The Curious World of Alice Becker

**"The Curious World of Alice Becker"** is the second tale in the fifth episode of the fourth season of The Nosleep Podcast. In it, a girl is convinced she knows the origin of a local urban legend. Written by Jimmy Juliano, writing as "Chance Patrick", it has a runtime of 15:00 and was performed by Corinne Sanders. It is the 367th tale overall on the podcast.

## Summary

A 4th grade girl recounts the story of a girl named Alice Becker. Alice was a troubled child who always smelled of stale urine with an addict mom who prostituted herself for drugs. The rest of the class takes pity on Alice and tries their best to include her in projects and games with her rarely ever talking, only mumbling and grunting for the little time she was in the class everyday. The few times Alice does talk, it is a string of seemingly unconnected words which the class is unable to decipher.

One day, Alice says the words "Trevor. Daddy. Bend. Red." before looking straight at their classmate Trevor. Later that week, Trevor's dad is in a car accident after drunk driving due to his wife discovering him cheating, running a red light. The rest of the class interprets this as Alice being a clairvoyant, although the girl is skeptical. The class then waits for Alice to speak again, anticipating what she might predict. A few weeks later, Alice begins to speak again, saying "Shadow. Miss Ogalham. Gutter horror."

The rest of the class deems this to be Alice confirming a long-standing rumor about Miss Ogalham. According to the legend, a monster called "The Shadow Creature" (because no one had ever actually seen it, only shadows of it) lives in the gutter drain near Miss Ogalham's house, with her dumping buckets of meat and blood into the sewer drain above her balcony to feed it. The girl remains skeptical, believing Miss Ogalham herself to be far scarier than any story about her. She recalls a time she was in the supermarket with her mother, with Miss Ogalham staring at her from the end of the aisle.

The girl's friends decide to test the rumors further, with the girl tagging along to try and stick up for Alice. The kids meet up outside Miss Ogalham's house, with the girl volunteering to explore inside the sewer drain. The grate covering right outside her house is too heavy to lift, so she enters from the drain's exit at a river a block away, with her friends waiting at the grate outside Miss Ogalham's house to listen to her report her findings. The girl squeezes inside the pipe, noting that it is very tight and requires her to army crawl through the drain. Her flashlight only reveals a small amount ahead of her as she crawls through, darkness enveloping the rest of her vision.

She begins to think she hears growls or something creeping towards her. At first she believes it to be her friends playing a prank, but quickly writes this off as impossible. The girl doubles her speed, quickly crawling to get to the grate near Miss Ogalham's house. The girl's skepticism towards the shadow creature dissipates, now convinced that it will kill and eat her. She hears shuffling behind her, which gets closer and closer. She then feels something clamp down on her ankle. Horrified, she screams and kicks furiously, then realizing that her foot was simply caught between two pieces of metal. Instantly relieved that it's all been her imagination, she continues forward to the grate.

She sees her friends faces, telling them there was nothing in the drain, her friends disappointed. The girl then looks to the much smaller drain that connects to the one right outside Miss Ogalham's house. The girl sees something inside glistening, reaching her arm inside. She grabs onto something soft and fleshy, pulling it out to reveal that she has grabbed onto the severed hand of a woman with a ring on the middle finger. The girl screams, with her then telling us Miss Ogalham was arrested shortly afterwards. Miss Ogalham had murdered the woman, the buckets of meat and blood likely her dumping the remains into the drain to remove the evidence of the body. The girl is lauded for exposing the murder of a young woman, although she explains that she now suffers insomnia and extreme claustrophobia.

The story ends with the girl explaining that Alice wasn't clairvoyant, but rather simply had knowledge of a horrific and underground world far worse than the problems she currently experiences. She says that Alice was misunderstood both figuratively and literally, she hadn't said "Shadow. Miss Ogalham. Gutter horror.", she had actually said "Shadow. Miss Ogalham. Gut her whore." Shadow was the name of the prostitute which Miss Ogalham murdered and gutted. The girl then reveals that Alice knew the tastes of Trevor's father, always having his prostitutes in the Riverbend motel and preferring redheads.