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Monster in the Closet

October 25, 2025·20 min·1 clip

Investigators find mummified human remains hidden in the walls, attic, and basement of his childhood home.

The episode opens with a narration about universal childhood fears of dark spaces in the home — basements, attics, and closets. The narrator describes his own intense fear of his bedroom closet, which felt threatening at night despite being a plain four-foot-wide space with a mirrored door. He tried various methods to manage the fear: placing a chair against the door, tying it shut, and even sleeping inside it one terrifying night. His father, described as a thoughtful, hands-on man who loved understanding how things worked, eventually noticed his son's distress. The father sat down with the boy and asked him to draw the monster he imagined lived in the closet, explaining they would know what to look for. As the child drew horns, fangs, bat wings, and poison sacks, he began to realize the creature he'd imagined couldn't logically fit in the closet and probably didn't exist. His father pocketed the drawing and promised to keep watch. The fear subsided for a while. The narration then shifts: a few years later, investigators obtained a search warrant for the family home and found mummified human remains in the living room wall, under concrete in the basement, buried in the backyard, and concealed behind kitchen cabinets. The father had been sliding bodies into wall cavities from the attic. He kept the narrator's room clear, apparently to prevent the child from accidentally breaking through a wall. The father was arrested on twenty-six counts of murder. The narrator went to foster care, noting that the small rooms there felt safer because they had no closets. He describes receiving letters from his father in prison after turning eighteen, stamped with the correctional officer seal, but being unable to read them. The letters stopped after a decade. The narrator went on to work hospital administration, met a woman named Shelly, and after some time told her about his father. She was shocked but accepted it, and became the first person he believed when she told him it wasn't his fault. They married. When Shelly became pregnant, the narrator felt compelled to visit his father in prison — needing to know he didn't carry the same darkness. He drove alone, waited with a legal pad, and was confronted with a frail, aged man who had never had a visitor. He asked his father directly: did you do it? Yes. Why? No answer came. Then the narrator asked the question he'd come to ask: why were there no bodies in the walls of his room? Before his father could respond, the narrator suggested the legal explanation — that he didn't want the boy to accidentally find them. His father shook his head and said only that the narrator had been scared of the closet, that he hadn't wanted to make it worse, and that he loved him. The drive home was dark and the narrator doesn't remember it. He told Shelly where he'd been. The story closes with the narrator unable to sleep, aware that some part of his father lives in him, afraid for his child, and still afraid of the closet.

As heard by us

A child's closet fear turns into domestic horror, and the house never feels safe again.

Monster in the Closet starts with a child's fear and keeps tightening the room around it until the closet stops feeling like a worry and starts feeling like a place where something was already waiting.

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Why you'd press play

For when you want a childhood closet fear to sharpen into something much worse.

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