Episode 183 - Real Scary Stories: Midnight Visitor

Have you ever felt like someone was watching you from outside your house?  It's an (overdue) honor to present this real scary story from K.L. Mill.

If you want to walk down memory lane with us, you can listen to The Man With The Axe (the very first episode of this podcast). Or watch Midnight Visitor. 

Get Lunatics Merch here. Join the discussion on Discord. Check out Abby's book Horror Stories. Available in eBook and paperback. Music by Michaela Papa, Alan Kudan & Jordan Moser. Poster Art by Pilar Keprta @pilar.kep.

Transcript

Welcome And Story Setup

SPEAKER_00 0:19

Hello, everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Lunatics Radio Hour Podcast. My name is Abby Branker, and today we have a really special episode for you. Today we are featuring a real scary story. And not only is this a very terrifying, creepy, unnerving, scary story, it also has a very strange similarity to the first story that kicked off this podcast and kicked off a lot of the lunatic's archives in general, right? And so it feels like a special moment. So we're going to give this story its own episode today. Again, this is somebody's true experience. And we're also really, really grateful because the writer not only submitted this story, but also recorded themselves, and they're a fantastic narrator and voice actor. So it's really a delight to be able to share this with you from her own words and her own voice. I'm not gonna get into the similarities to uh our first episode yet. I will wait until after the story to not spoil anything. So without further ado, let's roll the tape.

Helping A Brother Beat Curfew

A Man Stands In Moonlight

Footsteps On Gravel Near The Window

SPEAKER_01 1:32

IKL M. My father designed the house I grew up in. He was a Frank Lloyd Wright fanatic, so our house had classic features from the famous architect, like overhanging eaves, an open floor plan, and floor-to-ceiling windows. I got used to living in a glass house and learned quickly not to parade around naked, since the neighbors could see everything. Well, the squirrels and deer could see everything. We had neighbors, but our house was on about three wooded acres, set back from the street at the end of a long gravel drive that snaked between the trees. Most of the window walls faced the woods, so unless the neighbors were out for a nature hike on our property, they felt fairly safe. Our house was a split level built into a hill, also called a slope house. So the upstairs was really the main floor at ground level facing east. It was also the second story facing west, overlooking the woods in back. We went downstairs to the bedrooms, which were at ground level facing west. Can you picture it? It was a pretty amazing house to grow up in. Different, and my friends all thought it was cool. Downstairs, my parents' bedroom was at the south end of the hall, my room was next to theirs, facing the woods, and my brothers shared a playroom at the north end of the hall, their bedrooms branching off of it. My brothers were older than me by six and seven years, and tormented me as brothers do. But I still loved them and constantly looked for their approval. One way I could earn this approval was to help my brother, Scott, skirt curfew. To make sure he was home by 1 a.m. on the weekends, my parents would set an alarm clock outside their bedroom, set to go off at one. If Scott wasn't home in time to turn it off, there were dire consequences the next day. Not all the time, but often, I would set my alarm for 1245 and check to see if he was home yet. And if not, I'd turn off my parents' alarm clock for him. It earned my eleven-year-old self a driver when my friends and I wanted to see a movie or go to the mall. Karma in the bank. One autumn night, I slipped out into the hallway to check the alarm clock and found it still set to ring at 1 AM. Sometimes Scott was so tired he forgot to turn it off. So I deactivated it anyway and crept down the hall to peek into his bedroom. I planned on waking him up if he was in bed, both to annoy him and to point out my heroic actions on his behalf. The playroom faced the north side of the property, still wooded, but gently sloping up to meet the road, maybe fifty yards from the house. There was, you guessed it, a floor to ceiling window in the playroom looking out on the woods, right next to the door to Scott's room. As I headed towards Scott's door, I didn't immediately notice anything strange outside. But right as I was reaching for the doorknob, I saw movement. Thinking it was a deer, I stopped and looked out the window. There was a man standing in the middle of the woods, illuminated by moonlight, perfectly still at that point, but I know he must have moved to have caught my attention. The woods were awash in a low silvery light, and he matched the woods all in grey tones, grey jacket, dark jeans, a grayish knit cap on his head, definitely dressed for the brisk October weather. He was facing slightly away from the house, his head tilted up the tiniest bit, as if searching the night sky. Now someone walking through our woods in and of itself was not too strange. There was another neighborhood directly to the south of our house across a small creek, and cutting through our property, as the crow flies, would save a person walking home from our neighborhood about twenty minutes, as opposed to following the streets. So it did happen occasionally. This guy could simply be cutting through our property. But why was he just standing there then? I found myself mesmerized at the window, watching him. He was maybe twenty five yards away. But I thought I could see him swaying almost imperceptibly. I moved an inch closer to the window, and his head snapped to look at me. I flinched backwards, instinctively thinking he saw me. But that was unlikely, since I was in a dark room under the eave from the upper story, shielded from the moonlight. But his face was turned exactly towards me, and once again he was motionless. I wasn't sure what to do. I didn't think he could see me, but if I backed away from the window, would he be able to see my movement in the darkness? I wasn't given much time to ponder my predicament because he suddenly started walking quickly with a purpose. He was not headed toward me, but around the back of the house, which is where he would be going if he were still just a guy cutting through our property to get home. Still, I bolted out of the playroom, back down the hall, into my bedroom, and threw myself into bed. Oh, did I mention that my bedroom also had floor to ceiling windows? Two tall windows, about two feet by ten feet in each corner of the wall facing the woods. My bed was parallel to that wall, with the head of my bed next to one of the windows. Lying there on my side, I could see pretty far out into the woods, again, thanks to the moon. So I wanted to make sure I saw the man pass by on his way off our property. I watched for a minute or so. No one passed, no movement whatsoever. Could he have passed by before I made it back to my room? No, no way. I was in bed in less than ten seconds. There's no way he could have moved that quickly. Did he stop for some reason? And what could that reason possibly be? Then I heard it. Faint footsteps. My dad, the architect, had surrounded the house with a walkway, a few paving stones here and there, but mostly a natural pathway filled with pea gravel. Walking on pea gravel sounds kind of like a hybrid between sand and rocks. It's not as harsh as regular gravel. The foot kind of sinks a little with each step, making a softer, smoother sound. That's what I heard. The softly approaching sound of footsteps in pea gravel. My brain registered two things. One, the man is no longer walking in the woods, he is walking next to the house. And why is he doing that if he's just trying to get home? And two, he will be passing my window. He will be passing about four feet from where I'm lying. I didn't think I had enough time to turn over before he got to my window, and I didn't want him to think I was awake, so I just squeezed my eyes shut and laid perfectly still, still facing the window, covers drawn up to my chin. By the sound of his footsteps, he should be passing any second. Only he didn't pass. He stopped at my window. Even if my eyes hadn't been closed, I could tell he was at my window, because he was blocking out most of the moonlight shining through. Minutes passed. Or maybe seconds, I have no idea. My mind couldn't comprehend why a normal person would peeping Tom a house in the middle of the woods at one o'clock in the morning. And if he wasn't normal, what did he want? Could he get in? Did he know I was awake? And was he just waiting me out? Waiting for me to open my eyes to look at him? Then another sound.

unknown 9:42

Tap. Tap tap.

Growing Up And Moving Back Home

SPEAKER_01 9:45

Not urgent at all, not a hey, wake up, I need something, tap. More of a you're awake, and I know it, and I'm just letting you know I know it, tap. With a fingernail long enough to clink the window. Then a long scrape across the glass for good measure. More time passed. Then, finally, the footsteps continued on, passing my room, passing my parents' bedroom, then receding into the woods and the night. The next morning, I found out that Scott had not been home when I went to check on him. He eventually slipped in around 1 30. I asked him if maybe one of his friends had been too drunk to drive and had walked home through our woods, and he looked at me like I had grown a third eye. I didn't rescue Scott from his curfew much more after that. I grew up, went to college, got married, then bought my childhood home from my parents when they retired. Raising my kids in the house where I was raised is a surreal kind of deja vu. My younger daughter sleeps in my old room. My parents installed a hot tub out on the back deck before they sold it to us. My husband loves to soak in it late at night after our kids are in bed. You can lean back, basking in the steam, gazing up through a break in the trees at the starry sky and the moon. And during a full moon, the woods are illuminated in a silvery grey light. It's beautiful. Peaceful, he says. But I can't stop listening, hearing every snap of a branch and rustle of leaves, and wondering who might be passing through.

Parallels With The Host’s Fiction

Submissions And Sign Off

SPEAKER_00 12:05

And of course, not that somebody tapping on your window is not big and unsettling, but just that, you know, that's something that's gonna and obviously has stuck with this writer forever. So let's talk a little bit about KL Mill. KL Mill will read anything in the horror genre, but prefers to write fiction that's short and a little strange, like herself. She's also a voice actor, and when she's not talking to herself in her padded room, aka her home studio, she tries to get the voices out of her head and onto the page. Most recently, her work has been published by Cursed Morsels and Crepuscular Magazine. She also has stories included in the anthologies Greater Than His Nature, Atomic Carnival, and Once Upon a Future Time Volume 4, Brothers Uber. So the very first episode of Lunatics Radio Hour features the story that I wrote and is act might also be the first story in the book I have out, the short story collection that I published a few years ago. It's in there, even if it's not the first one, but it it felt like a very pinnacle story for me, and it's fiction. It's not based on anything real, but it felt like a very pinnacle, I don't know, example of who I wanted to be as a horror writer. And that story is called The Man with the Axe, but it's a totally fictionalized and incredibly similar story. And not only, you know, is there a man outside a house of a young woman, a girl who, you know, is understands that there's somebody out there in a lot of the stories about her mental kind of narrative of what to do in that situation. There's also a whole like subplot with the brother, which feels just like so, so obviously like on the nose with KL Mills' story. I also have to admit that this something strange happened with this episode. And I'm really saying this as an apology to KL Mills because we received this a over a year ago now, and I loved it, and I was like fantastic. Me and my friend Alex recorded this episode and it just never came out. And it's very unlike me to lose a whole episode. You know, you put in the time and and you get it, get it on the block, and somehow it's disappeared into the ether. So I apologize for the delay in getting this to you because again, I really feel like it's such a poignant story. It's so well written and so well narrated, but it also just ties in so well with the impetus of this whole podcast. So we also strangely have a short film out called Midnight Visitor. So that's the same title, which is different in that it's set in an apartment building, but it's kind of the same idea as somebody being outside and not sure how to deal with that known, you know, threat, or not even knowing if it's a threat, right? In all these stories, but knowing that there is somebody outside and where they maybe shouldn't be late at night and what to do and how to how your mental, you know, narrative gets gets away from you. So I'm gonna link everything in the description of this podcast episode. And also just a call to writers we are close, submissions are closed for the rest of the year as of right now for campfire tales, narrative, fiction stories, but any real paranormal, unexplained experiences, even if they're not paranormal like this, right? Something unnerving, unsettling happening, we would love to feature those stories. These have a very special place in my heart. And so please write in filmsbout lunatics at gmail.com or find us on social media, and we would love to feature your strange and unexplained stories just like KL Mill. And I hope to all of the folks out there who have had experiences like this, they don't keep you up at night. Thank you as always to everyone for being here. Thank you again to KL Mill. Stay spooky, stay safe, and we'll talk to you soon. Bye.