An Empty Prison by Matt Dymerski

#5: Jesus Christ. killing him. God. let us out. coming this way.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
This single day added on to my sentencement the difference
between a normal jail and the unending nightmare of pen
being a prison. I was supposed to get three hundred
and sixty four days, that was the deal, but the
judge didn't like my attitude that of the hell that meant,
so he made it three hundred and sixty five boom.

(00:26):
One year was the minimum for prison. My lawyer made
a stink and a half, but it didn't do any good.
That's my fault. In fact, he's the one who's going
to release this statement to the press or leak it
online if the Guardian Corrections Group GCG tries to get
an injunction on us. People have to know what happened

(00:47):
pen being a prison. I'm gonna put it right out
there and tell you that it was haunted. I think
I'm joking nuts lying, but you have no iye, Haunted
prisons aren't anything like you imagine those places that advertise
themselves and give people tours. Those are a sick joke

(01:07):
compared to the real thing. It got so bad that
you can actually look up GCG's official filing for Chapter eleven.
That shit put them out of business in their very
first prison, and right there on the briefs using an
early statute from North Dakota law from eighteen fifty seven
to file an insurance claim. It says site of penbin

(01:29):
a prison confirmed by Governor's office and two notary publics
witnessing in person to be afflicted by the supernatural such
that continued business is impossible. It wasn't the first time
the prison was closed for that reason, either, but leeches
keep buying it and reopening it, hoping to make a

(01:50):
buck off the common man. And I was shoved into
that hell hole without knowing the history even a single bit. Now,
don't get me wrong. The building itself wasn't so bad,
especially for something straight out of eighteen fifty three. It
was a big stone cube that was squat heavy, cramped,

(02:12):
but way less sealed off than modern prison. We could
see a lot of the cells around us. There's only
one main hallway per floor. We were close enough for
passing things between the bars. I have some real human interaction,
and it could have been worse. There were five floors
capacity for five hundred prisoners. When I first got there,

(02:35):
I had a bunch of cell mates. I heard there
were two thousand guys locked up. I believed it that
soon changed. I didn't talk to anyone for the first
three weeks. I never been to a real prison before.
I was messed up over it. I didn't want to
accept that I would be in that place, stuck with

(02:57):
three other guys in myself, for an entire year. The
whole prison seemed full of feral men. Bottom floor would
start screaming and hollering and panicking in the middle of
the night. We were on the top floor, but we
could hear their screams echoing through that open old layout,
like they were right there with us. I just thought

(03:19):
the prisoners and the bottom floor were all nuts until
the guards weren't there to wake us up. The first
day of my fourth week, Now, when I woke up
in my little corner without some asshole guard banging on
the bars of our cell, I finally finally had to talk.
I asked one of my cellmates, Dante, what was going on,
and I'll never forget the fear in his voice. So

(03:41):
he said something that should have made us all incredibly happy.
The guards are gone. Man. The prisoners were talking quietly
between the cells, loudly between the floors through various whispers
and shouts. The most we could figure out was that
something on the first floor it made them all quit

(04:02):
in protest. Sure it must have been the crazy screaming
like that during the night, right, except none of us
could get any word from the bottom floor. It was
dead silent down there. Guys on the second floor called
out for hours as someone was down there. They said
they could hear shuffling footsteps walking around it random every

(04:25):
so often, but whoever it was, they never said a
single word. That was the first time Dante mentioned the
crazy stories from the first floor. He muttered that he
hoped none of that was true. When I asked about it,
he just shook his head. Nothing, man, nothing, None of

(04:46):
it ever made sense. Now, we were a little worried
as the day wore on and nobody came to let
us out for breakfast, and nobody came to let us
out for lunch, and we usually got to spend outside
in the yard. Came and it went. You began getting restless,
you know, and the cells to our left. Dante's friend

(05:08):
Will began telling guys to pass the word. We should
all calm down and start sharing any food that we
had hold away. I remember asking Dante's Is it really
that bad? Why they've denied us meals and yard time
for a day or two before? He told me. But
the other two guys in ourselves didn't look convinced. One

(05:28):
of them said, but not like this. They made damn
sure we knew what we did. They never just up
and left. Someone hands in us pieces of crusty old
bread through the bars. It's much appreciated. The new guards
that didn't show up for work for another full day.

(05:48):
We got plenty of yard time that day from the
new guys, but they seemed more confused than us. We
all watched from a distance as Will asked a guard
about what happened. I don't know. GCG was paying a
premium for fast hires, so I just signed up. What
about the prisoners on the first floor, We'll ask. We

(06:10):
could still hear them shuffling around down there. We looked
on the way out into the yard, but we couldn't
see anyone. Mm. The guard frowned. Nobody in there. They
all got transferred, transferred The hell does that mean? It
means DOCR took him back, returned to state custody since

(06:30):
the company couldn't handle him. That made sense I mean,
if the floor had been full of nut jobs, then
North Dakota's first local private prison company hardly had the
experience to handle them. But these new guys didn't even
have the skills to handle us. But they were half
as many guards as before. They didn't know the routines

(06:50):
or who the dangerous ones were among us, and as
a result, they were distant, scared, forceful. I mean all
except one guy, Kellen. Kellen wasn't the first guard to
treat us like human beings, but then he was the
only one around. Traded jokes while in the yard, never
hit us, looked us in the eyes when he talked.
He went and found some paperwork to confirmed the crazies

(07:12):
had actually been transferred, but took three months to get
that info out of GCG, and by the time he
told us he'd heard back, we sort of forgotten the
whole thing. Two nights later, maybe two hours passed lights out,
the guys on the second floor began screaming. Dante leaped up,
fell on one of our cell mates by accident, before
shouting shit, shit must be a fire. I think. Guys

(07:36):
in our robe began banging on the bars, shouting for
the guards but the uniforms charged past and headed downstairs
without talking to us, and he gave them shouting orders
down below, and then yelling and confusion. The prisoner's screams
were clearer coming from the second and it sounded like
they were terrified of something in particular, and they wanted help.
That sounds of gates being slammed. The people running reached

(08:00):
us after about ten minutes of shouting, and then who
was silent. We sat in the dark, waiting and listening
until morning, and when the new shift came, they were
surprised and confused, and Kellen came by to ask what

(08:22):
had happened. We told him what we knew. He'd shown
up and found open gates at empty second floor. There
was no indication what had happened, but he promised to
check with corporate and figure out if the absent prisoners
had all been rapidly transferred. Again. A Dante gripped the
bars and made sure Kellen was looking at him. Please
find out what the hell is walking around down there night?

(08:46):
Kellen blinked at that, I mean on day's shift, so
I don't know what I could do. What do you
mean prisoners are gone? Then they told him fiercely but quietly.
But the guys on the third floor said they still
hear someone, maybe two or three, someone's shuffling their feet
every hour or so till morning. I mean, I guess
I can go look right now. Dante reached through the

(09:09):
bars and grabbed his uniform, something which usually got us
a beating. Hear me, do not go in there by yourself.
Stay in the stairwell as someone is with you. Kellen
nodded fearfully. It looked like he finally understood how spooked
we all were. He waved another guard off and Dante

(09:30):
let go, but nothing more came for a whole season.
The night shift had quit and more guards got hired
at an even higher pay. Callen, in another uniform, scoped
out the first two floors, but they found nothing. Dantes
thought it was because they were looking during the day,

(09:50):
but he wasn't about to ask our only friend to
risk himself. It was maybe three months later. Yeah, I
was halfway through my sentence. I had taken up drawing,
so I had a pen and paper when we woke
up in the middle of the night to everyone on
the third floor screaming in absolute panic. By this time

(10:10):
we were less scared during the event itself. We'll offered
a guard racing past five hundred bucks from his commissary
account if the man could come back and tell him
what was going on. Dante listened intently, trying to hear
individual screams from the third floor over everyone else's shouts
and confusion, and I wrote down any words he thought
he heard, and I wrote down, was Jesus Christ killing him?

(10:38):
God let us out coming this way. We weren't scared
when it was happening because we'd lived through it twice before,
but this time the long term fear was much deeper.
Now we knew for sure that it was going to
happen again, and any prisoners that had the means began

(10:59):
loyering up and doing everything they could to transfer to
other prisons, even if it meant worse conditions. The problem
was the North Dakota prison system was already overflowing, which
is the whole reason GCG got started in the first place.
So every guy that got out meant it was just
that much harder for the rest of us. Both of
our cell mates transferred, giving us space. That was nice,

(11:23):
but it was a small consolation. Apparently, word had started
to spread on the outside. In GCG's solution, instead of
paying the guards even more, was to stop having a
night shift altogether, except for just one poor guy. The
callan was a bit miffed he hadn't gotten raised out
of the whole thing, but he was starting to believe

(11:45):
us that something was going on. By then, he'd been
around a while, he knew that we weren't bullshitters, and
too many other prisoners had told him that they heard
someone walking around the first, second, and third floors at
random during the night, just a few steps, sometimes as
many as twenty. But it only happened every so often,
and only once had it been long enough that you

(12:07):
thought it had stopped for good. One guy in the
fourth floor said that he'd heard a full run from
one end of the third floor hallway to the other,
clear enough he'd expected a guard to come charging up
the stairwell, but nobody. Nobody appeared. He slid his wrists,
got transferred out on medical leave the next day, So

(12:30):
I mean we took him seriously. All that was enough
to get Kellen to start doing some research on the outside.
Came to us in the seventh month of my sentence
with a pale face beside us. The bars will ask
what's the word? A calend seemed grim. A lot of

(12:50):
bullshit out there, but this place is mentioned a lot.
It's been closed before, but I keep getting a stone
wall when I ask for the historical documents. Thing is,
I don't think the prison it solves the problem yet
this He pulled out a notepad for reference. Two Canadian priests,

(13:12):
father Norbert Prevencre and Severn de Molin, visited Pembina in
eighteen eighteen. For it was even an official township. And
I was back when the Hudson Bays Company was big
around these parts. That's how long ago it was. Well,
Pembina was the biggest town in North Dakota then, so
trading post was full. The priest chose to sleep outside

(13:34):
by where the Pembina River meets the Red River. Folktale
has it that a vision of a rotting woman came
in the night stole Prevencer's life. Two men bartered with
her to split the remaining life between them, consigning both
to live only thirty five more years instead of the

(13:54):
seventy sever had left. The sever got an extra month
and twenty days as a guar from his friend for
his sacrifice. He paused as if he might guess the
obvious outcome, and they both died thirty five years later.
I knew pembin A Prison had a horrible problem, but

(14:16):
that didn't mean I had to believe everything. So let
me guess a month and twenty days apart. Kellen nodded.
Dante snorted, it's true, dude. Kellen insisted. The dates of
death are right there on Wikipedia. But get this, thirty
five years after eighteen eighteen made their death year eighteen
fifty three, the year the prison was built, and the

(14:38):
place they camped that night by the meeting of the rivers.
I didn't know what it meant, but I was beginning
to feel very uneasy. I'm guessing it's right here, isn't it.
He was dead serious. I think there's some shit here,
ancient shit, I asked a guy I know. He's got
Chippewa relatives over at Turtle Mountain. They know the history

(14:59):
of the Red River better than anyone else. He said.
His uncle told him to never sleep at the meeting
of the Red River and the Pembina River. He said,
something lives here under the ground. It awakens with the
changing of the seasons. We were silent for a beat
after that. I mean, it was folktale nonsense, but it

(15:21):
was as good a theory as any. Whatever it was,
it was going to come back, and it wasn't friendly.
Will talked to Kellen for another few minutes, but Dante
was silent. After he was gone, I asked him, that's wrong.
He sat on one of the now unused bunks and
told me, and I got another five years in here.

(15:44):
You had no money for a lawyer. Your sentence will
be up before it reaches us, and then then I'll
be here alone, will it. There's no way to be
sure it'll be back in two months for the fourth floor,
and three months after that for us. I could get
out a week before, A day too late. Doesn't seem

(16:06):
to be exact. He just looked at the floor. What
I mean is I do hope. I do hope that
you get out before it comes. Oh. I wasn't sure
what else to say after that, so I just sat

(16:29):
in my corner like I always did. It wasn't too
much after that that we heard GCG was going under.
The mad rush for transfers had pissed off the state
and lost the company a vital contract for a second
location and investors had pulled out something like that. The
number of guards was cut and slashed, and Kellen took

(16:52):
a pay hit stay on as the only guard in
the day shift. There's only two prisoners left on the
fourth floor, the twenty of us remaining. As the general
week we expected it to happen approached, I feel like
I should stay just to see what the hell is
going to go down there. Former guards I asked about
it are all terrified as hell or refused to talk.

(17:13):
Some got violent, and just because I asked, it's cool,
Well told him you got a kid at home. They'll
be here for it. The twenty of us left on
the fifth floor sat in ourselves once night fell, praying, listening.
On Monday night, nothing happened. The two guys below occasionally

(17:39):
shouted up to us that everything was clear. On Tuesday night,
nothing happened. The strain was growing, though, and we could
sometimes hear them breathing rapidly down there. Could only imagine
the adrenaline rushing through them every minute. Until Dawnay night,

(18:03):
nothing happened. Yet something had changed in the air. The
prison was much quieter now than two thousand men had
become twenty two. I thought I could feel a subtle
sort of heartbeat in the air, pounding against reality, like
it was a thin sheet of paper. It's just your imagination,

(18:24):
Dante whispered. None of us were willing to speak louder
than that. On Thursday night, that heartbeat became a feeling
of footsteps approaching from a great distance. Guys, Bill shouted
from a cell You good down there? Still here, one

(18:46):
responded from down below, But I could feel it at
the door. It's knocking. The hell's that supposed to mean? What?
The man below and respond? Friday night? That was the night.

(19:08):
It would happen all day. The two guys on fourth
pulled and clanged on their bars, begging to be let out.
Kellen was torn. After two hours of listening to that pleading,
he came up with an idea and transferred both of
them up to our floor. If nobody's on four, he said, happily,
then we'll all be safe, right, not loud, We agreed,

(19:31):
but you're kidding ourselves. When the night guard showed up,
he freaked out, took the two men back down. He said,
out loud, what we were all thinking. If nobody's on
floor four. They'll just come right up to five and
get us all. How was Kellen thinking? I had to

(19:51):
listen for hours sobbing that evening. It was the hardest
trial of life. I wanted to call out to the
night guard. I wanted to ask him to get those
men out of there, but if I did, I knew
whatever was coming would find all of us instead. The

(20:13):
moment it happened was like a cold hand on my shoulder.
What's going on down there, Dante shouted. The man who
was not sobbing called back. It's changing, Will demanded, what's happening?
Tell us when it's read. What's red? Will yelled insistently,
goddamn it, what's red? Who stared down the hallway at

(20:34):
the night guard, who stood listening with fear. The screaming
began a few seconds later, this time only one floor above.
We could clearly hear their every word. The sobbing prisoners shrieked, there,
it's there. The man who'd been communicating with us began
incoherently raging with fear against his bars. Then strangely, he stopped.

(21:04):
The twenty of us clung to our bars, unable to help,
unable to flee. Many of us, cried, but we were
otherwise silent, for the yell would be to drown out
the last words of the men below. But they were
eerily quiet. For nearly two hours, we waited and strained silence,
as random footsteps traversed the fourth floor every so often.

(21:27):
What was happening? For the first time, the victims of
whatever was going on down below had chosen to be
quiet instead of yelling for help. Why would that make
things different? At long last, the sobbing man broke the silence.
Oh my god, it's coming your way. Shut up, it'll
see you distracted. Hit your bars. The sound of clanging

(21:50):
echoed up the stairwell. The sobbing man said, with terror,
it knows, it knows, Jesus Christ, do something. We were
no longer silent, echoed that sentiment, louder and repeating to
the guard do something. He just stood there, literally quaking
in his boots. Will screamed at him, Snap out of it.

(22:12):
The other guards and prisoners got away. You can too,
Whatever it is, he won't follow you if you let
them out and leave, I shouted, They're gonna die down there.
Dante threw his shoe and the impact Finally snapped the
man out of his terror. The guard ran to the
stairwell and descended. The first thing we heard him say
was a taken aback, merry Mother Christ. The sobbing man
again over here, for God's sake, let us out. The

(22:35):
other prisoner wasn't talking for some reason, but we could
hear his gasping terror. But that too went quiet. Then
we heard a buzzer, and all the gates on four
slammed loudly open. The sounds of panting, running and someone
dragging something followed. The prison went silent, just like that,

(23:04):
Just like that, we were alone again. The formerly crowded
prison now felt terrifyingly large and empty, with only twenty
of us and no guards. That night, the unmistakable sound
of footsteps echoed from down below. I counted time as
best I could. Forty five minutes then someone took three

(23:27):
steps out of a cell and into the hallway. An
hour and six minutes, someone ran ten steps along the
hallway and stopped abruptly. Twenty eight minutes, the footsteps approached
the stairwell, but then turned into a cell and went silent.
The thing was, whoever it was, sounded barefoot, and the

(23:50):
starting and stopping of locations didn't match where they ended
was often nowhere near where they began again. Later. By
the time dawn came, we were scared into motionless, terrified silence.
Took Kellen's arrival for us to begin stirring again with

(24:11):
GCG and bankruptcy court. We no longer had a night
guard at all. If it came for us, there'd be
nobody to let us out of ourselves. Like everyone else,
we hardly talked, we hardly ate. Each passing day. It
was a grain of sand falling from an hour glass

(24:32):
marking our executions. Our fellows began confessing to crimes they
hadn't even committed, just to get transferred to supermacs out
of state, the only option left of that and the
suicide attempts. One by one, Kellen escorted or dragged guys
out of our floor. Twenty became fifteen, and then ten.

(24:57):
Then it was just me and Dante, with Will still
in the cell to our left, the three of us
and Kellen, four men waiting for doom. We sat playing
card games in the weeks leading up to it. It
would be one full year for me in that place,

(25:18):
but I could swear i'd spent a lifetime in that cell.
I couldn't think. I couldn't remember life before, couldn't imagine
surviving after. Every day I prayed for a transfer to
come in. But North Dakota had gotten sick of our shit,
and the judges had stopped hearing cases from Pembine in prison.

(25:40):
They didn't know there was only three of us left.
Nobody knew. We contacted the media, we phoned the governor's office.
We made a ruckus. And that was worse than nobody knowing,
because it turned out nobody cared. There was nobody higher

(26:05):
up at GCG following the situation. Kellen couldn't get anybody
on the phone. Payroll meaning just his paycheck was being
handled by a third party disbursement company, couldn't answer questions
about ongoing proceedings. The week approached. On Monday night, nothing happened.

(26:29):
We were like statues in ourselves alone, waiting for a
sign of the executionist approach. When dawn came, we sighed,
We began moving again. Dante asked you get out Friday.
I nodded. If things went like before, I'd be released
the day of. As long as I left before sundown,

(26:52):
I'd be all right. On Tuesday night, nothing happened. Two
for two. It's one more, one more day. I sat
through that darkness till no The feeling of the prison
had changed around us, a subtle, a subtle heartbeat, some

(27:17):
depulse against our faces and ears and eyes. It had
come a day earlier in the week than the last time.
That morning, Will patted my arms. We both leaned out
of the bars. I'm sorry, man, Dante just shook his
head angrily. I wasn't going to get out in time.

(27:40):
On Wednesday night, the heartbeat became the sound of footsteps
approaching from some unfathomable distance. I think I stood there
at the bars of our cell that entire day, fingers
wrapped around metal with force to match the tension in
the air and in our minds. This couldn't happen, This
wouldn't happen. My lawyer would walk in and tell tell
me he'd gotten the judge's unfair addition of an extra

(28:03):
day removed. One day, one goddamn day. Even if I'd
spent the whole year in this prison, one day still
meant life or death. Let me out, Let me the
hell out, for God's sake. Nobody cared, and nobody would listen.

(28:30):
I'd like to tell you that Kellen stayed late that night.
I'd like to tell you that when the entire floor
began to glow red, the hallways that sells the stone itself,
whatever ungodly abomination on the earth, began to wake upon
the changing of the season, as distant footsteps became a
traveler at the door of our minds. I'd like to
tell you that Kellen was there, and he hit the button,

(28:52):
and he opened the gates, and he let us all out.
I like to tell you that I didn't see anything,
and that I'm not permanently a broken man. I didn't
I fought the walls of my cells that approached, slowly,
moving a few steps every twenty or seventeen minutes. I'd
like to tell you that all three of us were
able to run away and escape that horror upon reality,

(29:12):
with its rotting hands and blind eyes radiating crimson light
as it searched for us at random. But I can't
give you a satisfying end of this story. The disbursement
company fired Kellen, changed the locks on the property. According

(29:36):
to their paperwork, all the prisoners had been moved, and
they thought they thought he'd be getting paid for guarding
an empty prison. They left us in there for eleven
days before the error was found, which meant eleven nights
with that thing. For eleven days, we starved. For eleven nights,

(30:02):
we sat absolutely still, not daring to move or breathe,
or even look left or right. It knew where we were. Generally,
it stood right outside ourselves for hours, and sometimes walked
right through the bars and grasped at the beds around us,
daring us to make even the slightest motion. When you

(30:29):
spent six hours staring into the blind crimson eyes of
a rotting demon, unable to blink your eyes for fear
that it would hear you, it would hear the air
your lashes move. When you've seen what it's seen, the
worlds it's walked, reflected and hellish red, you'll understand no

(30:56):
one cares. I'd like to tell you that Kellen actually existed.
I'd like to tell you we had a friend amongst
the guards, and that it wasn't all bad. I'd like
to tell you that I wasn't traumatized by the hell
I went through, being left to rot, left to die
as nothing more than a number on some corporation's books,

(31:20):
but no one cares either. Kids, It's me, mister creepy Pasta.
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(32:45):
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