Good evening, it’s Spooky Boo Rhodes coming from the lighthouse in Sandcastle, California. As with all things wicked, TV’s can be the worst especially if there is something evil about them. In these spooky tales you’ll hear stories about possessed and sometimes downright demonic TV sets. Ever hear the phrase kill your TV? That’s normally just a saying but perhaps in these stories it applies.
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Now let’s begin…
by Phpguy
I live in Oak Park, just outside of Chicago, Illinois. See, we have an ordinance here where you’re not allowed to put up a “For Sale” sign in front of a house. So many homes are vacant here that they’d be absolutely everywhere if we could put them up, so in order to ensure people want to live here, we make it so it doesn’t look like nobody wants to live here. Thus, no “For Sale” signs.
I live alone with my pet cat, an all-black cat which I found out recently is a rarity. His name is Calvin. He was the runt of the litter. This isn’t really important.
The story all started about two months ago. That’s when I first got up late at night after a bad dream and went out for a cigarette and saw my neighbor from directly across the street was sitting in front of his large, bright television, which was facing right out his window at my house.
I did not think anything of it.
As days went on, I kept looking out my window and seeing my neighbor just sitting there watching TV. After two weeks, I came to the conclusion that he could very well be dead. It just didn’t make sense that he was just sitting there, TV on, not leaving the couch for weeks. I could only see the back of his head, and he very well may have moved while I was at work, but knowing it was there the light of his television kept me up at night, and for hours on end there would just be no movement. I came to the conclusion that I should call the police to ask if they could check up on my neighbor. I didn’t know him very well, we met twice. He was an older guy, I used to see him shoveling snow or raking leaves and I’d offer to help and he said no both times. He was a fairly active guy for his age and it didn’t add up that he’d just sit there for days watching TV and not leaving his house.
So I called the police and told them and they offered to check it out.
I saw them pull up and couldn’t help but watch. I was very curious, and even though I thought all that would happen was they’d call up an ambulance or something and remove my neighbor’s dead body, not something I’d usually be extremely interested in watching, I had grown so curious about what was going on over there that I couldn’t settle for the simple answer that my neighbor simply died in front of his television.
After knocking a few times, I saw them open up the front door and walk in. They looked around, one of them left the living room so I couldn’t see where he’d gone (I could only see the one room where my neighbor’s windows were). The one officer turned off the television and also left my sight. They both left and drove off.
About twenty minutes later I got a call explaining that the house was empty and my neighbor had moved out. They said a real estate agent had probably just accidentally left the television on. I went onto a few real estate websites and, as it were, the house was indeed for sale. Anticlimactic, but at least it was a far less morbid conclusion than I’d expected. I was sort of embarrassed that my mind had immediately gone to death when it really was so bland and simple, and I felt like a pretty bad person for actually feeling a slight sense of disappointment when I found out my neighbor hadn’t died as I’d assumed.
That was a reasonable answer, a totally logical one. I had no way of knowing without the real estate signs up front, and I had no reason to question it. My neighbor had moved out. Plain and simple.
When I went to bed that night, it had pretty much entirely left my head.
My bedroom window faces out towards my neighbor’s house. For the last two weeks, I had been watching the television from my bed. It was how I went to sleep, just confusedly staring in wonder, slightly disturbed knowing I could be looking at the back of the head of my dead neighbor.
And since I had been staring at that television for the last two weeks, it took a few minutes to register the horror when I crawled into bed and looked at the television, still turned on across the street.
I didn’t sleep very well. Every night, for about a month and a half, I’d just see that television. During the day, it was on. I’d walk up to the house when I was feeling more adventurous, and knock on the door, but nobody answered.
I started smoking quite a bit in lieu of proper sleep. Every night, I’d walk by the house; curious, scared, and confused. I contacted the realtor and asked if they were giving tours and she said they were not, so it didn’t get turned on during some open house. I thought maybe I was hallucinating, that the television was never on, but the officer definitely went over and turned it off, so it had absolutely been on, at least in the first place. I invited a friend over two weeks ago and after a little hanging out I told him the story and asked, straight-faced and horrified, if the television was on. He said that it was. He was clearly concerned for my health, and I don’t blame him.
So the only other option I could think of was that maybe a squatter had taken up residence in the vacant house. It wasn’t common in the area, as far as I knew. There’s very little crime or homelessness in the suburban area I live in, so it didn’t really make any sense for somebody to squat here, but it was all I could think of.
Last night, I worked up the courage to confront this squatter. I was going to call the police, but assuming the squatter had been there when I first called, I doubted it would do anything to tell them again. I worked it out in my head that as long as somebody else was living in that house illegally, it wasn’t so bad for me to walk over and enter uninvited.
Stupidly, I worked up this courage while smoking a cigarette late at night, when the only light out was the light pollution over to the East in Chicago and the dim light of the street lamps.
Shaking, both from the terrible cold weather we’ve been having lately and from the nervousness taking over, I opened the door. I was hoping the door was locked so I could back down on my sudden wave of courage and walk away without feeling like I was just running off with my tail between my legs. To my surprise and dismay, the door was not locked. I felt briefly confused, wondering why the realtor hadn’t put in a lock like they did when I sold my house, but I realized that if there was somebody squatting here then it shouldn’t come as a surprise that there wasn’t exactly airtight security.
Slowly, timidly, I walked towards the living room. I could hear the faint murmur of infomercials and see the moving lights and colors of the screen’s shine as I tiptoed, trying to make as little noise as possible.
My whole body went cold as I entered the room. There was my squatter: a middle-aged woman, wrinkly, grey-haired, and dressed like a homeless person. It at least added up. I was more horrified by the fact that I had to now confront them than at the woman herself.
I stuttered a scared hello and she looked at me, and before I could form a thought she screamed the most hellish, horrifying scream I’ve ever heard. It was not the scream of a middle-aged woman. It was demonic, deep, and ear-splitting. I froze up and my heart sank and my eyes widened and I stared, accepting that I was going to die, at this screaming woman for what seemed like eternity. It was an unwavering scream, it didn’t sound like she was losing her breath after what had to have been a whole minute. The moment the initial wave of shock wore off, I just turned and ran. She hadn’t moved save for turning to look at me as she screamed, and I looked to make sure she hadn’t gotten up to follow me out, and she had not.
I ran to my house.
I considered calling the police, but I didn’t want to explain the situation or risk getting myself into legal trouble for trespassing on my neighbor’s property, and if they went there and again did not find the squatter there was no question that I’d be seen as completely insane. I lay awake, refusing to look across the street at the television screen, and my thoughts raced. Surely it had to have just been a squatter. She looked like one, she was clearly living in a house that wasn’t her own, and she was probably a mentally unstable homeless woman. I decided the scream couldn’t have been as awful as I had thought, it was all just the makings of a scared mind.
I actually managed to get some sleep, shockingly enough, and when I woke up I briefly didn’t even remember what had happened the night before.
What I woke up to was somewhat odd. My cat always sleeps downstairs in the living room on the sofa, but I found him, wide awake, sitting on my bed cleaning himself. In all my years living here, I never woke up with him in my room. I petted him for a little and went downstairs.
As I began remembering the events of the previous night, I decided to go out for a cigarette, and on my way out I found that my front door had been unlocked. I ran through last night in my head and I remembered vividly my frantic run home ending in me making sure all my doors were locked. My memory is very rarely faulty.
I felt my stomach churn and my heart sink and I felt a chill as I walked back upstairs to go to my living room.
What I found would have been entirely mundane in any other setting.
My television set was on.
I called the police to explain the situation. I called out of work and am spending the next few days in my friend’s home with my laptop and my cat.
by JoshTheFifthBeatle
It lay there on the side of the road. A subtle box. Inside it, a standard television set, nothing extravagant, but very nice. A sign is attached, it reads: “Free”. You’re tempted by the offer, a seemingly perfect television, with all parts included, free of charge, no questions asked? But you’re taken aback by it. Why on Earth would any person leave a free TV for any stranger who stumbles upon it? You set rationality aside and pick up the box. You take it back to your place of residence and set everything up.
By the time everything is ready, it’s late. But you’ve worked hard to put this together, and you’re going to watch some television before heading to bed. You turn the television on, the glare is now the only source of light in the entire room. It starts on an apparently random channel, “#371”. It’s a dark living room, only visible by a glaring, unseen light source. A tall male, presumably in his mid-to-late ’20s is also in the room, he sits in front of the light source, and as you watch him, you notice that only his eyes are moving, in a rapid-fire fashion, darting left-to-right, up and down.
After a while you will become somewhat bored of this and will now start to look at his surroundings, they’re rather simple, things you see in anybody’s living room: couch, coffee table, etc. But then two large white circular things appear, and they begin moving at a rapid pace around the man; he’s completely unaware of this. You’re intrigued by these things, and cannot help but stare at them, wherever they may lead you. Eventually, the man is attacked by this thing and the screen goes entirely black, with no glaring.
You may assume this means the television is broken, but it’s not. It turns back on again, in another location. This time, a rather large woman is sitting on the edge of her bed, looking at a glaring light source, and her eyes are darting in the same fashion as the previous person.
The same thing occurs, two large white circular objects appear and go in several directions behind the unsuspecting woman, you again follow them and cannot help it. As in the previous video, the thing attacks the woman and the screen cuts to complete darkness.
The same process occurs 3 more times, but then, just before the final video, a small red light turns on from the top of your television set, and the final video begins to play. In this video, you see yourself…and you’re sitting in your living room…moving your eyes rapidly in front of a glaring light source, and two large white circular objects appear and move at the fastest rate ever, you cannot look away now, and just before the thing is going to attack you in the video.
You’re jumped on by something… something large…. jet black… with two large…. white eyes…
Written by Shinigami.Eyes.
I’ve had a few strange incidents in my life involving televisions. A lot of people always ask me why I don’t have a television in my room or why I’m so uninterested in TV shows. I often like to say that I don’t like getting too absorbed in shows, but perhaps some of you would like to know the REAL reason. I’ll start from the earliest event that I can recall involving a TV.
I remember something from when I was very small. I liked to wake up late at night and sneak around the house, just for the thrill of it. I always did it just to see if my parents would catch me. Just the possibility of getting in trouble and my developing ability to evade the scolding and spankings was very fun to me.
I don’t remember how old I was, but I think it was when I was about five or six… I decided to tiptoe out of my room because I wanted to get some chocolate milk at one in the morning. My bedroom was at the end of the hallway, and past that hallway, there was the living room. The living room had my bean bag, a love seat, and a large couch in it, and near the huge picture window, we had a television. It was very old. It had been in our possession for as long as I could recall. It had that wooden paneling look that much of my dad’s old random crap did.
Nonetheless, I completely lost interest in the chocolate milk I was going to run to fetch. I saw a semblance of a green face forming on the screen. I could clearly see high cheekbones, a disapproving scowl, and furrowed eyebrows. I couldn’t see the eyes very well, as at the time, I needed glasses and didn’t know, but I was too frightened to stick around any longer. To the young child I was, it was terrifying to know that what I usually watched so mindlessly was watching me, as well. If I wasn’t thirsty, I’m pretty sure I would’ve felt urine trickling down my leg. I remember I darted back to the hallway and took a swift left, right into my father’s room. I crawled under the covers with him and clung to him for dear life. I stammered something about a “scary green face” and he just comforted me until I fell asleep, assuming I had a nightmare.
Needless to say, I didn’t creep around like that again for a good long while, however, after a few years, that became a distant memory that I almost never reflected on. I thought of it as nothing more than a dream.
By then we had moved again, even though it was just up the street. That old TV was thrown out after it quit working. My parents bought a new one and gave me the one my mother used to keep in her room. I set it up and would watch cartoons on Saturday mornings. I think I even remember some show called Monkey Magic coming on? I do clearly remember tuning in to catch Sailor Moon and Dragonball Z. Yet again, things couldn’t stay calm.
I was falling asleep one night, and I heard that little resonant buzz of the TV turning on. My eyes snapped open. Nothing was on the screen except that familiar black-and-white fuzz. Annoyed, I snagged the remote off my nightstand and shut the power back off. It was okay for another few days. However, one Saturday night, when I was checking out the late-night programming, the channels were changing on their own. I just kept “battling” the television set with my trusty weapon, the remote control. My efforts were futile. Eventually, I just gave up and turned it off and unplugged it before it could further frustrate me. It wouldn’t be long until I plugged it in again to watch some things after school.
I don’t remember what night it was, but I was doing the usual bit of dodging my homework. I’d usually just do it on the bus, during lunch, or between class breaks. My thought was that if I was going to school, I should be doing work in school, not doing work at home where I should be having free time.
So I plugged the TV back in and stared into the screen like any lazy pre-teen would. The colorful images were soon replaced by the garbled black-and-white snow of static, as the channel changed. Green digital numbers appeared in the upper right corner of the screen. “02”. We didn’t have a channel 2, so of course all I got was black and white speckles and an abrasive sound. I changed the channel back to what I was watching, only for it to instantly switch back to “02”. I grumbled and tried again, but this time, my remote didn’t even respond. Instead, the mild buzz that I heard grew to an intense volume, louder and louder. My heart started pounding and I felt like I was going to panic. I don’t know why I was so scared. I yanked the cord from the wall and carried that TV to the driveway, setting it with the garbage.
“What’s wrong, sweetie?” My mother asked.
“It’s broken,” I answered. She didn’t ask any questions.
“Do you want us to get you a new one, honey?” She asked, looking a little concerned. I might’ve looked upset, and at the time, I was rather spoiled. I was usually just given anything I asked for.
“No, Mom. It’s okay. I wasn’t really studying well enough with it in there. It was pretty distracting.”
Once more, I moved. This time, I moved in with another family, as my parents knew and trusted them to take care of me in my questionable teenage years. For a long time, I once more forgot about the strange incidents involving the televisions. While I was a teenager, I recall their old TV started taking on an eerie green tint until they eventually had to get rid of it.
After that, I used to joke that every TV I came into contact with became cursed. My brother, far from superstitious, just laughed at me for saying such a thing, however, recently, I wonder if that’s true or not.
As I sit at my computer, typing, I find myself pausing. The voices I heard on the television upstairs have stopped. Now I hear the faint hissing of static and it’s slowly growing louder and louder…
by Boo Rhodes
Come one, come all! Have I a deal for you! It’s Black Friday today and that, my friend, means that you can swindle away any of the crumbs you have left after Thanksgiving to buy last year’s items and rock bottom prices. But I’m not selling anything tangible. I’m not selling TVs, air fryers, stereos, or even bedding!
I’m selling your souls.
You sold me your soul last year as you prayed that you would make it out of the store alive. Last year, when you stomped over five bodies as you grabbed that cheap television because it looked like a great deal, and then realized how crazy you looked when you saw yourself fighting people for the best Black Friday deal on social media. But you didn’t care! You had a giant flat-screen TV and a new man cave recliner which became the prize of your life.
Every night you plopped yourself down in front of that TV thinking it was the best deal of the century. Your cable feeding your mind with make-believe and sports got you addicted and now it has become your goal in life! You take so much pride in that possession, so much that you brag about it to your friends and take great care in telling them how to flip through the channels as they laugh deep inside pretending to listen. They really don’t care about your obsession with your TV and joke about it with their wives when they get home.
Over the year, the pounds creep up and your body spreads out as you watch that boob tube. Nothing else matters now, just your beer, your nachos, and that damn TV with that special recliner. While your friends are out having fun without you, your wife is out with someone else because she realized that she couldn’t compete with the damn device. Yet still, you worship the 67 inches of dreamland in front of you. 67 inches gives you way more than the inches you could ever give her.
It’s Black Friday again and now you’re wondering if you should upgrade. Your friend has a 3D TV that he brags about but he doesn’t seem to care about it as much as you love your television and that special chair. As you think about it, you realize that you’re out of beer so you push the recliner back into the normal position and begin to stand realizing that the leather of the chair has stuck to your legs. Laughing a little, you try to pull your ever-growing ass up out of the chair but something seems stuck. You think it’s your boxers so you adjust them and tug just a little harder trying to get up.
The pain! That isn’t your boxers that are stuck, it’s your skin! You pull harder and it feels like someone is tearing the hair away from your body. Thinking it’s your hairy legs, you jerk one cottage cheese thigh up off the seat and scream in pain as the skin tears away from the ever-growing flab of your thighs. A trickle of something warm and fresh pools beneath you and when you feel for what you might have spilled from your breakfast of leftover Thanksgiving gravy you realize that it wasn’t your food at all, but it is coming from your body.
The blood! It’s thick and sticky as it coats your hand. There isn’t so much that you’re bleeding to death, but it’s more than just a small scratch. As you try to get up from your beloved chair, you realize that you’re infused with it–sewn to the chair you love so much.
Thinking back in a fury of pain, you wonder if you had fallen asleep while watching TV. Perhaps someone came in to rob the place and sewn you to the chair? That sounds ludicrous! Or maybe your wife was taking revenge and glued you to the chair. That must be it. That bitch! She poured some glue down while you slept because she hates you!
But as you try to press your fingers between yourself and the chair you realize that your pasty white flesh and the warm brown tone of the cow leather have become one without stitching. Your fingers probe all along the outsides of your legs and between your thighs as you realize everything, and I mean everything, is suddenly merged with the smooth brown leather.
The pain grows as you rock yourself back and forth trying to work your body out of the recliner but it is of no use because your skin is infused with the leather as if it were from your own. It tears just a little and you feel your skin rip down the side causing you to attempt a stifled cry but nothing comes from between your lips for they too have become blended together. You try hard to open your mouth to scream and the mottled brown leather from the chair tears open just a little but it snaps shut faster than you can purge the air from your lungs.
You can feel your arms sinking into the sides of the armchair and your body melting inside. It feels like you’re suffocating because you can’t take a breath. The harder you try to breathe, the more frustrating it becomes until you feel yourself panicking. Anxiety kicks in and you know you’re going to die. Tears trickle down your cheeks as the lack of oxygen burns your veins and then nothing.
You realize that you no longer need to breathe. Sitting there in the living room you look around using the only mobile parts of your body–your eyes. Your dog sniffs at you, whimpers, and then sits by the door waiting for you to let him out but you are unable to even move or let him know you’re there. At least the TV is still on and you can watch a movie while you figure out what is happening. You watch until you fall asleep in the unusual warmth of leather.
The smell of fresh urine stings your nose and awakes you from the brief slumber you were attempting. It was all a dream your mind screams and your body jerks for a moment. The dog pissing on what used to be your leg suddenly yelps and begins to bark in alarm.
“Biscuit! What are you barking at?” Your wife walks quickly through the room, grabs a cup of coffee from the machine, and stops to look around. “Ray?” she calls out. “Are you here?”
She checks that bathroom and outside then she looks at the chair in confusion and then around the room. “That asshole left the TV on!” she says, shaking her head while turning off the only thing that was keeping you sane, that damn Black Friday TV.
Exit
Hey, it’s Spooky Boo Rhodes. Thank you for listening. If you enjoyed these stories be sure to head on over to my website at www.scarystorytime.com and make a comment or on my social media just follow me at SpookyBooRhodes.
I’d love for you to join me on YouTube on my channel Splatterday Nightmares where we get together on Saturday nights for a livestream. These stories and others are told and then I chat for a while with the listeners. The week’s worth of stories without the chat are then ported to the podcast on YouTube. It’s a little bit different than what we do here and it’s up to you how you want to listen. You can also join my commercial-free Patreon page for just $5 per month or more to get this podcast and my Horror Stories of Sandcastle podcast commercial free plus signed copies of PDF ebooks, and more! Just visit http://www.spookyboo.club to find out more info.
That’s all for tonight. I’ll see you in your nightmares.
