Creepypasta & r/nosleep Stories

Tales from the Gas Station (1/?)

At the edge of our town, there's a shitty gas station that's open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. If you were to go inside, you'd see row after row of off-brand chips, cookies, potted meats and ramen. Expiration dates suspiciously missing from canned goods like they were filed off years ago in some misguided attempt to control inventory turnover. A faded "wet floor" sign from way back covering a crack in the foundation by the cooler that has since turned into a pothole. The pothole, a collection point for sticky spill-off, has become a miniature tar pit collecting countless insect corpses and the occasional small rodent.

Nobody ever complains about the aesthetic. By some providence bordering on the supernatural, the health inspector has repeatedly signed off on the business, always kindly ignoring the faint smell of some kind of mysterious chemical cocktail that is the defining characteristic of the establishment. More noticeable than the family of mutated raccoons that lives in the crawlspace behind the grease trap. We think they're mutated anyway. At the very least, they must be inbred to the point of mental retardation. The alpha, a muscular three-foot-tall son of a bitch named Rocco, has been spotted multiple times chewing on people's tires and has been run over at least twice, but keeps coming back.

That lingering smell, a sweet combination of honeysuckle, ammonia, vomit, and who knows what else, has never been positively identified, but the prevalent theory is that it's coming from the cracks in the foundation, wafting up from underground. It's strongest right after a rain, and pungent to the point of tear-inducing if you get too close to the storm drains where even Rocco and his clan refuse to tread.

If you were to go inside, you might also see the bathroom cowboy. He exists as part urban legend, part urban fact. Because even though he has never been officially confirmed to exist, we have several security camera recordings of a man fitting his description entering the building, heading into the bathroom, and leaving. What makes him a legend is what people claim to see him doing in the bathroom. Some of the stories are only weird. Like the guy who went to pee only to see a man dressed as a cowboy handing out balloon animals. Some of the stories are more bizarre. Like the guy who says he walked into the bathroom to see a man wearing nothing but a cowboy hat, boxers, and boots with spurs, sitting at an old-fashioned stone sharpening wheel literally grinding an axe. When he walked in the bathroom cowboy stopped what he was doing, looked up with a smile and a tip of the hat and said, "Come on, Man. Come on with it." The guy, understandably uncomfortable with the situation, went to find an employee. But by the time anyone else came back to the bathroom, the cowboy had vanished, bench-grinder and all.

The cowboy that may or may not haunt the gas station bathroom appears to follow a code of rules. He never appears unless there's only one other person in the room with him. He never hurts anyone. And he's always polite. Honestly, he doesn't seem that bad. Especially when you compare him to some of the other things going on there.

If you go inside, you might instantly get a tooth ache. It's a strangely common phenomenon that nobody really understands. It should go away on its own after a couple hours.

If you do go inside, you will almost definitely see me, sitting behind the counter, because I am the only full-time employee, and I'm almost always here. You may catch me reading a book because, for some reason, the internet doesn't work way out here, and cell phone service is dicey on good days and nonexistent on most. If you need to make a call, you can leave and go up the hill a ways, preferably back towards town because the other way will take you into the woods and you don't even want me to go into all the reasons that's not a good idea. Or you can pay me twenty-five cents a minute and use the store's land line. That arrangement was cooked up by the owners and I have to actually enforce it because they do check the phone records. I'm sorry.

While you're here, don't be offended if I don't strike up a conversation because, if I'm being completely honest, I don't always know for sure if everyone that comes through those doors is real or not and if I had to acknowledge everyone in that place that could be an actual person, I would lose my mind. And we don't need any more of that going on around here.

I guess that the point I'm trying to make is this: weird things happen to me working at the shitty gas station at the edge of town.

I wish I could easily decide what was the weirdest thing to ever happen to me, but I can't. There were so many.

I've seen a total of four coffins inside the store on three different occasions.

I've met at least a dozen people wandering back into town from the woods claiming they had escaped aliens or government conspirators or cultists and that they had no money but needed to make a call and could I please just let them use our phone before "they" find them again. But rules are rules and I'm not going to lose my job just because you didn't escape captivity with a little pocket change.

Then there was Farmer Brown (yeah, that's his real name) who got mad at us and complained about the bulk feed we'd been ordering for him. He insisted something was wrong with the product because all of his animals suddenly had human faces. We settled with him by charging a significant discount on his next couple purchases. He stopped coming in one day and they found what was left of his body inside a bedroom at his farmhouse that had been locked from the inside. As far as I know, they still haven't figured out what happened.

Anyway, I guess I can tell you a story or two, but first I need to get ready for work.