Haunted Histories The Sinister Side of Property Management

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Welcome to another episode of the Nighttime Scary Tales Podcast, where we explore the dark side of storytelling. Tonight, prepare for spine-chilling tales featuring original horror stories, eerie supernatural encounters, and real-life crime that reveals the darker aspects of human nature. Each story is designed to keep you on the edge of your seat long after it ends. We’d love to hear your thoughts! Share your most chilling moments by leaving a review on your favorite podcast platform. More haunting stories are coming, so keep your lights on and your doors locked. Sweet dreams… if you can find them!

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:14):
I used to be a property manager in London back
in the eighties. For one reason or another, the flats
I managed weren't strictly legal, so it was basically my
job to collect rent, arrange repairs and be a buffer
between the real owner and the council should they ever
find out he was flouting regulations. It was a proper
cash under the table sort of thing, and we didn't

(00:35):
discriminate when it came to tenants. If you could give
us the month's rent, which was about sixty quid back then,
then we'd give you a bedroom and a shared house
with communal kitchen and bathroom facilities. These days a lot
of landlords ask foreigners for proof of their right to
be in the country, and I think you can get
into trouble if you're found to be housing illegal immigrants.

(00:56):
But back then, we weren't in the least bit interested
in who you are or where you were from. All
we wanted was money, and the same applied when I
met a guy called Yuri. Yuri mentioned something about being
from Latvia, but I never saw any papers to confirm that.
His name could have been anything, and he could have
been from anywhere I met him outside this crumbling down

(01:20):
house in Finsbury, one of the properties that I managed,
heavy emphasis on those quotation marks there, and the room
that he was after was a mess. There was peeling wallpaper,
damp patches everywhere, and a stink that was sort of
half mold and half despair. It was the kind of
place that you'd give a rat the hump, and Yuri

(01:40):
didn't quite seem desperate enough to rent it, but after
a brief look around he told me he'd take it.
I was surprised, honestly, but I wasn't about to argue
with the man. I just took his money, gave him
his keys, and that was that. Next month. When I
went around to collect the rent, Uri wasn't in. He
cleaned the place step quite nicely, gotten rid of all

(02:01):
the mold and the peeling wallpaper, and he left a
little note on his bed that just said busy at
work money In pillowcase, we dealt with some quite unsavory
characters on a regular basis, and I'd had someone try
and run a scam like that on me before. As
they say, if you play with feathers, you'd get your
ars tickled. When their rent money wasn't in the pillow case.

(02:24):
They said someone must have gone to their room before
I did and pinched the cash, and since it wasn't
their fault, they didn't think that they should have to
pay twice the rent money, and that caused an awful
lot of trouble for that character. Let me tell you,
I was thinking, good God, not another one of these.
But then when I put my hand in the pillow case,

(02:44):
Bob's your uncle. There was the money. It was like
that every month too, but it suited me down to
the ground. I never had to chase him or go
looking for him. He was reliable as anyone was old Uri.
But then came the month when well you'll see what
I mean in a moment, won't you. It was a
grim Tuesday lunchtime, all gray and dreary out when I

(03:06):
drove over to the house in Finsbury to collect the rent.
The police was dead quiet, with most outcrafting in some
manner at another, nothing but the hum of traffic outside
and the occasional cough from the guy down below's ground
floor flat. So I knocked on URI's door, just out
of habit, really, and when there was no answer, as
per usual, I just pushed it open. His room was

(03:28):
just the same as ever, bare except a single bed,
a rickety old chair, and a wardrobe that was well
on its last legs. I went for the pillow case,
expecting to find the cash in the usual place, but
there was nothing. I patted it down and shook it
a bit, but still nothing fell out. That wasn't like
Eurie at all. He'd only been renting about six months,

(03:51):
but he'd always paid on time and in the same fashion,
good as gold. Then I opened the old wardrobe to
see if his clothes were still there and saw they
were all gone. It was completely gutted. I hardly ever
found a reliable tenant like him, not in our game,
so it always stung a bit whenever they decided to
move someplace else. I was about to leave, and I

(04:13):
was right on my way out the door when I
spotted something under the bed. It was a suitcase, brown
leather and bashed up round the edges. I'm not one
for poking my nose in where it doesn't belong, but
something didn't feel right. All of Yury's stuff was gone,
and he hadn't left any rent money either, So what
was a suitcase doing under his bed? I thought for

(04:35):
a second, then said to myself, stuff it. I'll have
a quick look and see if there's a note or something.
I walked back in, shut the door, and kneeled down
next to the bed and pulled out the suitcase. I
flicked the latch, lifted the lid, and my heart stopped.
There was Yuri inside the suitcase, his body all twisted up, broken,

(05:01):
like someone had to fold him up to fit him inside.
His arms looked snapped and bent at odd angles while
his legs were tucked under him backwards. His face was
all gray and his eyes were wide open, staring out blankly.
There was nothing else, just him stuffed inside, like he

(05:22):
was something to be thrown away. I got up and
stumbled back. Hand clamped over my mouth to keep the
smell out of my nose, but I still felt sick.
The room started spinning, and the next thing um out
the door and taking the stairs two at a time.
I pulled the front door open ran out into the
street before I stopped. I remember how my hands shook

(05:44):
as I fumbled from my pack of cigarettes. I lit
one and took a long drag, but it did nothing
to calm me down, and as I paced back and forth,
outside the house. I wondered what the hell was I
going to do. At the time, I knew the owner
of the property, a man who will remain nameless, was
quite an active figure in London's criminal underworld. I just

(06:06):
didn't know to what extent that meant that he probably
go mental if I'd just phoned the police and invited
them into one of his gaffes. But this wasn't just
a broken window or a tenant who wouldn't pay up.
This was a goddamn body. I dug out a few
coins from my pocket and walked to the phone box
round the corner, and from there I rang the owner,

(06:27):
the sig burning down my fingers as I dialed his number,
his missus picked up the phone handed it over to him.
Then I told him all about the body in the
suit case. I obviously didn't just come out and say it,
not over the phone, but we had a way of
talking back then, where you said things without saying them.
Once he'd gotten the gist of it, I thought that

(06:48):
the owner was going to flip his lid, but instead
he stayed calm, a bit too calm under the circumstances,
and asked me if I was sure the tenant had departed.
When I told him, I was sure as eggs as eggs,
he told me not to involve any one else and
asked where the tenant was right now. Then, when I

(07:09):
told him, he asked me to help the tenant move out.
I told him, in so many words anyway, that if
he thought that I was getting involved in a murder,
he was mad. I said, we needed to call the police.
Limit what they were told about the properties and the tenants.
Then hope they breezed past us without getting a whiff

(07:29):
of what we were doing. But the owner wasn't having it.
He said if I went to the police, not only
would I be out of a job, but I'd also
be in serious trouble. Then, before I could argue further,
he hung up. Until that day, all I knew about
the owner of the shared house was that he was
involved in renting flats, well dodgy ones at that I

(07:51):
might have been a bit of a geezer back then,
but I wasn't stupid, and what he said on that
phone clued me into the fact that whatever else he
was involved in, it was a lot more illegal than
just some dodgy flat shares. My heart was pounding after
that phone call, my head spinning with all kinds of
frightening realizations for the past God knows how long I've

(08:12):
been working for someone who was now casually telling me
to dispose of a body like it was nothing. This
was more than just being some dodgy landlord. You'd have
to be a real dark kind of person not to
even flinch at something like this. But this guy knew
my name, my family's names, where I live, everything. But

(08:32):
at the same time, my fingerprints were on that suit case,
and if I didn't get out ahead of it and
tell the coppers that all I'd done was stumble across it,
then there was a good chance that I'd be going
down for something, maybe even murder. I didn't want to
go back to the house, and I didn't want to
just drive home either, so instead I went to the pub.

(08:53):
There was a place called the Red Line down the
road from the phone box, and even though it was
only a bit past twelve, I drank a pint of
law in about four or five gulps, just to steady
my nerves. The barman clocked me and gave me a
funny look, but didn't say anything. He just left me
to drown my sorrows in peace. Then I sat there
staring at my glass, wondering how everything could go from

(09:15):
normal to nightmare so quickly and so drastically. Yuri was
a good tenant, He was quiet, he paid me on time.
He seemed like a nice bloke too, So who'd do
something like that to him? And why? After maybe fifteen
to twenty minutes of staring at the bar top and
weighing up my options, I decided to do the smart thing.

(09:37):
I fished around my pocket for some more change and
walked back to the phone box and phone the police.
The cops turned up about twenty minutes later, two of
them in a panda car with their lights flashing, and
I was back outside the house by then, so I
gave them a wave as they drove down the street
and showed them the upstairs to where Yury's body was
in the suitcase. I only told them what they needed

(09:58):
to know, and they said that I'd done the right
thing by calling them, But still I was terrified because
I knew that as soon as my boss got win
that I'd been talking to the police, I'd be in
deep deep doo do That night, I crashed at my
mate Dave's place sover in Camden. I couldn't go back
to my own flat, it'd be too risky, so he

(10:20):
gave me a place to sleep for the night, But
all I did was lie on a sofa, eyes wide open,
thinking about how my life was about to change completely.
The next day, I heard word had gotten back to
my boss, or by then my former boss, that Yuri's
body was with the coroner and that the police were
talking to the tenants in the house that he owned.

(10:42):
Assuming that was true, my former boss had almost certainly
sent people out looking for me. So I asked Dave
if I could lie low at his place for a
few days until it was safe to return to my
flat to grab my stuff. He said that was fine,
but I didn't exactly tell him the whole story. If
I had, I'm not sure that he'd have left me stay.
I didn't go out at all, and Dave definitely knew

(11:04):
something was up, but he didn't ask questions. I just
kind of hung out on the couch, drinking his logger
and wondering if I was going to end up moving
to Brighton, Birmingham or maybe even Manchester. About a week later,
I went around to my flat in the middle of
the night to grab a few bits and bobs, But
when I got there the place had been trashed. Whoever

(11:25):
my boss had sent had done something to the lock,
because it didn't look like anything was wrong until I
tried to put my key in the door and it
creaked open. From the force inside my flat looked like
a bomb had hit it. They'd smashed my telephone, ripped
up my sofa, broken all my records, and from the
smell of the bedroom, they'd gone to the toilet all

(11:46):
over my clothes. I didn't take anything with me. There
was really nothing to take. The only thing that mattered
was getting to my mum's and then getting her on
a coach to Manchester, the furthest of my options. Before
anything happened to her, two guys had already been over
asking where I was, so she knew that I was
in some sort of trouble, but it still took some

(12:08):
convincing to get my mum to pack a bag. She
didn't know how I made my money, so I had
to spill the beans on her son being a bit
of a knotty boy before she understood how serious things were.
I told her the men looking for me were bad people,
and that the next time they darkened her door they
might hurt her as a way of getting to me.
The next day, me and Mum were in a B

(12:30):
and B up in Manchester. I had a few quit
in my pockets, so I found us both places to
stay quite quickly, and then after that it was a
case of trying to go straight and earn an honest
living for the first time of my life. No one
ever found us, but at night the nightmares did. I
dreamed that some one was zipping me into a suit
case and then shoving me under a bed, and I'd

(12:52):
wake up scare thinking some one was at the door,
but no one ever was. It was just my imagination.
Sometimes I wonder if the Cobs ever got anywhere with
Yury's murder. I doubt it, But I also don't think
that it was my former boss that had anything to
do with it either. He just wanted me to get
rid of the suit case. And if for some reason

(13:13):
he had wanted Yury dead, then he'd surely have given
the job to someone more cold blooded and reliable than myself. No,
I think some one else put Yury in that suit case.
I don't know why, but I know they'd have to
be pretty scary to be able to best a six
foot barrel chested Eastern European guy like Yury, then to

(13:33):
twist him up like that, to snap his arms and
legs and fold him in half. It takes a very
frightening person to do something like that, a person I'm
very glad I never had to meet. Back in the

(13:55):
late eighties, I was slinging keys as a landlord here
in New York City, managing a couple of walk ups
over in the East Village. They weren't fancy, just a
couple of crumbly brick buildings with tenants who paid late
and pipes that grown louder than a drunk on Saint Patti's.
I had some real crazy tenants from time to time.
Not all of them were bad. There were some good ones,

(14:17):
don't get me wrong. But out of the bad bunch,
the worst guy was the guy that lived in Apartment four.
Because sometimes what happened there still crawls into my head
at night. It started with a phone call one afternoon
in July. It was hot as hell outside and I
was in my office in the back of a Delhi
on Avenue a when the phone on my desk started

(14:39):
ringing loud. The lady's voice on the other end was polite,
almost sweet, and she said something like, excuse me, sir,
I'm looking for my uncle Albert Russo. I think he
rents an apartment from you on East tenth And I
figured that she was talking about al. He was a
quiet guy in his mid sixties who always the rent

(15:00):
under my door in an envelope like clockwork. And I
told her, yeah, I had an Alberton four, and then
asked who was calling. It was his niece, a girl
named Clara, and she hadn't heard from him in weeks.
Uncle al hadn't been picking up his phone and she
was getting worried. But since she didn't want to risk
the cops kicking his door down just to find his

(15:21):
phone unplugged, she figured that she'd call me first. I
appreciated that a whole lot, actually, and when she asked
if I could let her into his apartment so she
could check on him, I was only too happy to
help her out. A few hours later, I grabbed my
keys and headed over there to meet that niece, Clara.
When I got there, I saw a blond lady who

(15:43):
looked to be in her thirties, standing outside number three
twenty four. I introduced myself and she thanked me very
politely before we went inside, but there was still this
kind of background tension. We both knew that there was
a chance something bad had happened to her uncle, and
whatever that thing was, we were about to walk right

(16:03):
into it. We climbed the stairs to apartment four. Then
when we got to Albert's door, I knocked hard. I
yelled something like, hey, yo ow, it's me Tony, open up,
but it stayed quiet on the other side. I knocked again,
yelling a little louder, but still nothing. As I fished

(16:24):
the key from my pocket, I remember Claire's face getting
very tense, like she was bracing herself for whatever was inside.
Then I unlocked the door, pushed it open, and the
smell hid us like a brick to the face. It
wasn't just bad. It absolutely turned our stomachs inside out,
like a mix of something sharp and sour that stung

(16:46):
your nose, and I gagged and covered my mouth with
my sleeve. Claria was coughing before her hand flew up
to her face, and I don't suppose either of us
wanted to go inside, but I guess it figured that
we had to, so we did. The curtains were drawn tight,
so the apartment was very dim. I fumbled for the
light switch, and when I flicked it on, I wish

(17:08):
I hadn't. The place was disgusting. Trash bags were piled
in corners, there were plates crusted with old food, and
there was a low hum that I quickly realized was
flies buzzing all over the place. We took a few
steps inside the small, cramped apartment. Then Clara pointed toward
the half open bedroom door. I nodded, trying to keep

(17:31):
it together, then move towards it. I get my mouth
and nose covered, but every step felt like wading through
molasses as the air got thicker and the smell got
even worse. Then when I got to the bedroom door,
I pushed it all the way open and froze. There
on the bed was something. To me. It looked like

(17:53):
a decomposing body lying under a stained sheet. Flies were
swarming it, dipping in and out of the fat like
it was their own personal buffet. I'd seen bodies before,
but nothing as bad as that. Nothing even came close.
I remember how Clara gasped and clutched my arm. She
asked if that was her uncle, but I couldn't answer.

(18:16):
I know I shouldn't have, but I stepped forward and
reached out and pulled back the sheet, and my hands
were shaking. But what we saw underneath was absolutely horrifying.
It looked like a person at first, at least it
had the same shape. There were what you could imagine

(18:38):
to be arms, legs ahead, but the skin was bloated
and splitting open in places like rotten fruit Flies poured
out of the cracks. And the eyes Jesus Christ, the
eyes looked like they were completely gone, just black pits
with nothing inside of them. I stumbled back, but Clara

(18:59):
was already out of the room. I remember hearing her
shoes on the stairs, hitting them very fast as she
bowlted out into the street, and I followed her down.
She was outside, completely in tears. I told her to
wait where she was and then ran to a payphone
to down nine one one, and my heart was hammering

(19:20):
at a hundred miles an hour by the time I
got there, And although I could barely get the words out,
I did screaming that there's a body, please hurry. I
told them the address, and the cops showed up quick,
two tough looking sons of bitches who looked like they'd
seen everything, and they took one wh inside apartment for
and gagged, muttering something about another damn d comp e

(19:45):
m s rolled in and I saw the vasilin their
noses as they hauled their gear up stairs. Claire and
I went outside and I did my best to try
and console her, But after maybe fifteen minutes of the
m s being up there, things started to get weird.
I overheard one of them saying something to the cops
about calling forensics in, and I knew that wasn't right

(20:07):
unless they suspected some kind of foul play. Within the hour,
the building was crawling with guys in white suits carrying
all kinds of equipment, along with a couple of cameras.
And after a while, one of them, the short dude
with glasses, came down looking like he'd just seen a ghost.
He walked right up to me and asked if I
was the landlord. Then when I said I was, he

(20:30):
told me how the thing on the bed, the thing
we thought was uncle Al, was not human, and this
made Claire's head shoot up because as messed up at
the situation was, it was great news to her. If
the thing on the bed was not human, then it
couldn't have been her uncle, right, And she begged the

(20:51):
guy with the glasses to tell us more, but he
said that we had to wait for the lab results
to come back. After that, the cops to said they
wanted to ask us a few questions, and I told
them everything I knew, but Clara knew more. Al was
a retired school teacher and he lived alone, and he
didn't appear to have any known enemies. The cops then

(21:13):
searched the apartment and for the most part found nothing
but more trash. But in the freezer, the lowest compartment
was almost full to bursting with all kinds of meat.
And a couple of weeks later I got a call
from the precinct. The results were in and they were
worse than I could have guessed. The thing on the

(21:34):
bed it definitely wasn't Albert, but what it was was
a pile of mashed up animal corpses. Apparently there were pigeons, rats, squirrels, raccoons,
even some missing cats and dogs from around the neighborhood.

(21:55):
Forensics said they'd only been arranged to look human, with
the bones and flesh stitched together with wire, like some
kind of sick art project. And I almost threw up
when I heard that, And I never saw how Clara
took it, but it probably wasn't good. Sure, her uncle
Albert was probably still alive, but what kind of condition

(22:17):
was he in. No sane man disappears and leaves a
meat sculpture lying in their bed, So even if they
found him, what kind of a person were they bringing home?
I heard the cops were looking for him for a
long time. They put out missing persons reports, check local hospitals,
and they even dragged the East River, but they never

(22:38):
found anything. I kept in touch with Clara for a while,
calling every now and then to check in and see
if she'd heard anything about it or not, and she'd
always answer, but the reply was always the same, no news.
I'll let you know if he turns up. She never
did call back within any good news, and after a
while I just stopped calling, not because I stopped caring,

(23:01):
but because I figured all I was doing was giving
her painful reminders. I always wondered if Clara knew more
than she was letting on. Was there a history of
odd behavior with al some additional reasons she came to
his landlord first instead of just calling in a welfare check.
I never pushed her on it. Clara was always very sweet,

(23:22):
and I know families can be complicated. I just wish
I had the answers to all the questions I have
about old Albert and that meat person he left behind
in his bed. I've been a landlord in San Francisco

(23:45):
for damn near forty years, long enough to see every
kind of tenant you can imagine. Hippies, tech bros, deadbeats,
you name it. I'm just a working class guy, born
and raised in the Mission, scraping by on the rent
from a couple of old apartment buildings. They're not anything special,
but they're home to folks who need a roof. Most

(24:06):
tenants come and go, leave nothing but late rent notices
or maybe a couch too heavy to move. But there
was a guy in apartment to b and his story
still haunts me, even all these years later. Now, this
was back in nineteen eighty nine when James first moved in.
He was a scrawny looking kid in his early to
mid twenties with wire rimmed glasses and a very nervous smile,

(24:29):
you know the type. He said. He was a grad
student studying some kind of chemistry, molecules and compounds, stuff
like that. He had a deposit, good references, and a
promise to keep things very quiet, and he seemed like
the perfect tenant. And for a while he really was.
Rent came on time and there were no parties, and
he had no complaints, and I barely thought about the kid.

(24:52):
He was just another name on a lease. And then
maybe four months in, that's when the trouble started. Apartment
three b as in the one directly above James, was
home to a girl named Maria, a young bartender who
worked nights at a dive bar, and she called me
up one morning with a complaint. She told me something

(25:12):
was stinking up her place, something that smelled like chemicals
and burnt plastic, and after doing a little investigating on
her end, she discovered it was coming from two b
as in james apartment. And I figured it was a
one off, that maybe James spilled some cleaning stuff or
accidentally started a small fire something like that. Anyway, I've

(25:32):
seen it before. I told Maria that i'd check it
out and let her know how things went. I knocked
on two B that afternoon, but James didn't answer, so
I left a note under his door asking him to
call me. He didn't get back to me. Then about
a week later, Maria called again, only this time she
was angry. She told me the smell had gotten worse

(25:55):
and that she couldn't even open up her windows without gagging.
In response, I left a message on James's answering machine,
and I basically told him that I had to inspect
his place, that the least said that I could, and
that I didn't want him to make things any harder
than they had to be. He called back that night,
saying he was busy with research, then asked if it

(26:16):
could wait till the weekend. I told him sure, but
that if he wasn't true to his word, I'd be
considering eviction a little harsh maybe, but I had other
tenants to think about. So that weekend I finally got
access to two BEE after almost two weeks of trying.
Then what I saw once I got inside damn near

(26:37):
put my jaw on the floor. James opened up, looking
like he hadn't slept in days. His eyes were all bloodshot,
his hair was greasy, and the shirt that he was
wearing was stained with god knows what. Then the second
he welcomed me inside, I caught the smell. The place
reeked like a mix of bleach and something rotten. Then

(27:01):
when I saw the kitchen, I realized what the source was.
His kitchen barely even looked like a kitchen anymore. James
had turned it into a goddamn home laboratory. They were
like glass beakers and test tubes and several Bunsen burners,
as well as dozens of bottles containing liquids with names
that I couldn't even imagine pronouncing. There are all kinds

(27:23):
of wires running around the counter, all hooked a some
buzzing machine that looked more like something from a sci
fi flick than a harmless high school chemistry experiment, And
I asked James what the hell I was looking at,
and after politely telling me not to touch anything, he
said it was his research. I thought it might have
been drugs, you know, like he was making them in

(27:44):
his apartment, but he swore what he was doing wasn't illegal,
and that he was happy to have the cops come
over to inspect his work. Legal or not, it was
still causing trouble for people upstairs, and having smelled it myself,
I understood why everybody was distressed. In fact, I could
tell the fumes were drifting up from his kitchen window,
which he kept cracking to vent the stink. I told

(28:08):
him flat out that he had to stop what he
was doing, that he was annoying his fellow tenants, and
that if he didn't stop by the end of the month,
he was gone. James nodded, then mumbled something about how
he'd scale back. I thought that might be the end
of it, but boy, howdy, was I wrong. Less than
a week later, Maria called again, and at that time

(28:30):
she sounded like she was almost in tears. She told
me the smell was back, and that it was worse
than ever, and how it smelled like something was dying
down there. I remember sighing as I rubbed my temples,
and then told her that I was done playing, and
then I had served James eviction papers by the end
of the month, and she sounded relieved, incredibly relieved, actually,

(28:52):
But less than an hour later she called me a
second time. I remember thinking Christ what is it now?
His methought office has exploded. But when I did that
weary frustration transformed into another emotion entirely. I answered Maria's call,
and I was half way to putting on the most

(29:13):
polite and patient tone of voice I could possibly muster
when Maria started yelling down the line at me. She
was saying crazy stuff like James's up there screaming now,
like he's hurt. I've already called nine one one, but
I figured I should let you know. I immediately got
this sick feeling in my stomach, like something terrible was

(29:33):
about to happen, so I jumped in my car and
drove over to the apartment building. By the time I
got there, cop cars and an ambulance were already clogging
up the street, and neighbors were out on the sidewalk
gossiping and kind of craning their necks as they tried
to get an idea of what the hell was going on.
I remember pushing through the crowd before coming face to
face with a cop who looked far too young for

(29:55):
the job. I said I was the owner of the
building and that I had proof in my car or
if he needed to see it. He told me he
couldn't share anything right then, and then if I waited outside,
they'd come talk to me first chance they got. It
was frustrating not being allowed into my own goddamn property.
Then maybe a minute or two later, I saw Maria

(30:16):
among the crowd. She rushed up to me and thanked
me for showing up, and then told me the cops
had smashed their way into James's apartment, but wouldn't tell
her what they found. I stayed outside for maybe another
half hour or so, reassuring the rest of my tenants
that they'd be allowed back into the building once the
cops had made sure that it was safe. After that,

(30:36):
I spoke to that same young looking cop who told
me to expect a phone call in the next few hours,
and after that I drove home. The young cop was right,
and at around eight that evening, I got a call
from a detective about what happened to James. I figured
that he'd been taken to the hospital, but to my shock,
the detectives told me James was down and that changed

(31:02):
the whole situation for me right there, and I suddenly
went from angry and confused to feeling terrible for him
in any family he might have. Once the shock had
worn off a little, the detective started asking me all
kinds of questions, things like when did I last see James,
what was he doing, and was there anything weird about
him the last time I saw him? And I told

(31:24):
them everything from the lab to the smells to how
he looked like he hadn't been sleeping. The detective didn't
tell me much in return, only that they suspected murder
and weren't entirely sure yet. I was also warned to
stay away from that apartment until the cops were done
with her investigation, but I didn't argue. The last thing

(31:44):
I wanted was to walk in on whatever mess they'd found.
Days dragged by, and the cops still wouldn't let anyone
near the apartment, so naturally, rumors started swirling. Maria told
me that she heard the cops muttering about burns and
stuff like that, and another one of my tenants claimed
they saw guys and hazmat suits going into that apartment.

(32:07):
I tried not to let my mind linger on it
too much, but still questions got under my skin, namely,
what the hell had James been trying to do? When
the police finally cleared the scene. I went into the
apartment to see what they'd left. The place had been
stripped almost completely bare, and they'd taken all of James's
lab gear and books. It was almost like he'd never

(32:30):
been there to begin with, except for one thing. The
bath tub. It was old cast iron covered in enamel,
same as every unit in the building, but after James's death,
this one had burn marks on it. They were black,
charred streaks, curled into the shape of someone lying there.
The burn was deep, too, etched into the meadal, but

(32:52):
the rest of the bathroom was spotless, and there were
no smoke stains and no ash, just that terrible silhouette
burned into the enamel of the tub. I stood there, staring,
feeling this sort of deep unease creeping over me, and
then I walked out, my hands shaking a little as
I locked the door behind me. It was no way

(33:15):
that I was renting that place out again without replacing
that tub, and it cost me near eight hundred bucks
to replace it at the time, but I didn't care.
I just wanted that gone. And the cops closed that
case a few weeks later, saying that it's all just
been some terrible accident. Apparently James had been warned already
about lab safety at the school that he was going

(33:36):
to something about volatile compounds, and they figured that he
was running some rogue experiment or selling drugs or something
too wild for the university, and it backfired. Then when
it did, he jumped into that tub and tried to
put himself out, but I guess maybe he couldn't, and
so he died. I agreed that it all sounded like

(34:00):
some horrible accident, like that kid with wings who flew
up too close to the sun and got his ass burned.
But a part of me doesn't see how it all
adds up. I'm not some scientists, but I know fire.
So how does the guy burn so bad? Its scars metal,
but the rest of the apartment stays completely fine? And
if water didn't stop it, what the hell kind of

(34:22):
chemical fire was that? But maybe the worst thought of
it all involves whatever James was chasing. I mean, what
was he chasing if even the scientists at the school
he went to didn't touch it. And as the months
went by, life went back to normal. I got a
new tub and a new tenant there, but they didn't

(34:43):
stay long as no one really ever did. They would
oftentimes complain about weird smells, faint and chemical, even with
the place scrub topped to bottom, And I couldn't get
that smell out of the apartment no matter how hard
I tried. And the same applied to my mind too.
I'd be fixing a leak, he collecting rent and that
burned silhouette would flash into my head just as clear

(35:04):
as the day that I saw it. And I did
some digging asking around and found a guy who knew
James at that school, and he said James was obsessed
with rewriting matter, something about breaking down the building blocks
of life and putting them back together. And to me
that definitely sounded like he was on drugs or maybe

(35:26):
some mad scientists. I don't know, but not only had
James believed in this, but he also claimed that he
was close to cracking it too. These days, I have
a whole new section added to my rental agreements, all
about the use of volatile or flammable chemicals within the
apartment complex. Some potential tenets while reading it, though, have

(35:47):
said things to me like, Wow, what a weird thing
to have to write into a rental agreement, and I
tell them that I've seen everything in my years as
a landlord, and I imagine I sometimes smile when I
say it, too, but I don't imagine that smile reaches
my eyes at all, because whenever someone mentions that little
chemical clause, as I call it, I'm reminded of what

(36:10):
they say about rules, and how more often than not
they're written in blood. I'm from the South Side of Chicago,
and I'm a landlord who keeps a few run down
buildings afloat. My pops left me three six person apartments

(36:33):
in Englewood. Still own two of them, and I've been
wrenching pipes and cashing rent checks ever since. It's hard work,
and sometimes I think that I'll end up in a
padded cell one day because of it. But I'm just
too damned old to do anything else. By now, most
of my tenants are decent, hard working folks just trying
to make it through the month. But every once in

(36:54):
a while you get a real closet psycho. And let
me tell you of all the ones I ever dealt with.
Gerald tops that list. His name was Gerald, or at
least that's what he put on the lease, and he
moved in during the summer of ninety six. He was
a skinny dude. He had a scruffy beard and dark
eyes that just never seemed to blink. And he always

(37:14):
wore this ratty trench coat too, even in July when
the city's absolutely cooking. And I really wasn't sure about
him at first, and I guess in the long run,
I was right to be on shore. But he always
paid his rent early, always in cash, and he used
to slip the envelope under my door very quiet, first
thing in the morning. The only downside was is that

(37:36):
every so often he'd come through the door at three
a m. Carrying whole cases of what sounded like glass bottles.
He'd go jingling all the way up the stairs, waking
almost everybody up as he went. But aside from that,
he was a pretty good tenant right up until he wasn't.
Gerald had been living there for just a couple of
months when the sewer line in his building crapped out.

(37:58):
The whole basement was a swamp of this stinking sludge,
and tenants were starting to lose their minds. There was
an old widow in one of the apartments who swore
that her cat got sick from the smell and that
if it died, she was going to sue me, and
I couldn't afford a plumber till the city reimbursed me
for the damages. So to keep my ass out of court,

(38:19):
I figured that I had to snake the drains myself.
I grabbed the heavy duties drained snake that I kept
at home, the kind that you actually cranked by hand,
along with some gloves and a bucket. Then I threw
some rags in a flash light into my car before
I drove over to the building. When I got there,
I found the bypass clean out plug in the basement,

(38:39):
set down a bucket to catch any mess, and then
popped off the trap and started feeding that snake's cable
into the pipe. I started easing it around the bends,
probing for any blockage, and then there it was. I
felt something kind of squishy but solid, and that was
obviously blocking the pipe. I figured it was proper leah

(39:00):
combo of hair and grease and who knows what else,
so I started poking and prodding at it with the
drained snake to try and dislodge it. I was pulling, pushing, twisting,
and yanking and then suddenly pop the mass of whatever
comes unstuck, and it was mission accomplished in my mind.
But it also meant a bunch of toilet water was

(39:21):
about to come spilling out into the bucket, so I
took a step back and prepared myself for the smell.
All kinds of slop came splashing out, and as it did,
the four dragged out the offending cloggers, so to speak,
which splashed down into the bucket with this very disgusting PLoP.
Like I said, I figured it'd be one of those
hair and grease balls that I've seen so many times before,

(39:45):
or maybe a kid had flushed their teddy Bear down
the toilet. Stranger things have happened to me. But when
I saw it coming out of that pipe, it didn't
look like any kind of hair ball I'd ever seen before.
With my hand covering my mouth and nose, I walked
over to that big, old plastic bucket and looked inside.
There floating in the water was something I can only

(40:06):
describe as a huge snail without a shell. It was
like a big lump of slimy, gray green flesh. But
when I poked at it with the head of that
drained snake. It didn't move, and I thought that it
might be some kind of fungus or slime mold or
something like that. But like I said, I've never seen

(40:27):
anything like it before in all my years of unblocking drains.
Seeing as it was floating in a bucket full of sludge,
it's not like I went in for a closer look.
I just poured the bucket's contents into a larger sewage
drain outside, flushed the pipes in the house to make
sure that they were all totally unblocked, then went home
and took a shower after cleaning up the basement, and

(40:48):
I felt like hercules after completing a task like that.
But there was still the issue of the blockage and
how it had gotten there. So after a well earned rest,
I drove back to talk to my tenants. It was
early evening when I arrived, the best time to catch
everyone at home. Everyone opened their doors and assured me
that they hadn't been flushing anything that might have caused

(41:09):
a blockage, all except Gerald, who I figured was out
working at his night job. I didn't make a habit
of entering a tenant's apartment without their express permission. But
let's just say that I had a sneaking suspicion about
old Gerald. See. I had exactly zero troubles with the
drains of that house until Gerald moved in, and in

(41:29):
the few months that he'd been there, I had never
seen inside his apartment. So since the whole sewer water
in the basement thing constituted a health violation, I figured
that was as good a reason as any to grant
myself emergency access and do a little apartment inspection. I
knocked on Gerald's door for the second time, just to
make sure that he wasn't home. Then when I got

(41:52):
no answer, I used the spare key I had and
let myself in. Inside the place was like a museum
of where That's really the best way I can put it.
None of the furniture matched, and everything looked really old too,
not the classy, ante cold, the rickety, rotten kind. There
were house plants everywhere, weird, creepy looking paintings hung on

(42:14):
the walls, and there were stacks of books lying around
with words that looked like Latin running down the spines.
I called out Gerald's name again, just in case he
definitely wasn't there, and then threw in something about checking
his pipes too, and when I got no reply, I
was one hundred percent convinced that he was at work.
So I started towards the bedroom and that's when I

(42:36):
saw it, the utility closet at the end of the hall,
and it was pad locked shut. Now I don't allow
any locked utility doors in my apartments. If you want
to keep us safe, or a lock box or something,
that's your business, and I'll allow it. When it comes
to utility closets that contained things like boilers, pipes or

(42:56):
fuse boards, I need to access them twenty four seven
and for safety reasons, obviously. As I went to get
my bolt cutters, I remembered that was the closet Gerald's
water heater was in, and I wondered what the hell
he needed to padlock it for. I snipped the lock,
pushed the door open. Then the second I looked inside,

(43:16):
my stomach did a flip up and down. The walls
above the water heater, Gerald had installed a series of
shelves and lining them were a series of glass jars.
They were filled with murky looking water, and each one
something was floating. From where I stood, it didn't look

(43:38):
like pickles or peaches or anything like that. It was
something organic, sure, but it looked more like chunks of
something familiar. And that's when it hit me. They were
the exact same things as what had plopped out of
that pipe in the basement. And not even a second later,

(43:58):
I heard a floorboard creak behind me. I spun around
and there was Gerald standing in the doorway, trench coat
hanging over one arm, and he asked me what are
you doing? And I told him about the drains, about
the blockage, and then asked what the hell was in
those jars. Gerald just looked at me for a second

(44:20):
and smiled then in a tone so eerie that I
remember it clear as crystal even all these years later.
He told me they're my friends, like he was talking
about pet dogs or something. I told him to stop
playing with me and asked him again, what the hell
he blocked my drains with. Gerald just kept smiling like

(44:43):
he knew a dirty secret about me, and then said,
you shouldn't be here, And he was right. I had
no right to be in there, not unless it was
an actual emergency. But since I knew that it must
have been him that was responsible for block the drains somehow,
and since he had no right to be locking his
utility closet like that, I gave him a little talking

(45:06):
too before I booked it out of there. Now, back
in my truck, I called my cousin, Nicky, See he's
a cop, and I told him about the freaky stuff
that I saw in Gerald's apartment. How I thought that
it was probably drug related or something like that, but
he said unless Gerald was either cooking math or skinning
people alive in there, there wasn't much that the police

(45:27):
department could do. Now. Before we hung up, he told
me to just serve an eviction notice and get him
gone legally. So that's what I did. I typed up
a thirty day notice that night, citing least violations, unauthorized modifications,
health hazards, whatever the hell I could throw to make
it stick. Then the next morning, I slid it under

(45:50):
Gerald's door before I lost my nerve, and he didn't
fight it. He didn't even try and talk to me
about it. He stayed quiet, but his neighbors didn't. The
old woman said that she'd heard weird noises coming from
that apartment at night, and then an old friend, Jamal
in three a mentioned seeing Gerald carrying a jar down

(46:11):
the fire escape at night, cradling it like it was
a real precious thing to him, and I told them
everything would be fine, that Gerald was leaving soon, but
I have to admit it definitely creeped me out too.
The day before, as thirty days were up, I got
a call from that old lady saying the hallway outside
Jerl's apartment stanked to high heaven, and not only that,

(46:33):
but she'd heard him screaming and crying in the middle
of the night. I drove over right away, and the
stench inside Gerl's apartment was unbearable, but it didn't take
long to figure out where the smell was coming from,
and by the looks of things, he was long gone.
There was no note, but all his stuff was missing,
everything except a single jar, which lay smashed on the

(46:55):
kitchen floor with a puddle of what smelled like liquid
death surrounding it. The smell was so bad that it
stung my eyes. I gagged, covering my mouth with my sleeve,
and then turned around and walked out again. I eventually
called a HASMAC crew, thinking that it must have been
some kind of biohazard and that cost me a solid
grand that I didn't have, but they cleaned it up

(47:17):
and they didn't ask any questions either. I figured that
was the end of it. Gerald was gone, the unit
was empty, and I could just re rent it once
the smell aired out. But that stems stuck around, kind
of sharp, acidic and rotten, like it had seeped into
the walls and floorboards. Tenant started moving out. The old

(47:39):
lady said that she saw something in her bathtub one night,
pale and wriggling gone when she turned on the light,
and I told her it was just her imagination, but
Jamal said that he caught his kid staring at that
drain up there, and when he asked what he was doing,
he also said that he saw something. I comped them
a month's wrench just to reassure them that everything was fine.

(48:00):
But they eventually moved out anyway, not long after, and
by the summer the building was half empty and I
was hemorrhaging money. I hired a priest from Saint Sabinas
to bless the place, figuring that it couldn't hurt to
get a little positive pr going. And he walked through
that area sprinkled holy water, but it didn't help. I

(48:20):
was stuck for a while. I couldn't rent it, but
I couldn't afford to lose that building either, and it
got to the point that I thought about burning the
place down just to collect on the insurance, but knowing
my luck, i'd have been caught right away. In the end,
I was forced to sell, and I lost a lot
of money on the sale too, because the folks buying
knew that they'd have to tear the place down and

(48:41):
start again. They kept asking what caused the smell, but
all I could tell them was the truth. I didn't know,
and I wish it did, or I wish I had,
because that way, I'd have thrown Gerald out on his
ass the second I saw those jars in his utility closet,
because whatever was in them, if they had got out,
or if whatever that was was growing inside of that building,

(49:06):
there's no getting rid of it now. Hey, friends, thanks
for listening. Click that notification bell to be alerted of
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(49:27):
got a story, be sure to submit them over at
my email Let's Read submissions at gmail dot com and
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(49:49):
check out the Let's Read podcast where you can hear
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so much, friends, Remember comedy is all about timing ladies.