The Lurker on the Stairway | CreepCast

(upbeat music) - Welcome back to Creepcast. Today we're gonna be reading The Lurker on the Stairway. Apparently a member of our team that was vetting some stories that this was pretty interesting. It's an older one, seven years older. It only has 18 upvotes on our slash no sleep. So this is a good one. Check it out and check out this author. Who's the author? - The author is Digian Saugas, which looks like they have a website and a YouTube channel where they do readings of their own stories and stuff. They have some longer like near novel links, looking stories they've read out in parts on there too. So if this story's cool, then there's a plethora of other stories to check out from this person. It looks like they posted a lot to no sleep up until about five years ago. And then they started posting to their website and YouTube and stuff like that. But their most recent YouTube uploads four weeks ago. So they're so actively active, riding and stuff like that. So could be a hidden gem, could be a cool author who just hasn't got a ton of recognition yet. Which looking at their YouTube videos like a lot of the time if you just post a story you write, just a reading of it on YouTube, it typically wouldn't do that well. But most of it has over like 10,000 views. - Oh, it's cool. - So there is some kind of core fan base for this author already. It's just nothing that's true. They have one called the Fayette Mall incident that has 899,000 views. - Wow. - So near a million views on just seemingly a story they wrote and posted a year ago. So that's pretty cool. - Yeah, good for them, that's fucking sick. Well, hopefully, hopefully we can direct some attention over there. I mean, that's amazing that also novel-sized stories broken up into certain parts. I mean, it's awesome. And I think that's a really smart move for an author to do. Well, I mean, obviously YouTube has been a good platform to showcase stories and talk about them and stuff like that. So an author being like, yeah, I'm just gonna read mine over there. - Especially just in this longer format of no TikTok and people talking about like book stuff on book talk as it were, usually just shorter. And it's usually people just talking about like, oh, I like this book, whatever. But to actually have your full story there, it's pretty sweet too. Just give it out to people like that. - Yeah. So good. I mean, it seems that whoever Stigian Saga is which I don't see any name or stuff like that on their profile, they do say that they are in their bio on Reddit. It says they are a writer and war gamer from Kentucky. So one of my-- - Goddamn. - One of my Appalachia peoples up there. - Red boy. - Yep, that's right. - That's right. Lurker on the stairway though, I like that title. What you don't know what reminds me of is what's the story you read about the guy who it's like someone trying to talk to him at the door in like a Doomsday bunker or something. Or maybe not a bunker, but it's like apartment, right? And he doesn't want to-- - The one psychosis. - Yeah. - It kind of reminds me, I don't know why, but it has like a similar vibe, just maybe just because of the actual visual of Lurker on the stairway. But I'm like almost imagining someone like looking through a people or something, you know. - I could see that. I think, I mean, well, I was about to say we haven't covered stuff lately. It's just like a creature feature, but we have, right? - I mean, the most notable one is the fish people together. - Yeah, the two gay dads. Yeah, I know that's your scariest creature you can come across. - No, no, the fish people were infinitely scary. - No, we're there. - They were. The, I don't know, I'm stoked on this. I think it's gonna be a fun time. Guys, if you want some extra content, feel free to check out our Patreon, patreon.com/creepcast, feel free to check us out there. Also, if you're listening to this on Spotify, Apple Podcast, or anywhere that you can listen to podcasts, consider giving a nice rating. It helps us out. Isaiah, Lurker and the stairway, are we ready? - We are ready to begin. - Let's go. - Let's begin. Cambodia was not a place I'd been before. Nor was it a place I'd ever planned to go. Well, immediately bashing all of my expectations. You talking to like, "Coses, I'm like, "Shut in and the house. "There's something in the house." - It still might be. - First in its Cambodia was not a place. Good be, good be. But now I'm immediately thinking like, not for the worst. Now I'm thinking CIA vibes, jungle. - Oh, really? See, you know what's weird? My mind went to like, empty man, or something, friends going out, doing something, and they stumble across something and like some kind of, you know, empty man, I think it's like, in the mountains or whatever. He falls into a cave and then he gets cursed there. - Which one's empty man? - It's the one where it's like, the guys are like going to Tibet and they go across, it's a movie. But it's like, it's like fucking three hours long. But he like falls into a cave or something and then he gets hypnotized. But basically it brings this curse back with him. - I see, okay. - It had that popular clip where the guy is like, moving in the whole crowd. Like, there's like a cross the river, whatever. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right. This whole disastrous expedition started when a friend of mine pitched it as a solution to my looming monetary woes. It offered me a cheap cost of living. Many times lower than that, I could have found back in the States. A way to continue to work for myself as a copywriter without having to seek part-time work at some soul-crushing depression factory in the service industry. Perhaps more importantly though, she saw it as a way to force me out of my shell into more regular interactions with the world around me. I know a little biased because we just covered a story like an hour ago. But this is similar to what we were talking about in that story. Sear of possibilities. 'Cause I don't know what order these will be posted in. But you were talking about how the older stories had like a punch, you know, it was all about like, okay, you're in the monsters here. And then they kind of have that pay off near the end. Much the same now, especially on no sleep. It's kind of like it takes its time, lowering you in, building plot and stuff like that. But it goes to what you were saying about difference in writing styles. Yeah, I think it's just a different time periods. Yeah, yeah, the sign of the times, whatever. Though I've never been prodded in probe for any traditional diagnosis, I am an excessively reserved person with a disruptive distaste for interaction with new people and places. It has long dictated the ebb and flow of my days. I would not describe the way I interact with the world as fearful, but rather disinterested. I find great comfort in stewing alone among my thoughts for long periods, undisturbed by the intrusion of anything I don't grant permission to intrude. The king of my own keep, in a sense, with the drawbridge firmly fastened against all, but the most familial and vital company. It's crazy how similar. I was thinking the exact same thing. The sheer possibilities and these different approaches. That's such a clear concise way of understanding the character versus before. It's just like, yeah, people say that I'm content or that I'm competent or whatever. It's like too drastically different approaches to the same almost kind of character. It's like describing the same kind of symptom. There's sort of a shut-in, doesn't get along with a lot of people. Not even really a shut-in. They're just not that sociable, interact well with others. But the difference in writing style gives starkly different approaches. Because in the, in sear of possibilities, we were talking like ha ha in cell, ha ha. Like shooter vibes, which may be elaborate a bit more in that case, it's not coming out in order. If it's, yeah. So in the story, the sear of possibilities, the character was a similar kind of character that they were just interested. Disinterested. Disinterested. It does have a lot of friends. Yeah, not a lot of friends. Trouble and social situations and stuff. But because of how kind of direct the language was, where it's like, I get along with people, but I don't like people sort of thing. It gave a more like apprehensive, like a harsh vibe to it. It gave definitely a more aggressive. And that's where I think the in-sale rhetoric, I guess, came from, was because it felt so abrasive. In that story, I would argue may have been kind of intentional. Sure. But here, like you've said, the same kind of character being described in not even flowery, but a more kind of roundabout language, better worded. It creates a softer feeling to it, where even though it's the same character, it's not the same vibes. Yeah, more of a loner than like a threat kind of person. Yeah, 100%. Yeah. Having seen me forced into a semi-regular schedule of public outings and social gatherings at college, my long time friend thought this trip abroad could solve the dread of a nine to five job and my pension for self-isolation in one fell swoop, allowing me fiscal security and independence on my own terms, while also forcing me to do a bit of learning and exploring to find my way in a new place. Ever the schemer, she had sold the idea with a salesperson's guest stove that made her hard to rebuff. And the initial plan had been for us to go together, for she too was in search of greener and significantly cheaper pastures. The passing of her mother and the subsequent stress this placed on her family prevented this, though, and a departure together turned into a sort of delayed injury plan, with me deciding to keep my booked flight and go ahead and her promising to follow in five or six months' time when things at home allowed her to operate for herself again. The first week or so went smoothly enough. I picked up the social lubricant words, "Hello, please. Thank you." That sort of thing. I made myself get out and see some of the museums and phenomenal pen. It was uncomfortable. The heat in my desire for quiet scratching at the back of my skull, but I was busy and entertained enough exploring temples and seeing sights to ignore it. It all changed once a week or two had passed, and I'd gotten settled in. Stripped of the excitable tours, fresh eyes, and forgiving demeanor, the city became a different animal as experienced stripped away the veneer of charm, and I laid eyes upon the true face behind the mask. So strikingly, the language, the way it's described and even the setting of being explored a different area who has problems with the world they came from and now discovering it here, this feels so much so like. a HP Lovecraft or a Edgar Allan Poe even way of describing this like turn of the century era with people traveling into different worlds. Like, this feels like the way Lovecraft would write an explore writing about an ancient city he's come across. I like the idea too, that's in Cambodia. Yeah. We don't very rarely have that as like a setting, but you can almost just like already, like just because of just saying the Cambodian thing, I just think of like the sweltering heat humidity kind of thing being in a landscape that is just like so much more foreign than you expect. And now the charm of being there for a while has worn off. And now he's like finally seeing it almost more as like not necessarily a civilian, but it's like normalized to where he can see kind of just how grody some of the city environments are. Yeah, I think it's just a really fun visual setup. Like I like the setting that we're in. It's cool. Yeah. Yeah. And if like I'd be interested to look at some of their other writings, because Stygian like refers to like the River Styx and stuff like that, like the darkness, specifically Stygian is like the darkness related to the underworld and stuff like that. So because of that name and because of this writing, I wonder if all their stuff kind of has that, I don't want to say old school, but like classical feel to it in the language, or if that's like a language put on for this story. Either way, I'd like reading it. I'm like, wow, this feels like I'm reading Call of Cthulhu when it's describing like the explorers coming across the cults. Also probably helps that we got done just reading something that was very like polar opposite to this entirely. So that also makes you like, oh my god, it's like a master. Not just lovecrafts in like how good they are at writing, but just like the verbiage. No, sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The filth in Phnom Penh is omnipresent. It's trash heaps ever looming and spilling into the streets while dogs run over weeks ago burst with maggots in the heat upon streets smoldering after decades of neglect. The canals, murky stewpods filled with sewage and the rain sodding garbage knocked down from the streets, stink under the heat of the sun as it rises through the day, making certain sectors of the concrete forest almost intolerable. Rats, the size of a man's forearm and roaches longer than my thumb, flourish in the tropical heat amidst the murk, bold enough to leap over shoes and scuttle underfoot as pedestrians walk after dark. Wat Phnom, a well-aged jewel of a temple, the better part of a thousand years old, is stalked by as many prostitutes as trinket vendors. It's beauty lost in the sea of social decay. My rearing in southeastern Kentucky had taught me of poverty, but it was the utter dissolution of shame and restraint that truly shook me. Southeastern Kentucky, you from Harlan County, make me in this car from the same neck of the woods, get awfully specific. My name is Isaiah, and I'm in Canberra. Yeah, yeah, the sense is going to be like, I went to high school here and I'm like, huh? What? It's just a story about me dying in some ancient temple. I just like look up like, should we be reading this man? I don't like this. Yeah, it's set like a year from now. Yeah, Kayla calls me, do you want to go to Cambodia? No, I'm good. No, no, I'm alright. One reading this might think this is an indictment of Cambodia's capital, but it isn't uniquely a Cambodian problem. Cities in my home country, from New York to San Francisco to Atlanta, exhibit the same kind of disarray and filth, even if a better urban organizational structure keeps the visual horror in check. Human beings packed in on top one another and numbers beyond tally, loose grasp of what life was like outside the towers of stone and loose grasp of the niceties and boundaries that made existence tolerable before such terrible numbers were brought to bear. Even as the residents of such urban strongholds as Chicago or London proclaimed their cultured produce of theater or art, they live existences that would make the founders of civilization weep. If whatever priests, kings, rays, marias, cities and the cradle of civilization could have witnessed the fnampin today, they would burn their creations to the ground to spare future generations such torment. The mouse utopia experiment comes to mind. Alright, well, I- do I know you do we dig out of school? Yeah, I love the mouse utopia experiment when I was like in high school. I thought it was so cool. Yeah, it's pretty horrifying. Yeah, it's like if you put mice into a big city, like they will develop a caste system and become like have their like debauchers gangs who won't affiliate with the top. Wasn't the whole mouse utopia or mouse city thing? Wasn't it in practice or wasn't it supposed to be something to show like how humans would even act? Yeah, that was the idea. It was like, I forget the exact setup, but a bunch of mice were placed into this huge colony that had different tiers and stuff and immediately like the stronger mice separated themselves from the weaker ones and the weaker ones had to get by on scraps from the larger ones and the weaker ones couldn't mate. So they devolved into fighting and stuff like that. So like a higher echelon of mice started to almost rain over the lower tiers and stuff like that. I should have expected such things. For I'd seen cities of scale, whose occupants numbered in the millions before. But the starry eyed hope of the tours combined with the sense of adventure and challenge promised by a new and uncomfortable environment blinded me to the weight of the Stigian nightmare that is metropolitan life till I was already set up in my apartment with the six month lease to my name. The apartment however was comfortable. My landlady hospitable and my rent spectacularly low. I resolved as those first few weeks came to an end that I would keep my head down, avoid discouragement and get as much work done as possible while I rode out the inexpensive rent and mitigated my exposure to the outside world as much as possible. In half a year, with ten or twelve months of work under my belt and half the time, I could return to the States, either bolstered by more steady clients or stabilized by enough sword cash to keep me secure while I sought other ways to buoy my income. My friend, should she still aim to follow me then, could have the urban sprawl? I had seen more than enough already. My existence was one of nearly monastic solitude scheduled around outings which were planned with great care to ensure the least friction possible. I left my room just once every week to walk about eight blocks to a 24 hour grocery store on a street not far from mine. During the first of these trips each month, I would stop by an ATM down a side street along the way and withdrawal around $400 for rent and groceries. On the way back, I would drop the $200 owed for the month's rent through the slot on my landlady store. The trips initially were plotted out to avoid the heat of the day, starting around nine at night, but after being accosted by a trio of toothless lady boys stride a motorcycle looking for clients during one of these trips, I moved the schedule past midnight to around two in the morning. At this hour, the residential streets were entirely empty, save the occasional honking passage of a cab or motorbike, and offered me a plastic and atmosphere to navigate the trash warns as was possible. My safety for my city's occasional knife crime, ensured by the fact that I was nearly a foot taller than the tallest Cambodian man I had seen since landing in the country. I was left alone with the rats and stray dogs to operate like clockwork, counting the paces from block to block, knowing that it would take me nine minutes out and nine minutes back to complete my grocery run. That paragraph talking about like his unwillingness to go outside and stuff reminded me of what this reads so much like, have you ever read the king and yellow? No, but I know that you brought it up on the chin before the Robert Chambers book. Yeah, you've written around is actually the king and yellow. That was a huge inspiration to Lovecraft and a lot of his writings and he incorporated some of the entities from that lore into the world. But Robert Chambers book, the first four passages at least that are about people beginning to go mad and starting to feel like the king's presence or more specifically the book's presence in their life. It like from the verbage to the style of the writing and kind of someone describing their kind of dive into being a recluse very similar to the verbage here. Between these walks and the solitude of my apartment, only the occasional gecko scurrying in under the balcony door of the fourth floor room to escape the heat by camping on the cool interior wall troubled my doorstep. And I didn't mind the silent intrusion. I ate, worked out, scanned email and job posting boards for writing contracts and typed. My focus was so complete that I could forget the days of the week, the hour of the day, and the posturing of the world beyond. The heavily curtain windows in my room keeping the dreadful human son of the equator at bay. There are many who would balk at that sparse a schedule, but with the occasional call to a friend or sibling back home keeping me connected, I had all the contact I needed. I thrive in the space all my own, on my own, and with nothing to save a concrete hell beyond my door to distract me, my work flourished in the months I spent, hold up in phenom pen. Right up until I took my second to last walk as the day of my escape closed in on me. I had just over 5 weeks to go before April 22, my plan to part your day. I began my walk aiming for the familiar store down the street and following my route without a single hiccup. Mulean over a brackadocious biography I was working on for an Indian business man's personal website. My mind stayed as far away from the squalor of the street as was possible. The road was unusually vacant, with only one or two loudbikes sputtering past during my initial trip. My shopping was done with mechanical skill, same 12 items, bought with the same 3 bills. I thank you to the now familiar night cashier, and away I went. Tossing a few cashier nuts to a friendly and legendarily mangy mut that haunted the corner, blocked down from the shop when he approached to greet me, as was tradition. Things only went south near the end of the trip. And I reached one of the canals on the way back. The canal, perhaps 15 feet deep with a stew of stagnant liquid haunting its innards, ran off to both sides. Visible in either direction for a block or so before another concrete bridge, similar to the one I crossed, blocked my view. It abided the road, which intersected my own, and as I looked down the way to ensure no speeding rickshaws or bikes were heading my direction, a burst of motion on the bridge to my left caught my eye. My initial thought was that a muggin was underway, but as I slowed and took in the scene on the quiet streets of the sleeping quarter of the city, I quickly dismissed that possibility. An older man, who I can remember spotting on prior walks leaning against the canal rail as he dragged on cigarettes, had been seized from behind, a large figure nearly enveloping him as they struggled on the far bridge. His figure, a man at first glance, was overstretched and disproportionate. Its skinned, greenish gray color of mold, and its nude form tapering from a man's wire retourso into a writhing lower body that looked almost like a snake's. This tale, if that's the word to describe it, was a fix to a rusted metal beam beneath the bridge. The willowy creature having clambered up over the rail to seize its target unaware. His massive hands enveloped the old man's head, whatever protest or screaming might have been done muffled before it could begin. When he fell, perhaps four or five seconds after I first spotted this baffling struggle, the creature let him fall, a fleshy tongue latch to its prey following the man's throat as he went down. It stayed there, perched on the rail, for a few more seconds as it finished its work. Then the tongue came free with an audible pop, a spike at its end, making me think of hyperdermic needles or a mosquito's probiscus. This tongue withdrew with lightning speed like a frog's before in one fluid motion. The creature swung back under the bridge and dropped with a muted splash into the thick suit below in the canal. The ripples of its impact invisible in the shadows cast by the street lights above. An approaching truck, perhaps the source of its departure, rumbled past on the road along the canal, jolting me back to awareness. After a glance back up at the man on the bridge, now laying lifeless on the pavement, the gleam of the truck's lights brought my eyes back down to the water of the canal, where two glimmering pools of yellowish light gazed at me from the obscuring shadow. I didn't need any more motivation than that. Man, what a cool description. It's like a weird snake person of some kind. Yeah, it's like slithery has like a tongue, like it's, um, which, oh, I bet it's in a swank. Yeah, because Cambodia is pretty close to, uh, a swang ASWANG, yeah, because a swang is a Filipino legend, but that's right around the same region as Cambodia and a swang took a shape shifter as well. Yeah, it's a shape shifter. It's kind of like a demonic vampire thing or like a spiritual vampire. So they can change their shape and become different things, uh, but they're always characterized by a tongue that it sticks into you like a mosquito and it drains the blood and enters out of you. The swang is often associated as an imposter, so like say it kills your family member and then it pretends to be them in the house and it waits for you to go to sleep and then attack you, um, so it can take, like if it kills someone, it can take the form of them kind of thing, which I did a video about how when the CIA was trying to take over the Philippines in the 50s, uh, they did a bunch of like siop campaigns on the locals, one of the things they did is they killed a Filipino, uh, militia member and put two, two holes in his neck and drain the blood from him and threw the body back on the trail so that the other militia fighters would think there was a swang in the jungle. Wow. Yeah. Uh, and it seemed to work because they cleared out of that encampment like the next day. Jesus. Um, that or they thought the CIA's in the woods draining people's blood. Both would make me worry. Either way, it's like we got to get out of here, um, but that's how like culturally known the swang was to the locals and stuff like that. So yeah, it's like, it's like a kind of like skin walker ish, like mimic thing, um, but as opposed to those that are more spiritual, the swank is a physical creature that like has a layer and goes and hides the way and stuff like that. It's cool. I mean, I like the idea of it like hiding under a bridge almost like a fucking troll and lurking and snapping at someone. It does maybe think it's going to be kind of sweet. Then if it is a shape shifter, it's going to take the appearance of people that he knows like that shopkeeper, the NECs every day or something, which for a guy who's so paranoid of outside interaction is the worst case scenario 100%. Now anyone I'm interacting with could be the shape shifter and amplifies it 10 times over. Yeah. I really like the idea of telling what is, if you were like so far at least, if you were to lay bare bones, guy goes to Cambodia meets a vampire creature, right? Oh, yeah. But describing it with such like ornate language gives it like a, like a almost legendary, not saying like quality of the story, but like it is an old legend, like you're reading about some old manuscript, someone wrote and stuff like that. It's time to talk about something scary your health. I know I don't go in the doctor as much as I should. If I'm feeling sick, I'll just lie in bed and sleep it away. But that's only because I don't want to have to deal with the appointments, insurance and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That's why I have Zakhdok. Zakhdok is a free app and website where you can search and compare high quality in network doctors. Choose the right one for your needs and click to instantly book an appointment. We're talking about in network appointments with more than 100,000 health care providers across every specialty from mental health to dental health, eye care to skin care and much more. And the nice thing about Zakhdok is that you can filter for doctors that take your insurance or nearby and are highly rated. It's super easy to use and you can find an appointment time that works for you with the right doctor for your needs. Plus, Zakhdok appointments happen fast, typically within just 24 to 72 hours of booking. You can even score same day appointments. You don't want to admit it, but you should probably see a doctor. So stop putting up those doctor's appointments and go to zakhdok.com/creepcast to find an instantly book at top rated doctor today. I sprinted across the next street and up the following four blocks. Almost to my building's locked door and allowing off the road and fumbling with the keys in my pocket before I risked a glance back down the road towards the canal. The street was empty despite the pursuit I imagined was underway, but that didn't stop me from shouldering through the entrance the second the key was turned and tossing my bag groceries to the floor without mind for the noise, spinning to bar the metal door at my back the second I was safely inside. I gathered them up, stormed up the steep steps winding their way through the haphazard building and hastily unlocked my own door. Suddenly painfully aware of how close my top floor apartment sits to the open exit onto the covered roof where the laundry machine set just up the stairs. Once my own door was bolted behind me, I could catch my breath, dwell on the insanity of what had just occurred and weigh my options. Fast deciding there was no way a report to the local police could in well, I opted to stay silent for the moment, until my story in a slightly edited form should I ever be questioned, with the seemingly inexplicable nature of the attacker evaded as best way possible. I settled into my usual routines faithfully as I could, a vexation about what had occurred kept me from being the paragon of focus that was the norm. My work suffered, my sleep suffered more. My already nocturnal schedule, now a godsend as paranoia made me tread the thought of slumber in a darkened room. There was little rational drive to fear when I was locked away in my sturdy old apartment, but the feeling of fear haunted me all the same. It was, perhaps, this heightened sense of paranoia that ballooned my awareness enough to allow me to perceive the odd sounds, which infiltrated the neighborhood in the day. following my siding. In the dead of night, hours after the early rising city at close to stores and dimmed its lights, kind of cackling screech could occasionally be heard echoing down the alleys and through the streets. Far cry from cat screams and dog barks native to the area, which themselves seem to have been erased from the night's ambience. The best I can do to describe it is to indicate the more other worldly vocalizations of foxes, but these calls were of a much deeper pitch, carried a far greater distance around the rotten city they stalked. My isolated mind invested these noises with the shape of that thing from the canal, bringing its corpse-like flesh to my imagination as a companion to every scream through sleeping phenom pen. This persisted throughout the next week, growing more pronounced as the due date for my rent and the dwindling food in my small kitchen march closer by the day. When the 22nd of March came, I'd formulated a plan. One I felt sure would both appease my paranoia and keep me safe and secure until my departure in a month's time. I would depart the building, braving the crowds, hookers and curious children of the early evening to feel more secured, gins-things that go bump in the night amidst busier streets and hit the ATM, retrieving my final rent payment and the money for the month's groceries. Then, I would buy everything I could carry at the store, cautious to ration it once I got back to my building, eliminating the need for any more shopping excursions during my stay in Cambodia. Finally, I would slip my rent through my landlady store, finalizing my fortified existence until April 22nd. Finally, released me for my self-imposed prison. All while safe from the twisted phantoms I now imagined behind every corner on the streets outside. Why do you think he doesn't just break his lease early and just leave? Because he talked earlier about how he's staying down here and making money so that he can be better off when he gets back. And because money's an issue, I think the fact that he has the lease early and he's going to be here is like, well, I still don't have enough money to go back and rent an apartment. So it's just not possible financially. From what he's imposed, no, I don't think it's possible financially. And also, I think there's a bit of himself that thinks maybe he was seeing things or he's paranoid because now he's like, every noise is that creature, everything's that creature. So as a guy who's already paranoid, part of it may just be him convincing himself that he's paranoid. And then just for food, for thought, just for conversation sakes, why not just basis thing in Turkey and do an American cryptid versus a Philippine, like a Filipino cryptid? I think putting him in an unfamiliar region enhances the isolation because he talked about he has friends and family and stuff like that. If he was back in Kentucky, he could call a family member or a friend or someone. Sure. So there's just less resources for him. There's less, he's more alone. He's more trapped over here. And I mean, it also just be the fact the writer wanted to talk about it in a swamp. So rather than using like a Cambodian local, he's taking and every man for him, like a guy from the same region he's from, placing him over there as an alien without a lot of means of hell. Sure. Yeah. Because he said he'd be down here for six months total, right? So for five months, he's been, yeah, for five months, his expenses has been 400 bucks a month. And he's making money to try to get in a better position when he moves back. Yeah, I mean, I understand all that. I think it's just a matter of seeing something extremely supernatural and seeing someone die. I think to a degree he has to be, because he talked about his paranoia and how like he's afraid of every shape. There has to be some kind of self doubt of like, did I really see what I saw? Yeah. Like if I saw that, like obviously I'd be freaked out. I wouldn't immediately assume, I wouldn't immediately assume it was a monster though. Yeah, exactly. I'd be like, what, why did I see that? What was that? I mean, even weird, like, obviously much less tame. But even if I'm in like a haunted place and see something out of the corner of my eye, I'm like, oh, well, that's my brain plane tricks on me or whatever. If you see a mosquito thing, eat a guy in the middle of the night and you don't immediately see it again, you would have to be like, I must have been so sleep deprived, saw something, you know, you'd be scared, but like I wouldn't cross over that bridge again at night. Yeah. But there has to be a layer of like doubt. Yeah. Especially for someone who's calculated and thought out as he is. I want to take a moment to think today's sponsor, Ridge Wallet. The brand of Wallet that I've been using for years is here with even more to offer. See being a dad and running around the house between all of the wires I have for this stuff and the plug-ins for baby monitors and for bottle washers, things like that if maybe realized I've got a lot of cord. 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Once again, that's s-e-e-a-t-h.com/creepcast and code creepcast for 20% off at Sheath. Today, thank you to Sheath for sponsoring the show, there'll be in the description. We are now back to the episode. The walk was uneventful, but continuously slowed by my jittery scans of the world around me. Each clatter of rats in the trash heaps or street stalls, closing up shop for the night, making my heart leap at the sound. I diverted from my road toward the ATM one block down from where I usually walk to the southerly street, not wishing to walk alongside the canal where I had seen that inexplicable sight a week prior. I still had to cross the bridge on the way over though. Process made only slightly easier by the passage of a loud band of drunken australian expats on their way back from a bar. The racious laughter making it seem less treacherous. Without incident, I rounded a corner and came inside of the ATM. Glad on one level that there were no people around this little street to witness a foreigner withdrawing cash, but equally perturbed by the silence that seemed to rule this little stretch of roadway. The hum of the Khmer rogue airstreet lights overhead seemed to strangle the hawks and engine growls of neighboring streets. My footfalls sounding catastrophically light. loud to me in a way that I knew was imagined. I ignored my nerves and pressed into the little booth, focusing on the task at hand. Flying through the process of the withdrawal with practices urged on by the oppressive memory of the canal just up the road from where I stood, I emerged with money stowed safely away less than a minute later. I thought I noticed, during my paranoid scan of the roadway upon exiting the booth, a flurry of motion in the direction of the hated canal, but there were several gargantuan rats running here and there upon the roadway, so it was easy to shrug this off as a peripheral misinterpretation. Still, I made with speed for the store, going about my business with the same level of calculated efficiency as I had in the ATM. Outside, I was momentarily distracted by the absence of the familiar dog that haunted the street corner, but even after shaking the tin of cashews I'd bought, he didn't surface, and I resolved to move on. By the time I passed the canal, balancing three dangerously overfilled plastic bags on each side of me like some surf hauling grain, I estimated I had better time on this final outing than any other walk I'd made in the country thus far. Glances to either side of me showed nothing, but the stinking cauldron of refuse below, and the omnipresent thrum of engines and voices guided me safely past the water, and into the home stretch of this expedition into the urban unknown. It was only in the last harrowing minutes of the trip, the things truly went south. I arrived at my building store, about a third of the way down an alley which led to a little courtyard of dumpsters between the adjacent buildings, and set my bags on the ground to get the door unlocked. Keys fast-springing to hand. It was only after I had the door open, and bent to grab the bags one more, that I thought I spied a silhouette as it jerked back around the corner. My impression was of a head and shoulders rapidly withdrawn, but as I stood there in the bluish glow of the street line, staring after movement I wasn't certain was real, nothing resurfaced, and I forced myself to move into the door and bar behind me. My fortress now closer than ever. My rent dropped off in typical fashion. I brushed past and up the steep stairs, turning on and off lights at each floor to show me the way through the dark, mindful not to crush geckos beneath the night in the cool stairway. I rounded one corner, then the next, finally reaching the top floor apartment, and once more setting down my bags to undo the padlock and enter my hold fast, safe from the world outside. I glanced to the rooftop doorway, thankful to see no trace of movement, and brought my bags inside, setting them right against the fridge, and doubling back to lean out my door, and turn off the light on the stairway. It was then that I saw it. With the light clicked off, I turned, hand on the sturdy metal door handle to close my apartment behind me, and as my eyes pass the moonlight canvas through the rooftop exit up the little stairway next to my door, I froze. Hanging from above the top of the doorway, which had been empty just a moment before, long fingers gripping the top of the door frame, like a window seal, was a noiseless, slack-jawed face with great reddish eyes, not dissimilar to those of a frog, blessedly obscured by the newly fallen darkness in the stairway, beneath the wavering flap of skin, making up its fleshy jaw, a tapering worm of pinkish sinew weaved back and forth like a snake charmer's charge. It's needle-like tip, blinting with noxious spittle that dripped in moldering pools upon the tile of the stairs. The second's hesitation felt long, halted, as if played out at half speed, but as it moved to swing itself into the stairway, I slammed shut the door in one fluid motion, the bolt being jammed into place with another. The door, forged of heavy metal and built to deter burglars, shouldn't budge, but I backed away nonetheless, expecting some terrible clatters that think pounced against the gatehouse of its escaped prey. Instead, silence fell. Now it was left standing in my front room between the sink and the fridge, groceries forgotten, for a half hour as I listened for noises from the stairway which never came. Once I finally made myself move, I crept up to the metal door and listened. Minutes stretched on and still, no sound came. Relenting after nearly an hour on watch by the door, I backed away, at a loss as to how I should interpret what had just happened. All I can do in that moment was to ensure the padlock holding the bolt in place on the door was fastened and the locks set into the handle was turned. Put the groceries away and dim the lights. There were just three rooms in the apartment, with the kitchen and an adjoining bathroom up front and the bedroom in the back, and it was here that I hold up for the night. The balcony door of the same metal makeup as the front door was kept permanently locked, and the bars upon the window were well positioned and close together, giving me more than enough security to feel at least mildly safe. Man, to see that thing and to convince yourself that it was partially paranoia or to, you know, to think that you'll make it to be okay and then it's found you and it's at your house, you know, in the apartment stairway. My gosh. Do you think it's only attacking him just because he saw the other murder or is it just like I just got done feeding on that thing? It was lurking in the water, looking at him. Was it just, was it just fixated on to him since then you think? I think so. There's also the implication that it's been killing other things like the dogs gone. He doesn't hear the rats and like the other noises as much like it's killing off life that it can strip away. And honestly, he's not around that many people. He's one of the only lone targets still around. It's probably targeting him for that reason that he could disappear and people wouldn't notice. The night passed in silence. My mind on nothing saved the rooftop doorway and that thing from the canal until the vlog last. The sun rose and the noises of the streets welled outside, allowing me enough ease to finally find sleep. Waking that afternoon from dreams stalked by rock-bathed rates and skittering rats, I immediately checked and double checked that my rationing plan was in order, that my stored food could last me through the next four weeks. Then stealing myself for the wait and trying my best to focus on work, I sat before my computer and picked away at its keys, finding myself absolutely staring at the retained window and pondering the streets beyond much more frequently than I'm comfortable admitting. When the sunset, stripping the thin lines of light from the edges of the curtains, I allowed paranoia to creep back in. Silencing the music I had been playing and killing the loud fan in my room despite the heat, working in silence over my laptop with my ear honed for anything I miss. The first night passed peacefully, my greatest disturbance being that those fox-like screeches had rather conspicuously disappeared from the streets outside, leaving the world beyond my retained window an occasionally motorbike-desecrated churchyard of hushed anticipation. I planned my meals so that I did all my cooking in the front room kitchen near the stairs before the night had fallen, so the relative safety of my back room aided me in feeling at ease while I played in my mind the image of the slinking wretch from the canal hanging from the roof. I made an effort to sleep before the following day, settling in earlier in the morning and rising later in the afternoon. That didn't stop me for feeling haggard, worn by nightfall. The days of fretting started to catch up to me. The second night would not go so smoothly. It was two hours past midnight when I noticed a sniffing not dissimilar from a dog's but pitched low like that of the black bear's back home, emanating from the bottom of my balcony door. It sounded once, drawing my eyes to the door in the dark, the blackness of the balcony beyond preventing me from making out any shadows cast on the small space between the door and the tiled floor. I froze and made as little sound as I could manage. You're straining for more sound. None came for 15 or 20 agonized minutes. The air itself seemed cooler under the icy press of this terrified atmosphere. Then, a tinge roll of glistening flesh crept in beneath the door, snaking along the tiles like a serpent. It's dark, wet form, easily visible in the dark and bedroom against the pale linoleum of the ground. The stink of the canals after a days boiling in the sun slunk in with it, permeating the room almost as soon as I spotted the intrusion. At its tip, the familiar pointed stinger or needle gleamed, leading its exploration of the room. From where I set upon my bed, situated in the opposite corner of the room from the door, I inched back upon the mattress into the furthest corner, still endeavoring to make as little noise as possible. The thing on the balcony seemed to sense this, though, and the seeking tongue made its way for the bed, bringing the worst sorts of fear conjured images to mind. Fortunately for me, the length of the vile protrusion fell short, and after several moments of straining there against the door in vain, it was withdrawn, disappearing back out into the night from which it came, leaving a sort of slick snail trail in its wake. The tongue's owner did not depart though, occasionally sniffing up the crevice over the next hour or so, seeing if it's quarry would attempt to move. When dawn began to approach, the noises died away as the thing returned to whatever safe hideaway it kept during the sun's waking hours, and I fell into a nightmare, adult sleep. Continuously waking to check the balcony door, and sleeping with my closed eyes honed on the entryway, ready to snap open at the faintest sound. This is kind of reminded me of a little bit, is my dog was missing for three days or something. Let me see. I pulled it here. My dog was missing for three days. Yeah. The one where we learned about your grandfather and your dog. I don't know. Was that that episode? Yep. Wow. But that one was pretty much just like, the thing was lurking on the outside, and he was sleeping in the cabin, blah, blah, blah, all that kind of stuff. It's given me similar vibes to this. One thing I think it's kind of interesting is not that everybody from Kentucky is just like, oh, cryptids are real and all this kind of stuff, but I feel like there's a lot more folklore and stuff that goes into those areas that have these kind of urban legends and stuff. Oh, yeah. We all grew up with ghost stories and stuff. I was wondering how that is him being like from Kentucky in those areas, how that could have prepared him for something like this, or if there was something where he's like, I don't fuck with that stuff back home or any of that. If there was any kind of translation that could happen between that culture and this one, because it is similar. Just different size of the world. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, everyone has, I would say, everyone. If you're like me and you grow up with like a crayon father who talked about old legends and stuff like that, because I mean, obviously, there's people from there just don't care. We're not familiar with it, but growing up, I had a lot of stories about things that go bump in the night around the woods and stuff like that. My grandfather used to tell me about hide behinds, right, creatures that you would see him have the corner of your eye, and they would hide behind trees in the woods, and they would only kill you if you tried too hard to see him, right? So if you've ever seen anything out the corner of your eyes, just leave it be. Just sometimes stuff happens in the woods and you're not supposed to ask too many questions. Most people who've camped out long enough have stories of hearing really weird sounds or coming across or seeing a glimpse of something that doesn't make a lot of sense, things like that. So if you're primed with that, you kind of have the knowledge of like, you know, sometimes things happen and you just let him be sort of thing. But he's in a unique position where the thing is happening directly to him. Well, also, I mean, just to reiterate what you're saying, like, if you see something don't, you're almost like, I'm supposed to look, and in this case, he did look at it and see any made eye contact with the thing. Almost like that was an invitation to just be like, by the way, you're my next fucking target. You shouldn't have seen that kind of thing, yeah, because no one else is out on the streets at night. If it wasn't for him being a recluse, he never would have seen that was it was the person. I guess we didn't see who was the target. Is that was an old man, right? So it was an old man. Yeah, it was an old man. But I'm guessing it was a local though, it wasn't like another, no, it's just an old guy who was out there at night. Sure. And if it wasn't for him making his two a.m. grocery runs, uh, then he wouldn't have seen it. No one would have, he, the swan would have been able to kill someone with no witness. Is that why you said it's like a vampire is because it, it can't be out in the sunlight or something. Um, I don't know if that's explicitly a part of a swang lore, but I know they'd come out at night. Or is it just likes coming out at night because there's little, like, it's an easier time to hunt people. Yeah. Because there's fewer. I think that's typically what it is. I mean, maybe the swang has the detail it can't be in sunlight, but it's at the very least a nocturnal predator. Why, why, what is it with the fill, what do you think that, what do you think, because usually I always assume that it's maybe not necessarily exactly animals, but in terms of like the swang, is there an animal that like maybe someone mistook it for that and then it just started that role? Um, well, that kind of goes back to like old questions with like cryptid origins, right? So take for example, what's a, you universally understood one, serpents, right? So like every culture, every religion, somewhere in there has a great serpent or snakes have something to do with it, right? So that leads to the idea that either everyone saw snakes and had a natural fear of them and that did, or there was an original myth or lore that got disseminated across all the other cultures and then changed like, you know, the North's called it your mingander and it's like the world serpent or whatever, but then the Indians called it Nala, a car or something like that, like the great serpent that, uh, I, covers the gods and stuff like that. Um, and then you even have like in Christianity, this, the devil being represented as a serpent and stuff like that. So it's like, you have this core idea that finds its way across the world and different ideas. Um, so similarly, you have a lot of different cultures that have vampire-ish things, right? Like, blood sucking creatures that are humanoid, but always have these like, kind of bat-like features, stuff like that. So it's like, does that come from an original myth that made its way there or if you want to get even more, kind of, heady with it, um, there's a lot of similarities between these and like medieval depictions of demons and stuff, right? Like winged creatures, horned creatures, stuff that comes out and I'd cause mischief, obviously very different in like what they do, but in appearance wise, there's more similarities. Right. So it could be that. It could be like a myth that has originated and been passed around so much. Or it could also be there are, have been historical cultures that have been described as almost like cryptid or like monstrous aspect, um, that could have been other groups of people or other attackers. Like, I forget what the Yahweh, I think they're called the Yahweh, maybe Japanese, Japanese spirits. Yahweh is like gay boys and pretty sure. Yeah. Do we have a fact check on that? Is that what I'm thinking of like the big foot people in China? It's another short word like that may start with an age, I think. Oh, I thought I thought you were trying to, I thought you were going to like yo-kai, but maybe not. No, not though. Yahweh, yeah. Cause usually there's like a Yahweh boy dungeon in Japan where it's like a bunch of gay twin boys. Oh, I know what you're talking about. Yeah. Yeah. Is that it? The big foot people? Yes. Okay. So I'll let the Yahweh better. Yeah, I'm sure you do. Uh, out in Philippines. Yeah. Like these little boys. Come here. You know, I was thinking in my head. I'm like, wow, we've managed, this story is actually managed to not give Hunter an opportunity to go that way. But here. It's been very, it's been very interesting. I will say that. Oh, I'm super into it. This is the cryptids told this way or I'm at my alley right now. But the year in, uh, according to old legend, it's like, I want to say in like the Chinese farmlands and stuff like that, like more coastal getting, uh, had legends of these people called the year in that were these men like bigfoot creatures up in the hills that would periodically come down and like destroy their villages and take the women. Um, historically, there is do what probably just Mongolians, historically, their presence to think that these were Mongolians that were clothed in furs and stuff like that run attack people to destroy villages. So what story gets passed around, tribes of hairy men that come down and attack people and stuff like that. Well, it's always a game of telephone, isn't it? Yeah. It's always a thing where it's like, it definitely the first guy was just like, yeah, it was a fucking Mongolian guy come down and talk about wife. The next guy's just like, yeah, this fucking bastard monster. Some hairy, some hairy dude came down across, however many people in generations, of course, it's going to be something where it's just like the people up in the mountains, whatever yeah. That kind of thing. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. So similarly with like a swung and something like that, especially in the Philippines where there were so many different groups who had power at one point of the other and there were explorers from like Asia that were coming and attacking and stuff, there is precedence to say maybe legends like the swung, these blood sucking killers that come out of the night and attack you could have been like a foreign invader or something like that, right? So it's either like an original myth because there is like characteristic similarities to other myths or it could have been like a group of people that had these like evil traits attached to them because of what they did to the locals, stuff like that. So it's probably one of those two. The other option is that there are actual vampires in the Philippines that just kill people. That'd be so sick though. I mean, that is the cooler option. That is the much cooler option. Yeah. That's one of the reasons I like cryptid so much because like everything has a story, right? It's not like someone in the modern age set around is like, hmm, what if there was a vampire snake, a vampire snake thing and then everyone's like, oh, let's write all these fake stories. Normally these things will date back like hundreds of years with people telling tales and stuff and you can almost trace the game of telephone to see where it might have come from or how different ideas influence different cultures from different regions and through the monsters they talk about, it kind of paints a story of the people who tell them because what was the fear of like, you know, the Filipino farmer for some time, something getting them in the middle of the night. So the culture kind of matches that. Whereas you take, you know, the Chinese farmer who's worried about Mongolian attack and now there's like tribes of hairy bigfoot men that come into town. Well, what is just the cultural fear, you know, of that time and they're going to manifest that. That's even, that's even like, that, that, that still resonates even today. What's stuff of even like the 50s where it was like, or like 50, 60 space ray stuff. So aliens is a big thing. 80s with the air with this AIDS crisis and stuff. Obviously a lot more vampire stuff with blood, all that kind of shit. It's like it's all, it's all relevant to what is happening culturally in the signs of the times. The monsters you make that are kind of these extrapolations off the things you are afraid. You know, it used, and that's where, while a lot of the cryptids, especially the old ones are things that go bump in the night, things that kill you. Now a lot of our fears are more abstract. It's around technology. It's around like crowds. It's around mass hysteria stuff like that. Like we're doing the same thing. We've just done it more often. So the ideas are a bit more refined and a bit more abstract because now like, America, modern age, we don't have to worry that much about like running out of food or being attacked by like, or the cold killing us or something like that. But all those old legends did. They all relate to that in some way. Whereas now our greatest fears are around like, what can technology do? Yeah. I also think there's a huge push for like nostalgic. There's a lot of like, there's a lot of things for the tech, the technological side. I think it's just about how people are like communicating with each other, which is also why I think like obsession was so fucking big is people have had those awkward interactions and stuff before. Well, I mean, take back rooms. Like you were saying with nostalgia, the thing that attracts so many people to back rooms is at a glimpse. It's vaguely familiar. Like it's apart in your memory. You're kind of spacing out, but there's something uncanny about it. And then I think Kane has really taken that idea to its highest precedence at making it like a manifestation of what was, right? So in a way, the back rooms and like the idea around that is almost the same cryptid mindset of us extrapolating our own like, angst and fears and stuff into an embodiment. I am curious to see with a, which I mean, we've been under surveillance for a long time, obviously, but I am curious with how prevalent it is now with the flock cameras and everything, even like the data centers, all that kind of shit. I'm curious to see how a generation grows up with that and transcribes that into something fucking, you know, probably like a big brother kind of thing of always being watched and all that kind of stuff. There's been some media, but you know, there's been some media. What's also interesting is, you know, the more things change, the more they say the same. I mean, since Orwell, right, we've been talking about the big brother, literally big brother and like these overwhelming leaders that like need to know what everyone's doing and like the level of control and stuff, like those exasperations were there. And now we see them coming back into prominence as those become our fears again. But I also just think it's so interesting how anytime something does go bad, or like almost culturally this zeitgeist, like a spirit of a certain kind of unease starts to settle over us, give it a few years, you'll start to see art that portrays that. Do you think that it's going to be something that manifests itself as do you think that like obviously the thing back in the day with this with an was it was a calling in an a swung a swung or a swung. That's going to be a monster because it's like full tail and they're superstition and like those kind of things and people are also like that's real. It's a real thing that can happen versus now. Obviously, people are going to be like that. There's monsters aren't real. Do you think that's going to continue to be something that's more realized or more real of like a man in a suit versus something where somebody takes a idea of being survey like a surveillance saying and transcribing that into like an entity or something that you know monster-esque like you know what I mean like creating a swung off of these newfound fears or is it going to be more grounded you think still in the idea of it just being like a fucking guy in a suit or like somebody you would be like this is somebody who's in power over me blah blah. I think what's interesting about the modern age and really the last hundred years that I say yeah I would say has been unprecedented in history before it is the level of record keeping we have with everything right so take for example Christian okay not taking that I mean heavily documented thing that is an example sadly of what I was actually an earnest attempt to me for me to actually bridge that but I see where you're going now and yes but like take like an old thing for like the original werewolves right we have no idea exactly where that started right like a wolf man hybrid killing people right but we see when the stories start to crop up and stuff like that right and were there cultures that taught and told stories of like actual wolfman in the woods sure absolutely but these are all stories too like as much as I talk about like growing up in Appalachia hide behinds and like things like above the night I know they're not real obviously but I also understand that those stories came from places where the idea of them was might as well be real right there's things in the woods you let the woods pass sometimes stuff like that and the the hide behinds like an embodiment of that so it's like the beginning of its kind of nebulous it just started getting talked around and to the people who began the legend they probably I mean the guy who made up the story knew he was making up a story right it's the funniest thing to think back in the day that like group fairy tales or anything like that like a wolf like a werewolf wolf man was some guy who probably told his kid I wanted to scare him so bad he never goes in the woods yes or whatever so he doesn't drown in a fucking creek or something so he's just like by the way there's made to fit a need of the time there's a there's a fucking some dog wolf guy you will kill you you take that as fat he never debunks it because I bet you 100% they want their whole life to was it real oh yeah oh yeah of course even they're older you know absolutely so now you're gonna pass that down whatever do you ever see it I think I might have sent salt once or one time exactly yeah by well I think it's the most hysterical thing is the fact that people were just doing this is like basically just stories to prevent just scare you from doing X or you know just be like you remember that's why you shouldn't lie or like that kind of stuff yeah but the guy who started that story knew he was making up a story but for the generations after it became a legend like everything else did but take for example the last hundred years and like you said Christian right now every second of our lives from the inception of a story to everything we do with it is documented right so if today I start telling my kids the story and I start telling like the internet the world's largest story about a creature I make up there's a fixed beginning point with that right and people know it was a story so I feel like now because of how much information we have a buggy man can't really exist in the same context like even the back room's image right we know exactly where that image started we know now it was a hobby town and where it was and all that stuff and it takes some of the mystique off of it right of it being this other place even something like that has like a consensus around the framing of it whereas back in the day these legends just started to appear out of cultures so maybe they thought it was real maybe it was a story maybe it's somewhere in between maybe it was based off real things that were happening they extrapolated to it but then in the modern age because everything is so finite I feel like if we were to take our modern aspirations and like you said make them into a man it would be too clear that it's just wearing sheepskin right like it is it well would be too would the sheepskin as in like Peter teal yeah would it embody a person like woods which is actually fucking horrifying yeah it'd think about Sam Alton just being your fucking oh yeah that's scary yeah get out my room Sam but like so say there say there is to create like a monster or something that was like the embodiment of Peter teal whereas which was a funny idea whereas back in the day that legend would live on its own now forever people are like oh yeah that's the thing based on Peter teal stealing your key which I would do not far from the truth not above it you'll at least watch him through a camera that for some reason every local government and the planet decides to adopt at the same time but that story would forever be known for what it was it couldn't have this cloak of mystique over it I think in the modern age now can we still tell effective stories obviously and we can still like make these kind of representations of them that are more far fetched and out there but I don't think like in a swamp it would ever pass as real no well yeah no yeah whereas these old legends could yeah yeah I don't know interesting thoughts sorry yeah no I think I think that's cool again if you want a reading of these stories you can find them somewhere else that is true that afternoon still to loss as to how I would report such an invasion without being accused of lunacy I took my defense into my own hands I went about fortifying my position against this new threat setting my suitcase against the door to obscure the crevice at the base and weighing it down with filled water bottles and Tupperware to add bulk covering these with shoes clothes spare cutlery and anything else I could find that I felt would hinder the interloper with perhaps 70 pounds crammed into the suitcase my mind could sit a little easier the next few nights think continued its visits but with its tongue rebuffed by the suitcase its probing was limited to sniffing at the door by the end of the first week the stalker from the canals seemed to have moved on with those familiar fox-like noises I'd begun to attach to its jawless visage resuming their serenade out on the streets of the city echoing to my ears now and then Days return to normal. My paranoia gradually receding as first one week than another was passed in relative peace. It was not to last though, during my final week in the apartment, my nocturnal collar would pay me one last, unexpected visit. Though my nights had become less dreadful, that did not mean I had grown careless. Always I endeavored to have my nights dimmed my apartment silence by sunset. To have any food or water I plan to consume during the night, scrolled away next to my bed, and to get any necessary trips to the bathroom out of the way while the sunlight still shown on the roof above. That evening, I decided to shower before the night confined me to my back room, beginning around 6, while the sun said had yet to deepen the hues of the horizon beyond my walls. With nights being passed without air conditioning to better equate my ears with the world outside the window, I valued going into what I knew would be an uncomfortably humid night, clean, and relaxed. I had only been in the bathroom for three or four minutes, eyes closed against the water. When the fan mounted on the wall of the little space halted, it set in silence, oddly defying. With power outages common in Phnom Penh, I fast shook away the water and backed out of the stream from the inexpensive wall mounted water heating system on the wall, expecting my eyes to find the bathroom dark and anticipating a drop in water temperature after the loss of electricity. The cramped space, to my surprise, was still lit. Oh, it's found away. It's found away into his fan, oh no. The building was old, and I'm fortunate that in the moment I didn't just ignore the halted fan go about my business. Perhaps, even if I didn't consciously associate the stairs with the fan at the moment, I reflexively recalled on some deeper level how close the fan said into the wall was on the stairway walls outside to the rooftop doorway, where just one month ago, some unknown wretch had rise that searched for a new feast. My real salvation, however, was that wretched stink from the canals, reaching my nose and putting my heart into a ragged sprint. I looked to my right, eyes finding the small, dust-choked fan in the wall, and what I saw there sent me stumbling out the bathroom door and slamming it behind me with the water still running. It would stay that way for nearly two days, only being switched off when my landlady walked upstairs one morning to complain about how much water I must be using. Hanging there, twitching and thrashing in an attempt to force its way through the small opening between the plastic fan blades was the familiar sheen of that needle-like proviscus. Its bulk, having stopped the fan cold, while its owner hung latch to the wall of the stairway outside like some twisted vampiric tree frog, invisible to me save for that insect tile otherworldly tongue. Eventually, my departure date arrived, and I'd long worry that I would exit my apartment with suitcase and wallet in hand for my final walk down the precarious stairs to collect my security deposit and make for the airport only to find my unwanted visitor clinging to the stairway roof in protest to the sunlight outside, ready to finish the job. No such tears came to pass. I arrived home about 24 hours after walking out the door for the final time, staying with friends until I could secure my own place, having survived that otherworldly visitor on the stairway. I have never, in several years spent pondering the event since, been able to piece together what that thing I saw beside the canal could have been, or why it had such a fascination with me after my chance encounter with it on the rat stalk streets of Phnom Penh. No major news, official or unofficial, out of the Cambodian capital has commented on any strange disappearances or sightings save a blog post I stumbled on one day by an animal shelter in the city, celebrating the sudden drop in the stray population of Phnom Penh. Check it and help, but lay at the feet, or tail, as the case may be, of a much more sinister presence that increased civic awareness. Perhaps it was several entities, stalking being not a symptom of singular awareness, but rather of a hungry and growing population. I find this hard to believe though, for the number of missing ex-singuinated vagrants and nightworkers would be monumental. Equally hard to believe is the explanation of hallucinatory paranoia. For as comforting as it would be for me to sit here safe in the knowledge that no threat had ever been posed by the sniffing at my door and the snaking tongue or minutes away through the fan, I have never in any period of stress or isolation since had any analogous experience by their waking or sleeping. Rather, I've been forced to accept the possibility that, heavy as it weighs on my mind and disastrous as it is to my world view, there's something monstrous stalking the canals, alleys and rooftops of nocturnal Phnom Pen. Mostly, perhaps, it feasts on dogs, rats, cats and chickens as it closets way through the trash and across deserted streets, but occasionally, as I obsessively scroll through news feeds and blog entries made from Phnom Pen and the dark of particularly solitary nights, I stumble across a story about declining homeless populations in Cambodia's capital, praising the uplifting grace of this or that government or non-profit initiative, and I'm inclined to wonder how often someone, lying drunk or battered on the roads to sleep, is dragged down to the waters of the canals, never to surface again. What I liked about this character in this story is a guy who's like a bit of a loner, disinterested a lot of the world, or the area around him, gets a helpful tip from a girl that he knows and she's just like this is a really cheap thing that you can do, go experience a new shit and live kind of like a, you know, you won't even be able to speak with people because you don't speak the language. Yeah. It's kind of a dream. The guy is like well put together, he's like, it seems like what I like about this thing is the way that he describes things, it's like it's almost as if he's like meticulously thought about every single thing that is like going on or is going to be or it has happened before, to where it really builds that level of paranoia pretty well with this idea that there's like a creature out there and trying to come to terms with it, even though you can tell that he's like in my rationalized brain, I definitely know what I saw. It almost reads like a confession. Yeah. Like he's tried to deny this for years and he can't anymore. So he puts everything to paper. To me, I thought it sounded like a fucking college paper, the way that he's writing it almost feels like a thesis or something of by being like it feels, it feels almost like that analytical or like that like, uh, well, that's what it's talking about. Like it reminds me a lot of the old Explorer stuff. They would write manuscripts about like the things they came across and it almost reads like one of those like an early voyage into the Congo or something as a, as a guy who is from Kentucky going across to Cambodia to do this thing. Do you think that the monster is supposed to symbolize something that is this, is it supposed to be challenging his worldview of being like this loner, this disinterested thing? Because at first I was wondering if it was trying to be like an embod, like, hey, this was an HP Lovecraft thing coming from a guy who was like just a racist dude who was just like, I'm afraid of all these other people. So these like aliens and stuff are, are these like Cthulhu and all that kind of stuff. It's all manifested from things that he doesn't understand and then he's afraid of of that unknown, different cultures and all that kind of stuff. The other. Yeah. And that's why I'm wondering with this is that swung supposed to be something to this guy. Because it just, because with how, it's a very, I mean, beautifully written story. It's concise. I'm just, I feel like there's like a misconnection unless the guy, unless it was just an experience of being like, I just want to make a story about a swung, which could very well be it. But I honestly think, especially considering he lives in the end and he talks about this years later. And like I said, it almost feels like he's confessing this like inner almost like a bad dream he had that he can't shake. I think all of that prep on the front end talking about how he is afraid of interacting with others and how he came here to get away from people and living that level of a recluse for so long made the monster manifest itself. A monster that mind you solely praise on things that people won't miss, right? Things that can get away with true, like to the degree that the locals are like, oh, there's a lot less stress and homeless. Like that's how good it is that taking away people that and living creatures that people want. So him becoming that next prey item, I feel like is the narrative sort of screaming at him that if he wants to be friends, yeah, he will be sure I do like that. I think that's a really smart, that's like a really, that's a really interesting, I think smart take away from this that maybe something that could have been reinforced in the narrative or something of like, the idea of him walking away, he sees the thing on top of the roof being like, damn you, like walking away 'cause he can't chase after it. It would have been interesting if you have a thing at the beginning, you've done a really good job being like, I'm fucking, I just don't like people and I'm like, need people. I like being a loner, even the way that he interacts. His like, social hours are his like, actual going out and about. It's all not turning on when no one else is up to where is there something where maybe later on the story he had to rely on somebody out of his own like he fucking hates it. Maybe he doesn't even like the guy, be friends somebody and that's the thing that like, at the end of the story, what's it say? He goes back home and stays with friends. Something he'd be super removed from. I guess it would've been nice to have it being Cambodia, though, would be interesting. Something where he learns from that thing to where then he takes it back with him. Well, even then, I think that is kind of what happened 'cause he leaves 'cause he's like, you know what, means more to me than my friends and family? Low rent. So I'm gonna go to a place where I can't make any friends. I don't even speak the language. I'm gonna work on my laptop. And he comes back and now he's staying with friends. I think that is kind of like he went out there, realized like, if I wanna be a loner, I'm going to be forgotten and I'm gonna be preyed upon by the thing that takes lonely things, right? So when I come back, I am gonna stay with friends. I'm gonna be with you. - Yeah, we'll definitely change man. - It definitely makes us feel like his character arc is definitely somebody who's just like, I'd rather be by myself, whatever to somebody who's like, probably good to be around people. - Yeah. - It does feel like a full character moment like an actual character arc or growth of this guy happening. I just do, I do almost wish that something like that would have been tantalized or it would have materialized in Cambodia or him trying to interact with somebody. It's like almost coming to a realization or finding out that thing, but you're not even able to talk to the guy because they don't speak the same language. That would have just been a fun character dynamic between those things. - I think to it, another thing I liked is, he tried all of his steps to make the thing go away. Like, oh, I'll put heavy stuff by the door. Oh, I'm going to shut the bathroom for two days 'cause it was trying to get through. Isolation did not stop it. Like, sure, it didn't get to him and he slowed it down, but him just staying in his room was exactly what it wanted. He's more and more like. - Well, I used to back into a corner. - He's back, he can't get out. - And he won't leave. - And it probably makes him smell fucking sweeter or whatever, it makes him even more tantalizing. - His paranoia and his loneliness, retreating into that did not help. What helped was leaving. - You know what I thought it was going to be? As I thought that there was going to be a full turnaround with the shopkeeper that he gives him the specific amount every time and it's kind of like, all right, see ya. It's like, he's only interact with somebody. I didn't know if that was going to come back around. - I could, I would say that addition could have worked. Like even something as minor is like accepting the companionship of a person even if you don't know the language. - It is cool. I mean, like listen, what you're saying is correct. I do think that that's the end goal is like, he comes back and he's like staying with people super out of his character and it's basically fear now. And it is like this kind of thing of like, hey, you better have fucking buddies in your life for us to fucking entity, you know, when things go wrong it's better to have people in your life versus being a loner and have to face those things alone. - It's almost like a Christmas Carol thing. - In a way, it is. - I think it works. - That will be or might be. - I don't think it works though. I think that that's the only thing is like, it would have been cool to see some kind of big altercation whatever he learns to say. And then when he goes back, it's even more solidified by him being like, yep, I got a roommate now. I'm doing whatever, you know? I think that like, it's a fun thought at the end. I just, just as food forth, I mean like whatever. Just put the sake of conversation. - Well, I mean, this is a story that I think deserves that level of I for sure. Like what you're doing right now talking about like, well, this theme, how does that connect to that? This story is certainly in the caliber that it is playing with those things. It's not like we're going to Jeff the killer and being like, what's his theme? What's his whole deal? - No, I mean, it's written well enough to where I do think you're right. It's like a grim fairy tale of like, it's trying to tell you, it's trying to give you this thing of just like life lesson basically. - Like isolation will let the monsters. - And all I'm saying is that the in product being that like it's feeding on things that are isolated themselves. I mean, I think that's like, I think that's perfectly, I think that's exactly what's happening. By love the idea of then you've gone to the farthest ends of the earth, whatever, and then you kind of come to this realization and you can't talk to anybody. - Yeah. - You don't speak what you're saying. - You don't speak, you can't interact or even like have that barrier with anybody. And it makes it even more impossible, I think, is what- - I think that would have been, now that you say it that way, and I think I get what you're saying. Yeah, that would have been hot. To have a moment where he is desperate for something, but he's in a place where he can't do anything about it. - Try to reach out or even try to like make connections to the people and the people given him to kind of move the cold shoulder to or even just this thing of like using a fucking app to try to talk to someone or whatever. And it's just like- - That's a very menacing position to find yourself in. - Yeah. And even a thing too of like maybe he's affected by it and then like the locals know about this fucking thing. So then whenever he's marked or whatever, people like get the fuck away from me. - Yeah. - Like I don't even want you near me or whatever. Like his, you know, like almost like at the beginning, I kept picturing like a shot of the dead thing where he's going through his routine. He's like walking in the store being mong and then later he wakes up and that's his amplification but he doesn't even notice because it's like, he's just so muscle memory with everything. The guy going through at the beginning and he has all of his normal routines with the store and everything him going through with like the guy pays whatever. It's like all those things become disrupted once people kind of get a sense of like, oh shit, you're fucking, you're marked now, fuck that. - Yeah, even if it's something as easy as like he stinks 'cause he hasn't been showering. Like some physical attribute of like he's a pariah now, which would speak because like, not to say this because the swang's definitely real but you can almost imagine the swang as like his own manifestation of like his paranoid which I don't think the story's saying that but that is how personal his haunting is like it's messing with him and stuff like that. So you can even have like the consequences of his loneliness come off as something as physical as like he hasn't showered or something like that. Something to push others back. The now winning is seeking help, he can't find it. - You could also probably go in an angle. I mean, this doesn't necessarily, I'm not saying that this is a, everything I'm saying I like it because I know, I definitely don't want it to be like, it would have been better if this. That's definitely not the case. It's just, this is a really good story. We've got done really, I'm just kind of throwing it out there but I am wondering if there's something where because of an isolation thing you become ex forced into isolation or like putting yourself into isolation becoming a swung or something or being bit by it and you slowly become it or just whatever. It's like you kind of be, you manifest yourself into the monster of the circumstances you put yourself in. It's another way that could have been. But once again, I always like, I can tell I'm interested in a story whenever, there's like all these different other ideas and stuff. And this was one of the one of the stories that was just so, very quick, boom, boom. I did like that it was almost like the last month we get to be in his like six months stay. Once the isolation is really set in, yeah. Once the isolation is set in and it's also like, you're just right there versus it being something where it's like, okay, well, I have it over six months. 'Cause that also too, and I think that, 'cause earlier I was like, why would you stay? But it's also another thing where it's like, if it's good and you're like right at the finish line, you probably would just be like, I'm just gonna fucking stick it out. Well, I was thinking about it at the end where he's like, hold up in there and he's got two days left and it's like, it tries to get in through the vent. It's like, I don't even know if he can get out of the country in two days. Like, what's the process of like getting a plane ticket and traveling to the airport? What's on him on the outside? I don't even want like, if I don't have to do whatever, I don't want to have to see anything. My tickets in 48 hours just got a stick out there. So it makes it a believable circumstance. With the dog missing in three days and almost like, this also slightly reminded me just of if somebody hit, there was a period of time when we first started this show, fuck now almost three years ago, when it was a lot of stuff of people tripping a cabin of some kind. That was a lot of, there was a series of stories where it's people stuck in a cabin or somewhere like, isolated in the house and that's why I was like, kind of reminiscent on the dog missing for three days, stolen tongues, even a Gregory 88, whatever, of like a guy in like a house, a little nowhere, whatever. Do you, were you happy with the amount of like, or like, not happy, like, did you enjoy the amount of like, this of the monster being in it or do you kind of wish there was more to more to it? I think it depends on the tongue thing was fine. I guess I, I don't know why part of me is just, I wish there was just something I don't know what the answer is to that, but I, I think it was about all you could show if you don't want to either a, have a direct confrontation by confrontation. I mean, like an action set piece. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Or be, make the creature less threatening, like it just stands there and looks at him or something like that. 'Cause every time we see it, it is trying to kill him, right? It is right there. I think that's the problem is that it was an aggressive sniffing, like a rabid animal, which is cool. But there, I think some of the other things that we have seen before is like the psychological element of like waking up and you're like, something's been in my fucking house or whatever. Is it prepping him? Is it doing something that it's like fucking with the psychological aspects of this thing versus just being like. (grunts) Like tail coming out. I think it's like, I think it's just stalking him like a predator. 'Cause he sees it kill another person and then it follows him to his house and it's hanging over the doorway so now it knows where he lives. That fucked me up too, because there's like so many times where snakes will be wrapped up and be like wrapped up in your door. Like when you open your door and then the snake like falls down whatever my actual fucking nightmare. I forget how much you hate snakes and so funny. And then it tries to get in through the patio. So he breaks that up, boards it off, and then it tries to get in through the bathroom. The one room he has that is not connected to the main house and he just shuts up the bathroom. So the only thing left would be it gets to him or there's some kind of, I do think you could have an action sequence in this. And I think that maybe not so much like wrestling, but I love the idea of a character who wants isolation completely barricades himself inside of his apartment and the thing breaks in. And now he has to look for things off and actually get out. I think that could have worked. I can see that work. It's something like that where now it's there and he has to leave maybe on the final night or something. I think it's really cool though. I mean, I don't have that. And then he runs to the shopkeeper. Yeah. Yeah. Just, just, just something, you know, just set up, you set it up at the beginning to be paid off later. Might have been cool. I still think that they're, I think it was intentional to make a guy from Kentucky that goes to another place that has a cryptid kind of thing. Yeah. I don't know why, but I like the idea of a western that goes to an eastern culture. That's a very, you know, that old legend I was waiting for you in, is it Arcadia, Arcadia air go, the old story about death, you know, the one I'm talking about, the man there was, I'm going to make up the city names because I can't remember what the actual city names are. Uh, in the ancient times, the man was in Jerusalem, while walking through the shops, uh, he looked through the crowd and saw death. The Grim Reaper standing there and the Grim Reaper looked at him and was surprised. He had a shocked face. So of course, the man freaks out. He gets on horseback and he rides and rides through the desert. He loses that horse, gets another one rides as far as he can till, uh, that night he's in Arcadia. When he gets off the horse in Arcadia, death is standing there again at this point. The man's too tired to run. So he goes up to death and says, I'll go with you willingly. I just have one question. Why when I saw you in Jerusalem, did you look surprised? And death said, because I had an appointment with you tonight in Arcadia. So it's like by running and trying to get away, you come across the thing that, um, you know, you were trying to get away from, um, so my joke was Appalachian leaves Appalachia, who's cryptid in Cambodia. I think it's a dirty like fucking moth man or like big foot. It's like in Cambodia, like, no way. I know you. Yeah. I'm going to kill you tomorrow. Yeah. Actually, the, the Arcadia air go things different. That's from Greek mythology. Whatever the cities are, the in death thing, which also that story kind of applies the same thing of like, he felt like he was trapped and didn't have people. So he's like, I'm going to go this other part of the world where I can live with that. Uh, and he comes across the thing that he, he is kind of the manifestation and the consequence of him pushing other people away from so long. Um, he comes across it while trying to find like a, an isolation he's cool with. I like, I like that this is a being like a nice folklore, cryptid kind of episode. It's using the folklore like again, on the surface, Guy meets vampire in Cambodia. But it's using that to tell a much bigger thing in its themes, rather than just a cryptid. But on the surface, it is just a cryptid and I think that's really cool. As, uh, I have a question. I hesitate to use this word as an Asian man, but is this the most exotic place we've been trapped in in a story of creep cast as an Asian man? Um, I was kind of curious about that too. Have we had any other Asian country besides what we did, Japanese, uh, but in terms of like an actual, what I liked about this one though was, I mean, it's, it's like present day Cambodia, but it's like a guy basically just stuck in a Cambodian apartment, right? Kind of slummy Cambodian. Right. Which my, the whole time I was, I can't light district kind of idea. Yeah. The whole time I kept thinking about, like, oh, fuck, are we going to go out into the woods or something or like the Cambodian jungle is just such a, you know, fucking crazy place. But I liked that it kind of stuck into like a concrete jungle vibe that he kept talking about. There's still, and there's like something that was familiar to him about it, but still so kind of alien life, so different, um, I might be, have we, have we, I feel like we've done a story in Africa, like African jungle, I may be confusing that with stuff I've read. Well, we did the breathless story that kind of manifests like a woolly mammoth getting hunted is maybe what you're thinking, but I don't think we've got to full on Africa with a human narrator. Now, I mean, a bunch of lovecraft stuff does, or it's like Southeast Asian or something like that. It comes across that's probably what I'm thinking of, but yeah, it probably is the most exotic one we've done. I'll tell you what would be interesting, though, and this might be something to look into in future episodes is like taking like maybe a Cambodian short story, or a story writer, or seeing if there is something from those parts of the world that do have done a creepypasta thing and having them talk about it as normally as like some fucking kid from the Midwest would about his creepypasta, talking about like, you know, my girlfriends on Facebook or whatever. Is there an equivalent to that that's happening in Cambodia that just is a little different just because culturally it's so much different? I think it would be more akin to like someone from the PNW talking about Bigfoot, kind of thing, right? Because I feel like now this kind of goes back to what I was talking about earlier with like just the way modern culture is. Everyone around the world who has access to the internet relates to the Facebook stories and the stuff online because everyone has it, but like say you've got me in Appalachia talking about a hide behind or moth man or whatever, right? I'm sure there are cultural equivalents of that in other countries. I always just think that the slight differences are fascinating. That's like some of my favorite parts about even like reading like Japanese horror manga where whether it's, you know, Jinji tour like Kazuma's or whatever, it's just like, it's all kids hanging out, but it's just culturally a little different, you know, but there's just like these little subtleties that are different that kind of make it a little more like intriguing to me because I'm like, that's just, it's just a little more fascinating. Yeah, like with Edo stuff, you'll be, a lot of his stories are said around like high school age kids and you get the vibe, you can understand the dynamic and the friendships, but it will just be as an American reader, it's just a little bit alien enough that it kind of sets you apart, especially in Uzumaki where you spend so much time with those characters there. It places you just enough on the back foot to where like I'm somewhere else now and it, and with Edo's work specifically where everything's very cosmic, I think it adds to the delivery of it, but I'm sure if you were to look, I'm trying to think of examples with their escaping me right now. I'm sure if you did the same thing in a modern age with writers talking about their own legends around the world, it have a similar effect, I would say. I actually wonder, here's a question to post to the audience because I know we have a bunch of foreign listeners and stuff like that. Do they get some of that from the stories we read, you know, like when we read Edo and we see it's a little different and it kind of adds to like not really the uneasiness, but like the difference in it, I wonder if, which I'd say they would, foreign listeners get that from American stories. Yeah, I always wonder that too. If it's stuff like, I don't know, like Lonely Broadcast Tower, these things where I'm like in my mind, it's so North American, does that kind of set up feel fantastical or fun? Somebody who isn't just like, oh yeah, I feel like I've been to that place or whatever. Well, it should be fair, I fucking America is huge, so there's somebody who's on the East Coast who hear something West Coast and they're probably like, whoa, this is an advice for us. Yeah. But I would hope so. I think that that would be a fun part of it because that's just all of our Cambodian listeners sign off. Yeah. Show me. Editor, put up a percentage right now of how many Cambodian listeners do you have? It's gotta be less than a percent, right? How dare you? It has to be. How dare you? The only one, we have like 12 countries that are 1% or higher and number 12 is like the Netherlands. All right. We've got to get the Netherlands numbers up. I remember we did this one time for fun and we had we had a high listenership in comparatively Japan and it was like, well, other than English speaking, yeah, like you had, yeah, because it was like UK, Canada, Australia stuff. But it was Japan and there was one that I was like, really? It was like, I want to say it was like Egypt or something. It's like, oh, okay, all of our Egyptian listeners out there. I don't know. It's always fascinating. It's the same shit of like Americans watching like a mummy movie, like Egypt. You know what I mean? Versus of people in Egypt are just like, I don't know, it's cool, I guess. I was wondering about that. But anyways, that's our episode of today, guys. Thank you so much for tuning in. And once again, because you did such a great job, Stigian Saga's on YouTube, his website. Yeah. Please read it. Read another one of his stories. That was so good. I would love to read along like the anomalous. One of his things. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. And we'll have all those links in the description stuff and we'll probably even put like a little in card or something up just to go to a channel since we don't cover anybody who has just a full-fledged YouTube chav, yeah, so we'll put that in the description as well. So please go check out their stuff. If you like what you heard today, give me a like, it seems like they have a plethora of content there and they're not, you know, probably breaking every three seconds to talk about some random bullshit. So, you know, that's nice too. So thank you so much. I want to support the channel. You want a little extra content. Feel free to head over to patreon.com/creepcast or if you've been listening to us on audio platforms like Spotify or Apple Podcast, be sure to give us a nice raining. It does help us out. Until next time guys, stay creeped. If you don't talk to that girl, you're like, you're gonna die.