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Creepy Encounters

Creepy Encounters

Von: 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.
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  • Episode 11: A coworker who quit still shows up to our Monday meetings and I was apparently the last person in the office to realize she does not work here

    Episode 11: A coworker who quit still shows up to our Monday meetings and I was apparently the last person in the office to realize she does not work here
    Jul 17 2026
    Submitted by Dee — Tulsa, Oklahoma. 46. Paulette put in her notice in November. I remember because the week before we'd done the Thanksgiving potluck and she brought her scalloped corn, same as every year, and the Monday after, Rich told us she was leaving to help her daughter with the new baby down in McAlester. We signed a card. Somebody bought a sheet cake. And then that same Monday she was in the ten o'clock meeting, in the chair she always took by the window, and she's been in every Monday meeting since. Eight months of them. I do claims for a regional office here in Tulsa, and our Monday meetings are the kind of thing you stop seeing, like the carpet. Forty minutes, a spreadsheet on the big screen, coffee that tastes like the pot. Paulette sat in on them the way she always had. She'd catch a transposed number before anybody else. She knew which adjusters were behind. When my youngest had his tonsils out she asked about him by name three weeks running. It never once struck me as strange that a woman who didn't work there anymore knew our numbers better than we did. Her desk stayed hers, too, in the sense that nobody took it. Facilities cleared out the drawers, I think, but the little engraved name plate stayed screwed to the front of the cubicle — PAULETTE H., in that gold-colored plastic — and after a while it was just part of the wall you walked past forty times a day. I never thought about who leaves a name plate up for eight months, or who you'd have to be to take it down. Then in July we got a temp. Young woman named Aisha, covering while Rich was out for his knee. Sharp, quiet, watched everybody the way new people do. After her second Monday meeting she followed me back to my desk and stood there a second like she was deciding something, and then she said, low, "Can I ask you something? That older lady, the one who kept fixing the figures. Is she okay?" I said Paulette was fine, why. And Aisha did this thing with her face — not scared, more like she was the one who'd said the wrong thing. She said, "It's just, my first day, Denise told me she doesn't actually work here. She told me don't —" and then she stopped, because she was watching me not know what she was talking about, and she could see it landing. Denise. Rich. All of them. Somebody had sat every new hire down and told them about Paulette. Told them enough that Aisha, four days in, knew to be careful, knew there was a rule about her that everybody understood. Everybody but me. For eight months I'd been the one bringing her a coffee, asking after her daughter, saving her the window chair, and the whole office had watched me do it and let me. They thought I knew. Or they thought I was the one she was coming for, and they weren't going to get in the middle of it. I didn't ask Aisha what Denise had told her not to do. I want to say I did. I stood there and I didn't. I said something about how Paulette's just a fixture, thanks for looking out, and Aisha nodded fast and got out of there, and we have not talked about it since. That was two weeks ago. This past Monday Paulette was in her chair by the window. She'd printed the agenda for me, three-hole punched, because she knows I lose the digital ones. She asked how my boy's throat healed up. I said good, all healed, and I meant it, and I smiled at her, because eight months is a long time to be kind to somebody and you can't just stop on a Tuesday. The name plate is still up. PAULETTE H. I looked at it on my way out and understood, finally, that it wasn't there because nobody had gotten around to it. It was up because taking it down is a thing a person has to decide to do, and stand there and do, and be the one who did it. Nobody in that office is going to be that person. I know that now the way they've all known it the whole time. I walked past it and left it exactly where it was.
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    5 Min.
  • Episode 10: My mother wrote down everything I ate in high school and she still knows the numbers by heart at Thanksgiving

    Episode 10: My mother wrote down everything I ate in high school and she still knows the numbers by heart at Thanksgiving
    Jul 17 2026
    Submitted by Nora — Grand Rapids, Michigan. 38. The ledger was a spiral notebook, the three-for-a-dollar kind you buy in August, and it sat on the counter by the fruit bowl for my whole childhood. College ruled, wire coil, a Mead cover gone soft at the corner. My mother wrote in it every single day the way other people water a plant, and because it had always been there I never once thought of it as strange. It was furniture. It was the toaster. What she wrote was what I ate. Not cruelly — I need to say that, because I know how it sounds. There was no scale in the bathroom, no yelling, no comment about my body I can name. She just kept the count. Half a bagel, one-forty. The milk on my cereal, sixty. She would catch me at the back door with my backpack and say the day's number out loud, gentle, the way you would read off a grocery list. I assumed every mother did a version of it. I thought it was the same kind of love as a note tucked in a lunchbox. I carried the notebook to the table without being asked. That is the part I never told anyone, later, when it started to sound like something. I would bring her the notebook and the pen and sit while she wrote, and I felt useful, the way you feel useful setting the table. In the margins she kept a running total for the day and a smaller one for the week, in a column so straight it could have been typed. On Sundays she would tap the page and tell me how I had done. I always wanted to have done well. It stopped when I left for college in Ann Arbor, or I thought it did. She never mailed me the notebook, never asked what I was eating in the dining hall. I decided the whole thing had been a phase of hers and I was a little embarrassed I had made so much of it. I did not think about the ledger for a long time. Fifteen years, maybe. I got married. I had a daughter. Then last Thanksgiving my mother did a thing I had no framework for. My daughter, who is nine, would not finish her plate, and my mother leaned over and said, not unkindly, "You know your mom had eleven hundred calories the day of her junior recital. She sang beautifully." And then she kept going. The Tuesday before Christmas of my sophomore year. The morning of my SATs. She had them, all of them, the exact numbers, thirty years gone, and she read them off the inside of her own head like they were still on the counter by the fruit bowl. Nobody else at the table looked up. My father asked for the gravy. I want to tell you the horror was hers. That would be the easy version, and I told it to myself the whole drive home to Grand Rapids while my daughter slept in the back. My mother the strange one. My mother the one who did this to me. But here is what I actually did that night, after I put my daughter to bed. I opened the junk drawer under the microwave and took out the spiral notebook I keep grocery lists in. And I turned past the grocery lists. And there they were. My daughter's breakfast. What she left on her plate at dinner. A running total for the day and a smaller one for the week, in a column so straight it could have been typed. Four months of it, in my own hand. I had started it the week she turned nine, which is the age I was when I first carried the notebook to the table. I do not know when I began. That is the part I cannot get past — there was no day I chose it, no thought I can find and blame. I only know I found it because my mother said the recital number out loud and my hand was already reaching for the drawer before I understood why. I have kept it going since. I tell myself I will stop, and then it is morning, and there is a plate, and I am counting. My daughter brings me the notebook now. She has not been asked. She sits with me while I write, and I can see it on her face. She feels useful.
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    5 Min.
  • Episode 9: I started writing the date on the milk because my roommate never once ate and everyone said I was the strange one

    Episode 9: I started writing the date on the milk because my roommate never once ate and everyone said I was the strange one
    Jul 17 2026
    Submitted by Wes — Lawrence, Kansas. 31. I dated the milk. That is the part that makes people look at me a certain way, so I will just say it first and you can decide from there. When I bought a carton I wrote the day on the cap in Sharpie, and the day I opened it right under that, and I kept the flattened empties in the bin by the door until trash night. I am not a tidy person otherwise. My car is a disgrace. But I have always liked knowing when a thing came into a house and when it left. We were four in that house on Osage Street in Wichita — me, a married couple upstairs, and Denny. Denny had the room off the kitchen, the old dining room, the one with the pocket doors that never quite shut. He had lived there the longest. And he was easy, that is the thing I keep coming back to. He would sit at the table while I cooked and ask about my day and actually listen to the answer. Everyone liked Denny. I liked Denny. I just never once saw him eat. I do not mean he was a picky eater. I mean that in fourteen months I never saw food go into the man. No plate of his in the sink. No wrapper in the trash I could not account for. The couple upstairs ordered in and left their boxes on the stairs. I cooked and washed my one pan. Denny's shelf in the refrigerator held a jar of olives and a bottle of hot sauce and nothing else, and the olives in the spring were the same olives as the winter, at the same level, because after a while I had started writing small dates on his things too, in the corner of the label, the way I did the milk. That is the sentence where I lose people. I know how it sounds. So when I finally said something — lightly, at the table, "Denny, I have genuinely never once seen you eat, what do you live on" — the couple laughed like it was a bit, and later the wife caught me on the porch and asked, in that gentle voice, whether I was doing all right. Whether I was sleeping. She said, you know you write dates on everything, right. You know you count the boxes and the cans. She said it so kindly. She said, Denny is just a light eater, honey, not everybody makes a whole production of it like you and me. And I stood there holding a carton of milk that was two months past the day I had written on its cap, still most of the way full, because I had quietly stopped drinking it around the time I started watching, and I thought: maybe. Maybe I am the one to keep an eye on here. Maybe the person who dates the olives is the strange one in the house, and not the man who has never, in front of me or anyone else, put one single thing in his mouth. I moved that summer. A job across the state, an easy reason to give. I have my own place now, my own refrigerator, one shelf, and I would love to tell you I stopped counting. I write the day on the cap. I write the day I open it. Last week I poured a glass and it turned my stomach and I checked, and I had opened that carton four days before, four days, and I live alone now. No couple upstairs to laugh. No Denny at the table being easy to like. Here is the thing I keep landing on, and it is why I am telling you and not a doctor. They were right that I count. I do count. And the one clean fact my counting ever gave me, in fourteen months on Osage Street, was this: the milk in that house went down faster than one person drinks. Denny never ate. The couple ordered in. I had stopped. And it emptied anyway, a little every night, on its own steady schedule — the way a thing leaves a house when somebody you are not counting is keeping their own count. So do me a favor tonight. Go look at your own carton. Read the date, then look at the level, and tell me who in your house you have simply decided is a light eater.
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    5 Min.
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