R.L Stone's The Creepypasta

R.L Stine's: The Haunting Hour Season 4 Episode 13


Chapter 1


I remember watching a show called Goosebumps when I was a little girl. From what I can recall, it was a horror anthology show based on the children's book series of the same name by R.L Stine. Think of it as a kid's version of something like Tales From the Crypt or The Twilight Zone. Even though I watched the show, I wouldn't call it a masterpiece of television history or anything. You see, the only time I would watch it is when there was nothing else on TV because I just found this show to be way too cheesy for me to fully enjoy it. I also found the child actors and even some of the adult actors to be terrible, especially the kid who played Matt Amsterdam in the episode, "Don't Go to Sleep". Look, I'm not saying it was the worst show I've watched, but it had some major flaws that were just too prominent for me to overlook.

When I heard that another kid's horror anthology show based on R.L Stine related works called R.L Stine's: The Haunting Hour was coming to the Hub (Now Discovery Family) in 2010, I was intrigued. At the same time though, I still had my doubts about the show, thinking it was going to be just as cheesy as the Goosebumps TV series. When the trailer aired on TV, the show seemed a lot darker AND scarier than the original Goosebumps TV Series, which I thought was a much needed improvement. The acting from both the kids and adults seemed vastly better as well. After the trailer played, I decided to give the show a chance and check out what it had to offer.

So far, I have seen quite a few episodes of this show and I have to say, for a kid's horror anthology series, it wasn't that bad. While it does have a few good episodes such as "Weeping Woman", "Intruders", "Scary Mary", and "The Golem", I wouldn't consider it one of my favorite shows of all time. I guess this is because I found some of the episode plots to be predictable, especially the episodes where a kid sees a monster and no one else believes them until they see it for themselves. I will give the show some credit for at least fixing the problems of the original Goosebumps TV series and keeping me entertained until the end of an episode.

From what I saw, the series seemed to end in its 4th season on the episode "Goodwill Towards Men" and I was rather disappointed that it had ended so suddenly. I think this had to do with the fact that I found it pretty underwhelming for a series finale. After the series ended, I went back and watched a few episodes from Season 4 of The Haunting Hour on the DVR at my mom's house. It was a rather hit and miss season but not anything atrocious (the only episode in the entire series that I considered god awful was Poof De Formage).

However, there was another episode made after "Goodwill Towards Men" that was never part of the original run. Oh don't get me wrong! From what I understand, this WAS supposed to be with said run but I haven't seen it on Discovery Family nor have I seen it anywhere on the internet where I could watch it for free! When all of my available sources hit dead ends, it seemed like I would never know the truth behind this episode. However, things would soon take a turn when I visited my mother's friend Erika at her summer home in Cape Cod.


Chapter 2


From what I remember, it was pretty nice place. It was quite tranquil and seemed very remote but it wasn't too far away from any shops or businesses. The house was located on a dead end street and there was a lake near it although I wasn't allowed to swim in it because there was too much algae or something as I couldn't quite remember the exact reason. All I knew was that the lake looked like it had a bunch of tall recycling bins with their tops floating on the surface. It was rather disappointing that I couldn't go in the lake since I grew up near the sea and loved dunking my body in the calm and refreshing waters. To add fuel to my disappointment, it was also extremely humid that day and my skin was sick of the cool air coming from the air conditioners.

Anyway, I was hanging around the house looking for something to watch since my brother Hunter had already taken up the big living room TV that had Netflix and all those other fancy features on the Blu Ray player. I didn't bring many DVD's with me and I had already gotten bored of watching those. That's when I got the idea to browse through Erika's DVD collection since it had a nice variety of different movies and TV shows. Her collection mostly consisted of TV and movie titles that I haven't heard of and while some of the show and movie names sounded cool, they didn't seem to interest me once I read the actual summaries on the back of the cases. Oh well, I guess it was better than nothing.

As I was browsing through the collection in her room, I came across this odd looking DVD case. For one thing, it seemed like the case was large enough to fit a whole VHS tape in it, let alone a DVD. In fact, it reminded me of those VHS cases that you had to open to get the tape out, rather than just simply sliding it out. When I took the case off the shelf, I looked at the cover and while I was confused, I was also laughing at the same time. Basically, the cover had the title "R.L Stine's: The Haunting Hour: Super Disc" Written on it with what I like to call "Microsoft Word Bubble Text". It's kind of like that fancy graffiti that's really colourful and makes the text seem like it's popping out at you.

The cover also featured R.L Stine's face plastered on a giant monster shooting blue fire out its mouth aiming towards a pagoda in New York City. I had thoroughly examined the cover to make sure my eyes weren't playing tricks on me. As I was looking at the cover, something had caught my attention. I heard a creaking sound coming from the hardwood floor inside the room. The strange thing was that I had been sitting on the floor quietly, without vigorous movement. I tried to shift my attention back to the DVD cover, hoping that its surreal appearance would distract me from the noises.

However, just when I was starting to relax, I heard another creaking sound that was louder and closer to me than the last. Eventually, another creaking noise had occurred inches away from me and my body had really tensed up. During this time, I was unable to move and breath as I was trying to figure out what was going on. After a little while, the creaking had stopped and I told myself that it was probably just the settling of the house that had caused those creaking noises. I then got up off of the floor and prepared to leave the room. However, as I had gotten close to the door, I felt a strange sensation. I noticed this unpleasant tingling feeling, almost like a million tiny insects were crawling all over my body. This feeling had also made me seem rather jittery, which I tried as hard as I could to keep it under control. I then felt a bit of agitation as I felt like I was being crowded by a group of people, even though I was the only one in the room.

At that point, I felt vulnerable and extremely uncomfortable being alone in Erika's room, even though it was during the day at the time I had found the DVD. I felt like someone or something was hiding in Erika's room, watching me and waiting for me to let my guard down and inflict harm. Not only that, but it felt rather difficult to move in fear that I might trigger someone to jump out at me and give me a heart attack. All of a sudden, I had caught something out of the corner of my left eye. I saw a small, shadowy, humanoid figure zipping past the bedroom windows. The strange thing about this situation was that when I saw the figure, there was no one outside that could've made this shadow.

A little while later, Erika came home and as soon as she went into the kitchen to put away some groceries, I asked her about the DVD I had found. Although she seemed rather stressed out as she was putting away the groceries. The closest thing I got to a response was "Yeah OK, whatever honey!" Even with that said, she didn't really seem to be paying attention to me when she said it. This was rather odd because Erika was rarely ever stressed out.

Don't get me wrong, I was unbelievably impatient on the inside and I did ask her about the DVD with a bit of aggression in my vocal tone. However, it seemed like she may have been avoiding the question altogether. Though, maybe it could've been something else that made her stressed out. Was it a long line at the checkout? Did she have a bad day at work? Or was it a hectic drive home? I honestly had no clue. All I knew was that I felt very nervous and uncomfortable around her at that time.


Chapter 3


I decided to view the DVD myself. I went upstairs to my "Temporary Bedroom" which was really a room no one was using at the time of my visit. This room had three types of beds in it. There was a bunk bed on the left side of the room. Both beds had white pillows and manilla blankets, along with a Mickey Mouse and Looney Tunes comforter rolled up inside of footlockers that were clipped to the foot of the beds. Leaning up against a wall in the middle of the room was a daybed with white railings on three of its sides. It also had a thick navy blue comforter with a couple of white blankets underneath. On the right side of the room was a queen sized bed with a camouflage coloured comforter, two light green hypoallergenic pillows, and a memory foam mattress.

My room also had a TV with a stand that was on wheels. Not only did it have a VHS player underneath it, but a DVD player as well. Since this TV didn't get cable due to the fact that Erika and her husband's kids brought lots of movies with them, there didn't seem to be much else to watch anyway. Before I viewed the DVD, I decided to look for a fan because the air conditioner in my room wasn't working right and I didn't want to mess with it. I had looked in my closet but much to my dismay, I only found a few empty coat hangers sitting on the thick, wooden rod.

Thinking that there was a fan in another part of the house, I left my room and proceeded down the stairway. As I was walking down the stairs, my heart started to beat rather quickly and I had felt rather faint. Since I thought these feelings were occurring from overheating, I took a few deep breaths and continued on my way. I went into one of Erika's spare bedrooms to see if there were any fans in there. I opened up the closet and a towering pile of forgotten objects had toppled over and buried me. I then heard Erika's voice grow louder as she got closer to the room. She hastily dug through the rubble until she found me lying on the ground, moaning in pain.

"Are you alright?!" Asked Erika. She also wondered if I had gotten a concussion from the rubble. "Nope!" I responded cheerfully. Although I didn't get a concussion, I did get a couple of nickel sized bruises on my forehead. I went on to say that I was looking for a fan to put in my room. She let out a couple of small chuckles and proceeded to crawl underneath the bed. When she emerged, I was given a fan that was one foot high and had a square base. The cord was wrapped tightly around its neck like a snake and there were 4 buttons on the base, each with their own colour. The high setting was red, the medium setting was white, the low setting was blue and the off button was black.

"Oh boy!" Erika said with concern, "It looks like you've got bruises all over you! Maybe you should go upstairs and rest for awhile." I agreed and gave Erika a hug. While I was heading off to my room, I had noticed that I was slightly limping and I felt rather sore. It was even worse when I had to climb up the stairs because it seemed as though somebody was whacking my leg bones from the inside of my body. By the time I reached my room, my legs had turned into jelly as I could barely stand without feeling sore.

Nevertheless, I had started up the DVD player in my room. I opened the disc tray and the DVD case. When I picked up the DVD, I saw that it had the season and episode number along with the actual name of the episode which was titled: "Samurai Shōjo o Shōkan!" At first, I thought I had gotten the Japanese version of the episode but when I thought about it again, I realized that they probably didn't air this show in Japan.

I also had taken into account that this wasn't the first time The Haunting Hour had a foreign sounding title. Poof De Formage, as I recall, was the first episode with a title like this. However, unlike Poof De Formage, this episode title had actually translated into something that made sense, although I couldn't figure it out at the time. I recently did some research and found out that when "Samurai Shōjo o Shōkan!" was translated into English, it came out as "Summon the Samurai Girl!".


Chapter 4


At this point, I was itching to find out what was going to happen in this episode. With my hard to contain excitement,  I quickly put the disc into the DVD player and sat down on the daybed. However, instead of showing all the "FBI warning" screens, distributor logos, and the network logo, it had cut straight to the intro of the show. The quality of the intro was so sharp and the motion was so fluid that while it was playing, I was unable to blink and I had gotten a bit of a headache from it, even though I wasn't epileptic or photosensitive.

Keep this in mind, I wasn't watching this on a big screen HDTV. Instead, it was one of those little, "Camel" TV's with the big backs on them. I had also made sure to give myself enough distance from the TV to the daybed to prevent eyestrain. Besides, the TV screen itself wasn't that big to begin with. From what I remember, the screen was quite miniscule. In fact, it was so tiny that if you took a ruler sized throw pillow and put it near the TV screen, the pillow would cover the screen in its entirety. It felt rather odd to me since the room itself was quite large and it made the TV look as though it had been shrunken down. For that matter, I had also felt very small staying in that room as it seemed liked I was the size of a mouse compared to most of the furniture in there.

When the intro was done playing, instead of showing the name of the series, it cut to a DVD menu that contained "Summon The Samurai Girl!". Not only that, but the menu had also included a few other Haunting Hour episodes as well. There were 2 episodes from season Two (Bad Feng Shui and Dreamcatchers), 3 episodes from season Three (Weeping Woman, Intruders, and Uncle Howee), and 3 episodes from season Four (Grandpa's Glasses, Spores, and Lotsa Luck). At first, I found this rather confusing, but I thought about it again and found it to be a nice little bonus.

I took a good look at the menu to decide which episodes to watch after I had seen "Summon The Samurai Girl!" But then again, maybe this new episode would satisfy me enough to where I didn't need to watch another episode in a single sitting. After I planned my "playlist", I then clicked the Samurai Girl episode and it had begun playing.


Chapter 5


This episode started out with a cold opening, where the initial establishing scene would play before the opening credits. Though to be honest, some of the episodes in this series had started out that way so this didn't seem unusual to me. In this opening, a battle between Japan and another country was taking place. There were multiple, three second scenes of soldiers clashing with each other that had me on the edge of my seat. In these scenes, we see the Japanese army, in which the soldiers are samurai, use weapons such as Katana swords, fans, and scythe like weapons called Kamas. After that montage of fights, the episode cut to a scene where a group of samurai were chasing down a soldier from the invading army on horseback. As they were chasing the soldier, he made a sharp turn into a forest hoping to escape the samurai.

As soon as the samurai entered the forest, they split up and searched the area for the missing soldier. After they searched the forest to the best of their ability, they turned up empty handed and decided to leave, thinking the soldier may have gone elsewhere by now. As they were leaving however, a strange bellowing growl had stopped them dead in their tracks. A few seconds later, they came to the conclusion that it was probably a wolf or somebody's stomach growling and continued on their way out. Unfortunately, they didn't make it very far as a streak of golden light came towards them at such a breakneck speed, that by the time they turned around and tried to get out of the way, the light had already dashed through them, causing them to fall off their horses and hit the ground hard enough to be rendered immobile.

When I saw this scene, I felt like it went by so fast that it had warranted an audible "What?!" out of me. I decided to keep going in the hopes that the golden light would be fleshed out more later on. After the "Golden light samurai" moment, the episode immediately cut to a scene involving a frustrated Daimyo becoming even more frustrated by the fact that more of his troops have been disappearing and the most recent disappearance wasn't helping him simmer down at all. As he was trying to figure out why his troops had disappeared, it's revealed that his daughter was listening in on the conversation. Seeing the amount of stress her father was under, she became worried about him because she knew her father's heart wasn't very strong and if too much pressure was put on it, then his chance of survival would be slim to none.

Armed with this knowledge, she needed to figure out a way to help her father without drawing too much attention to herself. That's when she got the idea to dress up as one of the samurai and investigate the disappearances. As she ventured out to the samurai's base camp, she started to become quite anxious at the thought of seeming suspicious to the samurai. Despite the fact that she was dressed up as one of them, she feared that her voice might seem too high pitched to pass for a samurai. She then took a few deep breaths and tried to figure out a way to disguise it.

The girl eventually made it to the camp, where she wasted no time questioning the samurai about the disappearances. "From what I've heard, the invading army is using some kind of technique where they hide in various places and ambush enemy soldiers." Said one samurai. "They seem to be using soldiers to lure our men into the woods with a horseback chase. We would go investigate ourselves, but we've been told by the Daimyo to stay put in order to prevent losing more men," Said another samurai.

When the girl listened to the samurai's answers, she felt as though something was amiss. As the soldiers were giving their answers, she noticed that their voices sounded a little shaky and they seemed to have trouble making eye contact with her. Even though she was a bit suspicious of the samurai's answers, she thanked them anyway and proceeded to exit the camp. As she rode on her horse, she had felt a surge of energy flow through her and commanded the horse to run at full speed towards the forest. This energy also made the girl quite fidgety as she constantly wondered what the enemy of the forest could really be.

She had made it to the forest where she noticed that it was quite dense and filled with trees that seemed to touch the sky. These factors had failed to intimidate her as she entered the forest with no second thought. As she traveled through the woods, she noticed that the forest was too quiet for her liking. In fact, it seemed as though it was absent of life. When she was investigating, she came across samurai armor with no body attached to it. "Hmm..." Said the girl. "If there were enemy soldiers here, you'd think they would take the armor and weapons when grave robbing."

As soon as she finished stating her observation aloud, the golden streak had burst through the forest at such a magnificent speed. This time however, it had emitted a high pitched sound that made me cover my ears with the pillows on the daybed. I then saw the streak ripping through her body, leaving no visible wounds. The girl cringed and gasped as her eyes rolled up into the back of her skull. Since the streak went through the girl at an extremely high speed, she fell off her horse, and hit the ground in slow motion with such force that it sounded like a faint cannon blast. The camera slowly zoomed in on her unresponsive face, making it clear that she has died.

Chapter 6

By the time the cold opening had ended, I found myself sitting on the edge of the daybed in a daze as my eyes were bulging out of my head and my mouth was gaping open as wide as it could. Out of all the Haunting Hour episodes I've seen, this had to be one of the best cold openings of the entire series. In fact, I would've been satisfied if this cold opening was just the entire episode. I had soon gotten out of my daze when the intro to the show came on. Since I had already seen this intro, I decided to fast forward through it.

When I came to the beginning of the episode, I decided to pause it and get a drink. Although I wasn't limping as much as I did earlier, it was still difficult to walk down the stairs. I eventually made it to the kitchen and started to search the fridge for a refreshing beverage. It didn't take me long to find something I liked and I started to make my way upstairs. Before I could make it to the stairs, I saw the shadow figure from earlier dash across the living room floor and disappear behind the ivory beige leather couch. However, the figure seemed to be a bit more detailed than before. You see, it seemed to be wearing trapezoid shaped headgear with crescent horns in the middle of it.

At that moment, my heart had skipped several beats as I dropped my drink and bolted as fast as I could towards the door leading to the backyard. "Erika!" I shouted frantically at the top of my lungs. I started to check all of the areas in the backyard, especially the most visited spots such as the shed and grilling area. When my search came up empty handed, I ran back in the house and screamed Erika's name even louder. At this point, sweat was pouring down my forehead and my head felt extremely tight as I was wondering where Erika was. I had yelled Erika's named and banged on nearly every door in the house until I heard footsteps rapidly approaching upwards from the basement. The door had burst open with such great force, that I thought the knob had put a hole in the wall.

Much to my surprise, not only had Erika emerged from the basement, but Hunter had come upstairs as well. They started to ask me why I was screaming and I told them about what I saw. "Could it have been a squirrel or something running past the window?" Hunter asked. I sighed and covered my face with my hands. I said that the shadow was much too big to be a squirrel. For that matter, it seemed to move faster than a squirrel ever could. "OK! I'll tell you what." Said Erika, "How about me and your brother investigate whatever it was you saw? In the meantime, you should probably get something to eat and head back upstairs."

I agreed with Erika and headed over to the snack cabinet as soon as we disbanded. After a few moments of searching, I grabbed a bag of salt and vinegar chips and headed upstairs. I closed the door behind me, plopped myself on the daybed, and hit the play button on the remote without hesitation.

Chapter 7

 As the episode began playing, the setting had been switched to modern day Japan, where a black and white truck with a flat hood had been parked alongside the half opened steel gate of a two story home. From what wasn't blocked by the truck, the house seemed to have a large, green trapezoid shaped roof with rectangular windows on both sides of the house front. The siding had a beige colour and its texture reminded me of those "echo reducing" panels that are sometimes implemented into large rooms like concert halls. This shot was focused on for a few seconds with almost nothing but the ambience of humming cicadas and the occasional chirping of the birds alongside calm but faint orchestral music.

The episode then cut to an American family moving into their new home where a young girl that looked like she was in her early teens was carrying two cardboard boxes over to her mother on the first level porch.