This one targets a habit most of us share — until the feed starts watching back.
I run a true crime podcast. Nothing huge — about forty thousand subscribers, the kind of audience that sends you handwritten letters and argues in the comments about whether the Zodiac Killer is still alive. I know most of my regulars by their usernames. That's how small it is. That's how much I pay attention.
Six weeks ago, a new account subscribed. Username: @still_here_394.
I noticed it because the number was odd. Not a round figure, not a date. Just:
still_here_394. I assumed it was generated automatically — you know how some platforms assign you a random tag if your chosen name is taken. I moved on.
The account didn't comment. Didn't like anything. It just... subscribed. And according to my analytics dashboard, it watched every single episode. All one hundred and twelve of them, in order, over the course of four days.
Four days. Back-to-back. No pauses longer than a few minutes.
I told myself it was a bot, or someone on a long road trip, or an insomniac. I've had stranger listeners.
Then the episode requests started.
Every podcast platform has a suggestion box, and mine gets flooded weekly with cold cases, conspiracy theories, regional mysteries. I read them all. But the requests from @still_here_394 were different. They weren't asking about famous cases. They were asking about people I knew personally.
The first one came in on a Tuesday:
"Can you do an episode on the missing girl from Dunnmore Street? The one who lived across from you in 2019."
I had lived on Dunnmore Street in 2019. A girl had gone missing from my building — she was found three weeks later, unharmed, visiting a college friend she'd forgotten to tell her family about. It was never reported publicly. I had never mentioned it on the podcast or anywhere online.
I tried to convince myself it was a coincidence. A guess. A troll who'd somehow dug up a local police record.
The second request came the following Thursday:
"What about your brother's accident? The one at the reservoir. You were there. You never talk about it."
My brother drowned at Calloway Reservoir when I was eleven. He survived — barely, and with a limp he still carries. We have never spoken about it publicly. My parents asked us not to. There is no record of it anywhere I can find.
I reported the account. The platform said it didn't violate any terms of service — it was just making content requests. They closed the ticket in under an hour.
I stopped opening the suggestion box after that. I told my editor, Priya, and she laughed and said it sounded like an ARG — an alternate reality game, some fan trying to spook me for content. I almost believed her.
Almost.
Last Monday, I published a new episode. Nothing special — a cold case from the 1980s, a missing farmhand in rural Ohio. Standard stuff. Within seven minutes of going live, @still_here_394 had listened to the entire forty-two-minute episode.
Seven minutes.
And left its first comment. The only comment it has ever left, on any episode, on anything:
"I'm not interested in the Ohio case. I'm interested in you. I've been listening since before you started recording."
I called the platform's safety team. They looked up the account and went quiet for a moment that lasted too long.
Then the representative said: "Sir, this account was created in 2019. But your podcast launched in 2021."
I asked her to repeat that.
"The account predates your channel by two years. We don't know how it subscribed to you. Technically, according to our records, it subscribed before your channel existed."
She said it was probably a database error. A glitch in the timestamp. She apologized and offered me three months of premium hosting for free.
I haven't published an episode since.
The account is still there. Still subscribed.
My dashboard shows it as active right now — the little green dot that means a listener is currently tuned in.
I haven't uploaded anything in eleven days.
There is nothing for it to be listening to.
— Posted to r/NoSleep by u/pod_cast_pod
Account deleted 3 hours after posting.