Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Foreign 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 camper, I'm happy to have you. For many people in the Midwest, there's nothing more terrifying than tornado season. A storm that is capable of wiping you off the map in seconds.
[00:00:28] Tornadoes often come with little to no warning, so as someone from the Midwest, I am all too familiar with the hurried run to the basement or wherever else you might need to be in case of a tornado. Thankfully, I've never been in a tornado, but I have ridden out many a storm in the basement.
[00:00:48] Tonight you will hear a story sent in to me by Emily Granger from Iowa who who shares a story about writing out a tornado warning in a crawlspace under her stairs. Seems ordinary, right? Well, perhaps it would be if the ghost of her great uncle wasn't in there lurking, waiting for her.
[00:01:10] Now, without further ado, do you want to hear a ghost story?
[00:01:17] You'd think I'd be used to storms growing up in Iowa. Thunder that shakes the windows, sirens howling, you awake in the middle of the night. But something about tornado season still gets under my skin.
[00:01:31] It's not just the wind or the hail, it's the way everything gets quiet before those storms come in. An unnatural silence like the whole world is holding its breath.
[00:01:46] It had been a mild spring up until that night. I'd been living in my grandparents house for about six months, ever since grandma passed.
[00:01:56] The place had sat empty for years before I moved in. It's tucked away out on the edge of town, a little white farmhouse with warped shutters and a yard that tries to become a field if you leave it too long.
[00:02:10] I was fixing it up little by little. New paint here, new locks there, that sort of thing. The bones were good but the basement always gave me a weird feeling.
[00:02:24] Cold in the summer, damp, and not just in a water damage way. But that's where I had to go whenever the sirens went off. It was just after 9pm I I'd been watching TV. One of those old disaster movies where everything goes wrong in sequence. Like the universe is working off a checklist. I thought it was thunder in the movie until my lights flickered. Then the real siren started.
[00:02:54] There's something about a tornado warning siren that feels final. Like whatever it's warning you about already decided how the night ends. I grabbed my phone, a flashlight and a bottle of water like they tell you to do, and headed down the basement stairs. My Grandmother's voice echoed in my mind.
[00:03:16] If there's ever a tornado warning, you go down to the basement and you get in the crawl space. It's the safest spot. The crawl space. I hated it. Under the stairs, barely three feet high, sealed off with a wooden hatch that never quite closes right.
[00:03:34] My grandmother used to keep it locked when I was a kid. I remember asking her why, and she just said, because no one needs to go in there if they don't have to. But there was more to it. There always was.
[00:03:48] My great uncle, her little brother Michael, died down there when he was 8 years old. He'd gone missing in the early 1950s. For a period of three days, search parties combed the woods, the corn fields, even the wells. On the third night, they found him in the crawl space, still in his Sunday clothes, eyes wide open, no visible injuries.
[00:04:14] Somehow no one had thought to check there until it was too late. My grandmother never talked about it, just kept the hatch shut with a padlock and a prayer. But she's gone now. And that night, with the sky turning green, the wind shrieking like it was being torn in half, I didn't have the luxury of her superstition. I opened the hatch.
[00:04:36] The smell hit me first. It wasn't rot. It wasn't mold. Just old stale air.
[00:04:44] Almost like there was something in there that had been waiting. Unable to leave, I crawled in, flashlight clenched between my teeth. The hatch door wouldn't close behind me all the way, so I pulled it as tight as I could. The wind outside I could hear hit a pitch I didn't know possible.
[00:05:00] My eardrums wanted to pop.
[00:05:02] My house shook a little as dust ran down through the floorboards. I tried not to panic. I checked my phone. No signal.
[00:05:12] When the air shifted, the kind of cold that doesn't make any sense in May, not even during a storm. It slid in around me like a fog, settling in my bones. When I heard a scrape.
[00:05:26] It came from the far end of the crawlspace, frozen. I pointed my flashlight towards a sound. Nothing.
[00:05:34] Just a jagged wall, the concrete floor, and the shadow from the open hatch emanating out from the corner. I began to hear something. Or at least I think I heard something. A whisper.
[00:05:48] You came back.
[00:05:50] I jerked my head so fast I banged my head on a beam. My flashlight flickered, then steadied. I told myself it was the wind, the storm, my imagination.
[00:06:02] You always leave. But not this time, the voice said. Clearer this time. I couldn't move. I could barely breathe. My heart was thudding so hard I could Hear it in my teeth.
[00:06:16] And then. Knocking. Three slow, deliberate knocks on the wood just inches from my back. I turned around, moving the light towards the hatch. A knock came again, but. But not from the outside.
[00:06:32] Not from the floor above. From within the crawlspace.
[00:06:36] When a face pressed into the beam of the flashlight, it looked like a child. Pale, wide eyed. But the eyes were wrong. Too large. No whites, just glassy, bottomless black.
[00:06:51] The mouth on the face didn't move when it spoke. It's lonely down here.
[00:06:57] I screamed. Tried to crawl, but it blocked the way out. Just stared. Or maybe it didn't have to move. Maybe it was already all around me. You're. You're my family. That means you stay, it said.
[00:07:13] The storm was raging above me now, but I couldn't hear it anymore. The crawl space, or whatever this thing was, swallowed all the sound, swallowed all the light and maybe even time. I started to lose track of how long I'd been in there. My flashlight dimmed, then died. My phone was nothing more than a black mirror.
[00:07:36] I could feel it crawling closer.
[00:07:39] Not fast, not slow, but inevitable. It whispered again.
[00:07:46] I got left in here, so now I keep the ones who come back. I started praying. I don't know why. I'm not religious. But my grandmother was. And whenever she talked about this hatch, she prayed. So I sat there, praying. Well, begging whatever it is out there for daylight, for rescue, for anything that might pull me out of this crawlspace, out of its reach. But there was no one coming. There was no one else who even remembered Michael. No one who even knew where I was. Except for him.
[00:08:20] He moved closer. I could hear him shifting in the dirt, bones dragging like he wore his own death as second skin. I held my breath, pressing into the furthest corner of the crawlspace, my flashlight flickering soft out of nowhere. He. He was right in front of me. Reaching out, he touched me, a cold finger resting lightly on the back of my neck. Just on a single point of contact.
[00:08:48] Like it was deciding what to do, taking a measure of me.
[00:08:54] Then he whispered. Low, thick, like he was talking through a pipe filled with water.
[00:09:01] Blood keeps the door open.
[00:09:04] I don't remember screaming. I don't remember blacking out either. But the next thing I knew, I was laying on the concrete in the basement just outside of the hatch. The crawl space door was shut tight, sealed. It was morning. Light filtered through the basement window. Gray and soft, but daylight. I crawled upstairs on my hands and knees, my legs feeling like they didn't belong to me anymore. My skin stung like I'd been sandblasted and my ears rang a little bit. My phone buzzed back to life. I got blasted with emergency alerts letting me know that the power lines were down and that there was plenty of debris scattered across the county. But luckily for me, the tornado passed about two miles north of my house that night. It wasn't necessarily the storm that nearly took me. It was Michael. I don't go in the basement anymore. I keep the door shut, deadbolted.
[00:10:06] I keep telling myself I'll sell the house every spring, but springs come and they go and I'm still here. Honestly, still listening. Some nights the wind picks up just enough to rattle the siding. Sounds like someone knocking. Like those three soft taps. Nothing loud, but like he's being polite. And if I hold still long enough when I hear this, I swear I can hear him say, you came back once. You will again.
[00:10:38] Thank you Emily for sending in your story. As I mentioned before, I've sheltered many storms, but now living in Florida tends to be more for hurricanes rather than tornadoes. However, it's the same idea. I can say confidently though, that I've never had to face off against a ghost during a storm. I have no show announcements this week, but if you would like a shout out at the end of one or access to our monthly bonus episodes, head over to patreon.com do you want to hear Ghost Story?
[00:11:09] 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 are enjoying it, please leave a review. I would love to hear from you. Until next time.
