The Appalachian Book of the Dead by Octoberpod AM

[00:00:00] Listener discretion is advised. Hello and welcome to Scary Time, the podcast that helps you find new, emerging and undiscovered scary and paranormal podcasts. I'm Greg, the host and curator of Scary Time. Today's episode is from Octoberpod AM.

[00:00:19] Octoberpod after midnight is the retro horror show for bold individualists, telling true, ish and classic tales of horror and paranormal with cozy retro vintage aesthetic. If you like today's episode, make sure to check out the episode description for links to subscribe. All right, let's get this show started.

[00:00:38] Begin. The sound you hear is a wood burning stove. This is the start of Octoberpod on the Darkcast Network. Granddad was coal miner West Virginia but he immigrated from Ireland when he was a young man.

[00:00:55] But before coming here, he lived in a small village, I suppose you'd call it, in County Clare, Ireland. Our Daily Bread, a true story submitted by Doug AM 460, narrated by Edward October. And me and the other grandkids would love listening to him tell stories from the old country.

[00:01:19] He spoke with an accent that had one foot in Ireland and one foot in the holler. I can't imitate it, but just imagine it coming out of a leathery old dude sitting by a wood

[00:01:29] burning stove holding court with all the youngins and the family while mamal cleans away the supper dishes. Yeah! I can still smell the smoke coming off of that stove. Hear the clattering of mamal's dishes and just about taste her gravy and mashed potatoes

[00:01:46] that she'd whip up with a hand mixer. But that's not the story I'm here to tell. I guess I got carried away with my remembering for a minute. So we're at Mamal and Granddad's house listening to him tell stories.

[00:02:00] He'd usually have to smoke him a camel cigarette down to the nub before we'd get him in a talkative mood. He told this on a windy night in the dead of winter. Hell it might've been Christmas night, you know, the night of the 25th.

[00:02:14] Whenever it was, he picked the right night to tell it because me and my brothers, we still remember it like it just happened. So according to Granddad, there's this mom and pop bakery, the bake shop he called it, down in his village.

[00:02:36] I guess everything would've been pretty mom and pop at the time. He said you could go in there and they'd have all kinds of stuff us kids had never heard of before. Soda bread, hot cross buns, raisin and walnut scones, griddle bread, I forget what all else.

[00:02:53] Pines pies, steak and kidney pie, stuff like that. He said they're much too poor to get anything sweet like a fruit pie or a scone or anything. But for whatever reason, I'd get him a loaf of bread from there every week or every other week.

[00:03:09] After hearing stories of how poor his family was, that sounded like an awful big expenditure to me. Maybe they just had some other arrangement with the baker or something. Anyways, Granddad said that his mama, his ma he called her, would send him down to the

[00:03:27] bakery ever so often and get him a loaf of bread. Said she'd send him down with one coin and that sometimes he didn't get changed back. It was run by a man named Michael and his wife Geraldine.

[00:03:40] Geraldine would do all the baking and Michael would mind the shop and take your money. Now one thing I forgot to mention was that this village was in and out of the way part of the county and this bakery wasn't really in town.

[00:03:56] It was run out of the ladies house on the edge of town and from the sound of it, the edge of town wasn't a whole lot different from the middle of nowhere. Granddad made out like it was quite a hike just to get there from where he lived.

[00:04:10] So this one day he walked down real early in the morning. It had been raining and there's a thick mist or fog that settled down over everything. In Ireland he said it was always raining or fixing to rain or just quit raining.

[00:04:29] So Granddad, he was about nine or ten at the time, made his way through the swirling mists to the bakery. He popped inside the shop and he said you just go to the shelf and pick what you want, stick it in a poke and go pay.

[00:04:43] Remember that the bread wasn't as fresh as he's used to. He didn't smell anything baking in the oven and none of the loaves were hot. You know Granddad had been looking forward to carrying warm bread in his arms, you know for the walk home.

[00:04:58] On the count of the weather was so rotten. When he went to the counter to pay there wasn't anybody to take his money. Was the bake shop closed? No. The sign said open and the locks were on. The door was unlocked.

[00:05:12] Must have been busy somewhere else in the house. There was a bell that he could have rang but he said he would have felt rude and pushy, especially as a little kid so he leaned on that counter and waited.

[00:05:25] Started flipping a coin, spinning it, playing heads or tails games with it. Still there wasn't nobody to come to the counter. Said he'd been waiting, gosh maybe five or ten minutes. Finally he leaned over the counter and hollered for somebody to come and take his money. No answer.

[00:05:42] He leaned over the counter another time and noticed a dark lump on the floor. It was Michael, the bake shop owner. He wasn't breathing. Granddad went behind the counter to walk into the house. He knew the living space is just beyond the bake shop park.

[00:05:58] And he crapped around looking for Geraldine and hollered out that her husband was sick and needed help even though he knew that the man was dead. He said it was deathly quiet in that house. All he could hear was the creaking of the floorboards as he stepped.

[00:06:21] But he thought he heard Geraldine walking around slowly upstairs. He got to the steps leading to the second floor and saw Geraldine's hand hanging over the top step. As if she has collapsed on the top landing with her arms splayed out.

[00:06:40] The only part of her visible from the bottom of the steps. He said her skin was ghostly pale and her wrists looked pretty badly bruised. But her fingers weren't moving. And then all of a sudden there came this squeaking and crackling of footsteps on the floorboards overhead.

[00:07:00] Now by this point in the story, all of us kids realized that Granddad had walked in on the scene of a murder. And with the killer still upstairs creeping around. God, you can't imagine the thrill and the icy dread that come over us when he told it.

[00:07:16] With the fire popping in that wood stove and with the wind whistling outside and everything. I remember my brother popped up and asked, why did you do then? Granddad just leaned back in his chair and said,

[00:07:32] I laid my money down on the counter and walked home with my bread. I said, I'm going to take it. I'm going to take it. Roadkill Roulette written by M. J. McAdams from a true story submitted by Trey D.

[00:07:48] Narrated by Edward October with ghost vocalizations performed by Paige Elmore. We played this game on one occasion. At the time we were calling it Roadkill Roulette because we figured Roadkill is about the only thing we'd find playing it. My God, I wish that was true.

[00:08:20] Somebody's telling me this story for the first time. I don't think I'd believe it myself. But if you doubt what I'm about to tell you, I will send you a signed affidavit from my buddy Campbell Boggess who was there with me at the time.

[00:08:32] The other day, a couple weeks ago, I guess it's about two or three weeks ago, I was meeting some YouTube videos kind of dozing off. Watching YouTube videos about people using this Randonautica app and finding all kind of weird stuff.

[00:08:47] It got me thinking about how when I was a lot younger, like four smartphones and all that, we had our own low tech ways of getting into weird adventures. I think I can safely say that me and my buddy Campbell were like

[00:09:01] early Randonauts, maybe retro Randonauts, paleo Randonauts. We grew up in the holler. I suspect you did too, Ed. We didn't have a whole lot to keep us entertained. We didn't even have cable. We only got three channels on TV.

[00:09:19] So we had to be a whole lot more, I guess you'd say imaginative to entertain ourselves. Wild Turkey and Blackberry Shine was often the answer but we weren't into all that. We were usually too broke for a case of natty light and underaged boot.

[00:09:34] Campbell and I would drive around town and his dad's old Chevy and just talk mostly. We'd talk about cars and dreaming about women like that old song says. Sometimes on the weekends we'd head over to the main branch of the public library

[00:09:46] and go through the discard box looking to find some Stephen King's or Tom Clancy's, maybe some comics. One day I scored a, well it was like a book of magic, spells and potions and stuff. Now we're a deeply religious community and this wasn't long after the days

[00:10:03] when churches were burning scary stories of telling the dark along with zombie CDs for being too satanic. So a book like this would be extremely hard for us to come by. Honestly I can't imagine why the library would have a book like that on their shelves anyway.

[00:10:16] It was marked up with handwritten notes and scribbles, like one of my Nana's recipe books. On the last page I found some faded handwritten instructions. The Spell of Finding and it started with a silly poem. You shall find what you seek be it angel, demon or foe.

[00:10:34] If you follow these words I have written below. Write your intentions on the dried hide of a deer and burn it immediately. Gather the ashes in your hands and rub them on a bird of prey's bones. Toss the bones and read the signs.

[00:10:48] They'll take you to what you seek. Note, advanced spell. Do not attempt without a knowledge of the mystic arts and sorcery. Me and Campbell got awful tickled reading what must have been the ramblings of some crackpot but we were bored and curious.

[00:11:02] We didn't have deer hide or bird bones but we didn't have a pen, an old notebook and a quarter. What we didn't have was a clear idea of what we were seeking. We thought for a minute and Campbell started grinning.

[00:11:15] He tore out a sheet of notebook paper and wrote down, I seek a gorgeous redhead. We giggled for a minute. Campbell had a thing for Angie Everhard ever since he saw her in Bordello of blood. Muster ended that tape once a month.

[00:11:28] Then I flicked the lighter and burnt the page. Watched it burn and then we rubbed the ashes all over my lucky quarter. We made a set of rules. The original spell wanted us to throw bones and listen to them, whatever that meant.

[00:11:41] What we came up with was we'd start driving and flip the coin whenever we hit a four-way intersection. Heads would go left, tails would go right. If we dropped the coin or anything like that, we just keep going straight.

[00:11:54] So we hopped back in the Chevy and took off up a road with Campbell driving and me flipping. We're gone along for a while and ended up way outside of town pretty quick. We got so damn lost you couldn't believe it. Driving through country we'd never seen before.

[00:12:09] Ended up on some dirt road way down in Unicoi County. Cousin that road got narrower and narrower until it stopped at a cattle guard in front of a green metal fence and a bunch of poster property signs.

[00:12:22] The coin flips were telling us to go on through the metal fence. So young and stupid as we were. We parked that Chevy truck and continued on foot. It was in the fall of the year and we left town about three in the afternoon.

[00:12:37] So by the time we made it this far, it was getting on about supper time. The sky was overcast so we couldn't hardly tell how low the sun was in the sky. Campbell liked a night hunt so he always had a couple of wheat lights in the truck

[00:12:51] with him. A wheat light is a type of light you'd use for mining. There's a heavy battery pack that you strap to a belt with a corded headlamp attached. So we strapped on our wheat lights, hopped that fence and headed up through the grassy field.

[00:13:05] There's a clear trail to follow and if it ever seemed to fork off in any way we'd flip a coin. Now this grassy field butted up against a patch of thick brush and a tree line and the trail cut right up into the woods.

[00:13:18] We got a few paces inside the tree line and then we both stopped at about the same time. Notice how unnaturally quiet it was. And just at the top of the next rise we saw her.

[00:13:31] We couldn't make out her face or nothing but she had long red hair that was tangled and matted with leaves. She's wearing a white sundress on an evening that was way too chilly for sundresses.

[00:13:42] The hem of her skirt looked torn at the bottom and one of the straps just kind of hung off the right shoulder. One of us, I believe it must have been Campbell, hollered at her and she ran.

[00:13:54] We took off after her and followed her up the hill until she, and I swear on a stack of bibles is true, she vanished. Just poof, gone. But now it's full dark and if she hadn't been wearing white there'd have been no

[00:14:09] way we could have followed her even with our lights on. We went digging around to the last spot where we saw her stand in and I caught a sight of something kind of shiny buried beneath some leaves. It was an old hand saw.

[00:14:21] The handle was rotten and the blade was rusty and smeared with something that looked like blood. Not bright red but kind of dark brown like the color of blood when it dries. Was it blood? I don't know. I didn't want to find out though.

[00:14:38] We decided it's time to go and we lit out of there quick. I can't tell you how we found our way back to the truck. We drove in the backwoods finding road signs. People weren't carrying smartphones with GPS back in those days until we found state

[00:14:51] of Franklin and drove straight back into town. We didn't speak of it for about a week and we didn't run and tell anybody else about it either. Who'd have believed us? The next Saturday I brought it up to Campbell.

[00:15:03] I'm pretty sure that we both thought we'd seen a ghost or our eyes had played tricks on us but the longer I thought about it and prayed on it the more I realized that girl must have been real.

[00:15:14] And if she was didn't we have an obligation and a civil duty to help her? I suggested that we talk to Campbell's aunt who worked as a secretary down at the sheriff's office but Campbell said they'd just as likely say we dreamed it up.

[00:15:26] Hell, we might've gotten in trouble for trespassing. But I eventually wore him down and convinced him to go looking for her. What can I say when you're young you just don't think right. We brought some supplies this time.

[00:15:38] We packed back with some food and water, two wheat lights, a compass, two knives and Campbell's rifle plenty of ammunition. We had a notion that if somebody called the law on us for trespassing we'd be able to say we were just out squirrel hunting or something.

[00:15:53] That would at least sound a lot less crazy than saying we were out ghost hunting. This time we were able to drive back by memory. We had a vague notion of how to get there from a highway and a few wrong turns notwithstanding.

[00:16:06] We ended up at that old metal fence well before sundown. Once we started walking through the woods we relied on the quarter again to guide us to the redhead. That led us straight to the same rusty old handsaw on the hill. And then right on cue she appeared.

[00:16:23] I don't know if she was standing closer or if we could see better in the daylight but either way we could see just how messed up she was. Her arm where the dress was torn was twisted at a sick angle. Her feet were bare and bloody.

[00:16:37] Her bangs covered her eyes but her lips were cut and swollen. We couldn't see her eyes but we knew she was watching us. Then we heard this weak voice. Sounded like a dead cat being dragged through the gravel. Why aren't you helping me? Then she took off running.

[00:16:56] She had us weaving between trees even as we ran after shouting for her to stop. She just kept running. At one point I was close enough to reach out a hand to stop her but my ankle caught on something and I went flying forwards.

[00:17:09] Hit the ground so hard I spitting up leaves. And of course she was gone again. I looked down at what I had tripped on. It was a purse. It had been unzipped and emptied and the strap had snapped.

[00:17:21] I'm not sure if I broke the strap when I tripped or if it had always been like that. Camel came over and sat next to me long enough for us to drink some water and decide whether or not I'd sprain my ankle. I hadn't.

[00:17:32] Long enough for the sun to sink down behind the tree line. I'd say we had about 5 or 10 minutes of twilight before it got completely dark. When we stood back up we took one glance back into the woods and here she was again.

[00:17:45] She's standing closer to us than ever before. She's just about on top of us in fact. Close enough to make out her face if it weren't hidden behind a hank or red hair. Soon as we saw her she turned away and began walking into the brush.

[00:17:59] We didn't follow her because I suppose we'd figured out there's no catching her. She looked over her shoulder at us and spoke in the small, gravelly voice. I'm right here. Why aren't you helping me? Now we started following close behind her. She didn't run this time.

[00:18:21] She just kind of limped at a steady pace. The girl stopped with her back against the tree. She just stopped with her back against the trunk of a rotted out old hickory tree. Then without a sound she threw her head back with her mouth gaped open wide.

[00:18:34] Like in a silent scream. And then poof. Gone. Just gone. When me and Campbell went home that night I think we'd made sort of an unspoken agreement not to speak of this ever again. Not to each other, not to anybody else.

[00:18:53] And that's what we did until maybe about a week or two after Thanksgiving that year. Campbell came over to my house and took me to my bedroom and shut the door. He had a copy of the Johnson City Press under his arm.

[00:19:05] He opened it up to a page with a story about a body being found in a shallow grave on a trail in Unicoy County. There's a picture of state troopers digging around the base of an old hickory tree.

[00:19:17] Paper said that the remains were believed to be those of Jeannie Kirkland, age 17, of Elizabethton who'd gone missing after a high school football game. The body had been dismembered and medical examiners estimated she'd been dead since late September, not long after she went missing. There was another picture.

[00:19:32] It was a senior class photo. The photo was black and white but anybody could tell maybe because of the freckles that this girl had gorgeous red hair. The photo was black and white but anybody could tell maybe because of the freckles that this girl had gorgeous red hair.

[00:19:44] She was wearing her varsity cheerleading uniform. I felt something like a lead weight pressing down on my chest. Campbell looked at me in the eye and thumped the picture. Then he said, This is her, isn't it? Come hither, come yon A true story, narrated by Edward October.

[00:20:25] I never liked to talk about the weeks daddy had nothing to say. That was the beginning of what the doctors, at the time, diagnosed with some sort of psychotic break. I was 12 years old at the time and I remember daddy coming home off a swing shift.

[00:20:41] When he worked the third, he'd just shuffle off to bed just as mama was getting me out of school. Then whenever we saw him, he wouldn't speak to a soul. And this would go on for a stretch of days and days.

[00:20:55] One night mama went to bed early and me and daddy stayed up watching TV. Now, I loved sitting up late with daddy watching TV during one of his quiet spells. That meant I could turn the TV to whatever program I wanted.

[00:21:09] I was watching something and he turned and looked at me. He had this awful look on his face and the flicker of the TV made him look almost ghostly like. And he said, I didn't understand what he was talking about.

[00:21:27] And then he proceeded to tell me this long, convoluted story about how he was a member of a sort of tribe of what he called travelers. Now these travelers were capable of identifying doorways that only they could traverse. And doorways that would follow the path of the people

[00:21:48] and the people who were there. And they were able to identify doorways that only they could traverse. And doorways that would take them to another time and place. From the times within a 40 year window of the travelers' birth years. 40 years before or 40 years after.

[00:22:08] Daddy said that he's never traveled farther back than 1942. And he never traveled further into the future than today. We had this talk around Thanksgiving of 1999. Well, I said, Daddy, you're joking right? This is scary. At first I played along like it was a joke,

[00:22:28] but this seemed to make him angry. He kept on giving me details. Daddy told me that when you exit a doorway you're a different person. New body, different age. You could be a man or a woman or a child. It was a roll of the dice.

[00:22:45] But he said if you keep traveling you can just about live forever. He said that he usually traveled with the rest of his tribe going through doorways together, setting up new lives together and then leaving together. He said the last time he traveled he exited the door

[00:23:11] as a seven year old boy. Members of his tribe placed him with an adoption agency. That's where he claimed my Nana and Paw Paw adopted him. I already knew he was an adoptee and from there he just grew up like a normal kid. Got married, became a father.

[00:23:29] Daddy said that the rest of his tribe moved on years ago and he slowly began to forget who he really was. All the past lives he lived I just wanted to prepare you kept telling me I've been here too long and I'll have to travel again soon

[00:23:49] probably not until after Christmas. Now, I still thought he was kind of joking but I played along and I asked him why I had to travel why not stay with me and Mama? He told me never to tell Mama anything he just said.

[00:24:05] Then he said I'm all through talking and started watching TV again. We both dozed off halfway through some Western that came on. Believe it was Adios Sabata with Yule Brenner. His quiet spell ended the next day. Everything returned to normal for a while and

[00:24:26] honestly I didn't think anything of our conversation. Maybe he'd been joking like I thought. Maybe I'd fallen asleep in front of the TV and just dreamed that we'd had that conversation. Or maybe I was awake and Daddy was halfway in a dream when he talked to me. Well

[00:24:46] that didn't last long. Daddy started looking off in the distance at things. Things that weren't really there. We were with my uncle on his farm. He'd bought a new hunting dog that he wanted to show off to Daddy. The dog lot was a

[00:25:16] bit of a walk from the house and as we walked Daddy kept looking way off in the distance at something on the hill. Something on the hill behind the dog lot. He asked my uncle who is that guy? What guy? Fell into black hoodie.

[00:25:32] When my uncle and I assured him there was nobody there he just stopped in his tracks grabbed me by the wrist and we ran back to the truck. He didn't talk again for a whole week. Another time me and Mama had been out shopping

[00:25:51] with my cousin on Black Friday. Daddy met us for supper at the Olive Garden. He was laughing and joking, telling funny stories about guys he worked with at the fire company and then he stopped mid-sentence. He got up from his seat and headed straight out of the restaurant.

[00:26:11] Mama told me to go with him He almost ran off and left me before I could get into the truck. Well, I begged him to tell me what was going on as he peeled out of that Olive Garden and off into the highway

[00:26:25] and he said, remember that conversation we had several weeks ago? He goes, I didn't tell you about the others. We call them the fleet ones for whatever reason. They're kind of like the traffic cops they don't want nobody to find out about the doorways, you see. Traveler

[00:26:45] Only travelers can see him If they find you they drag you off to somewheres maybe hell Nobody knows Nobody that's ever been dragged off by would ever come back to tell about it. I've seen other travelers dragged off and it ain't pretty It's like they

[00:27:07] drag them off by the soul I asked Daddy that was what he'd seen at the farm and at the Olive Garden He nodded and told me he sees them all the time now He said he'd been here too long

[00:27:21] and they'd get him if he didn't travel again soon. This is what finally frightened me enough to tell my mother She didn't seem as surprised by this news as I figured she'd be Maybe she already knew Maybe he'd been taken by one of these crazy spells

[00:27:37] So we hauled Daddy off to the doctor's appointments and CAT scans and MRIs and blood work and therapists They weren't able to diagnose him with anything specific but they gave him a cocktail of meds and he depressed mostly They figured that would help and they did

[00:28:01] for a while He took his pills and went into his follow-up appointments like a good boy and everything seemed even keel for the most part Except Sometimes I'd catch him doodling in an old notebook with pictures of men or old hags all in black with no faces

[00:28:26] Sometimes he scribbled over the blackness where a face ought to be so hard with the pin to her hole You see in all kinds of scary movies Except Every now and then he flipped past an old episode of Quantum Leap or Dr. Who on our PBS affiliate

[00:28:46] and he'd say that those shows must have been written by travelers Because in both shows there's a time traveler that changes his identity in some way He'd also read a lot of old sci-fi novels especially Brian Aldous I remember he had a battered, dog-eared copy of Dracula Unbound

[00:29:10] and he came up to me one evening and he showed me all these references to Fleet Ones Underline He just looked at me and arched his eyebrow up as if to say found me another traveler He started singing to himself The tune was kind of like

[00:29:36] Ramblin Man by Hank Williams except he sang it with different lyrics There's an open door in front of me These faces in the mirror I've got to see But in that But then they'll claim my soul before the dawn And lovers will meet Come hither come yon

[00:30:14] I never knew him to ever listen to Hank I'd never heard him sing before in my whole life Well, Christmas came and went that year But Daddy didn't go nowhere and I sort of figured that Daddy was cured of his compulsion or whatever it was

[00:30:37] And I sort of forgot about all of it I wish I hadn't That way I would have paid more attention to all the times he'd wander off to inspect sinkholes and animal burrows or check out the rear exits and sub-basements of department stores

[00:30:58] And hindsight is easy to see that he was looking for doorways I guess anyone else would have found his behavior odd and suspicious right off the bat But to us with Daddy it didn't seem odd at all especially after a lifetime of suspicious behavior Then one weekend

[00:31:18] around Groundhog's Day he's driving me out to look for this comic book store Way down in Unicoi County I was gray and cold that day with just enough rain to make everything look wet and greasy Daddy turned to me and he said You know Dennis

[00:31:36] If I ever did travel again chances are good I'd end up somewhere in your lifetime I'd be sure to look you up I started crying It was a real ugly cry I yelled at him I told him that that may be true

[00:31:51] but if it wasn't a bunch of bullshit and it probably was I said you'd come back but you wouldn't be you I kept repeating that You wouldn't be you, Daddy You wouldn't be you We drove all the way out to this comic book store without saying another word

[00:32:10] We got there and he bought me just about everything I wanted I still have those books And then we drove back home but we took a detour through Johnson City and he bought me this big lunch at the Red Lobster Just me and my dad

[00:32:27] turned out to be a great day The best day Week later he went missing When Daddy didn't come home from work one night we chalked it up to one of his stories about his strange spells But by suppertime the next day we called the police

[00:33:02] It didn't take long for his truck to turn up It was parked on a gravel road up in the mountains right up again a barbed wire fence that marked off a few acres of post-it property Police said there were no signs of foul play

[00:33:20] that he had even left his keys as if he'd be right back But maybe he's leaving the truck behind for us to pick up later and mama still has that truck I think it still runs Me and mama kept the lights on for him and stayed involved

[00:33:40] with groups of volunteers who kept searching for daddy long after the police had moved on to other priorities But in our hearts we knew Daddy was gone for good We were right Daddy's never seen again When I got my driver's license I used to go on long drives

[00:33:58] in the mountains More often than not I'd end up along that fence road where daddy abandoned his truck I never did it to look for daddy I guess I wanted to poke around and see if I could find the doorway I know it sounds...stupid There was a

[00:34:20] rotted out log that might have done the trick but who knows Daddy could have walked on mile or more into the woods looking for it Yeah, that's crazy That sounds crazy I know it Still, whenever I'm back in town to this day I'll look twice

[00:34:40] when I see someone dressed all in black especially someone that doesn't seem to belong I start thinking about Daddy's fleet ones Sometimes I have dreams about the fleet ones come swarming towards me across stormy seas Swarming like these great big flocks of migrating birds blacker than that

[00:35:06] Still, there are other times when I catch a stranger staring at me from across the street or over from the far corner of the Walmart or something I've convinced myself that they're staring at me as if they know me even though I've never met them before Then I

[00:35:32] then I wonder if it's Daddy wearing somebody else's body living somebody else's life I wonder if Daddy walked through a doorway to find me But it isn't really him Not really The tape advances for a few moments until finally a woman fills the frame Mid-30s, unkempt hair

[00:36:10] but still pretty She's been crying When she speaks into the camera her voice is something very close to a croak I My name is Jane Woods and I'm a very ordinary person I wish that I had never watched that video cassette or that having done so

[00:36:45] I had died I found it in 1996 on the day they buried my mammal. It was a Saturday before Christmas The light from a window outside the frame brightens and its glare activates the autofocus Her face blurs then comes into focus for a moment and blurs again

[00:37:05] In those days back home I had an unsafary reputation That's a nice way to put it right I suppose I'd even made some poor decisions in high school, maybe even up through my 20s If you'd ever known my mother you'd understand why I'm not making excuses

[00:37:21] I'm just explaining Mama Ellen raised me because my mom couldn't raise her daughter from the Marshall County Jail Or while she was blowing truckers and rills at the Texaco in Wytheville Everyone in town thought I was a slut so

[00:37:35] I didn't want the preacher to drive me to Jackson's apartment after the funeral Jackson Trent, he was my boyfriend at the time That's where I found it The video cassette at Jackson's apartment in a shoebox up on a beam She clears her throat

[00:37:49] and pushes a strand of hair Flecked with new grays behind her ears It's a nervous gesture She feels stripped naked by the camera whose gaze seems to obsess over the shape of her lips their fullness and lack of color At first I thought

[00:38:07] Jackson might have put it there for me to find some kind of weird joke but when I watched the stuff recorded there I knew it was impossible Her head dips slightly out of frame as she picks up a video cassette She holds it up so that

[00:38:23] the camera can get a good close look VHS format in a battered slip case The slip case bears a logo as well as stray marks that might have been made by a child playing with a marker Some of these resemble rudimentary letters or simple faces

[00:38:41] but are too crude to really make out I don't even like to keep it near me I can't sleep nights if I do There's a bank in another town where I hide it in a little safe deposit box and I'll pick it up again when we're done

[00:38:55] What no one knows or cares to remember is that there were three Gorgons Each one possessed a visage hideous enough to turn a man to stone with her gaze Their names depending on whom one asks were Medusa Megara and Stino But they're true names

[00:39:19] for they live within the human soul Artis- Longing and heartache It was wet and cold that day and I never felt so numb I wondered if Mammal felt that way just before the end And then I realized that it had to have been worse

[00:39:43] Those waves of tears and shattering just washed over me again It had in fact been so much worse that the doctors euthanized Jane's Mammal by inserting a needle into her eye tissue And that was just to ensure they wouldn't bury her alive

[00:39:59] But even then they couldn't be sure They used special equipment to verify that her heart and brain activity had stopped before declaring her dead But how could anyone really tell under all that stone And anyway, we knew that she stayed awake

[00:40:15] long enough after the stone made it impossible for her to breathe The 11 o'clock news that she was the only news anyone in town ever watched appeared that night with its bluster of upbeat yet urgent intro music A news anchor teased a story about a Marshall County woman's death

[00:40:33] being linked to a local legend For such a rural area where a bedbug infestation at a public library passed for hard news this had to be the story of a lifetime if not a dozen lifetimes Footage shot at Mammal Ellen's home played throughout the news segment

[00:40:53] Camera pans across a daybed in the home of Ellen B. Woods Seven handmade sock monkeys lined the bed in two neat rows They stare at the lens with unseeing button eyes One of them is called Mojo Jane had clutched Mojo throughout her pitiable childhood

[00:41:11] But she was a little bit more more like a little boy than a little girl who had no idea what Mojo was like to her little child Mojo throughout her pitiable childhood Here he sits still beloved but now forgotten replaced long ago by a succession of Jane's

[00:41:31] self-absorbed lovers Mojo would never again comfort a sad or frightened child in the small hours of the night He now exists only as a small length of analog magnetic videotape A freak electrical fire that burns for over 7 years When this videotape burns

[00:41:49] it will be as though Mojo never existed WCYB reported about as many details of the incident as anyone could find A game warden had found Jane's grandmother Ellen B. Woods of Golgotha, Virginia Wandering through a row of pines on a mountain road

[00:42:09] Everyone in Marshall County knew it as The Government Road When he found her the game warden said that her arms were completely petrified When she arrived at Johnston Memorial Hospital 75% of her body had turned to stone The outbreak of stone began in the palm of the victim's hand

[00:42:29] radiating out to the fingers and up the arm Skin tissue adjacent to the stone would become red and inflamed before blistering then becoming rigid And finally turning to stone Oddly veined limestone in Memo Ellen's case During the blister stage deep tissue beneath the affected area

[00:42:51] including fat cells, muscle, blood, lint, etc would begin to petrify followed by bone and cartilage Ellen B. Woods of Golgotha, Virginia placed a phone call to her granddaughter, Jane from the hospital quarters of an hour later her body except for the soft tissue of her eyes

[00:43:15] had turned to stone I didn't get to tell my mama that I loved her before she died but I guess that's what everybody says when they lose someone unexpectedly It happened so fast that I didn't have time to really grieve The news reports all failed to mention

[00:43:31] that the phone call placed by Ellen B. Woods of Golgotha, Virginia didn't actually reach her granddaughter Instead she said goodbye to Jane's answering machine Jane has never listened to the message I want to hear her voice again but I'm too chicken shit And so Memo Ellen became

[00:43:51] the third officially documented victim of a real life Gorgon hidden in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains Of course it isn't really a Gorgon even as its supplicants ache and despair before they're in madly indifferent God it once fancied itself to be the pieces of some living thing

[00:44:11] but that was very long ago In 1942 a milkman named Frank Polanski was found by a coon hunter only a dozen or so yards from where Ellen was found According to local legend the hunting dog that had sniffed out the petrified remains never hunted again and could never again

[00:44:33] dare to be outdoors after dark The Marshall County Coroner with the help of a geology expert from Emory and Henry College conducted an autopsy to verify that the cadaver was a petrified human being possessing a skeleton internal organs and tissue structures of stone rather than simply

[00:44:51] a hyper realistic anatomical sculpture Another strange layer to the case was that Polanski had lived his entire life in a prison around Baltimore with no known professional or personal ties to southwestern Virginia or northeast Tennessee No one, not even Polanski's widow has ever been able to explain

[00:45:13] why he was found in an obscure corner of rural Virginia dressed in his white uniform On December 5th 1845 a preacher named James Archer Lewis was awakened in the middle of the night by a loud rapping the bedroom window of Golgotha's Methodist Parsonage

[00:45:33] The building still stands at the end of Bula Avenue but has since been converted to an antique shop Lewis investigated the noise and found a woman in her 40s writhing like a string puppet manipulated by some madly twitching invisible hand She spoke to the evangelist long enough

[00:45:51] to tell a disjointed tale of a hag in the woods of glowing eyes, the color of sadness and the sensation of spiders possessed of many tentacles and probing feelers spinning whams of limestone in her gut Before she fell to the ground in a state of utter petrification

[00:46:13] Lewis read a service for the unidentified woman and buried her in a cemetery plot behind his church In the late 1960s a team of paranormal investigators to dig up the grave in an attempt to ascertain the victim's identity they found petrified remains in the exact state described by

[00:46:33] Lewis and a number of his parishioners When attempts at identification failed, the remains were buried once more, this time in a newer cemetery a few miles outside town Three days before Halloween in 1978 This second grave was dug up and the remains were stolen

[00:46:53] and they will never be found The universe exists only in the present Thus, the fabric of reality has already evaporated before the human mind can process it Jackson Trent Everybody called him Jiffy Jack but no one really knew why Ran Mountain Empire video and knife on Main Street

[00:47:21] Half the store was devoted to video rentals stocked with outdoor sporting goods and knives The old men whispered rumors that Jackson conducted a number of questionable activities in his store Jane dismisses these claims You know how rumors are in a small town Jackson Trent was arrested

[00:47:39] on two counts of distributing pornographic material to a minor and five counts of selling a firearm with an expired permit A separate investigation found that a majority of his rental videos were pirated I've been living with Jackson for several months

[00:47:55] He had an apartment on the second floor of his store It was always easier just to go through the store than to use the back entrance I remember a skiff of snow had fallen the night before the funeral and the wooden Indian outside the store front

[00:48:07] was covered with slush It's funny what you remember Her lower lip blossoms pink for nine seconds and then goes pale once more I didn't like living there much You remember that farmhouse The night of the living dead or the cabin in the Evil Dead movies

[00:48:23] That store was kind of like that all the shadows and taxidermies everything dusty Daylight would filter through the store's filmy windows and fall onto knife display cases and shelves of new release videos As one ventured deeper inside the movies became older and more obscure The stuffed game

[00:48:43] more fearsome with faces frozen and exaggerated rage The horror and exploitation tapes lined the walls in the darkest corner of the building They stood on narrow unfinished wooden shelves guarded by a stuffed brown bear clutching a rainbow trout The apartment above the store wasn't much homeier

[00:49:03] I guess Jackson was another one of my bad decisions in life At this point Jane discusses the tape she found in the shoebox up on a beam in Jackson's apartment She becomes increasingly agitated as she describes its contents and how viewing it has changed her life

[00:49:23] Her sentences are a little more than fragments sometimes contradictory to previous statements Those watching her interview will invariably become unsettled Some experience nausea Portrait of an unhinged woman Among her more coherent and consistent statements one can glean a few pieces of information Apart from barely glimpsed abstract forms

[00:49:49] and unintelligible speech probably attributable to old content that had been recorded over the beginning of the tape is blank Nearly 23 minutes elapsed before any noteworthy content appears Moments from Jane's life past and future real and imagined Play out in brief flashes only seconds in duration Awful moments

[00:50:13] Moments captured by unseen cameras with impossible placement Moments that have never been and should never be Jane lists the scenes she remembers She only viewed the tape once but her recollections are crisp and urgent taking each one off with a trembling finger Her speech slurs

[00:50:35] and increases in volume as though she's delirious from fever and anguish Among the awful moments are these A lonely Christmas morning with a five-year-old Jane sitting quietly while her mother leads a strange man to bed His fingernails are long and dirty His final work shirts stained with sweat

[00:51:00] and kerosene Cut to her mother on her deathbed A brief fight against HIV and a long acquaintance with crystal meth have rendered her a living corpse Jane lowers her face to her mother's blistered lips Jane Please don't go She mumbles I need help shitting in the bed pan

[00:51:22] These were her dying words Fade to prom night and Jane's date Russell Boggess actually a third cousin drunk on blackberry shine and sawing open her panties with a buck knife He jams his fat, calloused fingers inside of her and she sobs looking up to the ceiling

[00:51:42] as if searching for assistance from some indifferent savior Her desperate sobs continue like a demented musical score as the tape cuts to a cartoon sock monkey with hyper-realistic eyes They looked wet and veiny as though they'd been magnified by some eye doctor's tool recited the exact date

[00:52:04] of Mamal Ellen's death on her mother's date February 25th, 2006 You've come to a horrible end The sock monkey says it's voices like a frightened child was bringing the dark There are other scenes but Jane either cannot remember them or cannot describe them She mentions something about

[00:52:24] acclamation version of herself vomiting and committing acts of self-mutilation The final scene is the longest on the tape A woman in her mid 30s fills the screen She's pretty but distraught She looks into the camera and makes a long tearful confession She's telling some

[00:52:44] unseen interviewer about all of the heartache she's endured and of some nameless dread that's invaded her life However, the audio of her confession grows increasingly distorted and muffled only to be replaced by the same low sobbing as before Sobs turn to screams screams lengthen and become frenzied

[00:53:10] Finally, the noise is more like the terrified and desperate barks of a small mammal as it is being flayed Cut to static and blank tape Death is the only valid reality All living things are fundamentally unreal Right now I work on the overnight stocking crew at the

[00:53:33] Piggly Wiggly in Mountain City I have a hard time sleeping nights and I figure I'd not take advantage of all the time I'd be home by myself in the dark Since that day since the video, I've had a hard time holding down jobs

[00:53:47] This is the first one I've been at for more than eight months or so She lists the dozen or more jobs she's lost since viewing the videotape and complaints of health issues that she believes the tape caused These include back problems, hypertension type 2 diabetes and an anxiety disorder

[00:54:05] resulting in vivid nightmares Sometimes when I wake up the fear and the terror are all I can remember of the dream Sometimes the dreams are as real as anything I've ever touched They're as real as you There's real as the blinking light on that camera

[00:54:21] Her most frequent recurring nightmare is set in Jackson's video store The snow is falling Sometimes heavy sheets of rain But it is always dark and Jane's dream self must always seek refuge in the store The only light in the store

[00:54:39] is from the flicker of a television behind the counter Sometimes the TV is the actual set in the store Other times it's the ancient, large as a dresser walnut console TV from Mamel Ellen's living room Standing opposite the television in her limestone form Her eyes are unusually

[00:54:59] wide and moist Her cheeks glisten with teardrops Her pose reminds Jane of a wooden Indian or a stuffed bear In fact, some versions of the dream depict the petrified grandmother clutching an inanimate catfish or a bundle of wooden cigars The video playing on the Dreamworld's TV is similar

[00:55:21] but not identical to the one found in a shoebox upon a beam Though it is always a pageant of atrocity pain and humiliation Grotesque sock monkeys often make an appearance Sometimes the video is not at all visible to the dreamer but its effects are always felt

[00:55:41] On a few occasions, Jane has attempted to fight the dream to stop the video to end her grandmother's captive torment. She always fails to present these attempts That's what I dream at least once a week Usually more, take it for what it is The nothingness is hungry

[00:56:01] It is now Christmas Eve or rather Christmas morning Jane is reading from a battered composition notebook No one would consider Jane to be a talented woman but she has a knack for doodling. Pages from the notebook are littered with pencil sketches and a frail woman in white

[00:56:25] Instead of a head A late 1970's model Zenith television has perched atop her spindly neck Her skeletal arms are a ruin of infected track marks My mama, the only one who's ever really loved me is a slab of rock buried in a cheap cemetery plot

[00:56:45] I believe that the hag in the woods killed her and then somehow authored a weird videotape to mock and torment me That's what I believe That is my only belief Wet eyes stare back at me through the every shadow and on the backs of my own eyelids

[00:57:01] There's nothing left for me here except this awful thing that's invaded my life The 11 o'clock news is over and static from the TV is stuck in my throat I'm writing down what's happened in the notebooks that if anybody cares

[00:57:17] they might be able to answer the questions that I can't As I write this I'm parked somewhere along the government road I'm looking for the hag that killed my mama I hope to find out who she is and who I am

[00:57:33] It's so dark but I think we'll meet before dawn I'm fighting my sleep now but she's awful close Whenever I close my eyes I hear the same awful sounds from the videotape just outside my car The tape stops automatically rewinds a trifle faster than it would

[00:57:51] in most players In small internal rotors wine almost imperceptibly just before the tape begins playing again It advances 22 minutes and 56 seconds of mostly blank tape A woman fills the frame mid-30s unkempt hair but still pretty She's been crying when she speaks She sounds as though she's struggling

[00:58:19] with a lump in her throat My name is Jane Woods and I'm a very ordinary person You have been listening to 2256 An original story written by John Iger This story was first adapted for the Break Room stories Narrated by Jen co-host of Our True Crime podcast

[00:58:47] with additional narration by Brett Norwood and Edward October October Pod was co-produced by MJ McAdams Produced, edited, and directed by Edward October Find all of our true true-ish and classic tales of horror and the paranormal on our YouTube channel October Pod Home Video

[00:59:11] Follow us on Instagram and Twitter at October Pod VHS or on TikTok at October Pod Find us on the World Wide Web at October Pod VHS dot com October Pod Retro Horror for Bold Individualists Thanks again for listening to Scary Time by IndieDropin Network

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