My eyes bulged. I wasn't staring at a tree anymore.

(21:31):
It was him Death, and he'd caught me good. Death
wore a long gray cloak, the same color as the
aged bark of the tree. He pulled on the scarf
in his grip, and I jerked forward. Don't take me,
I'm not ready. I choked out the words through the wool.
He pulled again, and I fell to my knees. The

(21:52):
scarf slackened some and I lowered it from my lips,
which were raw from the rough wool. Tears spilled down
my cheeks, freezing onto my lashes. Okay, I admit it.
I spat the words out between gulps of air. It
was me. We were playing, shitting on the pond. I
left my scarf on the ice. I knew Mason was

(22:13):
behind me, knew his skates would hit the wall and
he'd fall. I blurted out everything, rushing to tell the
truth as I pleaded for a second chance at life.
But I'm sorry, so sorry. I did it, and I'll
tell everybody. I'll confess Isaac a voice that my back
made me crawl around in the snow on my hands

(22:34):
and knees until I faced its owner. Mason stood about
a foot away, my aunt and uncle behind him. They
had heard everything I had just confessed to the grim Reaper.
I didn't care. I was relieved they knew the truth.
Now I didn't have to hold it in. Besides, I'd

(22:56):
rather see their faces filled with shocking disappointment rather than
me being dead. A quick look back proved I was safe.
There was just the oak tree standing in Death's place,
my scarf trailed from a branch, dancing with the cool
night wind, the old Samson place, and Death had let

(23:18):
me go this time. Did you like the stories I
told this time? If so, tell your friends and family

(23:38):
members about the Spooky Santa podcast. That way they can
listen to and remember. You can write your own scary
story and send it to me in an email. You
can email me at letters at Spookysanta dot com. If
you want to learn more about the stories I've told
or the authors who wrote them, you can find links

(23:59):
in this episodes show notes. Spooky Santa is a registered
trademark of Martler House Productions. Copyright Martler House Productions. Now,
be a good little boy or girl and join me
next time for more creepy tales from Spooky Santa.