Creepy Encounters

Creepy Encounters
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Short, first-person stories about the frightening things ordinary people run into — a neighbor, a stranger, a habit at home no one ever questioned. It's never a ghost.

  1. 22h ago

    Episode 75: My dentist showed me the same two sets of x-rays every three months for fourteen years and the new office says my chart was closed in 2011

    Submitted by Bev — Wichita, Kansas. 61. His office was in a strip mall in Wichita, between a nail salon and an insurance agent, and I sat in that chair every three months for fourteen years. It started in 2009. I had bleeding on the lower left, and he used the word pocket, which is what they call the space that opens up between a tooth and the gum when the bone underneath starts to give. He said if we stayed ahead of it I would keep the tooth. Staying ahead of it meant four visits a year instead of two. My plan covered two. The other two were three hundred and forty dollars apiece on my own card, and I paid it every time, because that is cheaper than an implant, and everybody I know has a story about what an implant cost them. Every one of those visits ended the same way. He would roll his stool back, swing the monitor around toward me, and bring up my chart with the two sets of x-rays on it, side by side. The old ones on the left. The new ones on the right. He tapped the screen with the capped end of a pen, never his finger, and walked me through it. Here's the bone level when you came to me. Here's where we're holding. He said holding like it was something the two of us were doing together, and for fourteen years I believed I was doing my half of it well. I want to say plainly that I liked him, because it matters to the rest of this. He learned my son's name, then my daughter-in-law's name, then my grandson's. He talked me out of whitening twice, told me it was money I didn't need to spend. The winter I got laid off, his front desk put me on a payment plan before I had to ask, and that is not nothing. I have had doctors who made me feel like I was stealing from them. This past spring my company changed carriers and he wasn't on the new list. I asked his front desk to send my records over to a practice on Rock Road, and I told the woman who answered to please tell him thank you for me. I meant it. The new hygienist had my file open when I sat down. She was asking the ordinary questions, do you grind, do you floss, any sensitivity on cold, and then she stopped scrolling. She said, this site on the lower left — it's marked resolved. 2011. I told her that couldn't be right, that I'd been in treatment on that tooth since 2009, four times a year. She turned the screen so I could see it, which I appreciated, because I was used to that. There were two sets of x-rays in my chart. One from March of 2009. One from June of 2011. That was all of them. Fourteen years, and two sets, and the one on the right — the new ones, the ones we were holding — was from June of 2011, and I had been looking at it every three months for twelve years while a man tapped it with a pen. She asked me, carefully, what I had been treated for since then. I said I didn't know how to answer that. She said she'd request the complete file from his office, and she did, and the complete file was the one she already had. I called his number in June. It rings through to a dental group out of Oklahoma now. They bought the practice when he retired in the fall, and the woman on the phone was perfectly pleasant and told me she couldn't discuss another provider's records with me. I said I understood. My teeth are fine. The new dentist says my bone levels are what she'd expect for a woman my age, that whatever was going on in 2009 stopped a long time ago. By my own arithmetic I paid a little over sixteen thousand dollars across those years, most of it for visits the plan wouldn't cover, and I can't tell you what I paid it for. There isn't anybody at that address to ask. I go twice a year now. That's what's covered. The chair at the new place faces a window instead of a monitor, and the first few times, when she was finished, I caught myself sitting there waiting for the screen to swing around.

  2. 1d ago

    Episode 74: My sister texts me pictures of her Sunday table and I never counted the plates until her neighbor said something at the car wash

    Submitted by Corrie — Grand Rapids, Michigan. 41. My sister lives eleven minutes from me. I want to say that first, because people hear the rest of this and start looking for a state line in it, or a screaming match at a funeral. There isn't one. Eleven minutes. Same city, same river, she's on the good side of it. When our mother died in the spring of 2019, my sister told me the family was done with holidays. That was the phrase she used, done with holidays. Everybody's worn out, nobody wants to cook for fourteen people, the cousins have their own kids now. It made sense to me. It made so much sense I said it to my own friends for years, like it had been my idea. That's what I want you to hear. Nobody lied to me in a way I could point at. We text. I need that part understood too. She sends me pictures of her house constantly — a new backsplash, the dog asleep on a laundry basket, and every so often her dining room table set for dinner. She's always been like that about a table. Cloth napkins, the tall glasses, a runner down the middle, the whole thing photographed from the doorway before anybody's allowed to sit down. And at the end nearest the window there's always an extra place. A plate, a napkin folded into a triangle, a water glass, the fork laid on the wrong side, because she's left-handed and she sets every place the way she'd want to find it. I noticed it the way you notice a lamp. My sister over-sets. When we were nine and eleven she put a plate down for the cat. I've seen maybe forty pictures of that table in six years and all I ever thought was that she still does the thing with the extra place. In February I was at the car wash on Plainfield, the one where you stand in the lobby and watch your own car go through, and a woman I half recognized came over and said my name with a question mark on it. Her name is Deb. She lives next door to my sister; I'd met her twice, in the driveway. She said she'd been hoping to run into me. And then she said, kindly, the way you'd say it to somebody at a wake, "I keep telling her she has to stop setting that plate." I said I was sorry, I didn't follow. "Every Sunday," she said. "She puts your plate out and she waits, and she won't let anybody sit in that chair, and then the food's cold and she puts it away." She looked at me while she said it and I watched her face change in the middle. It started out soft. By the end she had made a decision about what kind of person I am, and she wasn't hiding it, and she wasn't wrong to make it, because she'd been watching that chair for six years. Every Sunday. Fourteen people, most weeks. My cousins. My aunt. The family that was done with holidays. I called my sister that night. I want to tell you she was cold, because that's an easier story, but she wasn't. She was hurt. She has been hurt the whole time. She said, "You know where I live." She said she wasn't going to beg a grown woman to come to dinner, not after everything, and she said everything like it was the name of a thing we both knew. I asked what everything meant. She said if I had to ask, that was its own answer, and she had to go, the pie was in. There has never been an invitation. Not a text, not a call, not a passed-along word from an aunt. I went back through six years of my phone that week and counted chairs in every picture of that table. Eight chairs. Seven people. The plate by the window with nothing on it. So she's been waiting for me to come since 2019, and I've been waiting for her to ask me since 2019, and my whole family has spent six years watching an empty chair and drawing the only conclusion there is to draw. I could drive over on Sunday. It's eleven minutes. I've thought about it every week since February and I still can't work out whether showing up would be me finally coming home or me finally proving her right.

  3. 2d ago

    Episode 73: I called the county about the kids down the street and the whole road brought that family groceries every morning for a year and I took Thursdays

    Submitted by Bev — Corbin, Kentucky. 58. Our street was nine houses on a hill outside of town, and the one at the bottom was a rental, which where I'm from means the house everybody keeps an eye on without ever saying so. A family moved into it in the fall of 2003. A man, a woman I only ever saw through a windshield, a boy about seven and a girl about nine. The kids were outside at all hours, which by itself isn't anything. Half the kids I grew up with were. What got me was a morning that February. It was eleven degrees and the girl was sitting on the front steps in a t-shirt eating out of a bag of hot dog buns, and the boy was in the driveway with no shoes on, and I stood at my kitchen sink with my coffee and watched them for probably four minutes before I moved. I called the county that afternoon. I used the phone in the back of the pharmacy where I worked so it wouldn't be on my bill. The woman asked for my name and I said I'd rather not give it, and she said that was fine, they take them that way. A white car came out ten days later, sat in the driveway maybe twenty minutes, and left. That was the whole of it, as far as anybody could see. Then the bags started. A brown paper grocery bag, folded over twice at the top, standing up on the porch rail next to their steps. One of them every morning. Jo across the street got it going. She was a woman who had a legal pad for everything, and she went house to house up the hill and gave everybody a day. I got Thursdays. I want you to understand how good it felt. I bought the peanut butter in the jar with the blue lid, not the store brand, because I had a thing about that. A loaf from the bakery counter instead of the bread aisle. Apples. The cereal with the cartoon tiger on it, because I remembered being little and what that box meant. I'd drive down before six while it was still dark and set the bag on the rail, and I never knocked, because Jo said we weren't doing it to be thanked. Fifty-two Thursdays. A full year. And the other houses did their days too, I know they did, because I'd come home at two in the afternoon and that rail would be empty every single time. I told that story for twenty years. Any time somebody started in on how nobody looks out for anybody anymore, I'd tell about our hill and those bags. I never told the part about the phone call. Not to Jo, not to my husband, not to anybody. It would have sounded like bragging. They left in the spring of 2005. A truck one Saturday, gone before Easter. Somebody said Ohio. The rental sat empty a long while after that. Last winter somebody put a picture in the hometown group on Facebook of that house being knocked down, because they're putting a storage place in. Forty-some comments. People remembering the porch, the dogwood in the side yard. And a woman named Katie commented. Her last name was one I didn't know. She wrote: I lived in that house. I remember the bags on the rail every morning. We weren't allowed to open them. That was all she wrote. Somebody put a heart on it. Somebody else wrote bless you honey. Then the thread went back to arguing about the storage place putting up lights that shine in people's windows. I typed something and deleted it. I typed something else and deleted that. Here is what I keep landing on. That girl's coat was big on her in October and there was more room in it by March, and I saw her nearly every day of that year, and it never crossed my mind until last winter. And I think about that morning in February with the hot dog buns, and how that is the last time I can remember seeing either one of those kids eat anything at all. The storage place is up now. Orange doors, every one of them the same. I go past it driving to my daughter's. I still buy that peanut butter with the blue lid. It's four dollars more than the other kind and I don't even like it.

  4. 3d ago

    Episode 72: The same account has commented nice on every single thing I have posted for seven years and I thought it was a kid from my graduating class

    Submitted by Kit — Des Moines, Iowa. 33. I should say up front that I don't post much. A picture of my dog. A casserole. The sunset over the parking lot at work, maybe twice a year when it's really doing something. I have two hundred and some followers and most of them are people I went to high school with in a town of about eleven thousand, which in Iowa means you follow everyone from your class whether you liked them or not, because that is just what you do. So for seven years, every time I posted anything, the first comment was the same. One word. Nice. Lowercase, no period. And it was always first. My friend Tasha timed it once when she was over, as a joke. I posted a picture of her holding my dog and we both watched the screen, and she counted out loud, and she got to four. Nice. The account didn't have a real name. The picture was our old high school mascot, the cartoon bobcat they retired when I was in middle school, and the handle was a string of letters and numbers that looked like something a person makes up when they don't care. I figured it was some guy from my class who didn't want his wife seeing who he followed. That's not even unusual back home. Half the men I graduated with have an account with a pickup truck for a face. I thought it was sweet, honestly. My posts don't get a lot. There were weeks when that nice was the only thing anybody said to me that wasn't about work. I'd post at two in the morning when I couldn't sleep, a picture of my kitchen light or whatever, and four seconds later, nice, and I'd think, well, somebody else is up too. I used to say goodnight to it in my head. I posted from my grandma's funeral in March. Not the casket. Just the flowers out front of the Lutheran church, the ones my aunt ordered. Four seconds. Nice. I remember thinking that was a little off, for a funeral, but people don't know what to say. After the service there was a lunch in the church basement, ham sandwiches on the small buns and a sheet cake, and a man came through the line behind me. I didn't know him right away. He was a lot heavier and his hair was gone. It was Dale. He was married to my mother for about four years when I was a kid, from when I was eight until I was twelve, and after that nobody in my family said his name, and I didn't ask, because you learn not to ask in a family like mine. He said I looked good. I said thank you. And then he said, like he was telling me the weather, "You liked the flowers. I saw." I said, "Sorry?" And he said, "I say nice so you know somebody's there. I keep the phone on the nightstand with the sound up. It's our old box number. Rural Route 2. You were too little to ever get mail." Then he took a sandwich and went and sat by himself at the end of a folding table and ate it, and nobody sat with him, and nobody asked him to leave. When I got back to my car I looked at the handle again. I had read it a thousand times. RR2 and then 41. The house outside of town where we lived when he was married to my mother. Nobody my age back home would ever think of that as an address. We all just said the house on the gravel road. It was right there the whole time. He never changed it. He never hid anything. I haven't blocked him. I don't know why. I posted my dog last week and I sat in my kitchen and counted, and I got to four. What I keep thinking about is how glad I was. For seven years I was glad. Most people have one account like that, the one that's always there first, that never says much, that feels like company when it's late. And almost nobody ever looks very hard at the name.

  5. 4d ago

    Episode 71: My ex has paid my phone bill every month since I moved out and I only found out because I tried to add my son to the plan

    Submitted by Dee — Columbus, Ohio. 40. I have had the same phone number since I was sixteen. It is a 419 number, which does not match one thing about my life now, and I have carried it through four apartments and one breakup that took longer to get over than most people's marriages. We were together nine years. When I moved out in 2019 I did it the way you are supposed to do it. I made a list on a legal pad in my sister's spare room and I crossed things off. Electric in my name. Gas in my name. Internet, renter's insurance, the storage unit in Maumee, the car note, mail forwarded, address changed at the credit union. It took six weeks of hold music and I was proud of myself, which sounds small, but I was thirty-three and had never had anything in my own name before. The phone I never touched, because the phone never stopped working. That is the part people cannot get past when I tell it. They want to know how you do not notice. But a phone does not notice you back. It just works. You wake up and there are bars in the corner and you drive to work. I figured I had set up autopay sometime back in the house and forgotten which card it came off of. I have four cards. I am not a woman who reconciles a statement line by line. Somewhere in the back of my head there was a sixty-dollar charge I had never gone looking for, and that is exactly where it sat for six years. I never got a paper bill. I never got an emailed one either, and I want to say that plainly, because it is the whole thing. In six years I never once saw a bill for the phone in my hand. In April my son started in on wanting a phone, which at eleven is less of a request than a weather system, and I decided fine, he can have my old one, I will add a line. I went out to the carrier store in the strip mall by the Kroger on a Saturday. The kid at the counter had a lanyard and about nine minutes of patience. He asked for my number, typed it in, and stopped typing. He turned the screen a little. Not all the way. The way they do when they are deciding how much to tell you. He said, ma'am, you are not the account holder here. You are an authorized user. I said that is not right, it is my number, I have had it since high school, and he said okay, okay, in the voice you use on somebody's mother, and asked if I wanted him to print it out. I said yes because I could not think of anything else to say. It came out of the machine warm. Four pages. Line one of two was his number. Line two of two was mine, with my son's tablet under it from a kiosk in 2022. The name at the top of the account was his first name and his last name in that flat all-capital printing, and the billing address was a street in Sylvania I have never lived on, and down at the bottom, in the little box they put there to be nice about it, it said ON-TIME PAYMENTS. Seventy-two of seventy-two. The kid asked if I wanted to port the number over to my own account. Twenty minutes, he said, I would just need the PIN. I sat in that parking lot a while with the pages on the passenger seat. In June I called him. It rang and went to a voicemail greeting he recorded in the house on Fassett Street, his voice at twenty-nine telling me to leave it after the beep, and I listened to all of it and hung up without saying anything, because what I had ready to say was thank you, and I could hear how that was going to sound out loud. Here is where it is now. In August a paper bill came to my apartment for the first time, in my mailbox, with my address on it. Same account. Same name at the top. I did not know what to do with it, so it is on the counter under the fruit bowl, and the phone still works, and next month there will be another one.

  6. 5d ago

    Episode 70: My name is in a bed and breakfast guest book four times from Octobers I was never there

    Submitted by Birdie — Little Rock, Arkansas. 51. I have gone to the same bed and breakfast in Eureka Springs the first weekend of March since 2006. It is three and a half hours up 23, and the house is a purple Victorian with eleven steps from the sidewalk and a porch that goes all the way around. The woman who ran it when I started was Ida, and Ida had one rule about one thing. The guest book sits on the sideboard in the front hall with a green pen tied to the shelf on a length of kitchen string. Green ink only. Every line in that book, back to when Ida's mother had the house, is green — your name, your town, and a sentence if you feel like writing one. Ida used to say she could tell what kind of weekend a person had from the sentence. I have signed it nineteen times. Birdie, Little Rock. Dogwoods came early. Rained all Saturday, did not care. This March they had the hall torn up for new paper, the old books stacked on a chair by the stairs, and my room was not ready until two. So I sat down with the fat one that starts in 2009 and went looking for myself, which is what a woman with an hour to kill will do. I found my March. I found the year it snowed on us. And then, going through pages I had no business going through, I found October of 2011. Birdie. Little Rock. My first thought was that there must be another Birdie in Arkansas, which is a thing I have been told my whole life and never once had turn out to be true. My second thought was that the writing was wrong. Mine runs forward and gets tired by the end of a word. These letters leaned backward, every one of them, the way a left-handed man writes when nobody ever corrected him. October 2013. Birdie, Little Rock. October 2014. October 2017. Four times, in the green pen on the string, in a hall I have walked through for twenty years, in handwriting I have been reading off the front of envelopes since my sister married him. I did not scream or faint. I closed the book, put it back on the chair the way it had been, went out to the porch swing, and had what I would call the worst hour of my life, and none of it was about him. Here is what I remembered out there. In November of 2014 my sister called me at work. Marla asked it the way you ask about the weather, with about that much in her voice. Was Gene down at your place in Eureka Springs last month. And I said yes. I said it fast and I said it happy. He had called me the year before wanting the number, said he was going to do something nice, and I was so pleased to be asked that I gave him all of it — the eleven steps, the bowl of butterscotch on the sideboard, Ida and her green pen, which room gets the morning sun. I talked about that house for twenty minutes. So when Marla asked me, I was not guessing at anything. I knew the place she was describing to me because I was the one who had described it to him. She said, okay. She said, that is what I thought. And she let it go, and she stayed, and that was eleven years ago this fall. I have not told her. I have picked the phone up about forty times. What stops me is not that I cannot find the words. It is that I keep landing in the same place: four lines in a book would not have held up against anybody but her, and they held up because they came through me first. He never had to be good at it. He needed a sister-in-law who loved a house and could not shut up about it, who would answer a question in one second flat and never think about it again. He had that for free, and he never had to ask me twice. Marla calls me every Sunday afternoon. She tells me about her knee and about Gene finally putting in the new water heater. And I sit there with the phone against my ear, listening to myself agree with her, and I think about how good I have always been at sounding certain.

  7. 6d ago

    Episode 69: A woman has told me I look well in three different grocery stores over nine years and I was always glad to see her

    Submitted by Bets — Lubbock, Texas. 58. There is a woman who tells me I look well. She has done it three times that I know of, in three different grocery stores, over about nine years, and until this June I thought of it as one of the nicer things that ever happened to me. The first time was at the United on 19th, the fall of 2017. I was in line with a rotisserie chicken and a sack of limes and she was behind me, and she leaned in like we were partway into a conversation already and said, "You look well." That was all. I said thank you. She reached past me and waved her keychain tag at the reader before I could stop her, so my chicken rang up at the club price, and on her way out she said it again — you look well — and I stood in that parking lot feeling better than I had in a year. I want to be honest about why it landed. That fall was the worst stretch of my life. My husband had moved out in March, my mother went into the home in August, and I had quit answering the phone. Nobody had told me I looked well in a long while. They told me I looked tired, or they told me nothing and looked at my cart. Her cart had one thing in it. I remember because it struck me as admirably efficient — a single box of powdered sugar lying flat on the bottom of a full-size cart, sliding when she pushed. There's a woman who came in for one thing, I thought, and got out. The second time was 2021, the Market Street clear across town by the loop. I had lost weight by then and cut my hair. She came up on my left in the bread aisle and said it — you look well — and I said, "You've told me that before." She said, "You did then, too." I laughed. I'm not going to pretend I didn't. I told that story at work for a month. My grocery store lady. Third time was this June, in Amarillo. My sister's, two hours up the highway, a store I'd been in maybe four times in my life. I saw her ahead of me at the registers and I was the one who waved. I was glad. I want to be clear about that part, because it's what I can't get around: I raised my hand to her. She said I looked well. I said, "Do you have people up here too?" She said, "Oh, I don't shop." She said it the way you'd say you don't drink coffee. Then she looked down into her cart, where there was a can of evaporated milk and nothing else, and said you have to have something in it or they start watching you stand around. And then she said, "And it hasn't been three times, hon." I asked how many. She said she'd never bothered keeping a count. I asked if I knew her from somewhere — church, the school, my mother's floor at the home. She said no. She said, "I just like to see how you're getting on," and she got in her line, and she paid for the can, and she went out through the automatic doors into the heat, and that was the whole of it. I've asked everyone I can think to ask. My sister doesn't know her. My ex doesn't. I described her to the woman who ran my mother's hall and got nothing back. There's no answer at the end of this, and what I want isn't her name anyway. What I want is the number. Nine years, and I've got three of them. She has the rest. Here's what I keep setting down and picking back up. For nine years a stranger watched the worst of my life and the only thing she ever did with it was tell me I was getting better, and she was right every time, and I can't make myself feel about her the way I know I'm supposed to. Everybody's got a face they're glad to see out in the world. The one at the pharmacy counter, the one in the next lane at school pickup. You nod, you say you're doing fine, you mean it. Nobody ever asks how long that face has been glad to see them.

  8. 6d ago

    Episode 68: My landlord has painted my whole apartment every spring for nine years and I was the one who kept leaving town for it

    Submitted by Tess — Toledo, Ohio. 36. I have lived in the top half of a two-family on the east side of Toledo since I was twenty-seven. My landlord goes by Marv. The rent was six hundred and twenty-five dollars the month I signed and it is six hundred and twenty-five dollars this month, and there is nothing in Ohio that says it had to stay there. He could have raised it any January he wanted. He never has. What he does instead is paint. The first warm week of April, every year, Marv and two men he knows come up my back stairs with drop cloths and put a fresh coat of off-white on every wall in the place. The trim. The ceilings. The insides of the closets. The back of the pantry door, which nobody has ever seen but me. Nine springs I have been up there, so there are nine coats on those walls, and April smells like paint to me now the way it is supposed to smell like rain. It was never only paint, either. Year three he put in new windows, the kind that tilt in so you can wash them from inside. Year five, the whole kitchen. Year seven, the bathroom: tile, a new tub, a window that opens. My friends have a joke that I must have something on him. For nine years my one lucky story at a party has been my landlord, who fixes everything and charges me nothing. He never hid a bit of it. That is the part I need you to hold onto while I tell you the rest. He calls me in February, every February, to ask which weekend in April is good for me. One year he mailed me a little note with the dates written out in pencil. He has never touched that apartment without telling me first. And every year I leave. That part was mine. The first spring, when he said it would take them two days, I told him I have a thing about the smell, that it sits behind my eyes and turns into a headache that lasts until Tuesday, and that it would probably be easier on everybody if I just got out of the way. My sister has a guest room in Perrysburg, twenty-five minutes up the highway. So I take the cat and a bag and I go Friday around eleven, and I come back Sunday evening, and the windows are propped and the whole place is white and quiet and mine, and every single thing I own is sitting exactly where I left it. This April there was a new kid on the crew, the older guy's nephew, twenty-two maybe, with his ears still pink from a haircut. I was carrying my bag down while they were carrying the ladder up, and we did that little dance on the landing. He was friendly. He asked did I want the bedroom done this year or left alone, and I said everything, same as always. Then he asked me, in the most ordinary voice, where I go. My sister's, I said. He nodded. He said, that's what he told us. He said you take the cat and you're out by noon and you don't come back early, ever. He's real sure about that part. I laughed and said nine years running. The kid stopped. He looked at me, and then he looked up the stairs, and then he looked over at his uncle, who was not looking at either one of us. After that he did not look at me again. His uncle told him to go get the tape out of the truck. Nobody said anything else. I stood on that landing holding my bag with my keys in my teeth. I went to my sister's. I need you to understand that I drove up there and I stayed the whole weekend and I did not come back early, because coming back early did not occur to me until I was already home on Sunday with the windows open, smelling the paint. He has never once asked me to leave. I keep going over it and it is always me. I call him in February. I pick the weekend. I pack the bag and carry it down my own stairs, past the drop cloths, and at the bottom I turn around and thank him. Those walls are nine coats thick now. I have never seen a single one of them go on.

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About

Short, first-person stories about the frightening things ordinary people run into — a neighbor, a stranger, a habit at home no one ever questioned. It's never a ghost.

Information

  • Creator
    Creepy Encounters
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    75
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Show Website
    Creepy Encounters