Lot 084: The Cellar // My Mom Used To Hide Under My Bed

Today's episode is sponsored by I Know What You Did Last Summer.

Get It Now on Digital.

When five friends inadvertently cause a deadly car accident, they cover up their involvement and make a pact to keep it a secret rather than face the consequences.

A year later, their past comes back to haunt them, and they're forced to confront a horrifying truth.

Someone knows what they did last summer and is hell-bent on revenge.

As one by one, the friends are stalked by a killer.

They discover this happened before, so they turn to two survivors of the legendary Southport massacre of 1997 for help.

Starring Madeline Klein, Chase Sue Wonders, Jonah Hauer King, with Freddie Prince Jr., and Jennifer Love Hewitt.

I know what you did last summer is a perfect summer slasher, says Jordan Cruciolo of NPR.

Your summer is not over yet.

Don't miss a killer movie night at home.

A

Others arrive in pieces.

Whispers in the walls.

Dust in the corners.

Sounds that don't belong to the hour.

Lot 84 is one of those.

Two items.

High Priestess Emily brought in especially for you.

Unconnected by origin, yet curiously linked by sound.

Knocks.

Taps.

Rhythms too deliberate to be dismissed.

Too faint to be trusted.

We begin with this.

A ribbon.

Pink satin with a small silver bell still attached to the end.

Recovered from beneath the earth near a ruined barn, one no longer listed on any local surveys.

It still carries a scent.

Stone.

Iron.

And when held, some claim to hear giggling.

Others say the bell rings on its own.

Always just out of earshot.

It's been catalogued under one name.

We call this first story

the seller.

Before we begin, I want to point out some of the customers whose names have been etched in brass on this beautiful plaque I had made above the front desk.

These are some of the members of the inner circle of the antiquarium.

We go by the Obsidian Covenant.

Recent initiates include Chloe,

Ash Cash,

Blake Isaf,

the Big Bad Wolf of California, Kristen DeBose,

Romy,

Alexandra Cruz,

Castle Sepita,

Jody McGrath,

and

Tammy DC.

We are ever appreciative of your devotion to the Order.

Go to theObsidiancovenant.com to receive the sacrament.

Now,

where were we?

Oh, yes.

Welcome to the Antiquarium of Sinister Happenings

and Odd Goings On.

I was sent to investigate a missing child.

What I found

still haunts me.

I took early retirement two months ago.

They say it was voluntary, but if you read between the lines, the transfer, the psyche valve, the months of leave before I resigned, you'd see the truth.

Now, I've never told anyone what really happened in Barley Hill.

Not the chief superintendent, not the shrink they assigned me.

Hell, not even my wife, who thinks it was just burnout.

It wasn't burnout.

I know what I saw.

And more importantly, I know what I heard in that cellar.

But I'll start at the beginning.

Barley Hill is a speck on the map in Northumberland.

Two rows of cottages, one pub, one post office, and fields that go on forever.

The kind of place where time folds in on itself.

I was stationed nearby in Hexham and sent out to assist local plod when a girl went missing.

Her name was Abigail Shaw,

12 years old.

Disappeared on a Tuesday afternoon between school and home.

She should have walked back with her friend Lucy, but told her she was cutting through the woods to take a

shortcut.

Except there was no shortcut.

Just miles of dense forest and farmland.

Her parents were frantic, understandably.

I met them the night she vanished.

Good people, salt of the earth types.

Mr.

Shaw was shaking so bad he couldn't hold his tea.

Mrs.

Shaw kept glancing at the clock every few seconds, like if she stared hard enough, time would reverse.

The Barley Hill constable, a man named Pritchard,

was already out of his depth.

No CCTV in the village.

No reports of strangers.

No signs of struggle.

I took over coordination and brought in dogs and drones by the next morning.

We combed every square meter of woodland for three days.

Nothing.

Not a footprint.

Not a thread of clothing.

She'd vanished like smoke.

Then,

on the fourth day,

We found something.

it was a dog walker about two miles from the village near an abandoned farmstead, an old place called Greaves Orchard.

The dog had gone ballistic near the collapsed barn and

started digging at the earth.

That's where we found the ribbon.

Pink,

satin

with a tiny silver bell.

Abigail's mother confirmed it was hers.

The barn itself was unsafe.

Roof half-caved in, floor rotted.

But below it,

there was a trapdoor,

sealed with rusted iron bolts.

And this

is where things get odd.

The floor above that trapdoor hadn't collapsed.

There was no way the dog could have smelled anything through solid oak beams and a foot of earth.

But it did.

And it led us to that exact spot, like it had been called there.

We broke the lock.

The air that came up smelled like old stone and wet iron.

We descended.

The cellar was far too large,

carved into the bedrock with old tools.

Pritchard said the farmhouse had no records of underground storage.

No history, no maps, not even local gossip.

But here it was,

15 feet underground,

with stone shelves, iron hooks,

and something that looked a lot like restraints bolted to the wall.

We searched every inch.

No girl.

Just one small shoe tucked behind a broken crate.

and carved into the wall

six feet up

alive,

written in chalk,

still fresh.

That word stayed with me.

We brought in forensics.

They lifted Abigail's prints off the shoe.

The ribbon, too, but

nothing else.

No DNA.

No signs of anyone else.

We interviewed every villager twice.

I walked the woods alone some nights, flashlight in one hand, recorder in the other.

That

is when it started.

At first, it was small things.

My mobile would turn on in the middle of the night and start recording.

Voice memos I didn't make.

Then

came the voice.

Three times over the next week, I woke to a faint knock on my guesthouse door at precisely 2.11 a.m.

Each time I opened it to find no one.

On the third night, I stayed up and recorded the hallway.

When I reviewed the footage the next morning,

my stomach turned.

At 2.11 a.m.

The camera shook slightly,

then captured my own voice whispering,

She's in

the orchard.

Except I never said that.

I didn't tell anyone.

I didn't want to be pulled off the case.

Instead,

I went back to Greaves Orchard.

Daylight this time.

I paced the area around the barn.

Found nothing.

But the feeling.

That pressure behind the eyes.

That wrongness in the air.

It stayed with me.

The next night,

I got a call.

An old woman named Mags Willoughby.

She lived alone at the edge of the village, nearest to the orchard.

She'd seen something, she said.

Her voice trembled over the line.

Two nights ago,

I saw a girl running across the field.

Did you recognize her?

She looked like the Shore girl, but she

she wasn't right.

Not right.

How?

She was barefoot, mud up to her knees, but her clothes fing torn.

Her face.

It didn't look scared.

It looked

calm.

Like she was walking in her sleep.

Okay.

Where'd she go?

Towards the barn.

I stayed out there until dawn.

Nothing.

A week passed.

The official search was scaled down.

The press moved on.

But I didn't.

The case got inside me.

I barely slept.

Ate standing up.

My wife said I talked in my sleep, muttering about cellars and chalk and ribbons.

Then one night, a storm rolling in over the moors,

I returned to Greaves Orchard one last time.

The barn was creaking in the wind.

The trees swayed like they were trying to whisper to each other.

I descended the cellar steps with my torch and recorder.

Everything was as we'd left it:

empty.

But the word alive

was gone,

scrubbed clean.

In its place,

one word

newly written in shaky chalk.

Colder.

I turned.

Heart pounding.

A sound behind me.

Soft.

Delicate.

A giggle.

I spun and caught it in the beam.

A girl.

Pale, dirty feet,

wearing a nightgown.

Abigail.

She just stared at me, smiling.

I reached out,

but she stepped backward

into the darkness

and vanished.

I ran to the spot.

Nothing.

Just stone wall.

I don't know how long I stood there, torch shaking.

Eventually, I left.

Didn't sleep that night.

Didn't go back the next day.

They found her

three days later.

Wandering along the roadside near Hayden Bridge.

Disoriented.

Clothes clean.

No bruises.

No injuries.

Dehydrated, but otherwise unharmed.

The doctor said she'd been fed recently.

No signs of trauma.

She didn't remember anything.

She just kept repeating the same thing.

The man in the cellar was nice.

They assumed it was a coping mechanism.

A way to process fear.

But I knew better.

I asked to see her one last time.

Off the record.

I just wanted to ask a single question.

I sat across from her in the hospital room.

She looked at me calmly.

swinging her legs off the side of the bed.

Abigail.

was the man in the cellar old or young?

She tilted her head.

He didn't have

a face.

They closed the case.

Everyone celebrated a miracle.

The girl who came back.

But I know what I saw in that cellar.

And I know what I heard.

Because the night after she was found,

I played one of the voice memos from my phone.

It was my voice again,

muttering

over

and over.

She's not the same.

She's not the same.

She's not the same.

She's not the same.

She's not the same.

She's not the same.

Then

silence.

Then a child's voice.

Soft,

like it was speaking right next to the microphone.

Neither are

you.

Hmm.

Did you hear that?

Not the bell.

No, it's gone quiet now.

It's the answer that worries me.

You see, some echoes don't stop when the object is returned to the shelf.

They carry

room to room,

wall to wall,

until they find something willing to listen back.

I should check the eastern cabinet.

There's been movement in the glass, and if I'm not mistaken, something's knocking from underneath.

I'll return shortly.

Today's episode is sponsored by I Know What You Did Last Summer.

Get it now on digital.

When five friends inadvertently cause a deadly car accident, they cover up their involvement and make a pact to keep it a secret rather than face the consequences.

A year later, their past comes back to haunt them, and they're forced to confront a horrifying truth.

Someone knows what they did last summer and is hell-bent on revenge.

As one by one, the friends are stalked by a killer.

They discover this happened before, so they turn to two survivors of the legendary Southport massacre of 1997 for help.

Starring Madeline Klein, Chase Sue Wonders, Jonah Howard King with Freddie Prince Jr., and Jennifer Love Hewitt.

I know what you did last summer is a perfect summer slasher, says Jordan Cruciolo of NPR.

Your summer is not over yet.

Don't miss a killer movie night at home.

Why, hello there.

You've reached the antiquarium.

If you wish to leave a message, please do so with the town and have a great day.

Hi.

Um,

I got a speaker from your shop recently, and it it

has worked really well,

but when I'm not using it, I hear steps.

I hear movement around my home.

It's been getting louder and louder and I can't get away from the sound

because anytime I'm home, I just hear it just thumping away.

I don't know what to do.

He's back and I can't make it turn off, please.

and bigger and it doesn't stop.

Take it back

End of messages still with us

good

Because the ribbon was only part of the message

Now we come to the other

a plank of flooring roughly three feet in length Smooth on one side, as though touched by small hands again and again.

Along its surface, faint indentations.

Three, two,

four.

Always the same.

We've labeled it the tapping board.

It was recovered from beneath a child's bed.

The house was sold twice before anyone dared remove it.

But when they did,

they found scratches beneath.

Names,

dates,

and something else

harder to explain.

The second story in Lot 84 is titled, My Mom

Used to Hide Under My Bed.

I was born in 2000.

Grew up in a small town in Northeast Ohio.

We had one of those little ranch-style houses, all on one floor, three bedrooms.

It was just me and my mom for most of my life.

My dad left when I was a baby.

She was a good mom, from what I remember.

We didn't have much money, but she made sure I always had what I needed.

She worked as a waitress at a restaurant in the center of town.

Always tired, but always kind.

We'd watch movies together together at night.

She'd tuck me in, kiss my forehead,

and tell me she loved me.

I felt safe.

Except

at bedtime.

I must have been about six or seven the first time I noticed it.

One night,

after she tucked me in,

I heard the floor creak after she turned off the light.

Not out in the hall,

right

by my bed.

I remember freezing, listening.

Then I heard the sound of her breathing

slow,

heavy,

right

underneath me.

Mom,

I called for her louder.

After a few seconds, she crawled out from under the bed like it was the most normal thing in the world.

Go to sleep, sweetheart.

Mommy's here.

The next night, same thing.

I heard her crawl under right after lights out.

The soft thud of her knees and hands against the floorboards.

The shift of the mattress as she settled in.

I was too little to really question it.

I thought maybe it was just a game she liked to play.

But the older I got, the more I realized it wasn't a game.

It became a routine.

She'd tuck me in like normal, turn off the light,

and then she'd get under the bed.

Every single night.

And then

she started doing little things.

She would tap on the wood under my mattress in these odd rhythms.

Three taps, then two, then four.

Sometimes it sounded almost like a song.

Other times like random patterns.

If I moved or sat up,

she'd stop until I lay back down.

A couple times, I caught her

peeking out from the foot of the bed.

I'd feel eyes on me and look down and there she was.

Her face just visible in the dark, dark

one eye glinting in the faint light from the hall no expression just

watching

he's not my son he's not my son

he's not my son he is not my son

I stopped sleeping well

I'd lie stiff under the covers, too afraid to move or call for her.

If I tried to leave the bed, she'd grab my ankle.

Not hard,

just enough to stop me.

Then she'd giggle again.

Same soft, weird giggle.

I never told anyone.

How do you explain something like that when you're a kid?

I figured no one would believe me.

It wasn't every night that something scary happened.

Some nights she'd just lie there quietly.

I'd hear her whispering to herself sometimes.

Words I couldn't make out.

Soft and steady,

like she was talking to someone I couldn't hear.

This went on for years.

During the day, she was totally normal.

Made my lunch, helped with homework, joked with me, hugged me.

I remember trying to work up the courage to ask her about it once when I was around ten.

Mom,

why do you sleep under my bed?

Oh, buddy, I don't do that.

You must be having silly dreams.

But that night,

she was there again,

and the tapping was louder.

louder.

By the time I was nine or ten,

I stopped looking under the bed.

I started sleeping on the couch when I could get away with it.

Eventually, when I turned 11, she told me I was old enough to have a lock on my door.

She never came back into my room.

I don't know why she did it.

I I don't know what changed.

She passed away when I was 23.

Cancer.

In her last weeks, she was confused a lot of the time drifting in and out.

But one night,

I was sitting by her bed.

She grabbed my wrist and said very clearly,

I kept you safe, you know.

You were never alone at night.

I still don't understand what she meant.

He's not my son, he's not my son, he is not my son, he is not my son.

C, C-B-I-W-L-K-P-I-B-C-C-P-N-L-A

Thank you for your patronage.

Hope you enjoyed your new relic as much as I've enjoyed passing along its sordid history.

It does come with our usual warning, however.

Absolutely no refunds, no exchanges, and we won't be held liable for anything that may or may not occur while the object is in your possession.

If you've got an artifact with mysterious properties, perhaps it's accompanied by a history of bizarre and disturbing circumstances, maybe you'd be interested in dropping it and its story by the shop to share with other customers.

Please reach out to antiquariumshop at gmail.com.

A member of our team will be in touch.

Till next time, we'll be waiting for you whenever you close your eyes

in the space between sleep and dream.

During regular business hours, of course, or by appointment, only for you,

our

best customer.

You have a good night now.

The Antiquarium of Sinister Happenings.

Lot 084.

My Mom Used to Hide Under My Bed.

Written by King Crimson Zero.

Narrated by Conan Freeman.

Featuring Jessica McAvoy as Mom.

Jade Shand and Everett Shand as the boy.

I was sent to investigate a missing child.

Written by Stanzo.

Narrated by Trevor Shand.

featuring Amelie Brown as Abigail, Sarah Golding as Mags Willoughby, featuring Stephen Knowles as the antique dealer, engineering production and sound design by Trevor Shand, theme music by the Newton Brothers, additional music by COAG, Vivek Abishek, Clement Panchout, and Red Light Chill.

The Antiquarium of Sinister Happenings is created and curated by Trevor and Lauren Shand.

Follow us on Instagram and Twitter at Antiquarium Pod.

Call the Antiquarium at 646-481-7197.

Hello and welcome to the world of Scare You to Sleep.

I'm your host, Shelby Novak, a show for those of us who need something a little stronger than counting sheep, who find horror to be a strangely relaxing escape.

Here you'll find a myriad of fright-filled tales, from fictional to true stories, to high strangeness to guided nightmares, where I take you on a journey through your own personal nightmare.

So come get lost in the terror with me.

Listen to Scare You to Sleep, wherever you listen to podcasts, sweet screams.