Sleep Apnea

[00:00:05] Good evening, I'm Ben, and welcome to the show where you and I gather around this campfire to hear some of our fellow campers scariest experiences. Whether you're a new camper or returning one, I'm glad you're here. [00:00:18] Tonight's story was sent in by a camper named Jackson. [00:00:22] About those terrifying things that you can only find in moments your body forgets to keep you alive. [00:00:28] It's about a man who starts recording himself at night to track sleep apnea, only to discover that in the long silences between his breaths, something is speaking to him. [00:00:39] Now, without further ado, do you want to hear a ghost story? [00:00:45] My dad died on a Thursday morning, and by Sunday night, I started choking in my sleep. [00:00:52] That probably sounds dramatic, but it's the truth. I had sleep apnea for years. [00:00:58] Mild, they called it. Then moderate. Then one of those things doctors say you need to take seriously, which we all know is polite language for this is going to kill you. [00:01:11] I was supposed to wear cpap. I had it in my closet. I hated it. [00:01:16] I'd wear it three nights, tops, rip it off in my sleep, swear I'd get used to it eventually, then go a month or two pretending exhaustion was just part of being an adult. [00:01:28] After my dad died, pretending stopped working. [00:01:32] I started waking up with headaches so bad it felt like someone had pumped my head full of wet cement. [00:01:38] My mouth would be dry enough that my tongue stuck to the roof of it. [00:01:42] My chest hurt. [00:01:44] My heart would race for no reason. [00:01:46] Twice the first week I woke up sitting straight up in bed, clawing at my throat. Not because anything was there, but because for those first few seconds after waking, I could swear something had been. [00:01:59] My doctor told me the same thing. [00:02:01] Use your CPAP or schedule another study. We'll see if we need to adjust anything. [00:02:07] So I just started recording myself at night. Not video, just audio. [00:02:12] I set my phone on the nightstand and let it run while I slept. My idea was simple. Capture the snoring, the pauses, the gasping. Bring it in to my doctor. [00:02:22] The first few nights were exactly what I expected. [00:02:25] Sleeping, snoring, gasping. [00:02:29] There was something weirdly humiliating about hearing yourself sleep. [00:02:33] I'd always imagined sleep as peaceful. [00:02:37] But in those recordings I sounded like a house settling. [00:02:40] My wet breathing. The rustle of sheets, long stretches of dead air broken in by a sudden ugly snort. [00:02:48] The first time I tried to listen to it all the way through, I could only get about halfway. [00:02:53] It was all the pauses that got me. [00:02:55] You don't ever really realize how long 10 seconds is. Until you're listening for a breath that never comes. [00:03:02] Then 15 seconds. [00:03:04] In 20 seconds, I sat at my kitchen table with headphones on, gripping the edge of it so hard my knuckles were white, waiting for myself to inhale again. [00:03:15] When I finally did, it came out of me like I had been underwater. [00:03:19] I told myself the fear was useful, that this fear that I might die in my sleep from not breathing might finally make me take this issue seriously. [00:03:32] On the sixth night of recording, I heard something else. [00:03:36] I almost missed it. [00:03:38] The recording was pretty much the same as the others. Breathing, silence, snoring. [00:03:45] However, at 3:17 in the morning, there was again one of those longer pauses. [00:03:50] My breathing had stopped and there was maybe 12 seconds of nothing. [00:03:55] Then, softly, almost like somebody was leaning over a sleeping child, coming through the static of the silence. [00:04:04] Easy now, Jackie. I froze and stopped the recording. [00:04:07] Nobody's called me Jackie since I was 12. [00:04:10] To everyone else I'm Jack Jackson on paperwork. [00:04:14] But when I was little, when I had nightmares, when I got the flu, when I'd fall asleep on the couch, my father would carry me to bed. And he used to say this exact phrase, Easy now, Jackie. [00:04:28] I yanked the headphones off so fast they snapped against my neck. [00:04:33] I lived alone. My TV wasn't on. [00:04:36] My windows weren't open. [00:04:38] My apartment is quiet, so quiet that I could hear my refrigerator cycling in the kitchen. [00:04:44] I told myself that I was just hearing this, that it was just my brain fitting meaning to static because I was still grieving the death of my father. [00:04:57] We're always looking for the dead in everything. In crowds, in dreams, in voices down the hall at the grocery store, in the shape of someone's shoulders. Across the parking lot, I made myself listen again. [00:05:10] My breathing stopped and the silence came. [00:05:13] Then again. [00:05:15] Easy now, Jackie. [00:05:18] The second time was clearer. [00:05:20] I heard a breath in the words, heard a little rasp in the throat of whatever was saying this. [00:05:28] That night I slept with every light on and didn't record myself. [00:05:32] The next morning I told myself I was never going to record myself sleeping again. [00:05:37] But the next night came and I plugged my phone in and set it to record anyways. [00:05:43] I didn't even pretend this was for my sleep apnea anymore. I wanted to know if I could hear my father again. [00:05:50] Not every time I stopped breathing, but I could hear him. [00:05:56] Sometimes all he would say was my name. [00:05:59] Sometimes it was the same. Easy now, Jackie. [00:06:02] Once, after a terrible, terrible stretch of silence that ended in me choking awake, I swear I heard him say, there you go. [00:06:13] It was almost as if he was there, coaching me through it. [00:06:18] And part of me, I guess some awfully needy part of me was comforted. [00:06:24] I knew my father had died. He'd been dead for three weeks, cremated and sealed in a box on my bookshelf. [00:06:32] But here he was again, watching me sleep. [00:06:36] I started going to bed earlier so I could listen to the recording earlier. The next morning, I stopped calling people. I stopped going to the doctor and checking up about my sleep apnea. [00:06:48] I stopped going anywhere I didn't absolutely need to be. I'd get home from work, eat something over the sink, only ever thinking about the recorder on my nightstand. [00:06:58] The voice was always just out of reach, like it was there but some distance away. [00:07:04] That night, I must have had a particularly long silence in my breath. [00:07:10] It woke me up, even the gasping for air. [00:07:15] I looked over. My phone was still recording. [00:07:18] But almost as if my phone registered it before I did, I heard from the left side of my bed, clear as day, my father say, wear your damn mask now. This terrified me. I fell out of bed. [00:07:36] I was used to these recordings. It gave me a sense of security. [00:07:42] But hearing him next to me saying something that he had said to me in life because he had sleep apnea, too, worse than mine. He used to call his CPAP machine his fighter pilot gear. [00:07:55] The year he got diagnosed, he spent an hour at the kitchen table telling me that I was an idiot if I thought being tired all the time was normal. [00:08:03] Wear the damn mask, he would say. Or he would say something like, quit acting. Like dying in your sleep is somehow less embarrassing than dying. Sleeping in headgear. Back then, I could hear a sense of playfulness in his voice. [00:08:17] But this time he was serious. [00:08:21] The next night, moving forward, I got my CPAP machine out of the closet. [00:08:25] I cleaned it, filled the humidifier chamber, and changed the filter. [00:08:29] I sat on the side of my bed, the mask in my hands, but I couldn't quite get myself to put it on. [00:08:36] You see, a thought had taken hold in me by then, and I hated myself for this. But if I wore this mask, would my father stop speaking to me? [00:08:46] I'm not proud of this thought, because I know he wanted what was best for me. [00:08:51] And I wish I could tell you this story in a way that makes me sound smarter, less willing to trade my life for one more word from the dead. [00:08:59] I set the mask back on the nightstand and hit record. [00:09:03] I didn't remember falling asleep that night. [00:09:06] The next thing I remember was waking again, gasping for air. My chest was tight, my limbs were heavy in this impossible, drugged way. [00:09:19] The room was dark and I could barely move. I could barely breathe. [00:09:24] And that is when, I swear to God, the mattress on the left side of my bed dipped. [00:09:30] And again, not through headphones, but not through recording, I heard my father. [00:09:37] I told you to wear the damn mask. [00:09:40] I tried to turn my head to see if I could look at him, but I couldn't. [00:09:44] Panic at this point started going off inside of me. My heart was slamming. My vision flashed white at its edges. [00:09:51] I could still barely drag in enough air to survive. [00:09:55] The next thing I heard was I tried to warn you, but if you wish, you don't have to do this anymore. And for one second, I understood him. [00:10:05] The offer, the grief I'd been feeling, the exhaustion, the weeks of dragging myself through days that felt coated in ash. The secret shame of how much easier it would be to stop fighting every night for something as simple and stupid as one breath. [00:10:21] And it was because I understood this offer that I knew whatever was beside me that night was not my father. [00:10:30] I threw my whole body sideways off the bed and hit the floor hard enough to split the skin over my eyebrow. [00:10:37] The shock of all this forced an air into my chest like I was a rag doll. [00:10:42] I ran over to the light and turned it on. My room was empty and my bed looked untouched. My phone was still recording. [00:10:50] I grabbed my phone and walked back into the kitchen. [00:10:53] I listened to this recording once. [00:10:56] Only once, like the others. You hear me sleeping. And then a long, dead silence. [00:11:03] 48 seconds at least, maybe more. [00:11:06] Then there's a faint creak of the mattress. [00:11:09] Then his voice. I tried to warn you, but if you wish, you don't have to do this anymore. I use the CPAP machine every night now. [00:11:16] I haven't missed one night with it in over seven months. [00:11:20] I no longer record myself sleeping. [00:11:24] So there are no more voices. No more phantom mattress creaks, no long silences with my father speaking to me. [00:11:33] Sometimes, though, right before sleep takes me, when the pressure in the room starts to push and the mask seals on my face, my breathing no longer is wholly my own. [00:11:45] I think about the voices I heard in that recording and the voices I would hear in the room. [00:11:50] How it sounded, how certain. [00:11:52] And how every now and then, in the few seconds before I drift off, I feel like I can feel the left side of my mattress sink for just a fraction of a second, as if someone or something is sitting there, disappointed, waiting to see whether or not I remember to keep breathing on my own. [00:12:15] Thank you, Jackson, for allowing me to share your story. [00:12:19] This story lives in a terrifying space for me where your body and mind both become unreliable. [00:12:26] Sleep is supposed to be a place where we rest and recover, but for many it's a place of helplessness where even breathing is no longer fully in their control. [00:12:37] Maybe that is what makes this story scary to me. [00:12:41] I am happy you shared it. [00:12:43] I do have a couple shout outs tonight. I would like to welcome two new Lost campers to the show, J. Doyer and Fetichini Fluming. [00:12:53] I have to assume that is not a real name, but thank you nonetheless for supporting the show. [00:13:00] And to anyone else listening that would like to support the show as well gain access to monthly bonus episodes and early access to show episodes. Just head over to patreon.com do you want to hear Ghost Story? But as always, I am just glad to have you all as campers on this journey. Please keep sharing the show with anyone you think might like these stories or someone you're just trying to scare. If you're enjoying the show, please leave a review. I would love to hear from you. Until next time.