Shawna is a millenial through and through and she’s not about to apologize for it. She loves athleisure, trending water bottles, gentle parenting, getting in her daily steps, and her not-so-secret obsession; true crime, particularly podcasts. How meta are we? But this podcast is about a whole lot more than podcasts.
Shawna’s 9-5 is structure, a business she started from the ground up renovating old houses in North Dakota. She documents her before and after photos on social media, has three admittedly adorable children, and likes nothing more than putting in her headphones and listening to an episode where she tries to solve a murder while installing hardwood flooring. She has to remember not to press her sander down too hard right before they catch the perpetrator. Shawna enjoys her days, her family, her business. But, sometimes, the dark, gory, and kind of traumatic podcasts get into her head and Shawna finds herself lying in bed awake in the middle of the night, suspicious of every creak and groan emanating from her 100-year-old farmhouse.
Early in September of last year, while cleaning up the dinner dishes as their kids fought over the remote, Shawna recounted that day’s episode to Whit, her husband of almost a decade.
“But I knew it was the neighbor all along.”
“Yeah,” Whit replied, paying very little attention to the horror of whatever grisly murder that Shawna was so casually reporting, “you should have been in the FBI.”
Now, Shawna wasn’t an idiot and knew that Whit was being kind of a dick but she’d been feeling like she missed her calling as a detective for some time now. She’d been obsessed with one series after the other and swore that she figured out the killer long before the official investigators ever did. In the middle of caulking or painting or wiring, she’d yell out at the top of her lungs, “Check the husband!” or “It’s the gardener!” generally scaring the shit out of her construction crew. A lot of the guys who worked with Shawna were deeply superstitious and her outbursts would rattle the dude using a circle saw or a nail gun and her outbursts were most definitely becoming a personal injury liability.
“Stop listening to that garbage,” George, the foreman, would instruct Shawna as she installed a new ceiling beam. But Shawna couldn’t. The podcasts put her in the work zone, made the time go by, and occupied a different part of her brain than her hands-on labor. And, if she were being honest, she was kind of addicted. Her heart would race when the narrator described the scene and the investigation and her brain would crank out its own list of possible suspects. The only ones she disliked were the unsolved ones. Those offended Shawna’s sense of justice. She was ok with the horrifying tales, but she needed to know that, in the end, justice was served. George thought it put bad energy out into the world to be entertained by other people’s pain. Shawna did not like this categorization at all.
“Here,” George took her phone, pulled up the purple square app, and typed in a couple of words. “Listen to this instead. These won’t cause any harm.”
While George may have thought that he was saving Shawna from her downward spiral of true crime horror and opening up her mind to brighter horizons, he just substituted one addiction for another. Because George introduced Shawna to stories of the supernatural.
It wasn’t long before Shawna’s post-dinner conversations revolved around alien encounter conspiracies, historical haunting stories, and tales of spiritual reincarnation. Whit wasn’t exactly entertained.
“You don’t really believe this stuff,” he crinkled his forehead while drying the casserole dish.
“No, of course not,” Shawna lied while moving plates around the bottom rack of the dishwasher.
Do I believe this stuff? She wondered that night in bed as she put in her mouth guard to fend off her nighttime teeth grinding. The dentist had told her on multiple occasions that she needed to do a better job of decompressing before she slept or she’d be toothless by 50. Shawna knew that she needed to focus more attention on relaxing and relieving stress. But, the truth was, that wasn’t really her jam.
Sure, the idea of sitting in some lavender-scented bubble bath while reading a romance novel sounded like a great way to spend an evening, but ripping out that old bathtub and replacing the rusty plumbing while listening to in-depth reporting of how Bigliosi prosecuted Charles Mason sounded way more appealing. Shawna thought, in her own way, that George’s podcast was a step in the right direction. Because people weren’t getting hurt.
Even the alien abduction stories, while, sure, in some cases ruined people’s lives because of the obvious stigma of telling your neighbors that little grey men came out of the sky and invited you into a flying saucer for a rectal examination isn’t the greatest way to become the most popular person on the block, but it wasn’t what Shawna would classify as tragic. Shawna ruminated over her choice of audio entertainment as she got ready in the morning, pulling on her favorite army-green carpenter jeans and steel-toed boots. So, did she believe the stories?
Well, kind of. There was no way that humans were the only intelligent life in the universe. Right? Statistically, that would seem highly, highly improbable. And Shawna dealt with people all day. She questioned whether humanity was really as smart as it gave itself credit for.
And what about the supernatural stories? The tales of witches and warlocks and people who seemed to be able to communicate with the dead? Well… When Shawna first started listening to George’s episodes, she looked down on those people and enjoyed laughing at them as she laid kitchen tile or caulked a bathroom. But, after binging hours of this type of content, Shawna found herself slowly convinced that there was just as much evidence proving a spiritual afterlife as there was disproving it. And what about monsters? Nope, that was where Shawna drew the line. But that didn’t make the stories any less entertaining. Big Foot. Lochness. The Yeti. Those sightings and conspiracies made the day go by just as quickly as her old true crime favorites. However, Shawna didn’t find them as truthfully compelling. That is, of course, until a Tuesday night in late October.
As the groves of Aspen trees shed their leaves, carpeting the ground in a satisfying crunch, the days quickly grew darker, shorter, and colder. Shawna and Whit had let their daughter, Mabel talk them into carving a dozen pumpkins which now adorned their covered porch. She’d also talked the couple into adding a new member to the family, a Husky puppy named Echo, who talked more than Mabel. And Shawna liked Echo. See, their 100-year-old farmhouse was a work in progress, with way too many rooms for Whit and Shawna to monitor. As Echo trailed Mabel everywhere, usually howling or whining at something, it was easy to know where their only child was playing.
Now, if Shawna were being totally honest, her switch from True Crime podcasts to Supernatural ones, wasn’t necessarily helping her sleep better. Sounds that made Shawna’s hair stand on end escaped from all corners of the house as the temperatures dropped drastically at night. They’d shake Shawna from a dream that occasionally involved some kind of ghost or mythical creature. And that is what happened on this particular October night, the 29th, a day before Halloween, which just happened to be a full, shockingly orange, Harvest moon.
The Ironwood, Ponderosa, and Cottonwoods had all been in need of pruning over the summer but both Shawna and Whit had been too busy with work and Mabel and the basement renovation to take the time to cut them back. Shawna chastised herself over this lapse as she lay in their bed, listening to the leafless branches scrape against the side of the farmhouse like an old lady’s fingernails against the thick windowpanes. The wind was fierce that night and Shawna crossed her fingers that it wouldn’t take down a power line because she had way too much work planned for the following day. Somewhere downstairs, Echo howled at the moon, his tone ringing through the ancient walls. Then, another sound made Shawna jerk her head towards the door. She felt her heartbeat quicken, jumping to her now-tight throat. It was Mabel.
“Mom?” Her voice trembled. That sound sent a chill through Shawna’s bones. The joke in the family was that Mabel could sleep through an earthquake. Even as a baby, Shawna learned that she could build nursery furniture a mere three feet from her infant, and not wake the sleeping girl. Maybe it was Shawna’s prolific use of power tools while Mabel was in utero. Whatever it was, nothing could wake her when she was out for the night. So, to say it was unusual to have Mabel pad into her parent’s room in the middle of the night was an understatement.
“I can’t sleep,”
Shawna reached out and pulled her strong little daughter into her bed. She couldn’t explain it, but something felt weird.
“What is it, honey?” She tried to keep her voice as even and non-alarmist as possible but that’s certainly not how she felt inside.
“Something is making a really loud noise. In my room. In my wall. I think it’s… a… monster.”
Now, who knows if Shawna would have laughed this off had it not been the night before Halloween in a very old home with a howling dog, a full moon, branches that sounded like hands scraping across her windows and her head was not chock full of very detailed stories of the otherworldly? We don’t know. What we do know is that Shawna took the baseball bat from her closet and walked down the old hallway, floorboards groaning under every step, to Mabel’s room. And the sound she heard in there vibrated through her entire body, turning her blood to ice. There was a noise coming from the wall. A noise loud enough to wake Mabel Turner-Johnson. And the noise sounded as though, well, it really didn’t want to be in there.
The rational part of Shawna’s brain momentarily poked its meek little head out.
It has to be an animal, Shawna told herself and then repeated out loud to Mabel. But it didn’t sound like any animal that Shawna had ever met while living in her landlocked Northern state. It wasn’t a scratching or a whining like a squirrel, raccoon, or opossum. No. It was a hum, a groan that seemed to vibrate throughout the unicorn-clad room. And it felt like it was talking to them.
Shawna grabbed Mabel’s hand and dashed back to her room, shaking a snoring Whit awake with a start.
“It has to be an animal,” he insisted after groggily half-listening to Shawna and Mabel’s breathless story,
“Your head is full of all of those crazy podcasts. Of course you think that there’s something creepy in the wall.” He pulled his grey Army sweatshirt off the floor and over his head, turning to his young daughter, “There isn’t,” He told her gently, “that stuff isn’t true,” he insisted, looking up at Shawna with a tone conveying that he didn’t want to hear about any supernatural theories on this particular midnight.
Mother and daughter each took one of Whit’s hands and walked him down the crackling hallway and into her room. And, what he heard there, was undeniable.
Whit didn’t show how creepy the sound made him feel. He refused to believe that there was anything more than a perfectly boring and logical explanation for whatever it was. But the sound was real. It was a deep vibration as if a very baritone voice was in a lot of pain. It definitely wasn’t a rodent. Or a bird. But it also didn’t quite sound human. He walked over to the wall and banged his fist against the wood, feigning confidence. But that backfired. The noise got louder. Whit jumped back.
Sensing his unease, Mabel and Shawna gripped each other’s hands so, so very tightly. Shawna’s mind started digging a tunnel of its own. She imagined a corpse behind her daughter’s wall, decomposed between the insulation for who knows how many years. She imagined his tortured spirit, holding onto some kind of very important secret, now ready to claw his way through the sheetrock and into their lives. It was at that moment that Shawna would have sworn that she smelled rotting flesh and the goosebumps on her arm were so hard that her skin began to ache. But her maternal instinct managed to stop her imagination from spiraling any further.
“My camera,” she eeked out to Whit.
“What?” He looked at her so intently that, for the first time in their eight-year marriage, Shawna could see the true fear in his eyes.
“My, my-” Shawna’s brain grasped for the word. Remember she was a contractor. She had a lot of tools. And a lot of various contraptions. One of those happened to be a thermal camera. It wasn’t a strange thing to own in her profession. She would use it to inspect a roof for leaks or detect moisture or a missing shingle. Shawna tried to focus on the practical uses of the device as she flew down the old stairs, into her storage closet, and pulled out the camera. She pressed the power button, a mixture of relief and pure unadulterated fear when she saw that it was charged and working, and brought it back up to Mabel’s room. The picture that appeared on the digital screen sent a shock wave of chills through her spine.
There was something behind the wall. Something in the shape that looked vaguely human. And yes, it was alive. Because it was giving off heat. The yellow and red outline stretched six feet to the ceiling, glowing through the small monitor. It seemed to have one leg, a large, thick torso, and no discernable head.
For the second time that night, Shawna saw something in Whit for the first time. He had no idea what to do. He stood in the room, bare feet gripping into Mabel’s lavender shag carpet, the walls illuminated by the menacing, full moon, and the bright Hello Kitty lamp on her bedside table. The moaning in the wall was impossible to ignore.
“It has to be an animal,” Whit insisted with absolutely zero conviction, “Mabes, you can sleep in our room tonight.” That should have been a joke. Because not one of them slept for a single minute. The three of them tossed and turned and pretended that they were alone. But, they weren’t.
The dawn crept over the house like a slow-leaking liquid, slipping into the cracks and holes, filling the house with a suffocating grey gloom that felt heavy on its inhabitants. Bleary-eyed, Shawna and Whit looked at each other, across their daughter, sound asleep in the center of their bed. Shawna spoke first.
“We punch a hole in the wall. Small enough that nothing can get out. So many of these boards are totally rotten. It has to be some kind of nest.”
With the sleep deprivation and honest-to-God fear in his heart, Whit wasn’t sure what to say. Maybe they should call the exterminator? Animal control? A freaking conjurer and exorcist? He kept these thoughts to himself.
“Yeah, ok. Sledgehammer.” Shawna nodded and wiggled her arm out from under Mabel. She wished she could control how fast her heart was beating.
Standing in Mabel’s room, in the freezing morning air, wrapped in her bathrobe and work gloves, Shawna looked at the wall.
“It’s much quieter,” she whispered to Whit who nodded in agreement.
“Where are you going to punch it?”
Shawna gestured to the thermal camera lying on Mabel’s rumpled bedspread. She must have tossed in there in fear some hours earlier.
“I guess at the bottom? Where there was the least amount of heat.” Shawna heard her voice quiver.
“Unless it moved,” Whit ventured. The thought of being that close to an unknown living being that was living mere feet from where her only daughter slept, creeped her out more than she could articulate.
“Here goes,”
Shawna swung her arms back, gripping the heavy tool with everything she had while instinctively closing her eyes and smashing the steel end into the wall. And that’s when the quiet hum got loud. And then louder. And something escaped from the hole.
The cacophony of sound momentarily stunned both Shawna and Whit. The crash of the sledgehammer woke up Mabel who came running into their room, screaming. And what she saw was the last thing she expected.
Bees. Honey Bees to be specific. The largest swarm that any of them had ever seen. The family booked it to the door, slamming it behind them.
They didn’t start laughing right away. Nope. It took minutes that felt like hours for the adrenaline to drain from their bodies. Even Mabel had been up most of the night, stressed to the nth degree about what could possibly be living in the ancient walls of the historical farmhouse. But when they were finally able to relax, the laughter was contagious. They laughed through breakfast, through Saturday morning cartoons, and were still laughing when the beekeeper arrived with a truck and tools to cajole their extra thousands of uninvited houseguests into a new hive. Shawna sipped her third cup of coffee and watched in awe as the beekeeper found the queen, put her in a clip, and then allowed her workers to follow her into a box. A little handheld smoker helped them along.
As the Bees left in the back of a Chevy pickup, the family watched them out of their kitchen window as Mabel waved goodbye.
“I didn’t know that monsters are really bees. That’s interesting.” And Mabel went back to her cartoons.
And, she took a few days off, but by that Wednesday, Shawna was back to her true crime podcasts. She’s also now on a mission to tear out all the old insulation and fill her walls with the new stuff, leaving zero room for anything (or anyone) to set up a home in her walls. And she’d looking for lighter, funnier stories to keep in her earbuds as she installs cabinets and countertops, so, please, leave suggestions here in the comments.
And sweet dreams.
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