"Something comes up our alley at 4:10 every morning. My mother met it for nine years." Creepypasta

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A man discovers his late mother's secret ritual of paying neighbors to stand in an alley at 4:10 AM to ward off a mysterious entity that relieves chronic pain by transferring numbness and bodily dysfunction.

Key takeaways

• The narrator (Russ) suffered from failed back surgery syndrome and chronic pain, which vanished after standing in an alley at 4:10 AM for a mysterious entity to touch him.
• His mother secretly paid neighbors like Pauline Yost $20–$40 per night for nine years to keep the alley clear of the creature during her cancer treatment.

Main topics

• Chronic pain management and medical desperation
• Supernatural entity encounters and horror folklore

Notable quotes

"The money doesn't reach the thing in the alley. All it buys is a neighbor's agreement to stay in bed."

Conclusion

The episode delivers a bleak meditation on pain, sacrifice, and the hidden costs of

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:01) My mother had cancer for four years and never opened the morphine. The sealed box is still in the cabinet over her sink. The date on it doesn't run out until August. Speaker 1 (0:14) I know why now. I found out the morning after we buried her, standing at her back door in the cold, holding out a dinner plate like an idiot. Speaker 1 (0:25) I'm 41. I did roofs for 19 years, mostly tear-offs and re-sheeting. In 2021, I went through a warehouse deck in Frackville that had been rotting under the membrane since before I was born. 22 feet. They fused L4 to L5, put hardware in, told me I'd be back on the ladder in eight months. The fusion took. The pain didn't care. They called it failed back surgery syndrome. My wife left in the second year. I moved into my mother's front bedroom on the third. So, it was already my house, sort of, when it stopped being hers. Speaker 1 (1:13) We buried her on Tuesday, November 4th. Nick drove up from Reading and went back the same night for work. I stayed. Speaker 1 (1:24) Around midnight, I went down to the basement to shut off the water to the outside spigot before it froze. The breaker panel is at the bottom of the stairs. Taped inside the door, where you'd put a list of which breaker does what, was an index card in my mother's handwriting. Speaker 1 (1:45) 410 not before left don't say anything to it lock the door after Speaker 1 (1:53) On the back, in a different pen, softer. Speaker 1 (1:58) If it doesn't come, go back to bed. It's fine. Speaker 1 (2:04) The card was soft at the corners, like it had been handled for years. In the drawer under the phone, there was a spiral notebook. Dates down and left, dollar amounts next to them. 20, 40, 20. It went back further than I care to count. Initials against maybe a third of the entries. Speaker 1 (2:28) My mother worked at Boscoff's in Pottsville for 26 years. She was the kind of woman who'd float you 40 bucks, never bring it up again. So I read it as a lending book and put it back in the drawer. That was Tuesday. Speaker 1 (2:46) I didn't sleep. I don't much. Sitting is worse than standing. Lying down is worse. So most nights I do a rotation. By 3.30, I was downstairs in my coat. Speaker 1 (3:02) The kitchen faucet was running, maybe a quarter turn into an empty sink. I shut it off. I took the note to mean my mother had been feeding something. A cat, maybe. Whatever gets into an alley in this town. I got a plate down out of the drainer. A stack of plates sat in the cabinet. Each one chipped along the same edge, some badly. At four, I unlocked the back door and stood in it with the plate. Speaker 1 (3:34) Our alley runs behind the row. Cinders and dirt, widener for one truck. A pole light at the 5th street end throws a cone maybe 30 feet up. At ten past four, something came into the alley from the dark end and stopped where the light did. Speaker 1 (3:54) I didn't see it that night. All I had was that it was low, no higher than my waist, and that it held that height while it moved. It came about eight feet into the cone of light, stopped, and did not come any further. Speaker 1 (4:11) I put the plate down on the step. Speaker 1 (4:15) The thing in the alley stayed exactly where it was, long enough that my hands started shaking. I stood in the doorway and thought. Speaker 1 (4:25) Alright, so she was crazy. And I'm out here too. So what does that make me? Speaker 1 (4:33) Then, I thought about the card. I reached my left hand out past the doorframe into the cold, palm up, and held it there. I heard something moving. Speaker 1 (4:46) It was warm. It came up under my hand, wet and steaming. Whatever part of it touched me was soft, softer than a dog's nose. It pressed up into my palm for a few seconds, and it was heavier than it looked. Then it wasn't there, and I heard it going back up the alley unhurried. I locked the door, turned around, and stood in my mother's kitchen with my hand still out in front of me, like I was waiting to be handed something. Speaker 1 (5:22) I slept 11 hours. I'd made coffee before sleeping and drunk it half standing at the counter. Only when I set the cup down did I realize I couldn't feel the left of my tongue. A bit down on it. Hard enough that it should have squirmed. There was nothing there at all. I went up the stairs without having to hold the rail for the first time in years. Speaker 1 (5:52) The tongue came back Thursday afternoon, most of the way. Wednesday night, I didn't go down. I sat on the edge of my bed with my boots on from 3.40 until almost 5, telling myself I was making a decision. What I was doing was waiting to see if the pain came back first. Speaker 1 (6:14) It did. Thursday at 11 in the morning, all at once. By 4 Friday morning. I was at the door. Speaker 1 (6:26) It came the same eight feet into the light and waited. I felt the warmth in my palm and the numbness. Saturday too. I didn't put a plate out either night. I stood there in my coat over my pajamas, left hand past the frame, and got two more days without my back pain. I'd once been offered a spinal cord stimulator. $11,000 my insurance wouldn't cover for a 40 % chance I'd feel a difference. Speaker 1 (7:00) Nick came up Saturday afternoon to start on the house. She'd planned it out in a notebook, as usual. Three days, one floor a day, dumpster ordered for Monday. She's 34, and she's had endometriosis since she was 19. It took until she was 26 for anybody to figure it out. In between, she got told it was anxiety, her weight, her birth control. She's had two surgeries, and there's a third on the list. She stands up out of the chair the same way I do now, in stages. Speaker 1 (7:39) We've never talked about it. Speaker 1 (7:42) We did the front room, then the stairs, and we were okay. It was almost good. There's a stretch in the middle of clearing a house where it turns into a job, and you stop looking at what you're holding. We got about two hours of that. Then she opened the kitchen cabinets for the plates. Speaker 1 (8:04) Mom, she said. She held one up. The chip was the size of a quarter, right on the rim, and the glaze under it had gone brown from the dishwater getting in. She put it down and took the next one. Same edge. She went through the whole stack and stood there