Bonus Episode - The First Day of Spooky Season

'Ghost Story,' the podcast that unearths the spectral secrets from beyond the grave. In each episode, we bring you firsthand accounts of ghostly encounters, as told by those who have experienced the unexplained firsthand. Brace yourself for tales of restless spirits, haunted locations, and inexplicable phenomena. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, prepare to be captivated by the tales that will send shivers down your spine. Feel free to check out our sister podcasts, Bone Chilling Tales to Keep You Awake Podcast, A Truly Haunted Podcast, Forever Haunted Podcast and True Whispers a True Crime Podcast. See you on the next dreadful episode. #scarystories #realstories #horrorpodcasts are #horrorpodcasts #horrorpodcast #horror #horrormovies #podcast #horrorfilms #horrorfilm #podcasts #horrormovie #film #films #movies #movie #horrorcommunity #horrorfamily #damnedmovies #moviesofthedamned #horrorobsessed #horrorfans #halloween #horrornerd #horrorfanatic #horrorpod #horrorfan #slasher #paranormal #horrorjunkie #horrorpodcaster #horrorgram #horrorcomedy #scarystories #scary #creepy #horrorstories #horror #scaryfacts #creepypasta #creepyfacts #creepystories #creepyfact #scaryfact #horrormovies #halloween #conspiracytheory #conspiracy #horrorstory #scarymovie #scaryposts #conspiracytheories #scarythreads #spooky #scaryvideo #horrorfacts #paranormal #horrorfan #horrors #scarymemes #haunted #horrorfact #ghost   Warning: This podcast may be: frightening · scaring · hair-raising · terrifying · petrifying · spine-chilling · bloodcurdling · chilling · horrifying · alarming · appalling · daunting · formidable · fearsome · nerve-racking · unnerving · eerie · sinister   #murdermystery #bookstagram #death #buzzfeedunsolved #crimescene #truecrimepodcasts #missingperson #missing #halloween #crimejunkie #news #myfavoritemurder #spooky #supernatural

Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/a-ghost-story--5933047/support.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to the ghost Story, the podcast that on earths
the spectral secrets from beyond the grave. In each episode,
we bring you first hand accounts of ghostly encounters, as
told by those who've experienced the unexplained firsthand. Brace yourself

(00:27):
for tales of restless spirits, haunted locations, and inexplicable phenomena.
Whether you're a sceptic or a believer, prepared to be
captivated by the tales that will send shivers down your spine.

Speaker 2 (01:08):
Welcome to a ghost story podcast, the weekly whisper of
tales told in the glow of moonlight and the hush
between heartbeats. Each week we invite you to listen as
ordinary moments twist into extraordinary apparitions, and every heartbeat lingers
a little longer with the unknown. From whispered legends in

(01:32):
old towns to chilling true ghost stories, these episodes are
crafted to haunt, to spark your imagination, and to remind
us that some echoes never truly fade, so dim the lights,
settle in, and let the stories find you. If you're
listening late at night, you're exactly where you're supposed to be.

(01:56):
Subscribe to never miss a tale and prepare for the
glow of the unseen to illuminate your headphones. Welcome to
a ghost story podcast. Since today is officially the first
day of October, let's welcome the spookiest month of the
year with a special bonus episode. This chilling story is

(02:21):
longer than usual and just creepy enough to let a
drizzle of the fall chill seep into your bones. Are
you ready to get this bonus episode underway? I sure am.
Sit back, relax unless you are driving, of course, and

(02:44):
let's start this spooky tale. I always wanted a house
with a heartbeat, not new drywall and showroom side villans, history,
a place with fingerprints baked into the banister and time

(03:06):
ran into the floorboards. Blueprints never tempted me. They felt
like cages. Give me a story someone already lived in.
When my finances finally caught up to my appetite, reality
swung a bat at my dream. Every pre war place
I loved paraded a list of repairs I couldn't afford.

(03:27):
Leaning chimneys haunted plumbing, roofs like sieves. I resigned myself
to a cul de sac clone with a garage mouth.
Then my real to Erica called on a Wednesday, voice
tight like she was trying to keep news from escaping.
It's not on the market yet, she said, but it
will be come now. The house rolls out of the

(03:52):
trees like a memory. Someone kept polishing two story white
colonial wrap around porch columns like throat cleared introductions, eight windows,
staring down the lawn as if it were a stage.
I loved it the second the tires popped gravel. It

(04:12):
loved me back, with that dangerous kind of invitation that
makes you forget mad. I told Erica I couldn't afford
to breathe near it. She smiled like a person who
had already done a bad thing and wanted me to
be complicit. It's in your range, she said, low way in.

(04:33):
It smelled wrong, not the house, the price. Still. I
stepped inside, and my chest opened. Wide molding staircase curving
like ribcage. Floors that sang the moment you put weight
on them, not creaking exactly, more like hushing, hush, hush.
We're still here. Dust lay everywhere in a soft democracy.

(04:57):
The rooms were intact bones, good wall sound, as if
the house had simply closed its eyes for a long blink,
rather than decayed. Why so cheap, I asked, because I
was raised to ask the right questions, even when I
didn't want the answers. Erica's mouth flickered. Either she didn't

(05:20):
know or she wasn't about to say. The cellar accepted
my first offer without haggling. The paperwork sprinted. I stared
at my name on a deed and felt like I
had forged it. Movin day, the house swallowed my belongings
with an elegant, greedy throat. My furniture looked like toys

(05:44):
in a museum. By nightfall, I was barefoot on the
upstairs landing hand on the banister, feeling that wooden artery
pulse under my fingers. Mine mine. The pulse changed. It
started as a creep and grew into a choreography, footfalls, slow,

(06:08):
deliberate mapping paths through the empty rooms. I told myself
it was heat flexing timber old house gossip, but didn't
sound like settling. It sounded like walking a parade of
careful feet, weight shifting boards, answering yes you, yes, you again.

(06:30):
I blamed the first week on nerves, the second and
wind on the third. The house stopped pretending to be
another but awake. A draft like a needle, threaded itself
through the upstairs hall and stitched cold along my spine.
A smell of wet iron rose and would not leave.

(06:50):
Twice exactly. At three eleven a m. The front door
knob rattled, without the door moving, a staccato, like teeth
chattering in a glass. I don't believe in ghosts. I
told the bathroom mirror toothpaste foaming at my mouth like
weaponless rabies. The mirror slit light into my pupils and

(07:13):
threw me back my own face, a woman explaining whether
to a flood. On the sixty ninth day, the footsteps
stopped on my side of the bedroom door. My mattress
turned into an instrument. Each breath a plucked string. The
sound came again, closer, slow, like someone learning the choreography

(07:35):
of the boards. I got up. I'm not proud of it.
Pride belongs to daylight. I went to the door because
I would not be ruled by a sound. The latch
turned under my hand like a held breath. Finally exhaled,

(07:56):
I opened. She stood at the top of the stairs,
a long white night gown clinging to her like a
wet sheet. On a line. Her head tilted, listening, number locating,
She pivoted. We faced each other. I found her eyes
or the place's ice was supposed to be wrong, not black,

(08:19):
not empty, white, two boiled coins, no iris, no pupil,
no decision. Her mouth hung open, the way a hinge
hangs when a door hasn't quite forgiven its frame. The
temperature plunged, air bit inside my lungs. Nothing inside me
worked right. I made the noise you make when you

(08:42):
try to say a word and a river pours through
your throat. Her mouth unhinged further, a silent o, wider, wider,
until the lower jaw did something anatomically arrogant. No sound.
The horror of it, scream with no air, made my
back go hot with a flush I couldn't sweat out.

(09:06):
I slammed the door. The doorknob spun under my palm
like a pulse. I threw my weight against the wood
and felt it breathe back. Something pressed from the other side.
Palm print, palm print, palm print, too many palms at once.
That night I slept under the covers like a child

(09:27):
who believes cotton stops teeth. Every small noise wore boots.
Dawn finally dragged itself in a cheap savior, I swallowed
two sleep aids at sunset, because science exists for a reason.
At two a m my body shot upright without asking
my permission. The house felt wrong, down to the screws.

(09:51):
Pressure pushed in on the dry wall, on my ear, drums,
on the spaces between my ribs. I heard it her
outside my door, not walking this time, but dragging nails, knuckles.
The sound quivered along the jam scratch, scratch, pause, longer, scratch.

(10:12):
The knob rolled once, twice, stopped. I wasn't about to
be exiled inside my own room. This place is mine,
I lied to myself. I opened the door on a
careful breath. She was moving down the stairs, only her
torso visible, no lower body, a misfiled fact. I refused

(10:33):
to process the rail, brushed the sleeve of the night
gown and gathered a dark slash of wet like an autograph.
I waited until she slipped out of sight, then followed.
Because fear has a mean twin curiosity with a knife.
Every step I took answered with a sound like bone,

(10:55):
saying warning. At the foyer, I peered through the sunlight
the lawn stretched silver with moon. She drifted across the
grass with no respect for physics, night gowns, skimming the blades,
hair static bright in the cold. I opened the door

(11:17):
and the night punched my skin. She didn't turn. She
moved around the side of the house, toward the thin
woods that stitched against my fence. As she reached the
tree line, she brightened, barely at first, then more, until
her outline glowed the color of moon pooled in milk.

(11:38):
Ten feet in. She stopped and pointed her face at
the ground, like a dog listening for moles. Figures peeled
out of the dark, a man hat brim shadowing nothing,
a child entirely outlined in hollow, Another woman whose glow
flickered like an almost dead bulb. Then more, many more,

(12:03):
appearing with the awful etiquette of people who belonged to
a different kind of order. They crossed inches from me,
breathless and indifferent, moving toward one spot, like filings to
a magnet. They gathered twenty at least ice printed in white,

(12:24):
mouths open and unused, each body lanterning just enough to
ride itself into my vision. For a heartbeat, I thought
they were praying then they blinked out all at once,
and the woods snapped back into regular black. My legs
wanted to run in two directions. I forced them forward

(12:47):
into the trees, because a question can be a leash.
The ground squelched, wet where there should have been frost.
I kicked through leaves and hit stone, small rough, unfamiliar
stone edges chew by time, another another markets tilted and

(13:10):
low tombstones hiding under a thin eider down of earth.
A brushed dirt away with my sleeve until letters were names, dates,
the same last name, repeated until it became a drumbeat father, mother, children.
My yard is a mouth and the woods are its teeth.

(13:32):
The thought came wholesale, already shaped. I went inside, shaken
and half sane. I googled my own address with hands
that couldn't stay on the keys. Property lines, historic maps,
tax archives, digital ghosts stacked up on my screen. There
faded as if embarrassed. A notation, family plot inactive, a

(13:58):
boundary that the house had or the plot had. Lines
don't matter to the dead. I'd bought a home with
a throat grafted to a graveyard, knowing was a luxury
that didn't buy me safety. Everything escalated. Footsteps now ran
on ceilings upside down, little thuds becoming sprints, vents, breathed,

(14:23):
whispered syllables I couldn't translate and didn't want to. The
hallway light would flicker and then dim until the bowl
was a single, quivering filament that spelled stay in the
language of vibration, the kitchen force of bled rust that
smell like pennies and an old shirt on a hospital chair.

(14:47):
I woke one morning with three vertical scratches down my calf,
not bleeding, but angry. Skin welted like something had been
practicing handwriting on me. Another night, I slept and dreamed
I was drowning under the porch. Woke with dirt in
the corners of my mouth and splinters dug into my tongue.

(15:11):
I started leaving flower across thresholds, the way superstitions tell
you too. In the morning, barefootprints, narrow, high arched, walked
straight through without softening a single edge. I called a
priest because that's what movies taught me. He brought holy

(15:32):
water and a voice, one smooth with youth. The water
steamed in the air like the house was exhaling His
Latin unraveled mid sentence into my father's voice, telling me
to go to bed. The crucifix on his chain heated
in his palm until he hissed. A framed photograph on

(15:55):
the mantel, launched past his ear, and kissed the wall
hard enough to burst the glass into bright needles. Consult
someone specialized, he said, sweating, half joking, the way people
joke when they're walking away from a dog with an opinion.

(16:17):
I called a specialized person. A woman with salt white
hair and bead that clipped like rain. She walked my
rooms with her hand out, like she was socializing with
a storm in the nursery. Who built a nursery for
a house without a child. Her fingers closed in air,

(16:37):
and she winced. It isn't one, she'd said, it's many,
and something else uses them. She set candles. The flames
leaned toward the same corner, as if that's where gravity
had moved. Wax puddled, not clear, but black, thick, as
if the candles were bleeding asphalt. She chanted something old

(17:01):
and grain cracked. The air above the bedsheet dimpled like
a thumb pressed lightly. The beaded woman's eyes rolled white
for a blink, then came back with too much iris.
You need to leave, she said, in a voice with
a harmonizing undertone, not hers. I lasted two more nights

(17:24):
because quitting is easier. At dawn, the last night, the
house announced itself with a sound like stone teeth grinding.
Doors slammed in a sequence that spelled my name in
blunt syllables. The staircase stretched, No, really, it lengthened, like

(17:44):
salt water taffy being pulled, each step getting thinner, steeper,
greedy for ankles. I sprinted and got slower. Shadows lined
themselves up along the walls, obedient, shoulder to shoulder, a
guard of honor for my panic. The woman in the
white gown appeared at the landing amid a fist of static.

(18:07):
Her mouth cracked wider, wider, until the bone memory in
my own jaws screamed, stopped behind her in a wave.
The others assembled, a congregation, called to witness by something
without a pulpit, enough, I said, though my body had

(18:29):
already abandoned the word. I shoved through the viscous air
toward the front door. The knob was slick with something
cold condensation breath. When I twisted it. The knob turned
back the other way. We fought like children over a toy.
It's my house, I snarled, and the banister laughed, a dry,

(18:53):
splintery cackle rising from a thousand tiny mouths. A picture fell,
Then all the pictures fell at once. Books leaped their shelves,
and belly flopped open, as if to screen their spines.
The refrigerator shuddered like a bull trying to break a gate.

(19:14):
The radial flicked on and scattered across stations until it
found an a m frequency that was only white noise,
and beneath it a low chart. My name turned inside
out in that sound. The woman moved, not gliding now,
but loungeon. She closed the space between us at a

(19:36):
speed that made the world skip frames. Her hands snapped
out impossibly fast, impossibly long, and grabbed my forearms. The
cold of it shot up the bones like lightning. She
leaned close. Those boiled white eyes smothered the room. Her
breath was on freezer burn. Her jaw unzipped past human,

(19:58):
and inside her mouth there was no tongue, no teeth,
just a long hallway of wet shadow. I felt it pull,
not air, not breath, a tug on whatever leasious a
person to their name. I tore away with a sound
I did not know I could make. Skin slothed under

(20:21):
her grip, raw bright pain. I stumbled backward, and my
heel planted in the first tread. The staircase tried to
swallow me ankle deep. I wrenched free and pitched down,
elbows and hips and knees, taking each step like a fist.

(20:42):
The house laughed again, delighted a choir of wood. The
front door finally remembered it had a job. It unlatched
with a pistol crap. I hid the porch on all fours,
splinters spearing my palms. Cold n eye slammed my face.

(21:02):
I didn't stand. I ran, crawled to the grass, then
sprinted barefoot stone to stone across a lawn that was
suddenly fifty times wider than physics allowed. At the curb,
I turned to look, because some animals checked the shape
of what's chasing them. Every window burned with light, not bulbs,

(21:24):
not lamps, a white, aggressive brightness like surgery. Figures stacked
themselves in each frame, front facing perfect posture. The woman
a centerpiece in the upstairs hall. Jaw still distended. The
porch light snapped on and off in a heart beat
tempo Stay, Stay, Stay Stay. I drove without keys. I

(21:50):
don't recall unlocking the car. I only remember the prickle
between the shoulder blades that says do not look in
the rear view, and the way I disobeyed anyway in
the mirror. The house followed, no wheels, no street, shrinking
and not shrinking, as if distance had forgotten how to behave.

(22:14):
At a gas station fifteen miles away, I noted the
bite mark blooming on my forearm in a ring oval
too large for any human, mouth, too small for an animal,
I know, perfect as a stamp, teeth impressions raised and
white like frost. I listed the house the next day

(22:34):
with a trembling fury that felt like sending a child
to boarding school. My disclosure form was a mess. How
do you write hallucinations that leave bruises?

Speaker 1 (22:44):
I tried.

Speaker 2 (22:46):
I failed. My conscience screamed at me, and I screamed
back at the living matter more than the dead. Before closing,
I slept in a hotel where the sheets smelled like
detergent exit plants. On the second night, the room phone
rang at three eleven a m no caller, id, I answered,

(23:09):
because I am an idiot who thinks curiosity can be
a weapon. Static, then a voice like a throat full
of dirt. Home the line cut. My new place is
a newborn construction. Dust still in the seams, dry wall, breath,

(23:31):
no history. The first morning I woke to silence so
clean it made my gums ache. But sometimes the refrigerator
thumps like someone knocking from inside. Sometimes the vents whisper
my name in a voice with no vowels. Sometimes my
bathroom mirror fogs from the inside and leaves a shape

(23:54):
where a hand would be. I scrub until the glass
is only bress. I tell myself. New houses don't haunt,
I tell myself. I chose to present. I tell myself.
Love should not pull like teeth from beneath the ground
on good nights. The dormancy holds on bad nights. The

(24:17):
hallway light trembles in sympathy with a bulb three sip
codes away, and I see her reflected behind me, wide
mouthed and tireless, patient as rot, waiting for me to
forget which way doors turn.