The Creeps! || Book of Spooky Stories (COMPLETED ✔️)

20 ~ Pete The Moonshiner

(FROM URBAN LEGENDS AND CREEPY STORIES)
*****

In the fourth and fifth grade, I spent the night at my friend Tom's house almost every weekend. Tom lived in a run down farm house in the country. He shared a room with his older brother, Walter. The three of us would stay up late telling scary stories.

The scariest was a true story. Here is how Walter told it:

Back in the 1920s, this house was owned by a different family. Their closest neighbor was an inbred moonshiner named Pete. He lived in a shack deep in the woods and was frequently in trouble with the law. The parents told their children, a little boy and girl, to never go near Pete's land.

The young boy slept in this very room. One night, he was awakened by the sound of shattered glass inside the house. Living so close to Pete, the boy was very cautious, so instead of opening the door he locked it. The boy pressed his ear to the door and listened.

The boy heard stumbling footsteps down the hallway that were much to heavy to be his father's. He could almost smell the moonshine through the bedroom door.

"Let me in boy..."

It was Pete, but the boy knew he couldn't unlock the door. Overcoming his fear, the boy shouted, "No!"

After a minute, the boy could hear Pete's heavy boots fading back through the house. In a distant room, he could hear his father shouting at Pete, but the shouts soon turned to screams. For almost an hour, the sounds degenerated as the father torn his vocal chords into ribbons from all the screaming. The boy thought the pleading in hoarse agony was the worst thing he could ever hear until it was replaced by something worse. Silence.

Pete's boots lumbered back down the hallway to the boy's room. He pounded on the solid oak door. "Boy! Open up this door or you'll regret it!"

The boy could smell the moonshine through the door. Again he said, "No!"

And so it was his mother's turn. Her shouts and screams lasted for two hours. When they stopped, the heavy boots stumbled back to his door. The stink of moonshine was overwhelming.

"Boy! I said 'Open this door!' This is your last chance..." Pete threatened.

The boy was terrified. "Please don't hurt my sister!"

Pete was drunk and enjoying himself. He chuckled. "Then open up boy..." But the boy knew better, and so he spent the next three hours listening to the screams of his younger sister.

When the police came to investigate the house two days later, they found the mom, dad, and sister tied spread-eagle to their beds. Pete had cut a small hole in of their lower abdomens and pulled the bowels out of their belly inch by inch as they died in pain.

The police found the boy dehydrated but alive. He was still locked in this very room, pressed against this very door. He was completely catatonic. He spent the rest of his life in a sanitarium, occasionally mumbling, "Should I have opened the door?... Should I have opened the door?..."

Pete was eventually caught and executed. His shack was torn down, but his ghost still haunts this house. Sometimes, we can still smell a hint of sweet moonshine in the morning, and pain in our bellies, and when we do, we know Pete was here during the night, trying to pull out our insides.

This story completely creeped me out. Ten out of ten! I always insisted that the three of us should sleep with the bedroom door locked and the light on. Your imagination is so strong at that age! I was terrified of every noise in that house until finally falling asleep. Whenever I woke up at their house, I could smell the faint, sweet aroma of Pete's moonshine.

Whenever I told the brothers about it, they would giggle and play along.

"Yeah, I smell it too!" Walter would say.

"Me too, and my stomach hurts!" Tom chimed in, pretending to be scared.

Then the brothers moved to Utah when Tom and I were in fifth grade. I haven't seen them since.

Flash forward to this morning. I'm sitting in the chemistry lab on campus. As we were setting up the experiment, one of the chemical's smelled exactly like my memory of Pete's moonshine. It's an incredibly distinct, penetrating, almost sweet scent - not exactly like hard alcohol, but similar.

I had not smelled it since waking up in Tom and Walter's house after sleeping over. This was the exact same smell. I picked up the bottle and looked at the label: "diethyl ether." It was ether.

I stared across the lab in a daze. Frozen. I remember locking the door of their bedroom every night. I thought about waking with the faint smell of ether in my mouth. I remember the distinct pain in my bowels each morning.

And I realized... There was no Pete the Moonshiner.

They had been raping me.