Lot 238

Every year millions of people head into the wilderness searching for peace, beauty, and adventure. But hidden in those same scenic landscapes are stories of violence, survival, and lives cut short. I'm Dilya DeAmbra, and on my podcast, Park Predators, I uncover the true crimes that happened in the most amazing places on Earth. Listen to Park Predators wherever you get your podcasts. Hi listeners, I have a story I want to tell you. There was this doctor over at St. Agri's who would kill his patients. Oh yes, it was madness. Aren't you afraid the light take away getting? I'm sorry, I didn't listen to you. That adrenaline, I'm a poor bit. I snapped, totally lost it. He had no idea what was on those tapes. It was like a song. All he had the outcast. So gather around, gather around, and listen to me. Close. I used to work at a university. No, I wasn't a brilliant, beloved professor on track for tenure. I was a lowly staff worker running small programs and events for graduate students. Now, before you get the wrong idea, you should know I loved my job. Well, liked it anyway. The pay was steady, my supervisor was supportive. I had fantastic benefits and got pretty much every holiday paid off. Even National Arbor Day. The only problem was the parking. Even though I was a full-time employee, the university made its staff pay for parking. I thought it was shifty, but hey, I wasn't the one making the rules. Naturally, my stubborn mule sought to avoid the $7 parking fee. So I studied for some exemption, a workaround, if you will. And I found one. It was called Lot 238. About 1.5 miles away from my office was a big, empty parking garage, left over from an old veteran's hospital. Stretching six stories high, the concrete lot remained the only military building within miles of its vicinity still standing. The rest of the grounds, including the abandoned army barracks, were knocked down years ago. Even though Lot 238 remained intact, no one ever parked there. There were far too many urban legends surrounding the place. Paranormal patients that had psychotic breakdowns. Neighborhood pets sacrificed for pagan slaughter. Suicidal soldiers hell-bent on haunting. You know, that sort of thing. And of course, my mother would remind me often, every family dinner, to be exact, that she didn't like me walking alone so far away and late at night. But I took martial arts as a kid, always carried pepper spray with me, and digested a heavy amount of true crime content. So I figured I was fine, and that Lot 238 was nothing to be afraid of. But how wrong I was. One night, last November, I left work extra late. I was finishing up a proposal for new programming. When I looked up from my desk, I noticed everyone had already left. So I picked up my purse and gathered the essentials. Phone, keys, pepper spray, of course. And my favorite shade of red lipstick. Don't judge. We all want to feel pretty in our own skin. Then I began the long trek to my car. I remember the moon hung high in a cloudless sky. And it was quiet. It was as if a blanket of sleep had smothered all of campus and everything around it. There were no cars, and no other walkers. Just me and the crunch of my shoes on gravel as I walked further and further away from campus. And then Lot 238, the motionless monstrosity that it was came into view. Like a hunched shadow carved against the backdrop of night, it sat atop the hillside, a giant mausoleum. I stopped and stared at it. But only for a second, because then a strong gust of winter wind blew by. I wrapped my arms tightly around myself and picked up the pace. In no time I was standing just outside the first floor of the parking garage. I turned on my phone light and walked inside. There were rows and rows of rectangular columns expanding far back into the black. Fast food wrappers and broken bottles littered the floor. And not one single car was in sight. Besides slits of moonlight streaming in from the windows, the first floor was completely dark. I headed straight for the stairwell. I usually parked on the top floor so people from the street couldn't see my car. But when I reached the staircase, I stopped. The thought of climbing all those stairs was almost enough to kill me. I had worked about 12 hours that day and was beyond exhausted. So for the heck of it, I did something I had never done before. I walked over to the elevator and pressed the up button. And never, not for one second, did I think that the elevator door would open. Lot 238 had been decrepit and desolate for decades. Of course the elevator wouldn't work. I had just started to turn away, smiling at my joke when... I turned to face the elevator. Its doors were wide open. A small part of me knew. It wasn't right. A small part of me knew I should turn around and run right there, right then. But my back ached, my feet throbbed, and my stomach grumbled. I just wanted to go home. So in spite of everything my lizard brain was screaming, I watched myself walk inside the elevator. And with a slow, sharp, scraped, the doors shut behind me. Once I was inside the elevator, none of the buttons worked. It didn't even day. A rattleship or anything to show that my input mattered. I dreaded the red call button but pressed it anyway. Nothing. Not even a sound. I tried prying the rusty doors until my fingers thung. But it might as well have been pulling up tombstones. After that I figured I needed to call for help. But as soon as I pulled out my phone, I saw that I had no signal. No service. Frustrated, I shoved my phone back into my pocket and sank to the floor. Then the elevator began to move. But it wasn't going up. It was going down. For a brief moment I set there on the floor of the elevator completely dumbstruck. Was I actually moving? And how was it going down? I was on the ground floor. I mean, what else was there below me? I was dropping, lower and lower beneath the surface. I rose to my feet and gripped the sidewalk, steadying myself as the elevator continued its descent. Then suddenly and abruptly, the elevator screeched to a stop. A second went by. Then another. Then. Everything on the other side of those doors was pitch black. I began to feel uneasy, staring out into that absolute darkness. I remember feeling the great big void of space expanding far in front of me. And I knew that anything could be out there. Listening to me. Watching me. I hated that feeling, and I immediately tried pressing the closed door button. When that didn't work, I started pressing all the buttons, everything on the panel. But still, nothing worked. The elevator doors held wide open. I was breathing heavily and trying not to panic when suddenly, a few feet down, a bright LED shot on. The buzzing light lit up the space right in front of the elevator door. Then another beam right next to it clicked on. Then another. And another. Until an entire line of LED beams lit up, row by row, one after the other. I couldn't tell if it was an illusion, but the line of LED beams stretched so far down, I couldn't see where the last one ended. And in that moment, right before I realized where I was, I wasn't sure if I liked the dark or the light better. Because before me, was an underground level of the parking garage that seemed to expand so far, and so wide, I couldn't tell where it began or ended. There was no curve of the lane to signify a higher level. No ramp to show which way let out. There was only that bottom floor, filled with hundreds and hundreds of rectangular cement columns. I took a tentative step forward and looked to my left, then to my right. Again, there seemed to be no end to this underground floor. No way out, as far as I could see. And that was the problem, wasn't it? I could see an exit or an end, at least not from where I was standing. So, even though I was scared out of my mind, I braced myself and stepped outside. As I stalked further into the concrete jungle, I took tiny, trepid steps, until the elevator shrank into a small black dot behind me. And even there, nearly a hundred feet away, nothing around me seemed to change. And suddenly, it occurred to me, I could get lost in this place. I needed a way to mark my progress. Shaking slightly, I dug into my purse, fishing around for a pen or marker, but came up blank. After rummaging some more, my hand tightened around my pepper spray. And I made a silent prayer, thanking myself for not being a complete idiot. I gripped the canister with my left hand and kept searching my purse for. And then, my fingers found the red tube of lipstick. I pulled it out, uncapped it, and drew a big X on the nearest cement column in line with the elevator. That would have to do. I continued forward inch by inch, not seeing but needing an end to this unending madness. I must have marked at least a dozen columns before I saw the exit sign. First, I couldn't believe my eyes. I had just walked for what felt like hours without noticing a single difference in my surroundings. But then, there it was. Shining in big, neon green, capital letters. Exit! And right beneath it was a grey door. A staircase. Suddenly climbing up a dozen flights of stairs seemed like a marvelous thing to do. I ran to the door, relief washing over me. I was gonna get out of there. I was gonna have one hell of a story and me and my mom were gonna laugh and I would never park here again and I was gonna sleep in tomorrow because... But I never finished that thought. Because as soon as I entered the stairwell, I knew something was wrong. Really, really wrong. The air around me dropped 10 degrees and there was this smell. This rancid, musty odor that knocked the wind out of me. I was choking back a gag when the lights began to pulsing, flickering on and off. And there I was, standing at the foot of the first flight of stairs when I heard it. A sad, soft sort of wine. I stood there remaining absolutely quiet and listening. Someone was there. Maybe a few flights up and I could tell from the noises that they were hurting. They were hurting badly. Instinct struck and I shot up the stairs and as I got hired, the smell got worse and those shallow, soft, whimper's grew louder. Still, when I reached the foot of the fifth floor, I stopped again. I stopped because I had just stepped in a puddle of blood spattered, staining the walls, scattered in streaks like a demented polych painting. I was rooted to the ground, to the pool at my feet, when suddenly a loud tearing sound ripped the air. It was just around the corner that boo-hoo moaning and now a heavy wet, dribbling. I should have left. I should have gone back down the stairs, silent and unseen. But I was hooked on reality. And in the real world, what I was about to see doesn't exist. It was just a nightmare, a black shape born behind closed eyes. If I went around the corner, if I just saw with my own eyes what was up there, it would be better. I'd wake up. It doesn't make sense, but in the moment nothing made sense. I gripped the railing tight and took one step up. Then another. And another. And then I turned the corner. I remember staring. More than I remember what I was staring at. I waited for it to make sense, but it never did. To this day, I have no idea what was in the stairwell of Lot 238. But it was real. I swear to you, it was all too real. Hunched over a mound of flesh was a slim, willowy figure. Its back was turned to me so I couldn't see its face. But I noticed right away the protruding spine, the withered thin arms that hung past its knees. And the hands curled into massive, sickle sharp claws. And while I knew it wasn't human, I also knew it wasn't an animal. It couldn't have been not the way it was moving with absolute precision. It was dissecting the pile of gourd. The bloody mass might have been human once or another object distortion, like itself. And now it was muleing as it picked and sliced a slab of skin straight off the dead meat. It began humming, and I was crying. Then I noticed something else entirely. Its skin was a quilt of colors. Different sized strips of pink, white, grey, and brown varied in texture. Some of it looked like fur while others were stretched and clistening. But in certain places, this matching suit was sagging and peeling, exposing patches of mossy bone. I stood there, horror struck. As it dawned on me that the way the colors stuck together, the way they hung in torn fragments, it was almost as if it was wearing pieces of skin, strung together, torn from... Its head perked up. The bent over figure uncurled its spine. And before I could even guess what it was doing, it turned its head. It had no eyes, no mouth, no nose or ears of its own. Only half a bloody snout now sagged off the side of its face. A second later, the loose skin slid off. And there, where a face should have been, was nothing. Nothing, but blank, empty space. Even though the creature had no features, I knew it had seen me. It was watching me, listening to my heartbeat, pounding out of my chest. Then its neck began to turn in no way that it should. Its spine and torso twisting under skin, like bending around in an oversized shirt. And in this way, it turned around to face me without even lifting a foot. Then the creature took one step down. I flew down the stairs. I remembered gripping the railing as I rounded each corner, propelling myself down and around. The cling crack of claws scraping cement kept at my heels, but somehow I made it to the bottom of the staircase, first through the door. Once I was back in the parking garage, I almost stopped, overwhelmed by the hundreds of columns set in both directions. I wasn't sure which way to run. But then, in the distance, I spotted a bright red X. And I thought to myself, just follow the bread crumbs. I made a B line for one of the marked pillars, and once I passed it, I saw the next mark about 20 feet away, and the next one about 20 feet after that. The whole line of columns marked in red X's burned so clear and bright before me, it was like a goddamn runway. And I knew if I could just make it to the elevator, maybe this time it would... Behind me, the stairwell door crashed open, and I looked back only once. The creature snapped its head in my direction, and got on all fours. A fresh wave of panic washed over me, and I sprinted faster towards the next checkpoint. I passed it in no time and went on to the next. And then out of nowhere, I could see it. It was just a speck in the distance, but it was there, all the same. The elevator. And even from far away, I could tell its doors were still open. I pushed on even harder. I was going to make it just a little bit more. I was... I remember hitting the ground and seeing stars. My head was pounding. The rotten foul stench struck me first. Then I felt the weight of the creature pinning me down. I struggled to break free until I heard something tear. And scream. My screaming. As my vision came back, I looked down at my right forearm, and saw the creature peeling off a strip of skin. I could feel the claw unzipping my arm, shaving the skin with a tug of its nail, the rip. And then fresh air on my bare flesh, flushed my eyes with vibrant colors. On impulse, I was swinging, punching with my one free arm, trying to break free. Then I felt it, still there, like a gift in my left hand, the pepper spray. I was still clutching the pepper spray. In one swift go, I twisted the actuator with my thumb and pressed down hard. I aim for its non-face, but sprayed everywhere. I felt an intense burning sensation in my eyes and arm, and without thinking I dropped the canister, but also I felt the weight of the creature pull off me. I stumbled to my feet, linking back tears. The creature was left riving on the floor. It was shredding its own skin, tearing at the quilt of flesh and flinging patches like bad dandruff, seizing a chance I turned and ran towards the elevator. I don't know why I thought that time would be any different, when none of the buttons worked before, but I still tried. I pressed every button, smashing and smearing the panel with my own blood. I tried manually pulling at the doors, but they were stuck, spread wide open. The creature wasn't on the ground anymore. Now it was standing at full height, and facing me. Pain was shooting up my right arm, but I was still spamming the buttons. The amalgam started to walk towards me with slow, even steps. As it got closer, the bright LEDs began to shut off. Row by row, one by one, until nothing but the elevator light remained. The nightmare stalked forward, the void trailing behind it like a cloak. It was only a few feet away. My back into the corner then sank to the ground. My whole body was trembling, but I dove into my purse for something. Anything to defend myself. The pepper spray was gone, and whatever I found I threw at the creature. I remember each item, my phone, the lipstick, the bounce off its skin. The last thing in my purse was my car keys. I held them tight, sliding the largest key between my knuckles, ready to swing, and that was it. That was all I had left. Just then, the creature lowered itself on all fours, coming face to face. Five claws reached forward. I closed my eyes and... it picked up the red lipstick. I stayed completely still, and watched as the creature, with its long nails, delicately uncapped the tube. Then it began to smear the makeup, all over its missing face. Slowly, the black hole between its shoulders stretched wide. The laceration spreading like cracked lips. And now, a mouth tucks shape, a mouth inlay with rows and rows of hidden teeth. The creature hissed. Then, it grinned. I couldn't breathe. I couldn't move. I pictured the corpse within a stairwell, stripped of skin and braced myself for the unimaginable. But it never came. Instead, the creature, still clutching the red lipstick, crawled backwards, fading from the light. Then, with a slow, sharp scrape, the elevator doors closed. And then, went up. As soon as those doors opened, I ran like the devil himself was chasing me. I ran and ran and never stopped, not until I found someone. I remember slamming into the woman at the gas station. She was angry at first. Then, she saw all the blood, and called an ambulance. I passed out after that. When I awoke, the police and medical staff asked who hurt me. They wanted to know who cut off my skin. I tried telling them. I tried telling them about the creature down in the lowest level of Lot 238. But they tilted their heads, or raised an eyebrow, or tried to hide a smirk. They treated me like I was nuts, every single one of them, except the sergeant who said, in a gentle tone, that I must have been mistaken. Because Lot 238 was torn down, decades ago, along with the rest of the old military grounds. I sat there, speechless, not knowing what to think. But then, I looked down at my arm, at my bandaged, bloody skin, and I knew it was real. And I swear to you, it was all too real. But I think what you want. Call me crazy, or reckless, but regardless of Lot 238, if it's still out there or not, promise me, dear listener, that you will take care of yourself. Promise me, you won't park in abandoned lots to save a few bucks. Bet on safety and security, always. Because, if not, you might end up paying the ultimate price. Full Body Chills is an audio chuck production. This episode was written by Amanda Wisdom and read by Ellie McPherson. This story was modified slightly for audio retelling, but you can find the original and full on our website. I think Chuck would approve. Everyone's told a lie, but what happens when one lie becomes a life, a movement, a conspiracy? I'm Josh Dean, host of Camillean, and I uncover true stories of deception scams so intimate and convincing they fooled the people closest to them. These are strangers, they're lovers, friends, and trusted allies. Because the most dangerous cons don't feel like crimes. They feel personal. Listen to Camillean, wherever you get your podcasts.