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OK, so its been a long time snce I've told this story, but since a couple people actually remembered it I figured I'd go ahead and tell it again. I actually spoke to Tony about this a couple days ago because we hadn't seen each other in a few years and it was a Halloween party and I guess I had been remembering things a little wrong, but the gyst of the story is the same. So maybe back in like 2002 one of my friends Tony had just split up with his wife. They had been having problems, and we all knew it was coming, but since he was the first of us to get married it was kinda sad to see him be the first one to get divorced as well. He wasn't taking it too well, obviously, so a few of us decided that we should take him camping to get some good old fashioned male bounding in there for him. Nothing fixes a broken heart quite like getting drunk with a bunch of good friends around a fire for a couple of days and sleeping outside. He was pretty excited for it so we loaded everything up for a few days of "roughing it" and drove out into some random woods my friend Bryan knew about. I know we weren't supposed to be camping there at all, but who cares? This was for Tony and whats a little fine or something to get our friend out of his slump? Well, we get deep enough in and find a little side turn off road and decide to park and hoof our way into the woods for a while to try and find a nice spot. After about 10 minutes of walking we find this really nice little clearing that is absolutely perfect. We go about setting everything up. Tony and Mike go off to gather fire wood and Matt and I set up all the tents while Bryan dug us out a fire pit. By this time it was about mid afternoon so I started to make a bunch of sandwiches for lunch while we were waiting for Tony and Mike to get back with the fire wood. It takes them quite a while, but they finally come back and we get our fire going a little before evening and start drinking and talking. All in all it was a pretty great night and we actually wound up going through a lot more of our alcohol than we thought we would the first night. Eventually we all fell asleep with the plan to maybe grab some more liquor the next day. Matt was the first one up and had breakfast going for all of us. Nothing smells better than bacon cooking on a campfire, so I woke up just a little after him. I went off to gather more fire wood figuring that if I did it now we wouldn't have to do it again until right before dark. By the time I got back everyone, but Tony was up and talking. I kinda figured maybe he was just hung over, and since this trip was about him, letting him sleep for however long he wanted seemed perfectly fine. But when it got to be late morning and he still wasn't up Mike decided to go in and see if he wanted some water or breakfast to feel better. When Mike came back out he looked a little weirded out and just said, "Tony says we should just go home." This came as a big surprise to all of us because it seemed like he was having a really good time the night before. It seemed a little out of character to not want to come and just tell us he wanted to go home so we kinda poked our heads in to check on him. He was just sitting up in his tent with his arms wrapped around his knees and sort of rocking back and forth. I asked him if he felt sick or something and he said no. Bryan asked if he wanted to take a ride to get some food or something and once again he just said, "I think we should just go home." It really was odd behavior from him so we got to talking outside. Matt, Mike, and I wanted to stay camping anyways and so we had the idea that Bryan would go out and grab some more supplies for us, drop them off/pick Tony up, and then the two of them would head home and Bryan could just come get us in a day or so. While we were deciding this Tony came out of his tent and said he decided he'd stay that way we wouldn't need to split up. I really can't explain how odd all of this was coming from him. His whole demeanor was different from what I had always known and he was acting really skittish and timid. I just kinda chalked it up to everything he was going through and put it out of mind. Bryan asked him if he was sure a few times and all of us told him if he wanted to go home then he totally could and we'd be fine with it. We'd see him in a day or so and we could go do something else. He was adamant that if we weren't all leaving that he would stay. I felt a little bad, seeing as though he was the reason we were out there in the first place, but rationalized it to myself that he was just feeling down for the moment and once we all started talking and drinking he'd back to his old self again. Well, we were down to just a few beers and some whiskey since we hit it so hard the night before. Tony nixed the idea of going to get more booze so we just drank slowly and figured it would just be a mostly sober day of talking and joking around. Once again, no big deal, but it was still a really odd way for Tony to be acting. Just before evening we were all sitting around the fire and talking when Tony, who had been quite most of the afternoon, piped up and asked, "Don't you guys feel weird? Like we shouldn't be here?" It took me back for a second because I thought he was talking about "here" as on this planet, but I realized he was talking about camping. Bryan said he sort of felt apprehensive or nervous or something, but that it was probably because we weren't supposed to be camping in the woods at all so that was probably it. Mike was the next person to say that he had been feeling odd about things since the night before, but just put it out of mind. Matt and I thought it was hilarious and started giving them a bit of poo poo for being scared of trespassing. Things got quiet for while after that and I started to feel a little bad for giving them poo poo just for having a weirded out feeling. The sun was starting to set so I decided to go get some more fire wood before dark even though it wasn't my turn just to sort of make up for being a jerk. As I stood up and told everyone I'd be back with more wood in a bit Tony jumped up. "Don't go get wood. We got enough, just don't go get it." "The hell is wrong with you today?" I asked. "Lets just all sit here and hang out together. I have a really really bad feeling and think we should all stick together." I stared at him and then everyone else for a couple of seconds and sat back down. He was starting to weird me out and from the looks on everyone else's faces I think it was getting to them too. I decided that if he was goona be so weird then the last beer could be mine. I cracked it open and we all sat there in total silence as the sun started going down. Right when the sun was about on the horizon I got this really weird sinking feeling. Like an overwhelmingly odd feeling that I can't quite place and haven't felt before. Not scared, not anxious, but something sort of in the middle. Apprehension would be the closest, but it wasn't that either. Now, I never realized this, but when I was talking to Tony a few days back he said that we were all staring at the same exact spot of the forest. Like all of us, in dead silence, were all looking at the same spot as if we were anticipating something. And we were like that for minutes. That's when we heard it. It was this incredibly loud snapping/crunching/popping noise. And when I say loud I mean it felt like it hit me in the chest with sound. From what I remember it came from deeper in the woods, but Tony says that it had to have been just a little outside the clearing. Anyway, the next thing I remember is running, full tilt, through the forest back to the car. The woods had gotten dark by then and I still vividly recall seeing the light of the fire illuminating the trees in front of us as we tore through the woods. We got to the car in just a couple of minutes and piled in as quickly as possible. When we fired it up and tore away we noticed it was a little after 9pm. There is absolutely no way it could have been later than 6pm or so since the sun was still in the sky when we heard the noise so we have no idea where any of that time went, and only Matt and I remember the frantic sprint back to the car and speeding back to Bryan's place. Once we got to Bryans, all of us broke down. And I mean broke down. We were all crying and scared out of our minds and confused. I don't know if I've ever felt so small, and childlike, and frightened about anything ever before and certainly never after. We all sort of fell asleep on each other, huddled in the front room of his apartment, and none of us wanted to move. Tony woke up late that night and said we were all talking in our sleep and still shivering together, but he couldn't make out what any of us were saying and drifted back to sleep just a few moments later anyways. The next morning we all talked for just a couple of seconds about what had happened and decided that there was absolutely no way in hell we were gonna go back for our sleeping bags, tents, or coolers. Tony and I actually have tentative plans to head back up there and see if we can't find the old camp ground and sort of explore around and see if we can't find a fallen down tree or something around there that could have made that sound. I doubt we ever will though and even if we do its been over a decade so I'm sure everything looks a lot different than it did then and we'll never be able to find it again. I asked Tony what had got him so worked up after the first night and he told me that he had woken up in the middle of the night and just had this incredibly overwhelming feeling that something horrible was gonna happen. And that feeling didn't go away the entire rest of the next day which is why he wanted to go home. When we suggested splitting up he knew he couldn't let us do that and decided that staying was better than stranding us with out a car for the night. Neither of us have any idea about where the time went and he doesn't remember running through the woods at all. Looking back on it I'm really glad he stayed so we had the car there. I don't know what would have happened if it had just been Matt, Mike, and myself there with no way to get home and in a blind panic. Solice Kirsk has a new favorite as of 15:33 on Oct 27, 2015 |
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Oct 27, 2015 15:30
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Thanks for the kind words everyone! I'm working on having another one up by Halloween, but I am on call this week and it is making the deadline tough to meet. I will try my hardest!RedMagus posted:Man, I love when you post your tales Tewbrainer. I always gush when you post, but it feels like they're tales from an old leather diary that you always meant to read when your grandfather was alive, but it's only now, that you're cleaning out his stuff, when you realize there was a world you just barely missed out knowing about. Blizzy_Cow posted:Yay tewbrainer story! You're welcome! My family is all story tellers, so I grew up with many of these stories. Some are written down, but most are word of mouth / drinking stories that have been passed along. [Warning - this might sound religious, but I'm just waxing historical]. These normally follow a structure, which could be called a 'Scealaris', or a 'Story of Again' - as in living again. These stories generally have names and places, but no dates. They are meant to allow someone in the afterlife to relive experiences, and the omission of dates is so they don't realize that they are dead during the story. This might sound familiar - as this belief finds its way into many Germanic structures, perhaps due to a similar familial history from the population of Britain and Western Europe. One classic example that you may have read in school is Beowulf - where 'fame' or the notion of having your story retold, is the key to eternal life. The changing of these stories is considered natural, because sometimes you might not want your family member to remember running away in the face of the enemy. Again, sorry that went a little deep, just giving background because... Khazar-khum posted:Thirding this. I love your stories. It's a shame you haven't tried to publish a book of them. Claiming a story as your own generally considered bad, because you are just reflecting it. If I did put up a book, I would just donate it (like Goonbumps). However, I am working on making a public doc of all my stories posted here (thanks to whoever bought me archives) and I will have it up after I filter through all my horrible crap posts. As always, anyone who reads them is free to post them wherever or retell them. Especially if it is around a camp fire. Let me know how it goes!
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Oct 28, 2015 03:41
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are these actually stories from your gramps or are you that good at story telling?
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A request. There was an piece of online fiction I read a couple years ago that I thought for sure was a creepy pasta but I can't find it. It's about a bunch of kids getting selected to do a focus group for a toy company and the toys are a little weird. One I distinctly remember is a toy that children end up confessing their problems too. ie, one kid mentions getting abuse by his father I think or something to that effect.
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Oct 30, 2015 20:28
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That would be Child Three by Slimebeast. His stuff is pretty good.
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Oct 30, 2015 20:51
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Happy Halloween, my fellow goon ghouls and ghosties! Here's one from the vaults, a Halloween tale by Seaniqua... Haunted Hay Rack This is true. I have changed the names. I grew up in Nebraska, in a rural community an hour south of Omaha. My friends and I really enjoyed Halloween. Around fall it was usually Jon, Justin, Brandon and I that would hang out. It was weird because, outside of Halloween time, we weren't really close friends. We all just had a soft spot for the fall season and Halloween especially, so we would find time to cause mischief that our parents didn't know about. In elementary school, we would dress up and trick or treat just like any other kids. We'd sit around and tell ghost stories, watch Freddy Kruger movies we weren't supposed to, and generally be scared shitless. In middle school we moved on to the classic small town practice of scaring kids who were trick or treating. It was generally all innocent stuff. Hiding behind bushes, following kids silently then disappearing, the usual. This was more or less a way to hide the fact that we still wanted to get candy from houses, because we did that, too. In high school it got a little out of hand. Our freshman year was to be the last Halloween of hijinks, and we didn't have anything out of the ordinary planned. It was just supposed to be one last chance for the four of us to hang out and get candy. Unfortunately that's not all that happened. Justin's parents got a divorce that previous year. Again, we weren't really close so we didn't talk to him about it. The rest of us knew he was having anger problems at school. He had been in fights for sure I remember, and he may have been suspended at some point. My parents actually didn't want me to go out that night because of this kid's reputation. Not heeding my parents advice, the four of us set out that Halloween. It was 1999, Halloween was on a Sunday. Around midnight, we noticed Justin had been walking behind us for quite a way and he had run off somewhere. We couldn't see him anywhere around us. Not wanting to call any attention to ourselves so late on a school night, we didn't look for him. We figured he was in a mood or something and had ran off home or to smoke cigarettes and drink with his older brother, who is another story. Then we heard a voice we immediately recognized as Justin's coming from behind some bushes in an empty lot where we played football as kids. The bushes were rustling and we couldn't tell what was going on. He was mumbling something along the lines of, "Stop. loving stop. Keep your mouth shut." We quietly argued amongst ourselves over what he was doing, then Justin must have heard us because he stopped speaking, and the rustling stopped. He ran away in the opposite direction from us. We went over to the bush and saw a kid lying on the ground wearing a Homer Simpson mask. He wasn't moving. We asked him if he was okay and he didn't respond at all, he didn't make a sound. We were all loving terrified. Brandon took the kid's mask off, it was Brad Smith, a 6th grader in our town. His face was covered with blood, his eyes were bloodshot and blackened. He had bruises all over the place. He was barely breathing because Justin, the stupid poo poo, had been strangling this kid to death. To this day I haven't seen someone so hosed up by another person. He needed to go to the hospital. None of us had cell phones. Brandon and I stayed and Jon ran home, because he lived the closest. Not too long after Jon left, an ambulance and two town cruisers came to where we were. The paramedics rushed Brad off to the hospital and the cops asked us what happened. We told them. One of the cops gave me a ride home, the other gave Brandon a ride home. There was already a cop on the way to Justin's mom's house. Justin had actually just run back there and was sitting in the living room watching TV when he was arrested that night. Brad died in the hospital, he was 12 years old. Murder. Justin was tried as an adult and put away for life, although it was likely he'd be eventually let out on parole since he was so young. Edit: I want to stress that all three of us really tried to get this behind us. We didn't talk about it, the town stayed mum about it but I knew they were talking about it behind our backs. It was really hard on our families. My parents still refuse to talk about this. The next year, I got a job at a local haunted hay rack ride. Coincidentally, Jon and Brandon chose to get jobs as the same place. We were admittedly pretty freaked out by this coincidence, but passed it off as just that. Since we knew each other we volunteered to work the same area of the ride, which was supposed to be a team of three guys who would hide and surprise the hay rack riders. The job was an easy $20 a night. We would wait around in a little wooded area on a farmer's land, the hay rack would come by, and we'd scare them. We brought cigarettes and beers to enjoy during the down time, it was pretty simple work and enjoyable enough. But on Halloween night, we had a fourth member. I swear to you, this is the damned truth. The first hay rack ride went through at about 6:30 PM, as the sun was setting. We all sat on a few logs and cracked open a beer to share between the three of us. We shot the poo poo and tried not to talk about Justin. We all noticed him at the same time. A figure standing 50 yards away at the edge of the wooded area, not looking at us. He was looking past us. None of us said a word, he just stood there not acknowledging us. The next hay rack started to pass by and we nearly missed it, we all got up from our logs and did a real half assed job trying to scare the kids on the ride. After the rack passed, the figure was gone. We didn't see him again for a couple hours. The last hay rack was coming through, we did our job, and got ready to get the gently caress out of there because we were all feeling pretty uneasy. We started making our way back to the entrance of the hay rack ride. On our way back, we realized someone was walking behind us. We turned around. There he was again, the same figure as before. We were frozen. He spoke to us. "Where's Justin?" We didn't reply. "Where's Justin?" I said, "Justin's loving in jail..." He stood there and stared at us, turned around, and walked away in the opposite direction. We went to the entrance, all terrified shitless but almost in disbelief, we were thinking we got pranked by someone. It was common knowledge in that town that we were the three that found Brad Smith the previous year. Some chickenshit kid knew that the three of us were working there and decided to scare us. We were absolutely certain of it. We asked the farmer who ran the hay rack ride if he saw a fourth person with us that evening. He replied, "Sure, the one with the cartoon mask." Red Baron posted:I appreciate the courage it must have taken to write up all that, but what a loving tease to get through all that and then have you say, "Nvm, no ending, too hard." Sorry to the few people who replied to my story. I've been avoiding this thread since I wrote the first part of my story a few days ago. I'm realizing now that it probably wasn't cool to edit out the ending, so I want to explain myself and what happened. The truth is that I experienced the deaths of two children when I was young. Here is my personal experience, which is the only way I can think of to convey the weight of what went on. I hope that will do Justin and Brad some justice. I feel like the original ending I had - just a line or two - didn't do that. While it had a severe impact on the whole town including myself, I'm more concerned with showing respect for the two kids who lost their lives. Hopefully this is at least interesting to read. The farmer thought there was a fourth person with us, which really bothered us. After he told us that, we stuck around, hoping to see the kid come up to the barn area, but he never did. We told the guy that the kid talked to us and was trying to scare us, so he dismissed it completely. He told us to forget about it and go home, so we did, hoping it was just some rear end in a top hat who ran off after scaring us. The next day, a rumor started circulating about Justin in prison. People were saying he had hanged himself during the night. Justin's parents put a funeral announcement in the local newspaper that week, confirming the stories. I think Jon started telling people about our experience at the hayrack ride, because a couple people asked me about it. I lied and told people it was all made up, but really I just wanted people to stop talking about it. For about a week I had a terrible recurring dream with Brad and Justin in them. After it happened twice, I decided to keep a dream journal to try to get over it. I threw away the journal a long time ago, but I saved the text, here it is copy/pasted: I'm back in the field. No hay rack comes through. I am sitting on a stump. Brad is here. He has his back to me. He's standing next to Justin. Justin is dead, hanged from a tree. I am scared. I run back to the barn area. I'm back where we saw him before. I see the same scene with Brad staring at Justin, dead. I look away while I run. Everywhere I look I see Brad and Justin motionless. I go into the barn to talk to the farmer. There is no farmer. Justin is hanging from a rafter and Brad is standing next to him. I turn to run out of the barn, and Brad is standing in front of me in the same mask I last saw him wearing. I'm frozen. I start sinking into the ground. Brad is sinking with me. Chunks of the mask start falling off, like flesh off the bone. We sink further. Brad's face slowly starts to emerge from under the deteriorating halloween mask. His eyes and mouth are open. We keep sinking; the rest of the mask continues to fall off. I can smell it. We're up to our chins in mud and chunks of flesh. I'm up to my nose now. I see Justin being crucified. I wake up. I had that dream every night for 5 or 6 days. I went to Justin's funeral. Jon and Brandon didn't show up. The dreams stopped after that. I've gotten better about talking about it since then, but it's not a happy thing to think about. I've never had the dream again, thank goodness. I don't know if I believe in ghosts, but this experience continues to chill me when I think about it.
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Oct 31, 2015 17:35
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This is a long shot, but reading through this thread made me remember a story I'm looking for from one of the old goon ghost story threads (or maybe even paranormal images) It was a story with pictures, about a goon and his girlfriend/fiancee exploring a weird house out in the woods that had a hole in the floor. I remember that there was a story about the house that bad things happened to anyone who dared look into the hole, and that the last picture (which they found on their camera after getting back to the car) was some creepy poo poo. Ring any bells?
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Nov 1, 2015 17:17
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I've been dredging through the archives for something like that but nothing quite matches your description. I do have a short story about a creepy hole/room beneath a house that caused bad luck for several different families if you're interested.
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Nov 12, 2015 05:48
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coronatae posted:I've been dredging through the archives for something like that but nothing quite matches your description. I do have a short story about a creepy hole/room beneath a house that caused bad luck for several different families if you're interested. This sounds excellent.
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Nov 12, 2015 11:24
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Alright, here we go! The Ritual Room by G-Prestige First family My parents used to have these friends who lived in an old farm house years ago. This house has been around for over a hundred years, but the original family moved out a long time ago and these people moved in. They raised and trained horses, as well as instructed horseback riding lessons. I'm unsure what the husband's job was, but the wife's was solely taking care of the horses. I used to spend a lot of time there when I was younger, as you normally have to go where your parents go when you're 7 or 8 (these events started occurring 12-13 years ago. I haven't heard anything in the last 6 years or so.) Anyways, eventually, my mom started hearing things from the wife such as the husband has been abusing her and their daughter. Apparently the husband was normal and then his personality completely changed and this is when the abuse started. The wife claims that there was nothing that would trigger his anger, it would just happen. Then one day, I remember looking out my back window and seeing an extremely bright, red sky at night. It turns out that their barn was on fire. The barn burned to the ground, and it was later found out that a car had been purposely parked within the barn under hay, left on over night. This is what caused the fire. Apparently when the wreckage from the barn was removed, they had found a hidden room under the barn which looked like a sanctuary or place rituals were completed. There was a lot of large, colourful and strangely shaped rocks placed around skeletal corpses. The husband used to spend all his time taking care of that car, and according to the wife, he was very mad at some problems he was having with it, and planned to "at least make some money from the drat thing". I assume he was going to try and collect insurance from the loss of the barn. The marriage ended up deteriorating, and the wife and daughter left with very bad emotional scars. Second family Eventually, after they move out, another couple move in. After a year or so of living there, (they continued to train horses and my parents had formed a relationship with this couple as well) the husband started to behave strangely as well. Again, he beat the wife and had actually murdered about 8 or 9 horses with gunshots to the head. No reason was behind this, as they were very healthy. The husband was arrested, since the couple boarded horses as well and it wasn't their horses who died. He is then diagnosed with schizophrenia, something he showed no symptoms of before he had lived there for a while. Third family They move out, so moving on to the final couple that lived there. This is the worst situation of all three. These people, the Drinkwalter family, were very nice people. As usual with the people who live on this farm, they took care of horses. This time they didn't raise them, they simply boarded them and trained people how to ride them, as well as the odd horse show now and then. Again, following the pattern, after a year or so of living there the husband started behaving weird. He would spend days in the barn, only come in to eat and sleep, but he wasn't tending the horses. I'm not sure what he was doing, the wife just told my parents that she didn't know why he was always in there. Eventually he started becoming very abusive. He beat the wife, but never touched the daughters. One day, on July 28, 2002, there was a double murder. The husband had shot and killed the wife with a shot gun. This was on his daughter's birthday, and he left a birthday card on the table saying something along the lines of, "I'm so sorry, I had to. Happy Birthday". The husband had thought his wife was having an affair with his neighbor, so he headed over to his neighbor's house. When the man answered the door, he shot and killed him as well with the same shotgun. The man's son was standing right behind him. The cops were called, and a pursuit took place. Thats when the killer, Wayne Drinkwalter, died*. http://www.northumberlandnews.com/news-story/3770473-murder-suspect-dies-during-police-chase/ Wayne Drinkwalter was in a car accident because the police threw a spike belt down and he was ejected from his car. I find it creepy that the entire time, there has always been the "ritual" room below the barn, as they just build a new barn right over it. *The original link in Noodle Incident's compilation was dead, so I did a quick google search for the guy.  BONUS STORY ABOUT A SCARY-rear end HOLE IN THE GROUNDMammoth Cave by an unknown poster The year was 1958 when my parents were crossing the country to return home to visit relatives. Back then there were no highways, and the mountainous area of Kentucky was treacherous driving. Narrow roads that two cars, at some points, could not pass, and these roads also ran along the sides of mountains with steep cliffs and dangerous drop-offs. On their way to Ohio, by the time they got to Kentucky, my parents were so tired they decided to stop at a hotel for rest. They saw a sign advertising the world famous Mammoth Cave. This was not a billboard, mind you, because those were nearly nonexistent in the Kentucky backwoods of that day, but a handmade sign with an arrow pointing to the direction of yet another narrow road. They had never been there before, but figured it would be well populated, even in those days, with two or three hotels. Following the sign's directions, they turned and drove what seemed forever, almost to the point of giving up and turning back. After driving miles and miles on the dark and winding road, in the middle of the night, finally they arrived at what my father described as an aged, large, Colonial style farmhouse. They had not passed a car, or house, or any sign of civilization for many miles. In front of this huge house there was a sign - also hand-painted - saying "Mammoth Cave and Hotel." My mother got a terrible feeling and refused to get out the car. My father was stubborn, and decided it had drove too far for nothing and was going to check it out anyway. So scared she was, my mother said, that she locked the doors the moment my father stepped out of the car, even though there was no sign of life or other vehicles anywhere in sight. My father said the door to the so-called hotel was open, and when he stepped inside there was a huge hole near the entrance with a velvet rope hanging around it. He said it was near the door and you had to step around it to keep from falling in. On one side were a bunch of old, old women in rocking chairs; on the other side a sign-in desk with a huge book on it. He said it looked like something you would see in a western movie. He said the old women numbered somewhere between 10 and 12. It was dimly lit by what appeared to be lanterns. There were no other furnishings in the room - only the gaping hole, which went straight down into the earth. He said it seemed bottomless, and the cavelike hole eventually fell from view into darkness that seemed hundreds of feet down. He described steps that ran the length of its depth for as far as one could see. One of the old women told him that the hole was the Mammoth Cave, but it was "closed" being so late at night. She offered him a room to stay in and asked him to sign his name in the book. He said he still gets frightened when he recalls the event, and my father is not one to scare easily. He said he had a feeling that if he stayed much longer, he would never leave alive. He also said the women started to approach him, and he felt he may not have escaped their clutches had he not lied and told them he was going to the car to get his family. My mother had the car started and door opened by the time he reached it. He said she was terrified, even though she had not entered the farmhouse and saw what he did. To this day she said she has never felt so scared in all her life. They burned the rubber and got out of there, and did not stop until after daylight and they found "civilization" again. As the years passed, our family has gone to the real Mammoth Cave - nothing like the mysterious event my parents experienced that strange night so long ago. In daylight hours, we've even searched the primitive side roads and found no house similar in design. Once we found a burnt down farmhouse, but there were no visible signs of a gaping hole that led to what seemed the depths of hell. Nearly 50 years later and we're still looking for answers.
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Nov 17, 2015 03:17
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Holy crap, both of those stories are quality creep. The farmhouse one kind of reminds me of The Colour Out of Space. And the second, well, who knows what you can encounter down some dusky back road in the middle of nowhere...
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Nov 17, 2015 08:50
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http://www.nps.gov/maca/learn/historyculture/cavewars.htm Looks like this might be an explanation for your mystery cave. Mammoth Cave had many nearby competitors with smaller caves that were essentially tourist traps that literally tricked people into visiting/paying them. I'm certain that farmhouse was one of them, and it's just burned down and faded into memory.
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Nov 17, 2015 16:26
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Interesting! I'll have to see if I can find the original poster, maybe they had a similar follow-up. I wonder, will this thread ever be moved back to GBS? It was a lot more productive there, pre-GBS 2.0. With Lowtax cutting down on low-content stuff maybe it wouldn't be filled with random shitposting the way it was in 2014.
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Nov 18, 2015 06:24
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coronatae posted:Interesting! I'll have to see if I can find the original poster, maybe they had a similar follow-up. Accordion Man has a new favorite as of 06:29 on Nov 18, 2015 |
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Nov 18, 2015 06:25
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Wasn't there also a story about a trapdoor that teleported or some such thing?
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Nov 18, 2015 07:05
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Khazar-khum posted:Wasn't there also a story about a trapdoor that teleported or some such thing? The one where the kid's grandma drops a blanket through the trapdoor and the blanket materializes in a different house, or another one?
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Nov 18, 2015 07:58
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coronatae posted:Interesting! I'll have to see if I can find the original poster, maybe they had a similar follow-up. A few of us have already asked this but the GBS that these threads started in is very different to the GBS today. It's pretty much FYADs overflowing sewage compared to mid 2000's. There's a scary story for you, all the things you enjoy eventually change and you can't enjoy then anymore, HOoOoOoOoOoOoOoooo...
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Nov 18, 2015 16:13
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So I own quite a few old ghost story and folklore books that belonged to my father and his father. One is called "Tales of Tarheelia" and is taken from an old 1940s local radio program out of Raleigh, NC. I've considered starting a podcast to re-record some of these. Unfortunately I'd probably need to scan them in since no one appears to have typed them up. Here's a local library listing for them: http://www.earlibrary.org/TLCScript...=pac&Branch=,0, Who'd be interested in me trying this sort of thing?
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Nov 18, 2015 16:37
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De Nomolos posted:So I own quite a few old ghost story and folklore books that belonged to my father and his father. One is called "Tales of Tarheelia" and is taken from an old 1940s local radio program out of Raleigh, NC. I've considered starting a podcast to re-record some of these. Unfortunately I'd probably need to scan them in since no one appears to have typed them up. Here's a local library listing for them: http://www.earlibrary.org/TLCScript...=pac&Branch=,0, That sounds interesting.
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Nov 18, 2015 19:37
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Heavy Lobster posted:Definitely on the beaver/fox spectrum; I live across the street from a college campus that has a huge stream and forest running through the center of it, and beavers definitely show up pretty frequently in it, which would also explain why it sounded so wet. No idea what the fox situation is like in this part of town, but another clip showed off a call that sounded pretty close as well. Thanks! Horrible wet noises in Southeast Portland (did I guess right?) are usually nutria. They're like beavers who are bad at being beavers.
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Nov 18, 2015 21:08
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De Nomolos posted:So I own quite a few old ghost story and folklore books that belonged to my father and his father. One is called "Tales of Tarheelia" and is taken from an old 1940s local radio program out of Raleigh, NC. I've considered starting a podcast to re-record some of these. Unfortunately I'd probably need to scan them in since no one appears to have typed them up. Here's a local library listing for them: http://www.earlibrary.org/TLCScript...=pac&Branch=,0,  I would definitely be interested as well. shelley posted:The one where the kid's grandma drops a blanket through the trapdoor and the blanket materializes in a different house, or another one? Do you happen to have a link to/copy of that one? I've been looking for it for ages.
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Nov 19, 2015 01:18
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Does anyone remember the one where the storyteller is a cop, and he and some other cops are chasing something through a wooded area? There was something about a lean-to or shack, as well. Sorry for the lack of details; my memory is poo poo.
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Nov 20, 2015 23:52
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budgieinspector posted:Does anyone remember the one where the storyteller is a cop, and he and some other cops are chasing something through a wooded area? There was something about a lean-to or shack, as well. Sorry for the lack of details; my memory is poo poo. Pretty sure it's Darth Tang's Strange and Incomplete Tale.
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Nov 21, 2015 06:35
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PantsOptional posted:Pretty sure it's Darth Tang's Strange and Incomplete Tale. Bingo -- thanks! Jesus, it's from 2003?
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Nov 21, 2015 06:59
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budgieinspector posted:Does anyone remember the one where the storyteller is a cop, and he and some other cops are chasing something through a wooded area? There was something about a lean-to or shack, as well. Sorry for the lack of details; my memory is poo poo.  It's one of the stories listed in the op. There's also an epilogue, however.http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3697616&pagenumber=2&perpage=40#post441397700
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Nov 21, 2015 15:25
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So this weird thing just happened to me a couple days ago. I do pet- and house-sitting for a few local folks to bring in some extra cash. Last week, the neighbor of one of my regular clients was leaving town for a few days to help out a family member. I've known this lady and her dog casually ever since I started petsitting for the initial client, so when she contacted me to see if I could come stay for a few days, I readily agreed. After all, I already knew her dog, the neighborhood, etc. This neighborhood is a couple miles outside my city proper. Most people have decent sized yards and big houses, and while the yards are clear, the rest of the area is semi-wooded. Not heavily, but between most houses are strips of trees, varying from one or two to about twenty deep. Most of the trees are big and old, frequently pushing a good 80 feet in height. Anyway, I'd quickly settled into a routine with the lady's dog, hanging out in her large, ancient converted-barn house. The other night, I was standing in her kitchen, smoking. The kitchen windows face the narrow, winding road that goes through the neighborhood, and across the street was one of the thicker stands of trees; the next house was a bit further up the hill her house is located on. I had all the lights off and the windows open, mostly because I thought my clients next door might go walking by with their dog and I didn't want them to see me smoking. They probably wouldn't care much if they did--the lady who owned the house is a heavy smoker, so it's not like I was hurting anything. But I generally don't smoke; I've just had a rather hellish semester at school, and had bought a pack to help me face the 50 or so papers I needed to grade in the most unhealthy way possible. While standing there, the dog was lying on the floor a few feet behind me because he's sweet like that and wants to be in whatever room I'm in. Despite the tiny winding street, there are a few street lamps along it--one down near a sharp bend in the road, and one a good 20 or 30 yards further up the hill. The moon was about half full, so I could see outside pretty decently. I was looking out at the street and the trees across the road, and noticed what looked like the very elongated shadow of a person walking up the hill to my left, imprinted on the trees. I backed up a little, thinking it was my client/the neighbor taking his own dog out for a stroll, and that he was caught in the headlights of a car. But as I stood watching, I noticed the shadow wasn't really changing shape. It just kept moving its long, lanky self across the trees. I waited for the car responsible for the headlights to pass, but it never did. Behind me, the dog started to whine very, very softly. I kept watching, now feeling faintly uneasy, as the "shadow" crossed my field of vision and eventually melted into the next stand of trees up the hill. The neighbor and his dog never went by. Neither did anyone else. Neither did any cars. I finished my cigarette and shut the window. The dog had stopped whining when the shadow had moved out of my sight. I tried to figure out if someone had maybe turned up a driveway or something, but I can't figure out the physics given the angles and all. Also, it was a pretty cold night, and the shadow didn't appear to be wearing anything like a coat or a hat. I chalked it up to my first Slenderman sighting and went back to the couch with the dog.
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Nov 24, 2015 22:15
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What would happen if you kicked slenderman in the balls?
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Nov 25, 2015 16:17
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Pretty sure you have to murder someone now to appease him.
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Nov 25, 2015 17:43
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Blizzy_Cow posted:What would happen if you kicked slenderman in the balls? I think it would be pretty hard to reach them but if you did I suspect he'd get all mad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qy7NYfznss0 ChogsEnhour posted:Pretty sure you have to murder someone now to appease him. Hmm, time to consult my short list.
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Nov 26, 2015 11:41
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yo whatup fam I really like reading random people's spooky short stories, the problem is that a lot of them suck, and there's not much content produced here anymore which is bad because a lot of the ones from here were good so I am here to trawl r/nosleep and repost the actual good stories in this here thread here's the first one quote:As a kid, I was raised in a small fishing community on the Eastern side of Canada, surrounded by the gulf of Saint Lawrence and the Boreal Forest. The entirety of the land was close to 4000 foot square with an even smaller number of residents sprawled out over "main street", the main road running straight through our little town, and farming houses spread widely between areas of trees that were changed to domestic residential homes when agriculture stopped being profitable. In total, our community is surrounded by a vast expanse of ocean, and a seemingly endless barrage of trees that's spread over 55% of Canada's entire country. I spent most of my life hunting in those woods, so you can imagine my joy when my parents got me a "hunting dog". like a lot of the stories on reddit I think this one goes a little too far in the conclusion with the whole head in the window thing and would have been more effective if it reinforced the weird dog proportions to even spookier levels instead of oooooo a head 2 spooky but this one's pretty good and way better than most of the poo poo posted there i'll be back with more content freshly stolen from the reddits, I read 15 other highly rated but not very good stories to bring you this one also too many stories are about kids being abused over there I mean what the gently caress reddit
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Dec 17, 2015 06:51
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ok I like this one too Something's out in that old chicken coop, and I want to know what quote:Our farm really wasn’t all that big, yet it was big enough for us to find trouble, more often than not.
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Dec 17, 2015 07:01
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I have no idea why, but a good story ending with a terrible decision to go back or the hint of the thing following them home, that's like a great dessert after an excellent dinner.
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Dec 17, 2015 15:45
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Requesting some of Canis Latrans' stories. Not the pigman one, I think that's in this thread already. I remember 5 or 6 others from previous threads though. There was the Japanese tunnel of faces, and I think something about a cursed painting, and a few others.
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Dec 20, 2015 07:08
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Drink and Fight posted:Requesting some of Canis Latrans' stories. Not the pigman one, I think that's in this thread already. I remember 5 or 6 others from previous threads though. There was the Japanese tunnel of faces, and I think something about a cursed painting, and a few others. Oh God, Canis Latrans's stories are gold. I can't stop picturing the Japanese tunnel monster talking with a British accent, and it's hilarious. I can dig some up, if I need to.
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Dec 20, 2015 07:13
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I'm on it just give me 10 minutes to power up my laptop
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Dec 20, 2015 07:14
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Here we go, I'll start off with Face-jacket and then post the story of Eddie because I'm fond of that one. Face-jacket For a long period of time I was stationed in Okinawa Japan, which was a gorgeous and very brightly colored place. It's japan, so it's weird as gently caress to begin with, but the Ryukyu islands were a special and colorful weird as gently caress. The island is heavily urbanized, but there is still jungle in between the housing areas and the commercial districts, and it is crazy thick. This wasn't the low-brush jungle of the philipines, this place was just a morass of vegetation. The cities and towns themselves were very clean too, much cleaner than any other place I've been to, and the smell wasn't too bad. It smelled of the ocean, cooked meats and seagull poo poo, with only a little of the rank rotten vegetation smell you typically get in jungle areas. When I say the jungle was kind of inbetween places I mean just that. You could be walking down a heavily travelled sidewalk past a mall or supermarket or something and on the other side of the street, bam, inpenetrable foliage and weird noises. They had these snakes there, Habu, poisonous and hilariously aggressive that would screw around right at the borders of jungle-meets-city and chase you around if you were unlucky enough to draw their attention. Between them and the ganguro kids I got my fair share of mundane heebie-jeebies. Ganguros are...well, poo poo, look it up on the internet, I don't really have words for it. Pleasant enough kids, very animated, but just a weird subculture. Anyways, the fun stuff. I was spending a lot of my free time poking around the old mythologies and folklore of the area, and as you might have guessed Japan has a crazy deep history of scary monsters, ghosts of every imaginable variety and some really bizarre occurances. I was in particular digging around for information on the Ryukyunese version of the kappa. Kappas are pretty well known, turtle shelled dudes with a dent on the tops of their heads, dig cucumbers and suck the blood out of people who get too close to their river homes, yadda-yadda. Interestingly enough the part thats left out is that these things suck the blood out from your anus, leaving a bloated corpse with a distended rectum. This sounds gross, but it actually makes sense. When someone drowns they'll go through a coupla different stages of decomposition, bloat occurs and the rectum does get distended, sometimes grossly. I figured people dragging up someones body from a river and seeing the malformed orifices would probably whip up some bizarre creature to account for somthing that would seem so unprecedented. I thought I had it all figured out and went to a coupla different places to test my ideas and see how they were recieved from my various sources, which were old people. Old people who usually didn't like foreigners and eventually REALLY started to dislike me for bothering them all the time to boot. One of the guys I was always talking to about this stuff was a guy named Fred Nakamura. Fred had a more japanese first name I'm sure, but he never told me what it was. He was the awesome old goat with a collection of some really nasty and neat stuff. He had jars of preserved fish of hideous aspect, haunted mundane objects wrapped in paper wards and books, so many awesome books. He was a great source of information, and my time spent in his dinky little house was usually occupied by me poking around and finding something weird, like a jar filled with frog eggs and asking him what the gently caress. Then he would tell me what the gently caress and I'd be happy and buy him an Orion, which was this pretty awesome beer. One night Fred and I are getting heavy into the creepy stories and I'm complaining that while Japan has an awesome history of weird spooky poo poo I had yet to really see anything spooky as all gently caress. The entire island was like one big cocktease for me so far. All this lore, legendry and history and I had yet to meet a woman whose neck was like a snake or a hopping one eyed haunted umbrella (I poo poo you not, one of the yokai things is supposed to be exactly like that). Fred gets tired of my whining and pretty much calls me on my poo poo saying that if I was faced with something really and truly terrifying I'd lose my poo poo and bail, and everyone knows americans are all talk, especially the ones on this island, which was mostly marines and some airforce. I cop attitude towards that and puff up a bit, but he's just merciless, goin' on about how folks like me are all talk, no bark and no balls, blah blah blah. I know where he's going with this so I play along to the stereotypes. It's polite, it'll get me what I want and it makes the old guy happy to bash someone mercilessly to do it. I start bragging and he gives me a dare, and I take it in a heartbeat. Theres a little quiet creek not far from his house, and at that creek theres a concrete aqueduct thing that is apparently home to something pretty god damned nasty, he'll offer to take me there if I don't chicken poo poo out and bail. If I do, he'll mock me, my ancestors, my branch of the military, my favorite color and my first dog for the end of my days. Hells yes. I am in like Flynn. So this creek is in one of the wierd little sideways jungles not too far away from the Kadena airforce base. Nothing too fancy about it, it just missed development and is pretty rarely troubled by people. Its dense bush so we walk along the creek-edge which was rocky. The water was amazingly clean too for the first part of our trip. Crystal clear stuff, only occasionally did I see a styrofoam cup or anything normal like that. I could hear the streets to either side, people talking on their phones and music playing on the overhead speakers, also cicadas, always those god damned cicadas. So, we keep going the length of this little creek and very suddenly it starts getting choked and nasty. I went on about how pretty it was specifically to illustrate how nasty it got and how quickly. One second I'm looking at an arrowhead spring water commercial, the next, there's dead cats all over the place and it smells like someone slapped a leper with a colostomy bag. It was gross, stinky and uncomfortably warm and humid. Fred just keeps chugging along and pretty soon the jungle starts reaching over the creek and it's getting darker. Sure enough we come to a a bunch of large concrete pipes that serve as some sort of overflow collection. The pipes were pretty big, there were three of em, and you could walk right in without having to duck your head, and they were expectedly dark as hell. Fred points at them and tells me, "Alright badass, you march up the one on the right, only the right ok, you got a flashlight?" I pull out my little kick rear end flashlight I've had for years, the thing is trusty as a crow's eye and give him a smug grin, "Good to go Fred, when I get out of there your buying me a girlfriend for the evening." He shrugs and laughs and says something in japanese before shooing me into the hole. I start to head in, I've got pretty solid all-weather boots so I'm walking into the pipe from the middle of the creek, not too worried about foot rot or anything like that since I'm not planing on spending too much time out here. As I go in Fred yells at me from back up the creek, "Don't be a bitch!" I'm like, whatever dude, and in I go. The pipes dark as hell, and crawling with spiders. The creek narrows out and I'm able to walk on dry ground for a good distance as that little circle of light behind me gets dimmer. Theres not a lot of graffiti, which actually bothered me. Usually these places are rotten with tags and whatnot but this place only had a very few markings, most noticeable a bright red and yellow mark that said "PISS GO YEAH!!" which was awesome. I peed on it and then went my way. The tunnel curved, cutting me off from my lightsource at the rear and my little flashlight was doing a brave attempt at keeping the corridor in front of me illuminated pretty drat well. Eventually I couldn't see much to my sides though, which is how the cistern chamber caught me off guard. I was going along and I just got this feeling, halfway between spider-senses tingling and a noticeable change in pressure. I turned and scanned my sides and rear with the flashlight and discovered that I was standing in a pretty god drat big circle room with a low ceiling. Spooky place, it was awesome and carried the noise of my footsteps like crazy, I could hear my steps bouncing around all over the place. As I was marveling at my surroundings I noticed on the far end of the chamber, near a pipe that went further the walls looked, dirty...smudged with something, which from that distance I assumed to be crap. I walked up and discovered that the smudges were a little bit more defined, at first I figured it for graffiti and felt a little more relaxed, but as I got up there I realized, no, it wasn't graffiti and I began to feel a lot more worried. They were drawings of faces. Hundreds, maybe thousands of em. Life sized renditions of faces drawn in some brown-black substances that could have been paint, feces or...yeah, the cliche writing aid of the terminally homicidal. I don't think it was blood, but it could have drat well been blood. That wouldn't have been the creepiest part though, the faces, yeesh. These things were drawn with care and great detail, and they were all recognizeably individual. No two were alike. Male, female, young and old, every inch of the far wall was faces. There was no empty space between the renditions either, and occasionally a drawing would share a jawline or an ear with it's neighbor. It felt weird too, you always feel like your being watched when your alone but the sensation I was getting was uncanny and potent. I was being watched, by this wall. I just stared at em for the longest time, almost wanting to touch em to feel if they were just two dimensional or more. What broke my reverie was a face near the floor, at the edge of the tunnel leading deeper into the pipeworks. The faces weren't all japanese, some of em were anglo and african, and there was one face that stood out to me for its familarity. I freaked right the gently caress out. I turned to get my bearing and make haste out the exit, figuring I could haul rear end until I saw the exit, calm down and saunter out like a badass and still pass my dare. My light flashed around finding the passage I had come in from, but in it's travel it passed over something and I only saw it for a half second. Hunched over, raggedy-assed clothes, blank white eyes. It was a good coupla yards from me but I just didn't have the balls right then to put my light back on it. I wasn't alone in here, and whatever was there with me was right over there. I froze, checked my breathing and felt my heart go system critical. I could hear him breathing in there with me, the labored kind of breathing a COPD patient has, laborous, unsustaining breaths. Not loud, but long and troubled. A long pregnant period of time passed were I was just waiting to either poo poo myself or bolt. He broke the silence first, and his voice was high pitched like a girls, real shy sounding, like chimes or a voice you'd hear belting out some jump-rope poem in a school yard. "Would you take tea?" I gave an involuntary shudder and tried to say no thank you but it came out as "eeee." I heard him move towards me and I was gone, all my muscles suddenly decided to work for me and the whole freezing thing let up. I took off like a rabbit on fire. When I was young, I could run. Not so much now, I still have the legs, but the rest of me has gone pretty happily soft. Back then though, kapow, off like a shot. I was half coyote, half gazelle, I could outrun anything. My grandfather once told me that his dad won a bet against the devil in a race, and had since never been short of things to run away from. Right then, I was the Flash, I left a trail of splashes far behind me, and even though it was dark as a beggar's future I moved without fear forward, because I knew that no matter what was in front of me, it could not be worse than what was behind me. I'm lucky I didn't brain myself on the wall of the pipe. When I saw that circle of light that said "Outside! Safe!" I leaned into it and shot out of the mouth of that tunnel like a cannonball. Fred was standing there having a cigarette and I grabbed his raggedy old rear end and kept going. A couple of hours later, back at his house he gave me a sound bitching out and mocked me mercilessly. I was entirely too happy and terrified to bother shooting him down and took his abuse with a broad smile. "Dude, what the gently caress, did I just get the poo poo scared out of me by some old blind artist or something? I mean seriously!?" Part of me figured that there was very well a practical reason for what I had just experianced. Japan is rife with subcultures and weirdos, and it's not unlikely to run into some crazy old pervert hiding in a pipe who draws the faces of people he sees every day, and maybe the blank white eyes I had thought I saw were like, sunglasses or something, maybe he was wearing contacts. More likely, Fred set me up and a budy of his was in there waiting to scare the poo poo out of the american kid. If that had been the case, I was lucky I went with flight instead of the alternative, I had enough bad poo poo on my conscience, don't need to add mercilessly beating an old man to a pulp on top of it. Fred started telling me the story of what that pipe was and what it used to be. A long time ago, before the war and hell...before the japanese, there was a cave near there that had since been filled in. The cave was the home of an old man who took faces from people and made them into a kind of cloak he would wear as he went out hunting. If he saw someone whos face he wanted to take, but couldn't right then for whatever reason, he'd go home to his cave and with one long rear end nail and his own black spit, paint a rendition of their face on the wall so he'd remember it. The story says, to save yourself you had to sneak in there in the dark and smudge out your face when you found it. I got butterflies in my stomach and remembered what I had seen down there, and what I had neglected to do. I called Fred a miserable old bastard and if that thing came for me I'd never buy him a beer ever again. Fred laughed at me, called me a stupid kid, and then asked if I wanted to see more places like that. Of course I said yes. Face-jacket, thats what the guy was called.
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Dec 20, 2015 07:30
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Eddie I had a friend a long time ago named Edgar. Edgar was the single most mexican motherfucker I ever met. The actor from that Machete movie kinda reminds me of Eddie, except my guy was like...four foot something and broader than a barn door. I met this guy shortly after my time with the fleet, he was hurt in a pretty bad way and didn't wanna get fixed up by a legit doc or take a trip to the emergency room, his buddies had heard I did patch jobs on the cheap and welp. Pulling a coupla rounds out of someones rear end can make for strange friendships I suppose. Guy was covered in ink, he had tear-drops, numbers, spider thingies...all sorts of signs that proclaimed him as a macho badass with whom you do not want to gently caress with. I've been told what these things mean but I can't loving remember them for the life of me. Regardless, they're designed to ward people off and mebbe warn em about the individual wearing them. They have the opposite effect on me since I met Edgar, I feel safer...like I have someone at my back that will pull me out of the poo poo if it I need it. After I fixed up this guy, he saved my rear end more times than I can reckon. I lived in a pretty ratty part of town, and I'm not exactly a threatening looking person normally. I'm not an easy mark but I look the part ya know? Anyways, Eddie saved my rear end from what I think was a mugging on occasion. Getting cornered by a buncha dickheads out of the circle K with an eye on my cigarettes, I'm wondering where I'm going to stash the bodies and Eddie's bouncy car pulls up and solves the problem for me. Those fuckers BAILED when they saw him. He was pretty god drat friendly, drug me to a coupla decent parties, fed me el presidente til I was unconcious on his sister's couch and tried to hook me up with his cousin. I'm a half-breed, and neither of those parts is mexican, but that didn't seem to bother him, I stood out like a sore thumb at the gatherings ya, but I was the "Only white boy who I'ma let take a knife to my rear end." Long story short, we was pals. He and his boys got into pretty frequent rumbles with another troop and I made out nice for myself picking up their pieces. It may not have been particularly ethical doing patch jobs, but gently caress it I've never really been big on ethics. Anywho, they have this long standing fight with these guys from across town and eventually poo poo starts hitting the fan. Apparently the other guys had a santarista or some poo poo giving em a hand. I don't know if thats the proper term for the chicks that do this poo poo, I know the word bruja popped up. My own sadly racist as poo poo word for it was meximagician. Ya, ya I know, its not exactly telling of my cultured self to sling poo poo like that but whatever. Hispanic magic is bloody terrible poo poo. It's chicken feet and skulls, and bad poo poo incoming. Feels old as gently caress too, I have no doubt that that gobbldygook they spew when slinging a hex is nauhatl, and it makes my skin loving crawl. The other guys are getting more vicious, what would be occasional spats in the street and maybe a drive-by is turning even nastier. People are getting attacked in their homes, Eddie's hot cousin got her thighs stabbed while she was sleeping and they're doing poo poo like leaving gutted dog corpses hanging over fences. What starts making my guys worry is that they aren't feeling so hot all of a sudden. These are tough macho dudes, but superstitious as all hell, hearing a bruja is mucking around deflates em at an alarming pace. Edgar puffs up to compensate for this and starts making with the threats towards the bruja the other guys got. Saying he dosn't care about that poo poo, he's gonna slice up the old oval office and her sons. Blah blah blah. I'm like "Eddie chill man, she's prolly some dudes grandma." But he's having none of it, he's got a bit of torquemada in him I think, he's gonna cut himself a witch. poo poo does not go well for em over the next few weeks. Bunch of his boys get picked up and thrown out by the police, two of em flat out loving disappear and their girls are getting hit with the poo poo, the bad guys are targeting their families now. I know how voodoo rolls, it's a mindfuck, you make people afraid with it, ride their anxieties and fill in the blanks they make on their own. It's taking credit for something bad that happens even if you aren't the one responsible and tying all the lovely things that can happen to someone to one imagined source, you. It's terrorism, the most effective kind, people have been doing it to eachother ever since some broken rear end nutjob tribal picked up a dead animal and made the stronger guys hunt for him by claiming he could catch their souls in it. I was worried, but still pretty distant from all this poo poo. Edgar was my only friend in this, these were not my people. gently caress, I don't even have people. So I was watching it from the outside, only really getting involved when Edgar brought me someone to fix and a bottle of JD to pay me off with. By this point he knew he didn't have to bring me poo poo, I'd do it on the house if he needed it, but traditions right? I got involved when Edgar got his drat self loving killed. The way I heard it a grip of bad guys caught him dropping his little girl off at his grandmothers and loving disembowled him on the sidewalk right there. It had to have happened fast, this guy knew how to fight. He bled out in the ambulance, the paramedic taking care of him was a drinking buddy of mine and told me he was paled out right from the get go. It's not the first time I've had a friend of mine get a headstart on me, but it never feels good. Edgar was a hoot, and now he was loving dead...to boot, I was probably gonna get mugged loving hard next time I was out, and probably by the guys that killed him. They knew who I was, my protection was gone. So I did what any honest coward would do, I stayed in my loving apartment. I locked the doors, and didn't plan on leaving until judgement day. I'm not that much of an oorah go get em kinda guy. I can throwdown yeah, but only enough to keep my goofy rear end alive, and I almost never go looking for a fight if I can help it. I'm no viking, I'm a craven-hearted coyote son of a bitch. I would have been completely happy waiting this poo poo out. Ya sure there would have been some guilt, but I have plenty of guilt I carry along, eventually the individual poo poo stops mattering and it's just this loving thing following me around that I can placate with alcohol. My plan would have worked wonderfully if it hadn't been for Eddie not leaving me the gently caress alone. Now I was drunk as a ferryman, so that might have done it, but he was there sitting on my lovely couch one morning when I pulled myself out of bed. loving staring at me. Didn't have the decency to put his guts back in either, they were all splayed out over my tv-tray, getting gook in my microwave dinner I hadn't finished. "Get the gently caress out of here Eddie I can't fix you up this time dude." I sez. He's looking at me with the blackest eyes, and he ain't blinking. I sure as hell do. I leave him to my couch and go take a shower. Have you ever tried having a cigarette while showering? Theres an art to it, but its god drat satisfying. When I get back out there he's moved from the couch to my little kitchen and is looking up at all the empty booze bottles I got stacked on the shelves. I never threw away any of the poo poo he gave me, even after I drank em. Just kept them up there for some loving reason. He's staring at em, and I realize just how drat short this guy is. In life Edgar always seemed pretty loving gigantic to me. Here, now...he seemed so much smaller. "Eddie get out of my loving kitchen." I say, I havn't had an episode like this in years and I'm not liking it one bit. I've been doing really good. He just kind cocks his head towards me and says, "Ain't I paid you enough?" "Oh gently caress you," My bloods getting jumpy and my breath is starting to fever up,been at least a year since I've had poo poo like this happen, I was doing so well. "They did it front of my little girl man, she had em do it in front of Maggie." "Yeah well it's loving done now innit? It's over, go to sleep Eddie." "It ain't over man, what if she goes after her?" I'm looking for my meds now, going through my drawers trying to find the pills I havn't taken in like forever, but didn't have the balls to throw out. They make this poo poo stop happening sometimes, or at least they did. I'm a big fan of placebos, even if they don't do poo poo, my desperate and sudden need to take them right the gently caress now might actually accomplish the intended effect. gently caress, I probably coulda shot-gunned skittles and got the right effect. "It ain't over man, that witch gotta pay, she gotta get where I can get her." He says, he's got this lazy english thats unmistakeable. He dosn't sound all stuffed up and impressive like he used to either, he sounds like he's had the poo poo kicked out of him. Ha, gently caress that description, he sounds dead. Although in retrospect dead people shouldn't loving sound like anything right? "What the gently caress you want me to do about Eddie? Seriously, I pull bullets out of asses and stitch poo poo up, what in the name of seven snakes do you expect me to even be able to do? I'm not a jaguar mang." Can't find my pills, I'm starting to accept it as happening, not exactly the best of things and I know it. "You got to get her man, you got to get her rear end for me." "Thats serious poo poo, what am I gonna tell the cops when they pull me in? Edgar the Undead Mexican sent me, its cool guys?" "I never took you for a pussy." "I'm not a pussy, I just plan on staying alive you bag of dicks." "Why the gently caress for, you hate living as much as I hate being dead." "Yeah well I'm not looking forward to whats waiting for me where your at Eddie, I got bad poo poo following me." He takes down one of my empty bottles, Captain Morgan I think and turns it in his hands. I'm starting to get a bit desperate here. I got bad poo poo waiting for me if I leave the apartment before this poo poo blows over, on the other hand, I've got Eddie in here with me. Stuck between a spic and a hard place. Ha ha, gently caress me. "I know how this works mang," He says, "It's tradition, I'll do something for you, you do something for me." "What the gently caress you talking about Eddie, you can't do poo poo for me." "I'm not the only dead guy here Doc." And my blood runs flat loving cold at that. I've been collecting things like Eddie for a long god damned time. There are a lot of em, its what sent me to the pills ya know? They havn't come out in forever, but I never really felt like they left. "You threatening me Eddie?" "No you stupid gently caress, when I ever done you wrong?" "What the gently caress you figuring?" "You do this for me, you take this bitch out, I'll keep these motherfuckers in check, I can handle these bitches." It wasn't the first time I've shaken a dead man's hand. War does funny things to a guy. Maybe not funny ha-ha, but definately funny in some bizarre loving way. Funny like watching some fresh outta bootcamp shitbag catching a grenade and getting blown apart so loving hard and fast all thats left is his boots just kinda standing there steaming. Its horrible ya, and any right-minded person would puke right there. But war makes you laugh your tits off while you're puking your guts out, because its so goddamn funny. Maybe thats why after making the deal with Edgar I couldn't wipe my stupid smile off my face. It felt good to walk the warpath again. It was like getting a handjob from that girl in highschool who wouldn't give you the time of day back when you were a kid. It's like, ah...having a cigarette after a coupla days dry and you get that light headed hooo-yeah feeling. Like taking the perfect clean poo poo, you know the kind, zero residue left behind, zero splash, just a ten point dive from your rear end into the bowl, the kind they should have at the olympics. Once it was struck and the sun headed out I went to work. Violence was about to go down and the idea of walking out of it alive wasn't even pinging my common sense radar. I had to macgyver the poo poo I felt needful from what I had laying around. Jury-rigged witchcraft to ruin some old ladies day. Tore up my one yellowed pillowcase into strips and wrote the lord's prayer on it with magic marker before wrapping it around an old aluminum baseball bat Eddie's hot cousin gave me in case an rear end in a top hat kicked in my door. I grabbed the dice I used to bilk some dudes out of like forty bucks and tossed em in my back pocket. The last was a half finished bottle of I think, that Parrot Bay coconut poo poo that I could chug down like it was soda. Seriously though that stuff isn't even alcohol until about three minutes after you've slammed it, and then you are on your rear end. Rum is important though, dosn't matter what kind really, I know a guy who's big on rum, and he could be important if the poo poo goes sideways like I'm figuring might happen. gently caress, I'm hoping it goes hard sideways. By this time I'm rolling with the delusion. It feels loving good to just accept this as the way it is, to just roll with it and throw myself laughing into the madness. This delusion is something I'm comfortable with, it's pleasant. Like smoking in the shower. Ah, I'm mistaken. The last thing I took with me was my headset earphones and a little broken walkman. It used to have a working radio, but I dropped it rocking the gently caress out a few too many times and well...it didn't exactly work at loving all anymore, but I needed it. I was carried to the site of my crusade by a bus. Seventy-five cents. Bus driver looked at me funny, I was rocking out to a walkman that didn't work with a baseball bat over my shoulder. I highly doubt I was the strangest thing he'd seen that night. Back in the day crusaders got to wear cool poo poo like armor and fancy stuff like that, I had ratty blue-jeans and a Dr. Pepper shirt. I knew where these guys lived, everyone did. Other side of town in a lovely little neighborhood that mirrored Edgars stomping grounds. If you didn't know they were at war with eachother you woulda sworn they were family. poo poo they might have been. Bus dropped me off at the seven-eleven at the corner. Skinny black guy with a camo jacket asked me for my change, told him all I had was the bad kind and to get the gently caress out. He left. The small white house with the double front windows, thats what Edgar's cousin had talked about. It musta been like nine thirty and there was a party going on. Bouncy cars out front bouncing, loud music playing, and many men in white wife-beaters having a good time. They were marked like Eddie was marked, I still didn't have a loving clue what those marks meant aside from them meaning I was probably about to get my rear end killed. I turn the volume up on my little walkman. It's not playing anything, it never does anymore, but it's playing it loudly. Theres only one way to do something this stupid, do it hard. I had a dance in my step as I walked up to the two guys sitting on the hood of the car right out front. One of em popped his head up and looked at his buddy, they both said something but I couldn't hear it. Music was too loud. I give em a half smile, shrug and point to my headphones. The guy nearest to me pulls out a little nifty switchblade. He gets a bat to the face. Connects somewhere just around the jaw and turns him around. His friend hesitates a second before laying into my goofy rear end with a solid right that just about causes me to poo poo my pants. I hit street with more than the recommended velocity and try and get back as fast as I can. Just in time to catch a boot to the mouth as it turns out. Hurts. I have an issue with my mouth, it's a delicate spot for me. I'm about to call it and back out of this poo poo when my song comes on. You know the song, everyone has one, it's quite motivating...people can do fun poo poo when their song is playing, it's the reason I brought the loving thing. I'm getting the poo poo stomped out of me now, but he's leaving himself open in all the wrong places. Knees, knees are like paper-mache foundations on a skyscraper if you tap em right. Tap em with a bat. Tap tap. This house had a white picket fence I poo poo you not. It was hard to see if it was well kept because it was loving dark around here, only like one street lamp actually bothered to not be broken so I couldn't really tell, but I bet it was clean. I bet it was well kept. Apparently my altercation outside drew some attention and carbon copy guys start coming out from all over the place. It sounds bad, but in the place I happened to be at, all these guys sort of looked the same to me. Same shirts, same baggy pants, same markings, same angry "what the gently caress is this white guy doing with that bat" look on their faces. I wasn't just any white guy with a bat. I was Gringomageddon, I was become kali, my song was playing and even though I couldn't remember the words I was singing along best as able. At some point one of the fuckers put a knife in my upper thigh. Not really dangerously deep, although it was a couple breaths away from my balls, which would have been a problem. Enough to comically stick out to the side though. I hit them with my bat. I wasn't aiming to kill, or wound...or poo poo, I wasn't aiming. I was swinging. Most of the time I hit something, not always a bad guy. I distinctly remembering bashing the unholy batshit out of the mailbox and screaming at it. This is of course when poo poo gets weird. By this time I figure I'm so deep into my own little broken rectum of a rabbit hole that what is and what is not are completely indistinguishable from the other. For all I loving know I'm downtown at the thrift store just WAILING on the clothing rack and screaming about Ronald Reagan trying to sell my scrotum to the lizard people. Or I could be going to war with a bunch of gangbangers. By this point I no longer care. I really could use those skittles right about now. The people I'm beating down are people I've seen before. A young marine I watched catch a round in the head while I was fixing his broken thumb. A buddy of mine who got drunk with me back in the day and ended up drowning in a creek and I was too wasted to even loving notice. My first girlfriend, the one who got beaten into a coma by her dad and never woke up all the way. There's dogs loving everywhere. Barking dogs, tearing at my calves, some of em are pit bulls, cropped ears. Some of em ain't dogs...they are my coyotes, and they are laughing their asses off. My songs stuck in an endless loop and all I can do is keep swinging. I'm so sorry I didn't get your head down man, I was too focused on your stupid loving thumb. I am so sorry I wasn't thinking, I should have been watching your back. Somewhere in there my grandfathers cheering me on, but I cant understand him because the musics too loud and well, I never really could loving understand the guy. My hands are shaking and some part of me is wondering why I havn't been shot yet. There is gunfire ya, there's actually a quite a lot. There are bullets flying all over the god damned place, and oh holy gently caress Gunney's down and they are calling for the Doc and I can't loving get to him! Get the gently caress out of my way! I'm not alone anymore. Edgar's boys are here...and they are shooting the gently caress out of everything.I have backup? I have loving backup, my marines are here, it's going to be ok. Give them hell guys, give them buckets of it. I've got something to do here. You know its not easy to kick a door down. I remember that clearly enough. Don't get me wrong, I kicked that thing like four times hard as I could, and I've got some legs on me sister. All I accomplished was hurting my foot before I used the knob. I'm not without a bit of retarded. Open that door the polite way. Everything was going to hell around me, but I was the eye of the hurricane. It was calm where I was. Edgar was keeping the dead off me I think, he was out there in the front yard with his boys keeping my ghosts back while they kept the living occupied. He must have talked to one of them about this before hand. Coulda' told me about that part of his plan I think. The living room was fuckin' quaint. The couch was plaid, there was a potted plant and a giant crucifix on the wall with xipe totec splayed out on it. lovely little tv, on which was a guy in a bee suit silently looking at me with his mouth in a wide O and his eyes bugged out. Oh dios Mioooooo. She wasn't what I thought she would be, I imagined a shriveled little black thing with venomous eyes and black magic crawling off of her. I imagined a female version of the Emperor from Star Wars, all croaky and full of hate. What I got was a pudgy warm-looking woman in a flower print mumu holding in her arms what I first took to be a chihuahua and then on second glance saw as this loving...thing. Like an oversized hideous little skinned bat. Big rear end ears and beady eyes, mouth filled with ridiculously oversized teeth and tattered patagia just hanging off the sides. Its god-drat little hands, little people hands. This thing made chihuahua's look dignified. It was, what the gently caress. The bitch threw it at me, and it screamed as it came, it screamed words. Dumb old crow. I came equipped. Its not the first time I swang a bat at something that was probably a chihuahua. It was the first time I actually hit the loving thing. Out of the god drat park. Oh wait, this thing was a bat...I swung a bat, at a bat. Ah ha ha, gently caress me. She called up my old regrets on me, she hissed out my sins. I have a lot of those. She said poo poo in words I don't think have any meaning except to the dead, and the dead came for me as best they could. They held me down and whispered my name to me as it's written in the book the name-eater carries. She spat curses on me and I felt them hold. Edgar was trying as best he could, I think I saw him wrench a few things off me, but the poor guy had no idea the poo poo I carry around on me. I'm like a pack mule for bad poo poo. I went down hard. There were a lot of bullets flying around, did I mention that? I'm pretty sure I did. She found one. When that mamasita went down that poo poo let up just enough. The things holding me down with chains made of my own not inconsiderable regrets stopped for a bit. I was able to get up and stand again, I used the bat to assist. She was dead on the ground, gangbanger's bullet resting somewhere pleasantly warm in her graymatter, but this poo poo wasnt done yet. Old witches die hard. Her ghost was there pulling itself up and figuring out what the gently caress just happened, and I can hear Edgar screaming at me to do something. He wanted to do this part himself I think, but he's busy keeping my ghosts from ripping me right the gently caress apart. So I do the only thing I can do. I take a swig of rum, and grab a hold of my dice. I ask the Baron for one last favor, spew the rum into my hand onto the dice and roll those bitches. Afterlife lottery. I get a five and a three, they come to rest between her rapidly cooling breasts draped in that ridiculous mumu. I have no idea where that indicates, but I'm hoping it's like Eskimo hell or something ridiculous like that. Nothing but penguins with dildo-hats and polar bears on scooters. The good Baron takes her off my hands and it's done, it's loving done. I'm giggling, half crying...Edgar's not there anymore, and one of his boys yanks my stupid rear end out the door and into the car. Eddies sister is there and she puts pressure on my thigh, which is bleeding like god damned crazy for some reason and saying poo poo in that spanish-moonspeak with such rapidity that its making my head spin. They peel out of there fast as gently caress, I'm fading out but I'm there enough to giggle and mutter out "eepa eepa!" Ha ha, gently caress me, passing out time. Eddie's sister helped me get out of Los Angeles after that. gently caress that town, I'm never going back. But she and I occasionally keep in touch. Edgar's still around, but he keeps it quiet, especially since I've gotten my poo poo relatively together. So there, does that count as a ghost story? It has ghosts in it. In my head when I'm going over it, I'm always played by the same guy. To hell with Bruce Willis, I want Steve Buscemi. (I did look for stories abour haunted paintings but found none-- are you thinking of haunted jars? He has the Kissing Jar/Wife-in-a-jar and the now-lost Bad Jar. I'd be happy to post those if people want to read them)
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Dec 20, 2015 07:41
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Seriously I can't stop hearing "Would you take tea?" in Richard Ayoade's voice and it cracks me UP.
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Dec 20, 2015 08:17
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coronatae posted:(I did look for stories abour haunted paintings but found none-- are you thinking of haunted jars? He has the Kissing Jar/Wife-in-a-jar and the now-lost Bad Jar. I'd be happy to post those if people want to read them) Yessssss thank you. Post anything you have. I definitely remember a haunted painting but maybe that was someone else's story. The author calls his crazy friend in Arizona for help, and there's something about sage and a candle in a jar? Also "One second I'm looking at an arrowhead spring water commercial, the next, there's dead cats all over the place and it smells like someone slapped a leper with a colostomy bag." is the best sentence ever written and I crack up every time. Also has mountain winter zombie Nazi guy (I can't remember his name) written anything lately? Other requests: - the drain lady - the one where the teens go exploring an old school and the guy's girlfriend gets grabbed by something under the stairs - anything from Onic not already posted - Tewbrainer - where did I put my copy of Goonbumps? Lots of good stuff in there.
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Dec 20, 2015 20:24
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Drain Lady by Kendrik My father was a military man. Retired back in ’95 from the Navy after 20 years of proud service to our country. But before that, we moved often… every 3-4 years or thereabouts we’d pack up and get shipped somewhere new. Early 1989, a wonderful opportunity arose and dad took it. A 16 hour flight later, and we were stationed at N.A.S Sigonella, Sicily. I guess I was about, ohhh 10 or 11 at the time. Those years were blurred save those pinpricks of memory that still haunt me. That still plague my dreams from time to time. Our first home there was an apartment in a complex called “Bellavista” far from the Naval base. There was a waiting list to move into Base Housing that generally ran for about a year and a half’s wait. Until your time to move, you had to live amongst the locals wherever you could. Bellavista was a beautiful place… we lived on the upper floor of the complex and had a wonderful view of the countryside off our back balcony. At night, one could look up at the night sky and see a thin trail of fiery red lava slowly ebbing from still active Mt. Etna. And in the morning, everything left out in the open was often found to be blanketed ever so slightly in volcanic ash, almost like a light dusting of snow. But naturally, as perfectly nice as Bellavista was, it wasn’t meant for us for long. The lnadlord’s daughter was pregnant, engaged… and homeless. Guess who got the boot? So we moved, with the landlord’s assistance, into another home. Motta S. Anastasia, a little cobblestone-streeted town near Catania, and much closer to the Navy base. The day we drove up to the new place, I felt ill. Of course, nothing was thought of this at the time, but I’d swear in retrospect I was being told something. The place was a 3 story house with an apartment on each floor. I really don’t remember the neighbors, but both were similarly Navy families. And I can imagine I pissed them off a lot with the screaming. Dad unlocked the door and proceeded into the small entryway. The cobblestone street gave way to a marbled floor entrance and a matching set of marble stairs up to the second floor, which was our new home. The place was stunningly beautiful. Marble floors… glass french doors into the living room area… balconies attached to nearly every room, save the one that was to be mine. Claw foot bathtub…bidet… all the modern conveniences expected of a home in Europe. I walked into the room that was going to be mine. Small, simple, square and quite cold. To the left, at the end of the wall was a door covered with a “persiana.” Basically, a form of window blinds made from heavy horizontal flaps that was operated via a cloth strap attached to the wall. I pulled it up to see that the door was mostly glass and beyond it was a very small “room” lined with brick along the floor and walls. I opened the door and stepped into the room and looked up to discover the room extended all the way up through the third floor and up to a hole in the roof. There was no covering on the hole either… it went straight into open air. The shaft allowed a fair amount of light to shine into the only room in the house without a window in it, which I thought was pretty drat cool initially. The chill seemed to come from the room, despite the glaring sun nearly directly overhead. It was then I heard the first whispers. Like… if you were to take a wire brush and softly rub the stiff bristles against your jeans. At the time, I attributed it to echoes off the brick… but I couldn’t help but feel weird about it. It wasn’t coming from any discernable direction or source… but it surrounded me like a blanket, as if sound could be tangible and touchable. It pressed in gently on my ears like pressure on an aircraft ascending or descending. I turned to leave and I noticed a glinting drain in the middle of the floor. It was obviously for rainwater to drain away but my nausea increased when I saw it. My stomach gnawed at itself as I ran out of there and I swear I saw the drain cover jiggle a bit on my way out. I lowered the persiana quickly and rejoined the family in the living room, shaking and sick as a dog. Now granted… a little brick room was far from the norm for paranormal ghosty stuff. But try telling that to whatever was in there. Christ. For weeks and weeks, I’d get up the nerve to open the persiana in broad daylight and risk a peek… only to stumble back from the door sick as all hell to my stomach and trembling. I tried telling my parents of course… but an 11 year old’s ramblings about a scary brick room generally get chalked up to too many “Freddy” and “Jason” movies. The whisperings rarely stopped at night. They were persistent from the time I laid down until I finally forced myself into slumber. Often, I’d wake up in the middle of the night to silence, and then the whisperings would start up again, as if it was waiting to make sure I was awake. There was never any real words to the whispering… just a hollow “ksssh sshhhaww hissssshhhhh haaahhh ooooshhhh aaashhhhh” that seemed to repeat, but never in the same cadence. There was no emotion behind it either that I can remember. It wasn’t angry, it wasn’t sad nor happy. Just there. Always loving there. One night, after about 2 months of this, I was awoken by a particularly horrifying dream. I seemed to start having those dreams after we moved in… I had never had constant nightmares prior. But I awoke from the dream with the feeling that something was terribly, terribly wrong. Immediately my eyes darted to the door… and saw that the persiana was up. Now, European goons with experience, back me up… Persianas are about the noisiest drat things to have in a house. They’re generally metal slats hooked in with metal hooks that grind and squeak loudly in protest as they’re pulled open. There was no way in hell that the persiana, which was always closed, could have been opened without waking up everyone in the house. But sure enough, it was open about 3/4 of the way up the damned door. A bit of moonlight reflected off the bricks in the shaft and into my room with a dull bluish tone. I lay there for hours, paralyzed in my bed, but unable to look away from the door, lest there be something there when I looked back. Eventually, I just conked out… The next morning crept up finally and I was freed from my paralysis. I ran to the door amidst a wave of nausea and pulled the persiana shut as fast as I could. There was a light dusting of volcanic ash on the brick floor and I’d swear I could make out footprints or scuffing in it. Mom, still asleep at the time, yelled at me from across the hall after hearing the noise, but I couldn’t care less. Over the course of the next 3 months, it was the same routine. The whisperings never faltered. The persiana would be found at least 2 to 3 times a week opened, and the blackness of the room would stare out at me in my bed. Then one night, it was different. I still have nightmares of this incident and it makes me cringe and want to curl up in a ball still whenever I conjure it up. I had awoken again in the midst of a terrible nightmare. And sure enough, the persiana was up, but this time it was all the way up. The moonlight was barely filtering in that night, but I’d swear I could make out something there in the room. It felt like I was at just the right angle for me to see whatever it was, and if I were to move the slightest bit, I’d lose sight of it. It was a small sphere that shimmered like a soap bubble does. But it was so faint I could barely make it out. I watched as it hovered there for the longest time. It began to shrink like some TVs used to do when you turned them off… shrink into a tiny dot of light. But before it winked out, it flashed and expanded. It did so at an alarmingly fast rate and solidified into the form of a woman. She looked to be in her early to mid thirties, dark curly hair… definitely a local Sicilian. When she became “whole” and a solid image, she began shrieking and pounding on the glass doors with both fists. Her head swiveled wrong on her neck, shaking back and forth like if you put a teakettle on a stick and shook the stick around. Her eyes were completely black and full of anger and hatred… The skin around her mouth flapped loosely, giving me glimpses of her teeth and tongue and her hair was tossing around violently. Some sort of liquid oozed in small spurts from the corners of her mouth and flecks of whatever it was flew as she shrieked. Her screaming was horrific and nonsensical, and all I could do was scream back. My dad charged into the room to my bed, thinking I was having a nightmare. She shrank back from the door and… ugh. She slithered down the drain somehow. She twisted and distorted and I’d swear I could hear her bones splintering and cracking as she wound herself down into it. It was awful and to this day, dad says he’s never heard anyone scream so inhumanly before. I often ask him jokingly if he meant from me or her. Hazo has a new favorite as of 20:44 on Dec 20, 2015 |
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Dec 20, 2015 20:41
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Abandoned School by Seventhrev I’ve got a pretty long one that I think I’m ready to tell. I’ve lurked here for years on and off but never noticed the ghost story threads until now for whatever reason. It’s a good ten pages in MS Word, so I’ll break it up into chunks, to make it a bit more digestible. The first part is mostly set up, and doesn’t get weird till the end, so I’ll preface it with a little gem of wisdom my grandmother once gave me about night-lights to get into the swing of things and make this post at least worth something. Like many young children, I slept with a night light. We had one in the hall and the bathroom too for night journeys. One summer, my grandmother came to live with us, and took up residence in the room next to mine. I’m not sure why she told me this, but I distinctly remember her saying it just before bed-time one night. She said, “you shouldn’t use a night light.” I of course asked why. She looked at me dead serious and said, “they only let the devil see you better.” Needless to say I never slept with one again, and hated the one out in the hallway enough to shut my door at night. I was probably all of eight years old at the time. Thanks Grandma! Ok, on to the main story: This is an event that happened to my ex-girlfriend and myself along with a few of our friends about 11 years ago. We were all in high school at the time, Juniors all of us but my younger brother who was a freshman and his older Sophomore friend. I had a thing for haunted places, though honestly I really hadn’t done much more than explore some supposedly haunted abandoned house out in the stix. Nothing doing there. My girlfriend, we’ll call her Katie for the sake of privacy, was also mildly into the whole paranormal thing, as were a couple of my friends and my younger bro, Mark. As the story goes, my mother discovered that I was into these kinds of things, and sure enough, so was she. She really enjoyed the whole idea of ghosts and ghouls and such. None of us had really done anything though, that is to say, we’d never actually gone out to a cemetery or haunted house except for me and two of my friends. Now at this time of her life, my mother liked to smoke when things got stressful. However, she tried not to do it often, and she never did it in front of anyone. It was her little secret, even though my brother and I knew it was going on. She’d sneak into the bathroom and turn on the overhead fan and open a window and puff a couple out. We’d always smell it sooner or later, but we played it cool. She could be drinking we figured, so a little cigarette here or there was better than some of the alternatives. Anyways, around that time she was on the verge of divorcing our cheating step-father as well, so things were pretty tense on the home front. He was indeed cheating, and she eventually did divorce him, but after she found out, she allowed him to prove himself, if you will, by ending the affair. Anyways, she’d occasionally just get so stressed with work and her cheating husband, and surely of making dinner and cleaning house and working late at her lovely job and all the other stuff moms do for their families, that she’d just hop in the car and take off. She’d always tell us when she left, and eventually we got used to it. She’d essentially just drive around for a couple of hours, usually out in the boonies, and smoke. It was her way of letting off some major steam. After one of these drives, she came home all excited. She was always in a much better mood after a drive so at first I didn’t think much of it. But she kept looking at me like she wanted to tell me something, get something off her chest, but she was smiling about it so I knew it wasn’t anything terrible. Finally I asked her what was jiving her up so much. She leaned in close, and the smell of cigarettes on her breath, mingled with mouthwash, was overpowering, but I stayed put all the same. “I found an old abandoned school,” she said. At first I didn’t get it. So what? A school? Out in the boonies? And it was abandoned? And then it clicked. She leaned back and smiled. “You wanna check it out?” she asked. My interest was immediately peaked. Of course I did. However, I couldn’t quite accept that my mother was just gonna let me go traipsing around some abandoned building far away from any form of civilization, even if she were chaperoning. I hesitantly nodded, but voiced my aforementioned misgivings about the matter. She promptly said that she knew exactly where it was, and that as long as I took a handful of friends and we all had cell-phones charged and plenty of flashlights and a decent first aid kit, she didn’t mind my checking it out. I could hardly believe it. When she’d found out about my former adventure in the not-so-haunted house out in the stix, she’d nearly launched into the stratosphere. She’d taken my car away from me for a month, she had paid for it after all, and I had to ride the damned bus to school, which was a major shock to my high school junior ego. So here it was, the answer to my previous longings to do something. All I had to do was let her know about it. Of course that seems obvious now, but as a teen the last thing I wanted to do was tell my mom I might be getting up to some trouble. So she agrees to allow me to visit the site, but of course she lays on the Mother pretty thick. If anything, anything at all goes wrong, even a scratch on some rusty metal, she is to be called immediately. Also, all the other parents of my friends involved must be aware of our little outing as well. This was the gotcha. None of my friends parents would agree to such an excursion, especially not Katie’s. However, my mother didn’t ask us to prove all was well with the other parents, so we never asked them. Perhaps a bad decision in the long run, but again, we were all teens, and just because my mother was suddenly open to the idea of us mucking around inside some possibly haunted but mostly nature overrun school, none of my peers parents were likely to be. So, we didn’t tell them, and mom didn’t ask. We decided to visit the school on a Saturday. It would give us plenty of time to check the place out, and we were all hoping that we might actually be able to spend the night there, with a quick call to our parents of course. The plan was to all pile into the van of one of the guys coming along, Joe was his name, and head out around noon. We’d go eat lunch someplace first and then make our way out there, placing us at the school around 2:00 in the afternoon. This way, we figured, we could argue that we’d not had enough time, and we might as well stay the night, if we could. And of course we’d only really be calling my mother. I felt certain she’d let us stay as long as her rules were obeyed. We headed out, grabbed a quick lunch, and got to the place close to the designated time. All was well. My mother had been right when she said the place was way out there. There was nothing for miles around but cornfields dotted with thick tangles of woods. None of us could fathom why there would be a school so far away from anything. I later found out there had been a one street town there, within shouting distance of the school in fact. It had been abandoned after a fire gutted most of it, sparing the school, some forty years previous. None of us knew this at the time, otherwise we might have widened our search, for there were apparently a few old houses and remains of the one street and such in the newly grown woods in the area. We just figured it was a schoolhouse for the farm kids back in the olden times, before we were but a twinkling in our mother’s eyes. For the first hour or so we mostly stuck to checking out the perimeter of the school. It wasn’t massive, but it wasn’t tiny either. It was a good three stories high, rectangular in shape, probably had at least 20-25 good sized rooms in it, including administrative offices and such. It had probably served most of the region, as the city I’d grown up in had been tiny back when the place was built, as were all the surrounding hamlets. I discovered all of this upon doing some research at the public library shortly after our little excursion out to the place. I didn’t find many records for the building, which I thought was strange, but what I did find indicated that it was the main school for some fifty miles in all directions. And the town it was built in had apparently burned to the ground. The school was saved but most of the towns survivors simply moved to one of the neighboring hamlets, which by then were growing enough to warrant building their own schools. So this one gradually fell into disrepair and was forgotten. It was terribly overgrown with vines, bushes, even trees. The western corner was dominated by a massive oak that seemed to have grown right up alongside the building, destroying much of the exterior as it grew. None of the windows had any glass in them, not even shards. There was a bit of graffiti, but it was noticeably scarce. This place was truly off the beaten path. None of us had heard of it from anyone else and there were plenty of similar places, old houses, shacks in the woods, etcetera, in the area that teens ventured out to. The road, if you would call it that, that we drove down to get to the place, was completely overgrown, never been paved, at least that much was clear. We had to park the van halfway down it due to a couple of several year old trees growing in the middle of it. You could see some of the school from the main road that we took to get there. Of course it was barely wide enough for two cars and looked like it hadn’t seen any maintenance in a decade. Joe was not happy about all the potholes he had to caress his van through. The place didn’t initially seem all that daunting to me. It looked like a semi-modern school that had been left alone for a few decades and mother nature had done her thing. I didn’t get goose-bumps looking at it, and as far as I can remember, no one mentioned anything about being creeped out by the place when we first arrived. I was really kind of unimpressed by it at first. Our initial search revealed little. There were remains of a playground area behind the school, mostly just rusted playground equipment, a lot of it unrecognizable due to it’s advanced state of degradation. We did notice what looked like a dilapidated old house, one story tall and probably no more than three or four rooms, off in the distance. But we decided to leave it be for the time being, focusing on the school. The front entryway was completely overgrown with vines. Most of the building was covered in them. My grandfather owns a house in the town I grew up in near there with a similar vine problem. He actually mostly lives in Florida, but spends some time in town to make sure his sons are keeping his family business tip-top. Every summer, he has to either have one of my uncles or a hired crew come and trim down the vines growing all over his house. It’s a yearly battle and the few summers he’s simply let it go led to nothing but damage to the gutters and windows of the house. The vines growing all around this school were the same kind, ones you might find on some stately manor giving it an air of age and pomp. Of course, these vines had seen no attention for years, and were really doing a job on the exterior of the place. What little we could see of the actual exterior was made of limestone and granite, two very abundant rocks in the region. Adam, another of my friends along for the trip, had thought to bring machetes, otherwise we would have had a hard time getting into the place. He had three with him and distributed them amongst our small group. He had one, Alex, a friend of my brothers, had one, and I had one. My brother, Katie, and Joe were equipped with pretty powerful flashlights. We decided that we’d split up into pairs as we explored the place, we all had flashlights of some kind, and at least one of us would have a machete in case some homeless guy or wild animal decided to attack. So, after a look around the outside, we hacked our way through the front doors. The doors themselves were long gone. The clearing of the entry took longer than we expected, we could see the gap and the vines didn’t cover it completely, but they were tough as hell. Finally, we cleared a hole and headed in. We were immediately met by the smell of an ancient rotting building. I wished we had brought some kind of masks or something, because the place was surely toxic. The walls were warped and caving in with mildew and water damage. The floors were slimy in some places, crusty in others, but all around fragile. It’s a wonder none of us stepped through any of them. The front hall was in pretty bad shape, we figured because it had been open to a good deal of exposure with the doors missing. We didn’t notice any remnants of them come to think of it, they were just gone. Most of us had enough sense to bring at least one extra set of clothing with us, except for my younger brother. After hacking our way into the front entry we backed out to retrieve a shirt or some such to wrap around our noses and mouths. They weren’t perfect, and you could still smell the place through them, but they were better than nothing. My brother, being the douche that he can be sometimes, decided that he didn’t need anything anyways, and refused to wrap a t-shirt of mine around his face. I gave it to him regardless and he stuffed in in his back pocket, most of it hanging out, “just in case” he said. By this time it was getting into late afternoon. The month was early October, so the light was going to be failing soon. But we have enough time to get a good lay of the land before we’d have to rely solely on our flashlights, the interior was dim but not dark. We split up. Me and Katie were together of course, my brother and his friend Alex, and Joe and Adam are the final pair. Katie and I decide to head to the top floor, my brother and Alex take the middle, and Joe and Adam poke around the ground floor, with the idea that we’d meet up in an hour or so at the entry way again and each take a different floor. This way we’d all get to see the whole place before it got too dark and we could decide upon a good place to crash for the night, or whether or not it was a good idea to do so at all. So we all head out. Luckily, the stairs had been made of concrete, at least the ones at the entry, so going up to the top floor was not difficult, though the stairs were strewn with several decades worth of debris from storms and peeling ceilings and walls. Katie and I made it to the top floor without too much trouble and started moving through the school. The place was interesting, to say the least. Most of the classrooms still had desks and cabinets and such in them. In the few that we could open, however, we didn’t find anything but rust, mold, and rot. I felt no heebie-jeebies while I was there, at least not till the end. Even Katie remarked that the place was not what she expected. I don’t recall hearing any weird sounds that weren’t explainable by the creaks and groans of an ancient building, nor did I see anything strange; no children running past a doorway, no old schoolmarms eliciting rage upon their former pupils, no silent-hillesque monsters looming out of the shadows. Of course, that was the case at first. Then, for some inexplicable reason, Katie simply disappeared. I say she disappeared because one minute I was checking out the corner of some moldy room, the next I was asking her what she thought of some huge hole in the wall that looked out of place, and she didn’t respond. I looked around and she wasn’t with me anymore. At first I didn’t panic. She’d simply stepped back out into the hallway again, on to the next room. I called for her, no answer. One of the reasons I digged Katie was that shecould play a good practical joke. I was the type of guy who loved pulling one over on a buddy or whoever, and Katie was the first girl I ever dated that actually enjoyed the occasional prank and loved to one up me whenever she could. So of course I figured she’s about to spook my rear end. Nothing to worry about. She’ll jump out at me any second, or feign being injured or whatever to unnerve me. So I call out for her again, kind of playful like I’m onto her. No answer. Typical, I think to myself. She’s just reeling me in. I leave the room I’m in and make my way to the next, glancing over my shoulder every few moments to try to catch her sneaking up on me. I never see her. The next room is empty. The room after that is empty as well. Two rooms later and I’m at a fungus covered wall at the end of the hallway praying that the shirt wrapped around my face will keep all the nastiness out. I check the last two rooms there at the end of the hall and she’s still not around. Now I’m starting to feel the beginnings of anxiety. Usually by this point she would have sprung her trap on me. But no dice. So I carefully backtrack, searching every room again, opening closets where they actually still had hanging doors, looking under rusting and rotting desks, glancing through vine infested windows to make sure she’s not outside looking up with a grin on her face. She is simply nowhere to be found. I checked the entire top floor, as thoroughly as I could. I’m thinking by this point that I need to do what mom asked me to do; call her if anything goes wrong. But I just know that Katie is playing a prank on me. She has to be. How could she just disappear? She had to be somewhere, and wherever that was, she was probably laughing her rear end off about it. But my gut was churning and something was definitely wrong. I held off on calling mom. I figured Katie might have headed back downstairs and outside to do the necessary or something. I found it strange that she wouldn’t have said anything to me about it, but this place was obviously toxic, maybe she had gotten sick and just couldn’t stay long enough to say “hey, I’m out.” So I headed down to the second level along the main stairwell. There were at least two other stairwells going down from each end of the hall at the top level, but I figured I’d have a better chance of catching her down the main one as the side ones were wooden and did not look safe at all. I found Mark and Alex on the second floor, and they hadn’t seen Katie either. Neither of them looked like they were faking to prolong the prank, and Alex actually looked upset. I didn’t take the time to ask him what was up and instead started shouting out Katie’s name. By now I’m getting pretty worried and hoping to hell this better pan out as just one hell of a trick on her part. Still no answer. My brother and Alex and I all head down to the ground floor after a cursory look in all the rooms on the second floor, all pretty worried about Katie. After a few minutes of searching, we find Joe and Adam, and they seem to be pretty bored with the place. They ask what the other floors look like before we get a chance to mention Katie’s disappearance. My bro and Alex just shrug while I blurt out “where’s Katie?” They both look at each other, and then back at me with blank stares. Joe starts to crack a grin and suddenly I feel better and angry all at once. Surely he’s in on it and just can’t hold it back any longer. He’s about to tell me she’s waiting in some closet somewhere close and I just have to keep looking so I can get the poo poo scared out of me by my girlfriend. The joke was going to be, after all, on me. He asks me if I’m kidding him. I freak out and say of course not. He doesn’t get it and I suddenly get very angry. I’m confused and worried and this prick is seemingly playing around with me. I’d had enough of the joke and was about ready to pound his face. He suddenly realized I wasn’t kidding around and got really pale, said he didn’t know where she was, asked if I’d looked everywhere. Of course I had, I told him. But surely I had not. I realized that this place could have a basement. It was then that we heard the scream. It was like nothing I’ve ever heard before in my life. It was obviously Katie, but I’ve never before or since heard anyone scream in that kind of terror. It sent my body into animal mode. Every muscle tensed up, from my rear end cheeks to the cheeks on my face. For a moment all any of us could do was stand there and listen to this banshee wail of a scream. It was petrifying. And then another came. And another. By the time Katie had screamed a third time I was on the move. Halfway down the main hallway I heard what sounded like a large heavy door slam shut. She must have screamed another half dozen times before I finally found her, at the bottom of a stairwell, a level below the ground floor; the entrance to the basement. Ok, I'll go ahead and post the last two parts, figured I'd spread them out a bit for the sake of sanity but, I guess I'll cut to the chase. Here's the second part of our misadventure, the third to follow on it's heels: Things of course got very strange at this point. The stairs, as I mentioned earlier, were wooden here, and looked completely unsafe. I hesitated, but only for a moment as Katie screamed again, before heading down them as lightly as I could. It was also, obviously, pretty dark near the bottom of the stairwell. All three of the upper stories of it were lined with windows, but they had mostly been covered over by the vines on this part of the building, so the whole place was dim. I flicked my flashlight on as I made my way down the one flight to the basement landing, but did not immediately see Katie anywhere. She let out a gurgle of a scream, and then another real peeler. I wondered if her wailing might not bring the stairs down from under me. Finally, I get to the bottom, the other guys are all clustered at the top of the first floor landing looking down at me with pale faces and nervous eyes. None of them seems willing to follow me down, for the moment I didn’t really care. I just wanted to find Katie and get the hell out. And from the sound of her screams she was right there with me. A quick look around the landing revealed that it was just that. A doorway was built into the wall to my right as I left the stairs. The corner of the building was in front of me. There was a little stretch of concrete floor in front of the door that led to a corner on my right. Katie was seemingly over there somewhere. I flashed the light and saw her huddled in the corner where the stairwell came down, as far from the door as she could get. The light obviously startled her because she let out another scream. I started towards her but she got visibly more shaken the closer I got. It was as if she didn’t see me. I say see me rather than recognize me because she really seemed to be looking through me, but not at my face. Clearly, though, she could see me approaching, so it was pretty unnerving. I slowly squat down next to her, and she’s moaning the whole time, still looking through me and not at me. She starts slapping me and scratching me like some wild animal, screaming and kicking and lashing out. She knocked me on my rear end and I went sprawling towards the door. Here eyes got really wide, like she was either finally recognizing me, or something worse was going on in her head, and started moaning again. Her hair was a mess and her clothing looked like it had been torn and was filthy in places. So she is clearly out of her mind. Instead of approaching her I start talking to her, telling her that its just me, her boyfriend, that everything will be all right, that nothing is gonna hurt her, there’s nothing to worry about. After a few minutes of this, she seems to calm down a bit, and finally stops looking through me and at me. Suddenly, and finally, she recognizes me, and just starts sobbing at me. I move in close and she hugs me to her, babbling through her tears about something on the other side of the door. I don’t want to stick around, and of course I need to get her out of there, so I didn’t mess around. I picked her up and trudged up the stairs as fast as I could. She was basically wrapped around me like a little frightened kid the whole time, her legs locked around my waist, her arms around my neck, and holding me in a vice grip. Finally, I get her to the top of the stairs, but she doesn’t let go. I don’t care and push my way through the guys just standing there, like they were statues frozen to the ground. A moment later, we’re all outside in front of the place, the guys just standing around scratching their heads. My brother at least tried to help me comfort her, but she only moans and cries louder when he comes near, so they all just kind of backed off and let us alone for a moment. I manage to get her to loose her monkey grip on me and we sit down in the tall grass, her on my lap with her arms around me under my arms and her face buried in the nape of my neck. And still all she can do is sob and moan a bit. I tried to talk to her about what happened for a few minutes, but she just gets all panicky and says she wants to get the gently caress out of there. All I wanted to do was oblige her, so I hollered at Joe to start up the van so we can head home. I tell Mark to call mom and manage to get Katie to actually stand with me and walk to the van. We all pile in and are about to go when suddenly Katie starts to freak out again. She suddenly shouts “wait!” and we all look at her. I’m still holding her next to me and she’s still shaking all over, and she looks at me and says, “my purse.” I’m a little confused at first, but then I realize she had brought it in with her. I had asked her why at first and she showed me a little first aid kit inside and a bunch of extra batteries. She had emptied out most of the other stuff she normally carried in it but still had her wallet inside. She had told me it was our survival bag with a wink, pointing out a couple condoms as well. At this point, I’m ready to leave the drat thing wherever she dropped it, because she clearly does not have it with her. She would have as well if her wallet hadn’t been in it, I‘m sure. But important stuff was there, some cash, her social security card, her driver’s license, the usual. She didn’t want to leave any of that behind, or have to come back out here and get it later. She was getting much calmer by the minute, happy I’m sure just to be out in the sunlight again, but she refused to leave without the thing. Rather than argue with her I hop out of the van and start making my way back towards the school, machete and flashlight in hand. I figured at least one of the other guys would follow me in, my brother maybe. I looked back and they’re all still sitting there in the van staring at me like I’ve got tentacles growing out of my eyes or something. I gesture at them to follow me and Joe leans out the window and shouts, “she’s your girlfriend man, I ain’t going back in there!” Everyone else shares the determined-to-stay-put look on their faces. By now, I really don’t give a gently caress. I haven’t seen or heard anything weird other than my girlfriend freaking the hell out. So I head back in. This is when I do actually begin to feel the heebie-jeebies. The whole place just felt oppressive. I didn’t notice it at first, or brushed it off for as my own internal worry for Katie, but halfway down the hall to the stairwell, around the same spot I had previously heard what must have been the basement door slamming, it started feeling really bad. It was like a bad case of acid reflux or something. My stomach started churning and I felt like I was still carrying Katie, like something was pulling down on my shoulders. Still, I persisted. It’d take me no more than another three minutes to get down there, grab her purse, which was probably right where I had found her sitting, and jet out. Then I started thinking about that basement door. I hadn’t really paid much attention to it before. I’d just sized up my surroundings, homed in on my girlfriend, and forgotten about where I was for the sake of getting her out of there. But as I made that last little jot to the stairwell, it dawned on me that I had actually heard a door slamming. My mind started to wander, and I tried to place it into a nice snug little box of logic. Maybe a door down the other end of the hall had been blown shut, or on at higher floor. The thing is, none of the rooms that any of us investigated had any doors on them. There were of course large metal and wooden cabinets in most of the classrooms, so surely it had been one of them. But my brain still insisted that this had sounded like a large door, not a cabinet, being slammed shut. And of course, the only real door I had seen so far was the one in the wall of the basement landing. I don’t really consider myself some kind of tough guy or anything. Never been in a fight, not even with my brother. I get scared just like anyone else I’d imagine. I can’t stand deep water, even if I can see right to the bottom of it, in fact that makes it worse. And spiders freak me out. But for whatever reason, I kept pressing on. Katie would not let it go if I left her stuff behind, and I’d likely have to make another trip out there to get it to make her happy. So I just kinda sucked it up and plowed forward. I resolved to get that purse so I could be rid of the place and that was that, screw the tension in my neck and the weight on my shoulders. The oppression of the place did seem to lighten a bit as I mustered my courage, and I found myself at the top of the staircase peering down into the gloom below. And the final part. (This all took place in South Central Indiana, and really that's as much as I want to say about the location.) I start making my way down the steps, a little more carefully this time. The sound of the wood creaking under me is really noticeable now without the screaming and sobbing to drown it out. I figure I’ll be lucky if I don’t slip this time on a well rotted step or patch of mold, or worse, step through the wood. I’m about halfway down and moving the light around on the steps below me, not paying much attention to the landing below so as not to loose my footing, when suddently the sound of the van’s horn honking makes me want to climb the walls and shout bloody murder. Joe honks again as I realize what I’m hearing, and anger washes over me. Now I’m not scared at all, just pissed, and off balance. I started moving down the stairs a bit faster. I’m nearly to the bottom when suddenly I feel what must have been fingers pinch my Achilles tendon on my right foot. This time I actually do jump, because now something is screwing with me. It’s not a car horn or weird smell or the weight on my shoulders, it’s someone’s fingers on the back of my foot. They were only there for a moment, but they pinched pretty hard, enough to bruise when I checked it out later. I thought I’d go toppling over, but managed to right myself and rush down the last remaining steps. I wheel around and without much searching find that there is a pretty good sized hole between two steps a ways up, right were my foot had been when I got the pinch. The hole looks large enough for me to stick my own hand through so I figure there has got to be someone down here with me. I side-step towards the door to my left now and shine the light on the wall of the descending staircase. Of course, there is a hatch there. However, it has a lock built into it. No handle or anything, just a flat little square door in the wall that previous tenants of the school probably stored something behind. I’m pretty amped up, and starting to get scared all over again. The place really seemed to be pushing down on me once more. But I don’t care if there is someone back there or not. I just want to grab Katie’s poo poo and get out. So I pass the light over the ground where Katie had been squatting, she was pretty close to the hatch actually, and there’s nothing there but some leaves and twigs and debris seemingly from past flooding. This is when I notice the door I’m standing next to is actually open, just a bit. It was enough to really get my blood pumping. I hadn’t paid too much attention to it before, as I said above, but I had been pretty sure the thing was closed. And of course I had heard something slamming down here. Maybe it had been the hatch in the wall under the stairwell, to this day I’m still not really sure. It could have been anything. But nonetheless, as I stood there in the murky light cast from the vine-crowded windows above and the slight glare of my own flashlight, I couldn’t help but feel truly pit-of-the-stomach scared. I broke out in a cold sweat staring at that door, wondering what the hell might be beyond it and why Katie’s purse wasn’t right here. I hadn’t managed to get anything out of her before I’d trudged back in other than her babbling about something on the other side of the very door I’m standing in front of. Again, I wonder if she had been talking about this door or the hatch. Regardless, I’m freaked. But I just stand there for a moment. I still need to find her damned purse, and I’m not quite ready to give up. I’m just overreacting, I tell myself. There is nothing down here but rotting wood and dripping pipes and a pile of leaves in the corner. Everything is cool. Find the purse, and get the gently caress out, yelling and making GBS threads yourself as you do it if you have to, but do it. So I steel myself for a moment, and finally reach out for the door. Slowly, I pull it towards me, shining the light around it as soon as I can. Thankfully, nothing jumps out at me. But the feeling of weights on my shoulders intensifies again. So for a moment I just stand there with the door open, moving the light slowly through the room before me, letting my eyes adjust to the darkness ahead as best they can. Clearly, this was some kind of maintenance room. I see brooms against the far wall, an ancient mop bucket with a molding mop in it next to a huge porcelain sink covered in black cracks along one of the side walls to my left. To my right is a jumble of junk, a lot of it unrecognizable. The place looked like it had been inundated a few times and I could only guess that the pile of stuff I was looking at was old decaying boxes of books. The place stank far worse than any of the other rooms we’d been in up till then. Without really thinking of anything but finding that damned purse, I move into the room quickly, shining my light to the left and right, ready for something to jump out at me. Nothing does. This is when I notice the light coming from under the door on the far wall. Either my eyes adjusted to the gloom, or someone or something had actually just turned on a light on the other side of that door. It was really dim, and my immediate thought was that it had to be candle light because it seemed to fade in and out a bit as if it were flickering. There wasn’t a window in the door or anything like that. I of course flashed my light over on it. It was a large metal door, rusting pretty badly. But it looked thick as hell, and not yet ready to give up the ghost and fall off it’s hinges or crumble to nothingness. I could only imagine horrible things behind it, but it was probably the door to the boiler room or some such. For a moment, I dared not move. Then the purse came to mind again and I made a cursory search of the room I was in along the floor to find it. This, however, was as far as I was going to look. I had made up my mind about that if nothing else. I couldn’t stop looking at the other door while I searched the room once more with my light, and that almost not-there light was still seeping out from under it. I had made up my mind to finally check out when I heard what sounded like a bolt being thrown. I jerked my flashlight up towards the door, frozen in place. I felt like I was underwater or something, the pressure on my shoulders was palpable, and my ears started ringing and popping, as if I were driving down a really steep hill. Even my stomach felt like it was up in my throat. All I really wanted to do was bolt, but momentarily, I could do nothing but stand there like a deer in the headlights, shining my light on that door and waiting for whatever it was that was going to happen to happen. I have no idea how long I stood there, but it surely wasn’t long, because before I knew it I was leaping up the stairwell and breezing down the hallway to the entryway of the building. I burst out into the sunlight, dazzled by the brightness, though it was overcast, and made a bee-line for the van without taking a second look back. The guys inside could clearly see that I was freaked out and Joe started it up as I approached. I hopped in and we tore rear end out of there. Back on the main road, Joe suddenly didn’t mind the pot-holes so much and we were halfway home before we knew it. My brother finally looked around his seat at me and Katie, now clutching each other, and asked us both what the hell had happened. We both just looked up at him. Katie finally said, “not now Mark.” We drove the rest of the way in silence. She didn’t even mention her purse. The look on my face and my behavior must have told her it was gone and there was no going back to that place because she never did bug me about it again. Whew! This has turned out longer than I figured it would. Anyways, a few days go by, and we don’t mention a word of anything about the school to anyone. My mother is noticeably concerned when we get home, but I told her nothing at the time. Eventually she stopped bugging me about it, just glad nothing truly bad happened. Finally, after a few quiet nights just hanging out together and watching the television in my basement, Katie and I decide to talk to at least one another about what happened. She refuses to tell me anything until I tell her what happened to me. So I lay it all out for her. Her eyes open wide and she kinda nods when I mention the pinch on the back of my foot. I finish telling her about the way I felt and the room behind the door and the hatch and the light and the bolt sliding, and she is pretty shaken up. So she starts to tell me about what happened to her, slowly and almost pleadingly at first. And bit by bit, her story really starts to freak me out all over again. So we had been up on the top floor, and sure enough, she’d gotten it into her head that she’d prank me. So while I was distracted she ducked out of the room we were in and rushed down the hallway to the top of the stairwell at the end of the building. She figured she’d head down it and jump out at me as I came down either it or the middle stairwell from around a corner or something. The steps are pretty bad of course so she has to take her time, but she doesn’t want to get caught either. She said she can’t really explain why, but for whatever reason, she didn’t want to stop at the second floor landing. She could hear my brother and his friend, but they seemed to be down at the other end of the hall, so it’s not that she’s worried they’ll find her, she just has this impulse to head down to the ground floor and get me there instead. So she kept moving down. By now I was actively looking for her and was nearing the other end of the building. She got to the first floor landing without incident, but as she’s arriving, she says she sees light ahead and below in the stairwell leading to the basement level. She figures its Joe and Adam and thinks she can maybe get a twofer and scare the poo poo out of them too. So she begins moving down the stairs. As soon as she does so, the light she saw goes out. She said she actually hesitated at that point, but still figured it was Joe and Adam, they’d probably heard her and were waiting or something. So she kept going, not bothering to turn on her flashlight so that she might still creep up on them. Near the bottom of the stairs, she starts to get that same weighted feeling that I described to her, like something was sitting on her shoulders. But she presses on. On the very step that I received my pinch on, she got something much worse. She claims what felt like a hand wrapped around her entire ankle and yanked back. She went toppling down the last half dozen stairs and landed in a heap, apparently knocked unconscious from the fall. This is where it gets really terrifying. She finally comes to, who knows how long later, but it couldn’t have been too long as it only took us ten, maybe fifteen minutes to eventually find her. By this time myself and my brother and Alex are down on the ground floor making our way to Adam and Joe. So she’s laying there in the darkness, wondering what the hell just grabbed her and starting to get freaked out, when she realizes she’s not at the bottom of the steps where she should be. She’s back in the corner where I found her, next to the hatch under the stairs. She can kind of make out the door to the right, and it is clearly wide open. The hatch is also ajar in such a way that she can look in at the darkness beyond. I’m really not sure that I can do this part any justice, I’m glancing over my shoulder just typing it down. The whole ordeal sends shivers up my spine every time I willfully recall it and I’m probably not going to sleep for poo poo tonight. It won’t be the first time, but at the very least this will hopefully be somewhat cathartic. So she’s sitting there in the dark, and is stone cold petrified to move. If Adam and Joe are trying to freak her out they are obviously doing one hell of a bang up job. She decides to try to get up and find her flashlight, which isn’t anywhere near her that she can tell, and get the heck out of there. She has made up her mind that spending the night is out of the question and she just wants to go home and slip into a warm bath or something, shake this place off and forget about it. This is when she notices the eye in the opening between the door of the hatch and the wall. For a moment all she can do is stare at it. She said it was pretty small, and the face surrounding it, though covered in shadows, seemed to be terribly wrinkled. She doesn’t remember a mouth of any kind but just telling it to me she broke out into tears again and once more wrapped her arms around me on the couch, shaking and sobbing a bit. It was just one eye, small and black. It didn’t glow or wink or anything like that. It had whites, but not much, otherwise she figured she might not have seen it at all. Suddenly, the hatch closes and she hears the lock turning. She’s not into full out screaming mode yet but she says by this point she started to get audible, letting out little chokes of air and sucking them back in as if she couldn’t breath. Who could blame her. Her ordeal was not over. Now she notices that the light she’d seen earlier is back, and it’s coming from the room beyond the open doorway to her right. She looks up and begins to finally start screaming. Standing there were two figures, one about a foot taller than the other, but both small. She figures the small one was no more than a couple feet tall, and the other, maybe three, three and half feet in height. They both appear to be wearing some kind of dark heavy textured robes of some kind, like sack cloth, but black as pitch. They’ve got hoods on and are just standing there staring at her. They instantly make her think of the single eye she saw not a moment before, for these things, though their pasty colored faces are in pretty deep shadow due to the hoods and general gloom of the place, are horribly wrinkled. They have mouths but without lip structure of any kind, like narrow slits in their oval faces. And the eyes were just like the one she had seen in the hatch, black middles with a sliver of whites around them. One of them had what might be a nose, some kind of protuberance at least, but the other had just a flat spot with a single black hole in the middle where it’s nose should have been. They had hair but it was stringy and tangled, though long, as it poured out of the hoods they wore and down their fronts. The hair on both was jet black by her recollection. Suddenly one of them flicks on her flashlight and is moving it around, looking at it, making the light dance all over the walls. The other seems only a bit interested, and they both take their gaze off of her for a moment, but eventually the taller one looks back at her while the smaller one clicks the light on and off repeatedly. Then it shines the light right in her face for a moment before turning it off again for good. Of course by this point, she can’t hold back the screams any longer, and starts really belting them out. And the things both start to move towards her, kinda shuffling a bit. She doesn’t remember seeing their feet or hands or anything else, the black robes covered them up pretty well. Her first instinct is to toss her purse at these things before they can get to her, and luckily, it was still around her neck and shoulder. So she yanks it off and chucks it at the two figures. They instantly retreat out of sight. She kind of curls up into a ball in the corner and plants her face in her knees and just screams, hoping to God one of us gets there soon. When I arrive with my light, she thinks I’m one of them again which is why she started bashing me, but finally when I start talking to her realizes it’s just me. She doesn’t remember hearing the door in the basement slam shut. From there she doesn’t remember much until she was back in the van, realizing that she had just flung her purse at these things in the doorway. She’s not thinking clearly, and all her mind can latch onto is that she has to have her purse back. It was like she needed it for comfort or something, some kind of way to ground herself again. If she could get it back, then maybe she didn’t throw it after all. Maybe none of it happened and she just tripped on the way down the stairs and had one hell of a nasty concussion-induced nightmare. By the time I get back and she can see the way I look and that I have no purse with me, she just went into lock-down mode, like I myself did, for a few days straight. She claims that she actually had to make her mother let her sleep with her while her father slept on the couch for weeks after. They were pretty pissed with me and let me know about it every time I came over to pick her up or called asking for her. It’s a wonder I guess that they didn’t just keep us apart, but she seemed to be better around me, I knew I felt better around her, just being close to someone who had gone through something similar. As far as I know, she never told her parents what actually happened, or anyone else for that matter. I ended up telling my mother and brother, and he told his friend Alex who let the other two guys in on what had gone down, but they didn’t spread the story around to anyone else as far as I know. They were all pretty shaken up about it as well. We rarely spoke of that day and they never pushed me to tell them myself what Katie and I went through, thank God. The story mostly ends there. Katie later told me that she would occasionally wake up from nightmares where she could see the two figures coming at her from her closet doorway. I was really thankful that I had seen nothing of the sort myself, but still had my own similar nightmares. Over time, we grew apart, and eventually broke up the summer before our senior year. We hung out a few times that year but really, our previous comfort in one another seemed to just grow into a sense of dread. I hate to say that this thing pushed us apart, but I really think it did. She became really dejected and quiet, completely unlike she’d been before, and I just felt strange around her. It sounds cowardly I guess, but I just didn’t want to deal with it anymore and was the one to break it off. I felt like a huge jerk doing it, but like I said, our relationship had really soured in the months since going out to see the abandoned school. I have no idea what eventually became of Katie after high school. Hopefully she’s well. I still have nightmares about whatever those things were, not so much lately, but for years they haunted me as I’m sure they did her. Anyways, it feels kind of weird to get it off my chest. I’m not sure that I feel any better about it, but things have gotten better since then, so I shouldn’t be too worried I guess. So there it is, my long rear end creepy ghost story, or ghoul story, or whatever you want to call those things in the basement. Hazo has a new favorite as of 20:45 on Dec 20, 2015 |
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Dec 20, 2015 20:42
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