2x10: The Muttering Man - Let's Not Meet (Feat. David Ault)

[00:00:00] My name is Andrew Tate and this is Season 2, Episode 10 of Lets Not Meet, a true horror podcast. My guest this week on Lets Not Meet is David Ault. You'll probably recognize his voice as one of the many talented voice artists on the No Sleep Podcast. Enjoy!

[00:00:57] I was home alone, one hot summer evening. My parents were out on business and I was enjoying the time alone to do whatever I wanted. We lived in a two bedroom, first floor apartment at the time. From the front entrance was the hall that opened into the kitchen.

[00:01:15] To the far left end of the kitchen was my room, and to the right of the kitchen was the living room which connected to a small den. My parents' bedroom was also connected to the living room off to the right.

[00:01:28] It was around 9pm when I had just finished dinner and began my nightly routine of taking out the trash, brushing my teeth, and shutting down for the night. Before retreating to my room, I opened all of the windows in the kitchen and the living

[00:01:43] room so that the house would cool down over the night. I'm a little bit of a security freak so all the doors in the house have locks including my bedroom and the bathroom. I shut off all of the lights and went to my room to watch TV.

[00:01:58] At around midnight, I dozed off. I had a weird dream or rather nightmare of someone knocking on my door with the knocking getting progressively louder. It was odd because in the dream I was laying in my bed but I couldn't move.

[00:02:14] The knocking got so blaringly loud until I couldn't stand it. Then I heard a scream and I woke up. My heart was racing and I was sweating but no damage done. I looked around my room and glanced at my alarm which read 4am.

[00:02:33] Seeing nothing out of the ordinary, I brushed off the dream and laid back down. I closed my eyes and suddenly heard knocking on my actual bedroom door. A little delirious, I thought that I had slipped back into the nightmare.

[00:02:48] My eyes shot wide open and I sat up and stared at my door, trying to listen. There were three slow knocks that followed. My very first thought was that my parents were back early with food or something and they wanted me to have some.

[00:03:07] My dad was notorious for knocking on my door when he got home late at night to check on me, sometimes without calling my first name. I always told him it spooked me and he should announce himself when he knocks but he always forgets.

[00:03:22] I got up and began walking towards the door but something felt wrong. When my parents came home there is usually commotion. They might be having a conversation or I can hear their keys jingling, my mom's heels, footsteps, something. This time though, it was dead silent.

[00:03:44] I stopped halfway to the door and called out, Who is it? No answer. I opened my mouth to call out again but before I could get my first word out there were several rapid knocks on the door.

[00:03:59] Very persistent knocks, as if it were an emergency and whoever was on the other side needed to get in now. I felt a lump in my throat. My mind was racing and the first thing I thought of is that maybe it was my dad on the other

[00:04:17] side, what if he was choking and couldn't speak, what if he needs my help. I was frozen in place and could not move. I said, who is it? Once more, again nothing. Please say something, please tell me who it is, it's not funny. I said.

[00:04:37] A few moments of silence went by. Suddenly it was as if someone threw their whole weight against the door. Rapid loud bangs began attacking the door, kicks, punches, it was as if there were three people on the other side trying to bang the door down.

[00:04:58] It was so loud that I started crying. I found myself jumping backwards and crawling to the corner of my room. The violent banging went on a few more moments, then silence. I sat in the corner frozen.

[00:05:14] My hands were covering my mouth and tears were rolling down my cheeks. I thought this was the end. I was shocked the door still stood because when I heard the first bang I thought the

[00:05:27] frame would come crashing down and whatever was on the other side would instantly enter and end my life. I sat there for a short period of time but it felt like an eternity. Suddenly I heard clinking, the sound of metal rushing into each other.

[00:05:46] I knew whatever was on the other side was going through the silverware drawer. If my life didn't end already this was the last chance because I wouldn't get another. I sprang up, climbed onto my dresser sitting against my window, threw open the curtain

[00:06:06] and shoved the window down and climbed out as quietly as I could. I fell to the sidewalk and ran to the police station down the road. I was hysterical and told them what had occurred. That night my parents were called and they did an investigation of my house.

[00:06:23] The only things out of place were a cigarette butt left at the base of my bedroom door and a butter knife on the kitchen table. In the following months we moved out of that apartment and thankfully I can say that was

[00:06:37] the most excitement I had ever been through. I soon went to college, graduated and moved to a new state with my family nearby and life is continuing as normal. I'll never know if it was a prank that night or someone was actually out to get me but

[00:06:54] whatever whoever you are let's definitely never meet. First, a little bit of context. I was 15 years old living in a small town in England. Our house had a long drive on the front walled on either side.

[00:07:23] There were large bay windows at the front and the door was tucked away to the right facing the boundary wall, invisible from the street. In front of the door, for reasons beyond my understanding, was a little square patch of

[00:07:37] loose decorative stones which crunched audibly whenever somebody walked across them. Stepping through the front door would land you in an empty room serving as a sort of entryway with the bay windows on your left, a step up to another room on your right and

[00:07:53] the staircase ahead and to the right. The room to the right was separated from the entryway by long curtains which on this particular occasion I had left drawn. This room housed the family PC so naturally I spent many sleepless nights there.

[00:08:10] The PC was on a desk immediately to the right as you stepped into the room. Beside it was a small window through which the front door and the drive was visible. I kept the curtains on that window closed. So it was around 2am.

[00:08:29] I had just finished doing what the majority of frustrated teenagers would do given internet access and privacy and moved on to whatever shitty browser game I was playing that week. The lights were out and my family were all upstairs.

[00:08:42] I leaned back absentmindedly and in my peripheral vision I could see the darkened bay windows. I almost choked. There was a hooded man stood right up against the glass, not moving, not talking, just stood there.

[00:09:00] I fought every urge to double take and pretended that I hadn't seen him staring blankly at the screen while I tried to figure out what to do. I didn't know how long he had been watching me.

[00:09:11] I leaned back to try and catch him in my peripheral again, still there. I couldn't see any of his features under the hood. It wasn't as if he had just been passing on the street and I caught him as he happened to glance into my house.

[00:09:26] This guy had to open the gate and creep down the drive to arrive at my window. Then he moved. I was still in a dreamlike state, rooted to my seat. I knew the door was locked and that my one man audience would at least be slowed by the

[00:09:43] double glazed windows should he try to get in. My mind raced through the options available to me. My phone was upstairs and getting to the staircase meant walking past the windows. In the other direction was the rest of the house, including the kitchen.

[00:09:59] I could arm myself with some kind of knife but even if I had one I wasn't sure I could use it if the guy managed to gain entrance. There was an unmistakable crunch as the guy stepped down onto the loose stone in front of the door.

[00:10:16] If the curtains had been open we'd have been face to face through the glass. That's when he started muttering. I told myself that he was talking on the phone and it wasn't until writing this years later

[00:10:34] that I realised I never saw a phone nor could I make out a single word of what he was saying. For all I know he was talking to himself or, and I really hate this idea, to me.

[00:10:48] He was inches away, blocked only by a pane of glass and curtains speaking in a low hushed tone. I couldn't stand it for a moment longer. I lifted myself from the chair with the air of a person surrounded by landmines trying desperately to be silent.

[00:11:06] All I could hear was the muttering and the sound of blood rushing in my ears. I inched towards the kitchen and retrieved the biggest knife I could find. Then I crept back to the desk, standing behind the wall that led to the entryway.

[00:11:22] I listened intently trying to figure out what he was saying. It was just loud enough to be audible but it was muffled by the building. I hadn't heard any further crunching so I knew he was still in the same spot by the door.

[00:11:37] I took a breath, readied myself as best as I could and broke into a sprint for the staircase. I didn't stop until I reached my mum's room. I woke her up and explained the situation.

[00:11:49] Then I made my way back to my room, mum in tow, knife in hand. My room was at the front of the house above the bay windows. This is the detail which kept me awake for weeks afterwards.

[00:12:03] There was a low roof below my window which could easily be scaled. I'd done it myself a few times in the years I'd spent there and I was a kid. My bedroom window was very slightly ajar.

[00:12:18] If he had decided to, he could have simply climbed up and into my room. She peered outside and he was gone. We went back downstairs to check both entrances. He had vanished completely. I didn't sleep that night and I kept the light on until sunrise.

[00:12:41] We got in touch with the police but nothing came of it. At the time my mum was running the pub around the corner from us so she checked the CCTV. She found the guy on tape leaving the pub in the direction of our house.

[00:12:53] The timestamp put it at an hour or so before I saw him. To this day I am unsettled by the sight of a darkened window, worried that I will look around again and he will be there, muttering just loud enough to be heard and watching.

[00:13:10] So, muttering man, let's not meet again. First off, this is the only creepy, scary-ish thing that has ever happened to me in my life, which is probably why it stands out so much in my memory.

[00:13:37] In hindsight, the location and general isolation probably made it seem much scarier than it was but at the time it felt like I'd stumbled into the opening scenes of a full-on horror film. Anyway, here's the story.

[00:13:52] So just over ten years ago I was fresh out of college and had moved back to my parents' house for the free rent and food for nine months or so before I was leaving the state for graduate school.

[00:14:04] Now my parents are super chill and gave me my own space in the house but being a 22-year-old single guy and living at a house in the sticks – they had just recently moved about 40

[00:14:15] miles south of a major midwest city – it's certainly not ideal but I didn't have any other options so I started looking for some work more to pass the time than to save up some money.

[00:14:27] Anyway, so summer turned to winter and I still hadn't found anything solid but by then I desperately needed to spend more time out of my parents' house so I took a part-time gig doing some light bookkeeping for a small business owner guy that my dad knew.

[00:14:44] I didn't really want to do it since it didn't pay much, was short term and wasn't even a real office set up but again, since my parents lived in the middle of nowhere midwest – think

[00:14:56] acres and acres of farms – I knew I had limited local opportunities to make some cash and this guy was going to pay me under the table as well. About that same time a friend of mine in the city said that if I just paid him $200 a month

[00:15:12] and helped clean up, he'd basically let me crash in his living room until I was ready to move out of state. That was all I needed to hear. I took the job. So my dad's friend's family had a construction type business – they helped out with building

[00:15:28] stuff a little but it was ultimately more focused on renting out a few bobcats and large augers they owned, also other various drills and then odds and ends like generators and other low level construction or farming equipment that someone in that area couldn't afford

[00:15:42] to purchase but needed to use from time to time. This was a small mum and pop type thing where everyone knew everyone and the office only opened on days when someone was coming by and was generally a mutually beneficial situation for the business owners and the locals.

[00:16:01] Since I had minored in a business adjacent area and my dad recommended me, they trusted me to go in there for about 15-20 hours a week and check and file the rental forms,

[00:16:12] make sure nobody missed a payment date if there was a payment plan in place, answer an email or two discussing prices and availability and so on. Super easy gig. The old building where I worked was about, I think, 90 years old and at the top of this

[00:16:29] little hill and the downstairs used to be an old country bar until the 1970s when this family bought it cheap, cleared out the bar and fenced in the property to use its parking lot area to store all their rental equipment and gear.

[00:16:42] I could generally come and go as I pleased, work any hours I wanted to as long as the work got done, so if things were slow and there weren't any rentals for a couple of

[00:16:50] days I'd usually go in after 7 and stay until around midnight or 1 since I knew I'd be alone and could listen to music loud and take my time and all that. The office where I worked was on the second floor of the building above the old bar and

[00:17:07] looked out onto the long driveway. From my seat I could easily see out the window and once or twice saw a family of deer or a raccoon scamper by and I always glanced out when I saw movement since it was very noticeable.

[00:17:21] It was incredibly remote, very still and quiet so if something unusual occurred or if something felt off I definitely noticed it. One night during winter it had snowed a few inches and my dad told me to stay in because

[00:17:36] the roads were bad but I had an old SUV and more than that just really wanted to get out of the house so I went into work at about 8pm and was going to stay until just after 1.

[00:17:50] I always left the gate open at the bottom of the hill since believe me when I say that nobody ever showed up at night since we were literally in the middle of nowhere.

[00:18:01] I think the nearest occupied house was about 2 miles down the road and to even turn onto our short road you had to only be coming to our specific building and probably know it was there beforehand.

[00:18:14] It was a local zoney type thing and very small since the family had inherited a lot of money and kinda did this rental thing on the side. Basically someone would never just get lost and end up at our building.

[00:18:33] So I'm jamming away to some fallout boy as everyone makes mistakes when they're young and having some coffee and kept glancing at the snow outside here and there since our one orange-ish street light reflected onto the ground at the gate and was causing the

[00:18:46] light to shine off the snow in a really cool and dare I say pretty way. At one point around midnight I went downstairs to the big bathroom to do my bathroom business and then came back upstairs and got settled back into my work.

[00:19:05] I probably did about 5 minutes of work when I glanced outside and saw a huge imprint of something in the fresh snow just below the light. It seemed like it must have been a huge dog or substantial animal had just rolled around

[00:19:20] on the ground there on its back or something. Since I didn't notice it just 15 minutes before it had to have happened while I was in the bathroom or maybe when my back was turned since I would have seen that type of movement for sure.

[00:19:35] I shook it off and assumed a dog or maybe even a farm animal, this was common, it was that type of area, had got loose and maybe was attracted to the light or something, who knows.

[00:19:48] At around 2 in the morning I was leaving and as always got out of my car to lock the gate up, and to be honest I'd pretty much forgotten about the imprint in the snow, but when I

[00:19:58] When I looked down I was shocked to see that it wasn't just some disturbed snow, but it was undeniably the imprint of a human made snow angel. If you don't know what a snow angel is, it's when kids lie on their back in the snow and

[00:20:13] push their arms and legs back and forth so that when they get up it looks like the outline of an angel. I used to do this when I was a kid so I 100% knew for sure that's what it was and it was deliberately made underneath the light post.

[00:20:29] But it wasn't from a kid, it was from a very large person or at the very least a normal sized adult wearing tons of layers of big winter clothing. I looked up and saw what I already knew, that whoever had made this snow angel could easily

[00:20:44] look up and have seen me through that window, so they must have waited for me to head downstairs to make this angel. Now I definitely would have seen or heard if someone drove up to our building even if

[00:20:59] I was in the bathroom, so I knew someone had to have walked deep into the freezing cold and snow for a few miles, stopped in front of our building and then do a snow angel in

[00:21:09] the small amount of time I wasn't sitting in front of my desk window. I glanced around for tracks in the snow and saw that there was one set that led to the nearby woods to the right of the building, so it was clear that the person didn't use

[00:21:23] the road but instead came from the opposite side, which made me instantly uneasy since that side was just trees and darkness for miles and miles. I was definitely a little freaked out now once I realised that someone had just been

[00:21:41] this close to me secretly in the middle of the woods, and I looked around but didn't see anything amiss at all and now just wanted to get the hell out of there.

[00:21:51] When I got back in my car and drove a few feet, I realised that my boss would be there in like 4 hours and might see the snow angel and assume I did it, since he probably assumed I kept the gate locked when I was there.

[00:22:05] It wouldn't have been that big of a deal at all but I was young and felt like I might be made fun of by him if nothing else, they were all manly men and I liked books, so I

[00:22:15] opened the gate back up real quick, ran over and kicked the snow around so it hid the angel, looked it up again and went back to my car. Also I should note that this is what really happened at this moment, but I almost lied

[00:22:31] here and said something else since it seems fake, since I assume the average person wouldn't get back out of their SUV and not just flee in their car because they'd be embarrassed

[00:22:41] about a snow angel, but at the time I was insecure and cared a lot about what others thought, so unfortunately this is what I did. Also I wasn't exactly fully terrified at this point even though it was certainly unsettling,

[00:22:58] I just thought it was really weird and could have been an illegal hunter, even though hunting at night in the cold didn't make much sense. Either way the imprint was made 2 hours earlier and I assumed they were long gone, but that's when I heard it.

[00:23:16] When I was getting into my SUV there was the loudest high pitched laughing coming from the woods. It almost sounded like a fake laugh like the witch in the wizard of oz or something, like

[00:23:29] someone was doing it fake on purpose to show they weren't scared of me or how I'd react at all once I knew they were there laughing at me on our property. It was close enough that I knew they could probably see me, but I couldn't see them at

[00:23:43] all since other than the street light I was under there was no illumination. After a few seconds of laughing they stopped, and then it was just silence everywhere except for my heart beating through my ears.

[00:24:02] Then the laughing started again, though louder this time, more like screaming and laughing combined, I sort of froze for just like 5 seconds listening in a panic. Now I spent a lot of time in that area and I know what coyotes and foxes sound like at

[00:24:17] night with their high pitched screeches during mating season so I can't completely logistically rule that out, but to me it honestly felt like an adult man trying to emulate a woman laughing like someone was deliberately trying to make a fake scary shriek laugh in order to scare someone.

[00:24:39] Well it fucking worked. After that 5 seconds I immediately filled with adrenaline, got into my car and drove the hell away from there as fast as I could without sliding off the road.

[00:24:51] Back at home I was up all night trying to figure it out and told my parents the story when they woke up. After talking it out we all decided it was one of two things, it was either my brain

[00:25:03] somehow convinced itself that the snow formation was angel shaped when it really was just caused by some animal and then the snow tracks and laughing was just a coyote or red fox, though I don't think that's what it was.

[00:25:17] What I truly believe, the second thing, which is that some local was out walking around for some reason and decided to mess with me. I didn't have any close friends left in that area that would do this and if they did they

[00:25:31] would certainly have brought it up to make fun of me for speeding away in terror. I found out later that the nearest house was a super old couple so I highly doubt it was

[00:25:42] one of them, which means that whomever it was went out in the woods in the night in the freezing cold, was just to mess with a stranger. I don't have any mental issues or a family history of them, I didn't do drugs, I drank

[00:25:57] socially at that time but certainly didn't that night. I also don't believe in the paranormal so I never once gave that a thought. In my heart I know someone was out there.

[00:26:10] I worked there another six weeks or so and never had a single issue, though I knew where my boss kept his gun and I always made sure it was there when I started my shift. And I certainly always locked the gate from then on.

[00:26:25] Thinking about this experience that night, the part that freaked me out the most was that he would have had to have waited around for me to leave for just about two hours just to do that laugh.

[00:26:36] He didn't know me, I could have been crazy and the type of person to get mad and try to find and attack him, yet he didn't seem scared or to care while he tried to mess with me.

[00:26:49] For some random dude this is probably a story he tells from his point of view to make all his friends giggle hysterically but for me, that dude, the one I call Angel in the Snow Guy, the one with a laugh I will never forget. Let's Not Meet.

[00:27:05] Thank you for listening to this week's episode of Let's Not Meet, a true horror podcast. This outro has been recently re-recorded as some changes were made at the request of an author for safety or privacy reasons.

[00:27:22] The credits for this week's show are all still available in the show notes. All of the stories you've heard this week were narrated and produced with the permission of their respective authors. Let's Not Meet, a true horror podcast, is not associated with Reddit or any other message

[00:27:35] boards online. If you have a story you'd like to share, send it to letsnotmeetstories at gmail.com. Thanks for listening. See you next time.