High strangeness just hasn’t been the same since the death of radio legend Art Bell.
The spook stories shared on his show by long-haul truckers and ham radio insomniacs in the wee hours of the morning put YouTube creepypastas to shame.
I’ve been a night owl since high school, and Art’s show became a staple of my late-night study sessions all through college.
The weirdest stuff I’ve ever heard came from Art’s show, and all of it came from third-shift Boomers who swore it was true.
That is one point in Baby Boomers’ favor. Millennials and Zoomers can’t spin a horror yarn to save their lives.
And they can’t tell the difference between fact and fiction, or the internet and real life, so even when they claim their stories are true, you just can’t trust it.
Man, I miss Art …
Anyway, here’s one related by a caller to the annual Ghost to Ghost AM special from Halloween 1994.
One night a sound from the living room shocked me wide awake. I sat bolt upright and saw I was alone in the bed I shared with my girlfriend. No one was in our bedroom, so I got up and went to check the living room.
I found my girlfriend huddled in a ball on the couch, staring at me with eyes like dinner plates. She just muttered when I asked what was wrong, and it took a few minutes to coax it out of her.
What she said shook me worse than when I’d been jolted awake.
My girlfriend told me straight-faced that she’d awakened to the sound of me talking in my sleep. I was lying next to her flat on my back and stiff as a board, carrying on half a conversation.
That wasn’t the weirdest part. She tried to nudge me awake and found I was deathly cold.
That wasn’t the weirdest part, either.
The weirdest part was that she heard someone else talking with me.
Someo0ne my girlfriend couldn’t see in the shadows of the bedroom.
She fled into the living room and sat there in the dark, frozen in fear. According to her, she could make out three voices: mine, an older woman’s, and a young girl’s. She remembered me asking where the woman’s glasses were and why she hadn’t worn them.
That last part chilled me to the bone. Because six months earlier, my late wife and our daughter had been killed in a single-car accident.
I couldn’t get a straight answer from anyone about how the crash happened. So I’d hired a P.I. who’d helped me uncover that my wife hadn’t been wearing her glasses at the time of the accident. Her glasses weren’t found at the scene or in the car, and they never did turn up afterward.
Those missing glasses were the only clue to their deaths, and their strange disappearance still haunts me.
In retrospect, I wish my girlfriend had listened closer to whoever was at my bedside that night.
See, a Zillennial creepypasta would attribute that story to night terrors or sleep paralysis or restless leg syndrome or some other old woman neurosis.
Instead, it’s left to you, the audience, to decide.
Now I miss Art even more.
For an overdose of existential horror with space pirates, read my acclaimed adventure novel:
Triggering fond memories of being a young parent, when one of the kids was sick and the wife sent me into the night for cold remedy / what-have-yous and I would flip on the AM radio. Otherwise I was typically asleep during that time interval. East of the Rockies, West of the Rockies guy, right? It was fun to hear the yarns being spun.
That was him.
From the title I was reminded of the guy who claimed to have an alien standing next to his bed at the very time he was calling. Art asked him to give the phone to the alien, and the caller complied, leading to silence followed by a thump. The caller claimed that the alien had not really done anything with the phone before dropping it. As far as I remember, the alien didn’t actually do anything during the call.
I came across this a while back through an animator’s interpretation of the events, but I can’t find the animation again.
On the mention of Sleep Paralysis, I have to ask; Has any practicing Christian of any denomination experienced the alleged hallucinations that are referred half jokingly as Sleep Paralysis demons? Every story I hear in reference to them are from most likely secular people and non-practicing catholics, and I swear neither I nor any of my family members have experienced anything like that, and we *all* have had our brushes with demons in the past!
That’s the extremely online Millennial tendency to cut story elements off from their real world or traditional origins and cram them into video game cutscene or monster formats.
Skinwalkers are another case in point. It’s almost certain they made their way into the zeitgeist through C2C AM guests like Red Elk and Colm Kelleher. Art’s guests and callers shared tales of Indian necromancers who could run in wolf shape and who had to kill their loved ones to get their unholy powers. They didn’t smell like pennies, look like emaciated aliens, or mimic teenagers’ voices. Instead they were scary.
Does anyone else find the least believable – or maybe the creepiest – part of the story the fact that he was sleeping with a girlfriend six months after his wife and daughter were killed?
I find it neither creepy nor unbelievable. Rather, it’s very plausible and very sad, and perhaps sad because plausible.
If we assume a functional atheist who has just lost his entire family in a baffling accident, it’s not at all surprising he might rebound into a new relationship, cohabitation and all. People handle grief, or try to avoid it, in all kinds of different ways. It’s not healthy or moral, but it’s also not too surprising.