Episode Transcript
[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 or returning one, I'm glad you're here.
[00:00:18] I've been getting a lot of really good stories sent in lately and I'm extremely grateful for that.
[00:00:24] If you sent in a story or sent me your experience and are waiting for me to get back to you, I want to let you know that I've gotten a bit behind.
[00:00:33] But I'll be getting back to you soon.
[00:00:35] Tonight we will hear a story sent in by a camper named Evan Silver.
[00:00:40] It's really a story that is my kind of horror. It's not just a ghost story, but a story where Evan and his girlfriend Claire have a very real reaction to their encounter with the paranormal.
[00:00:53] They didn't just run away screaming, they reflected.
[00:00:58] Now, without further ado, do you want to hear a ghost story?
[00:01:05] A few years ago, my girlfriend Claire and I were deep in the routine of our day jobs. Exhausted, overworked and constantly daydreaming about getting out of the rat race.
[00:01:17] You know the type of talk, those late night, half joking plans you make with someone you love.
[00:01:23] For us, it was always the same fantasy. Open a bakery. Somewhere quiet.
[00:01:29] Fresh bread, warm coffee.
[00:01:31] A place where the morning felt like something worth waking up for.
[00:01:36] Until one day, these talks weren't just fantasy anymore. I found a listing randomly while scrolling through a sublet site at 2 in the morning.
[00:01:46] A storefront in Brunswick, Maine. The rent was stupidly cheap, so cheap it felt like a scam. But the photos. Oh, this place had charm.
[00:01:56] Rustic brick walls, big windows.
[00:01:59] The kind of old world character that Pinterest people just kill for.
[00:02:04] Claire was skeptical, and rightly so.
[00:02:08] But we called the landlord anyway. A guy named Mr. Adler.
[00:02:12] Strange man, really. Spoke in weird clipped sentences. Never smiled. And when Claire pressed him about the building's history, all he said was the previous tenants lacked commitment.
[00:02:26] That should have been a strange red flag, but I was already picturing the storefront outside Morning Glory Bakery, painted in bright yellow.
[00:02:36] I signed the lease within a week.
[00:02:39] The place needed work, lots of it.
[00:02:42] Three weeks of scrubbing, repainting, minor repairs here, there.
[00:02:47] But eventually we opened.
[00:02:50] And for a moment, for one glorious moment, it was magical.
[00:02:56] Locals wandered in, curious. Claire's croissants were a hit. My sourdough sold out the first weekend.
[00:03:04] For the first time in a long time, I thought maybe we had made the right call.
[00:03:10] And that's when everything Started going wrong.
[00:03:13] At first it was small things, things that I could explain away.
[00:03:17] Ingredients going missing. A bag of flour. We both remembered ordering just gone.
[00:03:23] Eggs cracked and smeared across the counter.
[00:03:26] We blamed stress. Maybe we were forgetful.
[00:03:30] We were tired.
[00:03:32] But when Claire left a tray of pastries in the display overnight, perfectly golden, the next morning they had turned black.
[00:03:40] Like they'd been baked again somehow.
[00:03:43] Then there was the sugar, or what we thought was sugar, turned out to be salt. An entire day's batch of muffins ruined.
[00:03:52] Still, we made excuses. Maybe the bags were mislabeled.
[00:03:56] Maybe some neighborhood kids were messing around.
[00:03:59] Anything that was easier than what we were starting to suspect.
[00:04:03] We could hear whispers. Soft murmurs that existed just on the edge of our hearing. We could hear them while we were cleaning late at night, while we were baking in the morning.
[00:04:13] Nothing was ever clear enough to understand. It was always just there.
[00:04:17] Claire said it had to be the wind coming through the walls. I didn't argue.
[00:04:22] But at some point during this bakery endeavor, I lost my ability to sleep through the night.
[00:04:30] One night in particular, it was gray and damp. It was one of those main evenings where the sky presses down from the heavens. I'd gone to grab one more butter from our supplier.
[00:04:40] Claire stayed behind to clean up.
[00:04:43] She told me what happened when I got back.
[00:04:46] She had heard laughter from the basement. High pitched and childlike.
[00:04:51] She called for me, thinking I was playing a prank, but no one answered.
[00:04:56] So she went down to check it out. The basement was always cold, dimly lit. We mostly used it for storage. But that night, Claire said it felt different.
[00:05:06] Like something was down there, waiting for her. There was an old wood burning oven in the back, rusted shut, unused for decades.
[00:05:14] As she approached it, she heard a voice. A child's voice.
[00:05:19] Please.
[00:05:20] Please.
[00:05:21] Then more voices.
[00:05:23] Layered, pleading. Let us out. We just want sweets.
[00:05:29] Please help us.
[00:05:31] The oven rattled and Claire ran back upstairs. When I got back, she was pale, shaking.
[00:05:37] She told me everything.
[00:05:40] I expected.
[00:05:41] I don't know, hysteria. A dream, maybe. But instead, I felt cold. Cause I remembered something our landlord, Mr. Adler, had said.
[00:05:51] The previous tenants lacked commitment. We stayed up all night digging through town records, old newspapers, looking for anything.
[00:06:01] And we couldn't find anything concrete. Just. Just an old folk tale, really, about a bakery that was in this very building in the early 1900s, owned by a man named Elias Gray.
[00:06:15] They say his pastries were the best. Kids loved them.
[00:06:19] When in the same year his bakery opened, over a dozen children went missing. No one ever found the bodies, and there was never any suspects.
[00:06:29] But Elias packed up shop, left soon afterwards.
[00:06:33] As he left, the disappearances ended as well.
[00:06:36] In hindsight, according to this legend anyway, the locals of the times began to suspect Elias, but they could never prove anything.
[00:06:45] The next morning we went in to open the shop and in the center of the floor spilled in sugar across the floor, spelling out one word, clumsily childlike, stay.
[00:06:58] We looked at each other, didn't say a word.
[00:07:02] We just started packing. We gave Mr. Adler his keys back. He didn't look surprised. He didn't even ask why. He just nodded, walked away.
[00:07:12] Both Claire and I went back to our day jobs, our dream of the bakery shelved.
[00:07:18] And sometimes when it's quiet, I can still hear the whispers, the oven rattling.
[00:07:23] Many of our friends make fun of us for giving up on our dream.
[00:07:27] But I want to ask you this.
[00:07:30] What would you do if your dream started whispering back?
[00:07:33] Would you still chase it?
[00:07:35] Thank you Evan for allowing me to share your story.
[00:07:39] I am sorry that your dream of running a bakery did not work out, but I'll say this, your encounter story was incredibly well written, so you may have a future as a writer.
[00:07:49] I have no show announcements this week, but if you'd like a shout out at the end of an episode or access to our monthly bonus episodes, head over to patreon.com do you want to hear a ghost story?
[00:07:59] As always, I'm 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 it, please leave a review. I would love to hear from you. Until next time.
