Speaker 1: Welcome listeners to Tales, a podcast that brings your short
stories to life through narrations, sound effects, and more. These
stories will be brought to you by different authors with
different writing styles, but with the same spooky vibes. So
lock your doors, check your closets, make certain there's nothing
lurking under your bed, and angel there.
Speaker 2: Are your sail.
Speaker 1: In the fall of nineteen eighty seven, local news channel
WSBTV of Atlanta, Georgia, was attempting to fill a scheduling
gap in their Sunday morning lineup. After a fuse lisitation
by local business owners, they decided to allow the young
Reverend Marley Satch to take the available our blog to
do a religious theme show. It premiered October eighteenth with
little promotion. The show was standard religious fear and consisted
of the reverence sitting in a simple cheer, reading passages
from the Bible to the camera, and discussing their interpretations
and significance to our modern day to day life. The
show received a reasonable number of viewers and continued to
be showed into early December. It was then that the
studio began to receive extremely strange complaints from the viewers
of Word of Light with the Rev. Marley Satch. The
calls were from women and women only, who vaguely referred
to uncomfortable feelings that they had at a very specific
interval during the program. They described feelings of nausea, back pain, dizziness,
and blurred vision. These callers, for no disconcernable reason, were
convinced that it was a viewing of this program that
was causing these symptoms. It was later determined, after three
weeks of complaints, that these dedelands were happening at roughly
twelve minutes interval during the course of the program. The
small studio staff checked all recording equipment, both audio and video,
and found nothing faulty. When a reverend was made aware
of these incidents, he merely shrugged and stated cryptically that
some can't handle the voice of God. The head of
the studio, at a loss to explain the cause of
these complaints, decided to continue running the program. By February,
viewership had dropped sharply, and it was decided to pull
the plug on the show. The studio had figured it
would be more prudent to spend as much time as
possible on the news story that had other two local
news networks a buzz the miscarriage epidemic. Starting sometime in November,
the number of healthy pregnant women miscarrying in the Atlanta
metropolitan area had reached over three hundred. The CDC could
not find no disconcernable cause for this terrifying occurrence. The
reverend took the show's cancelation with what could only be
described as agent indifference. When informed, he made no protests,
merely nodded, almost knowingly. He left the studio after the
last episode was filmed, without so much as a word,
and dropped off the face of the earth. No one
ever heard from him again, not his former congregation or
any member.
Speaker 3: Of the church.
Speaker 1: The studio moved on filling a slot with an infomercial
and continued to concentrate on the miscarriage story. A year
and a half later, an in turn at the WSB
studio discovered the tapes of the Word of Light and
began going through them in an attempt to find stock footage
for an upcoming peace the station was doing on the
impact religion had on the city. The Atlanta incident as
a miscarriage epidemic became known as in medical journals picturred
out three months after the studio canceled Reverend's Satchest show,
and had already began to fade from the public consciousness.
As the intern went through the tapes, he accidentally made
a disturbing discovery about the footage. While attempting to stop
one recording at ten minutes and forty five seconds, he
mistakenly jammed the fast forward button while the footage whizzed by.
He attempted to pry up the button with a screwdriver.
Just as he succeeded, the tape stopped at thirty two
minutes and one second. The intern actually fell out of
his chair when he looked up at what was frozen
on the screen, the image of a badly decomposed, severed
head filling up the entire frame. After he collected himself,
he moved the film back a few frames, then forward,
and realized that his mind was not playing tricks on him.
He began going through the rest of the recording and
soon discovered that at exactly twelve minute intervals, the image
would appear for one frame. Thinking it's some practical joke
being played on a new guy, he presented it to
one of the film technicians ready to be mocked. The
technicians was just as puzzled as him. No one had
touched the footage since the cancelation of the show. After
the studio had closed for the night, the intern convinced
the tech to help him go through all the tapes
of the Words of Light. They discovered that every single
episode had the same horrifying anomaly. They also realized that
as the show progressed, the image had become more disgusting,
as maggots began to eat away at the loose flesh,
and pieces of the hero and skin seemed to have
fallen off expotentially. The tech made it clear to the
intern that what they were seeing was technically impossible, since
the film itself showed absolutely no signs of splicing, and
he himself had been at every filming of the show
and knew of no time when this image could have
been inserted into the frame. The tech easily moved on,
remembering the incident as a darkly funny personal anecdote, but
the intern wouldn't let it go. He made copies of
as many tapes as he could before they were wiped,
and took them to see if he could find anything
else in them that might point to who did this
or why they would do it. A week later, he
attempted to rote the technician into helping him again, saying
that he believed he had discovered something even more disturbing
than the images himself. When the single frames were edited
together in chronological order, the head's mouth appeared to be moving,
as if trying to form words. The tech fearing for
his job, told him to get rid of the copies
and not to talk about it again. A week later,
police responded to a nine one one call made by
an elderly woman in one of the Atlanta suburbs at dusk.
She had heard horrible noises coming from her next door
neighbor's house, where a young couple lived. She told the
emergency responded that the wife was pregnant and that she
was terrified that something had happened. When the officers arrived
on the scene twenty minutes later, they found no lights
on in the windows and the front door jar. They
moved in slowly and made their way into the living room. Inside,
they found a young woman dead with her abdomen sliced open.
The wound was jagged, and a trail of blood led
from her body to the couch on the far end
of the room. There sat her husband the studio, in turn, naked,
the corpse of his unborn child at his feet, dying.
In his hand, he held a rusty piece of metal
side and he had used to gut his pregnant wife.
The television was on and playing an eighteen second loop
of silent footage of a decomposing head mountain some unintelligible words.
The story at the police precinct to this day goes
at the inn, kept saying under his breath.
Speaker 2: Over and over again.
Speaker 1: As they led him away.
Speaker 2: The light of God calls them Story two their Theodore.
Speaker 3: Dear Theodore, I am the monster under your bed. Personally,
I think monster is a bit of a harsh word,
but that's what you call me, so that's what I
choose to go by. To make it clear, though, I
go buy many names beyond you, Nights Talkers one, The
shadow Man is another. I think I also may have
accidentally started a few legends without meaning to. Would you
believe that Bigfoot may have just been me taken a
stroll through the woods. Truly, depending on who sees me,
any human can imagine something different. So far, I like
your imagination the best. As I'm writing this, you're six
years old, for all up and under your bed. I
followed you from the niku and listened to your crying
all the way home from the hospital. I admit that
the crip was hard to squeeze myself under, but I managed.
I'm grateful you've since upgraded to a big boy bed.
It's a lot easier on my back. As you've grown,
you leave the house more and more. I'd forgotten that
children go to school so young until I heard you return,
excitedly rambling to your ignorant parents about the things you've learned.
Missus Thomas sounds nice from what you say. I approve
of her for now. Anyone can sound nice coming from you, though,
because you tend to see best in people. It's a
quality that gives me hope. This world needs more people
with infinite optimism like yours, and you can quote the
big scary night Monster on that. In fact, you even
try to find good things in me. When a moon
casts a hideous mix of shadows and lightened your room,
and the fear of my very presence make you tremble.
I hear you whisper to me.
Speaker 1: I'm scared, are you scared too.
Speaker 3: It's clear that you don't know who you're talking to.
To you, I am nothing but a nameless creature with
no aim or purpose, just an underdetermined maliciousness. You don't
even seem to know what I would hypothetically do to
you should you fall asleave while I'm around in the daytime.
You think you're safe for me? Do you think shadows
simply disappear?
Speaker 2: Little one?
Speaker 3: If I wanted to hurt you, I would. You drew
me once when you were four, the crumpled paper ended
up under the bed with me. You've never truly seen me,
and your art skills were underdeveloped, to say the least,
so of course there were a few inconsistencies. Your illustration
depicted a haphazard gray scrupple with pointed teeth and bounds
and too many clause accounts, almost like a sickly demonic porcupine.
I couldn't help but be amused when I saw it.
I won't say you are completely wrong. I suppose I
mentioned all this because I know you know nothing about me,
but I know so so much about you. In fact,
I like to think that I know you better than
you know yourself. I know that you don't like vegetables
but will eat any food place in front of you.
I know that your favorite cereal is Rhese's Puff, even
though you really get to eat them. I know that
you only know one curse word, but you're afraid to
say it out loud. I know that you want to
be a firefighter, but two months ago you wanted to
be a construction worker, and you will end up being neither.
I know the name of all your friends and which
ones will turn out to betray you in the future.
I know the name of your first and second girlfriends
and your first and only boyfriend. I know you love
your parents even though they hurt you. I know the
age at which you'll die. I also know how to
stop it. Though I do know a lot of things,
I'm not sure when this letter will reach you. In fact,
i'm not sure you will ever read it. I wish
I could say that I was positive you'll understand why
I'm about to do what I plan to and that
you support my decision when you grow older. But the
truth is, I don't know if you ever will. The
only thing I'm one hundred percent clear on is that
I won't regret doing what I'll do to them. They
deserve the punishment they'll receive. Because at night, when the
tree branches look like giant claws at your window and
the darkness seems to be moving in closer, I know
it's not me. You're truly afraid of deep inside, in
a place your mind cannot get access. You're afraid of
your parents.
Speaker 1: I'm scared.
Speaker 2: Are you scared too?
Speaker 3: You ask the question, not over the sounds of me,
but over then they fight and spat like wild animals.
They never end in cyclone of neglect and anger. You
have no idea how they act when you're gone. Flourish
it in the temporary safety that a clash will brings you.
You cannot yet fathomed the amount of pain they will
bring you when they realize you've become too old to
cuddled and just old enough to treat you like they
treat each other. You would be so good without them,
much better off, I assure you. It'll hurt for a while,
but you're still so young. The pain will feed, and
then you'll be free, free from their chaos and self
destruction and abuse. You'll be able to live the life
you want with no one to hold you back. One day,
if you read this, you'll understand why it took them
away from you, and I hope that then you'll thank me.
I hope the nightmares of your parents' blood will slowly
fade into the background home, replaced by that endless optimism
I know you call so close, And when that day come,
I hope you realize that I care for you more
than they ever did, eternally yours. The monster still under
your bed.
Speaker 1: Are the real monsters among us, are our day to
things that we believe look under our beds or in
our closets. Thank you for listening to the Tales podcasts.
Until we meet again,