Speaker 1: Calorogu Shark Media, Hello and welcome to Ghost Scary Stories
and our special Christmas series The Long Cold. This is
episode one, Snowbound. The first thing I noticed when we
pulled up to the cabin was my mother's car. Wasn't there.
It should have been. She'd left two days before us,
said she wanted to air the place out and stock
the pantry before we arrived. The drive from her house
in Eugene was six hours, hours from Portland was eight.
She should have been there for two full days already.
But the driveway was empty, just snow, unbroken and smooth
as poured cream, stretching from the to the front porch.
Tom killed the engine and looked at me. Maybe she
parked around back. There is no a round back, just
the mountain, he shrugged. Cell service. I checked my phone.
One bar flickered, then vanished. No, she probably got delayed
weather coming in. Maybe she's waiting it out somewhere. I
wanted to believe that, I really did. My daughter, Lily
was already unbuckling herself from her booster seat, face pressed
to the window. Mommy, it's so pretty. It looks like
a gingerbread house. She wasn't wrong. My grandmother had built
this cabin in nineteen fifty one, and every board, every beam,
every window frame looked exactly the way it had in
my childhood photographs, brown timber walls, a stone chimney, a
wide covered porch with two rocking chairs that nobody ever
sat in. Even the Christmas lights my mother had strung
along the eaves were the same fat multicolored bulbs I
remembered from when I was Lily's age, except the lights
weren't on, and my mother always turned them on at dusk,
said it helped her feel less alone up here. Let's
get inside, I said, I'm sure there's a note or something.
There wasn't. The cabin was cold, not just unheated, cold
in a way that made me think the windows had
been left open, but they hadn't. Every window was latched tight.
The fireplace was empty, not even old ashes from a
previous fire. The pantry was bare. The refrigerator held nothing
but a box of baking soda that had been there
since I was a teenager. My mother hadn't been here
at all. Tom found the thermostat and cranked the heat.
The old furnace groaned somewhere in the basement a sound
I remembered hating as a child, that low, mechanical moan,
like something waking up against its will. I'm sure she's fine,
he said, because that's what Tom does. He fills silence
with reassurance, whether it's warranted or not. Rhodes probably got bad.
She's smart. She wouldn't push it. She would have called
no service. Remember, she would have found a way. He
didn't have an answer for that. We unpacked the car
in shifts, Tom hauling suitcases while I brought in groceries,
Lily helping by carrying her stuffed rabbit and providing commentary
on every snowflake she encountered. By the time we finished,
the sky had gone from gray to charcoal, and the
first flakes of what the radio had called a historic
winter storm system were beginning to fall. I made soup
for dinner, Campbell's chicken noodle heated on the old gas stove,
while Lily colored at the kitchen table, and Tom tried
to find a radio station that wasn't static. The cabin
had no television, no internet, no connection to the outside
world except a landline phone that produced only a soft,
empty hiss. When I lifted the receiver line's probably down
from the weather. Tom said, the weather just started. He
gave me a look, the look that meant I was
being paranoid, that I was catastrophizing, that I needed to relax.
I'd seen that look a lot over the seven years
of our marriage. Sometimes he was right, sometimes I was.
Lily went to bed at eight in the small room
at the back of the cabin that had been mine
when I was young, same iron frame bed, same patchwork quilt,
same window looking out into the darkness of the mountain.
I read her a chapter of Charlotte's Web and kissed
her forehead and told her Grandma Ruth would be here
in the morning. I know, she said. The man told me.
I paused at the door. What man's sweetheart, the man
in the wall? My skin went cold, not a metaphor
actual physical cold, like someone had opened a window directly
behind me. What do you mean the man in the wall?
Lily yawned and pulled her rabbit closer. He talks to
me sometimes, he's nice. He says, Grandma was here, but
she had to go somewhere, go where. I don't know,
he didn't say. She yawned again. He doesn't like the
Christmas lights, Mommy, he says, they hurt his eyes. I
stood in that doorway for a long time, watching my
daughter drift towards sleep, trying to convince myself this was normal.
Children have imaginary friends, They say strange things. They processed
the world through fantasy because reality is too big for them.
But Lily had never mentioned a man in the wall before,
not once in seven years. I didn't tell Tom. I
should have, but I knew what he'd say. Kids are weird.
Don't make it into a thing. You're overreacting. Instead, I
poured myself a glass of wine from the bottle we'd
brought and sat by the window in the front room,
watching the snow fall. It was coming down heavy, now,
thick white curtains that erased the world beyond the porch.
I couldn't see the road anymore, couldn't see the tree line,
just snow and darkness and the faint reflection of my
own face in the glass. That's when I saw the footprints.
They were at the edge of the porch. Lights reached,
which half filled with new snow, but still visible, A
line of them emerging from the darkness of the trees
and crossing the yard toward the cabin. Large prints, a
man's boots. Maybe. They came right up to the porch,
right up to the steps, and then they stopped. They
didn't go up the steps, they didn't turn around and
go back. They just ended, as if whoever made them
had walked straight to the cabin and then ceased to exist.
I pressed my face to the window, breath fogging the glass.
The snow was filling them in, but I could still
trace their path from the trees, across the yard to
the porch, no footprints leading away. My wineglass was shaking.
It took me a moment to realize it was because
my hand was shaking. I went to the front door.
I don't know why I shouldn't have, but some part
of me needed to see, needed to confirm that I
wasn't imagining this. I unlocked the dead bolt and pulled
the door open, and the cold hit me like a
physical force, like something that wanted to get inside. The
footprints were real. I could see them clearly now, even
as the snow worked to erase them. They were large
and deep, pressed into the snow with the weight of
someone substantial. They came from the trees in a straight line, unwavering, purposeful.
They climbed the slight rise of the yard. They reached
the bottom of the porch steps, and they stopped. I
looked down at my feet, at the porch boards, at
the thin layer of snow that had blown under the overhang.
There were no footprints on the porch, no tracks leading
to the door. Whoever had walked across that yard had
not climbed these steps, had not walked across this porch.
But the footprints hadn't turned back either, So where did
he go? I closed the door, locked it, checked the lock,
checked it again. Then I went through the cabin room
by room, checking windows, checking closets, checking the basement door,
still locked from the inside, dead bolt throne, just as
it had been when we arrived. I checked the back
door in the kitchen, the small window in the bathroom,
the hatch to the crawl space above the bedrooms. Everything
was secure, everything was locked. No one could have gotten in.
But those footprints led to the cabin, led right to it,
and they didn't lead away. Tom found me standing in
the hallway outside our bedroom, still holding my empty wine glass,
staring at nothing. Hey, he touched my shoulder. You okay,
there were footprints outside. Footprints coming from the trees, coming
to the cabin, but not going back. He frowned, that's
I mean, it's snowing. They probably just got covered up.
They came to the cabin, tom straight to the porch,
and then they stopped. So someone walked up and then
walked back the same way their return. Prince covered that.
That's not what I saw. He looked at me for
a long moment. The look again, the Sarah's being paranoid.
Look the let's not make this into a thing. Look,
it's late, he said. We're both tired. The drive was long,
your mum's not here, you're stressed. Let's get some sleep.
Everything will make more sense in the morning. He was right.
I knew he was right. Exhaustion does strange things to perception.
Worry does stranger things. But when I finally lay down
beside him, when I finally closed my eyes, I couldn't
stop seeing those footprints, couldn't stop tracing their path in
my mind, from the dark of the trees, across the
white of the yard to the steps of the cabin,
and no further. Where did he go? Where could he
have gone? If not back the way he came. The
answer came to me as I drifted toward an uneasy sleep.
It came in my daughter's voice, in words she'd spoken
hours before. The man in the wall, the furnace moaned
in the basement, the wind pressed against the windows, the
snow fell and fell and fell, And somewhere in the
darkness of that old cabin, in the spaces between the walls,
in the gaps behind the closets, in the crawlways above
and below, something listened to us. Breathe. I didn't sleep
that night, not really. I lay in the dark beside
my husband, and I listened to the sounds of the
cabin settling around us, and I told myself that old
houses make noises, that wood contracts in the cold, that
pipes rattle and floorboards creak, and none of it means anything.
I told myself that until just before dawn, when I
heard something that made the telling stop. It was soft,
so soft I almost missed it. A sound from Lily's
room at the back of the cabin, a sound that
didn't belong. A man's voice, low and rasping, speaking words
I couldn't quite make out. And then my daughter's voice, answering.
I was out of bed. Before I knew, I was
moving down the hall, hand on her doorknob, throwing the
door open. Lily sat up in bed, blinking at me
in the gray pre dawn light, alone, perfectly alone. Mommy,
who are you talking to? She rubbed her eyes. The man.
He wanted to know how old I am? What man, Lily?
What man? She pointed at the wall beside her bed,
at the old wallpaper with its faded roses, at the solid,
unbroken surface that had been there since my grandmother built
this place. The man who lives in there, She said,
he's nice, Mommy, but he doesn't like the Christmas lights.
She yawned and lay back down, pulling the covers to
her chin. He says, they hurt. I stood in my
daughter's doorway as the first pale light of Christmas Eve
crept through the window, and behind me, somewhere deep in
the cabin, I heard the faint creak of weight settling
on old wood, something shifting in the spaces between the walls.
Ghost Scary Stories is a production of Calaoga Shark Media.
Some elements of AI may have been used in this production,
but it was written, edited, mixed, and produced by real
Live People Executive producers Mark Francis and John McDermott.