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Sun rises in the east, suspension of disbelief voided...
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Jun 13, 2014 17:02
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| # ? May 4, 2024 09:11 |
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This isn't really a ghost story. It's not even really a story, more just...stuff that happened that keeps me up sometimes. For a long time I was pretty certain this was 'just' a kid from an abusive background, more memories have surfaced since then that make me doubt that. When I was about six or seven, I had a friend named David. You know how every class has That Kid? David was That Kid, but he hadn't always been; when we started school a couple of years before I'd been the class's smelly, nose-picking, constantly crying mess and David was one of the popular sporty types, but over time I'd grown up a little and something had happened with David. His eyes had gotten weird and watery, he'd stopped bathing and he no longer went out to play football at break time. I wouldn't have gotten to know David on my own, but Connor - who was my first real friend at that school - got paired up with him one day and just straight-up decided we were a trio now (being the normal one, he could do stuff like that). I was pissy about it at first but quickly I started to like hanging out with David myself. We didn't really see eachother outside of school at first, but working with him in class I realised he was bright. Like, really bright. Teachers tended to ignore him so I'd always figured he was one of the thick kids they gave the minimum of everything to, but talking to him felt like talking to an equal (yeah, I was an uppity little poo poo, the truth was both him and Connor were easily smarter than me). Once we got talking or playing he was good company and it was easy to forget he was, well, David. The first time I remember noticing something weird around him (beyond the usual Smelly Kid weird) was the term after we became friends. When it rained we were always kept inside over break, given a big box of lovely pencils and crayons and left to our own devices. Me and Connor were drawing Crash Bandicoot characters and arguing about whose rendition of them sucked harder. David was just drawing intently for the whole twenty minutes, so quiet we forgot he was there until the end, when I casually asked "what did you draw?" Wordlessly he showed me what he'd been working on. It was just a big-rear end pair of eyes taking up the whole page. David had coloured the irises in pink but left little white cracks in them. The outline of them was blurred where he'd rubbed out and redrawn it a few times, so I couldn't tell if they were meant to look angry or happy. They were really detailed in that way that kids think is a substitute for quality - I got the feeling he was trying to capture something that was well beyond a six year old's abilities. Still, it was pretty impressive at that age. "Cool," I said. "You should make those bits red." I pointed at the white gaps. "No, they're white." "They're not, they're the veins in your eyes." I insisted. "They're worms, not veins," he said, sounding genuinely annoyed. This was about to turn into a big and bitter argument by kid standards, but the bell rang and it was time to pack up our poo poo. David took his drawing and ripped it right up. From then on I had a glance whenever he was drawing, and it was always something like that. Off the top of my head, I remember a whole page of smaller eyes, one that had a load of black arms reaching in towards the middle of the pages (these were all weirdly sized and misshapen). One time we were told to draw our homes, and David drew his mum's terraced council house then ruined it by putting wiggly lines in white crayon all over it and just shrugged when the teacher asked why. There was one he drew that ended up on the wall of fame out in the school's corridors. It was of two figures, a small one that I guess from the Newcastle shirt it wore was meant to be David himself, and a bearded man in a long brown coat. I didn't pay it much attention at the time, but it was still up there a couple of years down the line ('inertia' was our school in a word) and I remember taking a closer look then and getting a chill. Cartoon David looked miserable, while I couldn't tell what the bearded man was meant to be feeling. He was smiling, but he didn't look happy, and he had pink eyes for some reason. (A side note about the man with the beard: I don't remember seeing anyone like that, but somehow I have a very clear image of a face for him. I'm not great with faces and I've never had a realistic one just pop into my head. The pink eyes are hard to describe, some albino eyes come close. His colouring is normal otherwise though, he just looks angry. I'm well aware this could just be confabulation or whatever on my part, maybe I saw someone who fit the bill in a shop one time). I started going around David's house with Connor and a couple of other kids when we were older, I'm going to say eight. It was crappy but nothing unusual for our area. My first impression of his mum was that she was too old (mine was still only in her mid-twenties at the time) but very nice. She'd let us stay as long as we liked and bring us bourbon creams or sometimes rancid-tasting ham and mustard sandwiches I dreaded. She couldn't do enough for you and never stopped smiling. Sooner or later she'd always disappear into another room though, and you'd forget she was around. Once on my way back from the toilet I caught a glimpse of her through the crack in the door. She was just sitting on her bed, staring at the wall. I waited there for about ten minutes and never saw her move, although her breathing was ragged and I think she might have been muttering at times. When my friends started shouting for me, she seemed to shudder. I quickly got out of there and when I saw her later she was all smiles and sunshine again. This wasn't just one time, every time I visited she'd eventually excuse herself, sit down somewhere she thought we wouldn't see her and just space out. David's dad wasn't there much, and honestly I only remember him because I was surprised that he wasn't the bearded man from the drawing. He seemed like a nice, normal guy, there was nothing 'off' about him in the same way as David's mum. The only visit I really remember, David was overjoyed to see him. He hung out with us for a while, but eventually asked, "where's your mother?" David's face fell and he just kind of jerked his head towards the stairs. I followed him up using the toilet as an excuse and watched through the crack in the door again. David's mum was on the bed, staring as usual, while his dad talked to her urgently. I couldn't make out the words, but he didn't get any response anyway, and eventually he moved away from her and I think I heard him crying. Looking back I wish I'd been a more curious kid, but at that age I just accepted stuff with an "oh, that's a thing then" even if it made me scared or uncomfortable. It's how I felt when I ran into older kids huffing glue on the railway or accidentally tuned in to The Exorcist when I was four, and I had the same reaction when I saw David torturing a big spider in the school bathrooms. Torturing might not be the right word, he was just holding it down by the legs and pressing. When I asked what he was doing he said something about "this is what it's like when they go in you." One of the spider's legs broke off and he seemed annoyed. "It's not like that, it's like you can feel them but it's not on your skin." I forget when exactly David stopped coming to school, but there was no big event leading up to it. It might have been a gradual thing with him turning up less and less, I dunno. Either way nothing else happened for a long time, and I never saw David again. Me and Connor were still friends but we'd pretty much forgotten him by our early teens. At thirteen/fourteen, we were hanging around that area (which had become even rougher and more dilapedated by then) with another boy and a couple of girls, one of whom suggested we go break into a boarded up house nearby (we really didn't have much to do, so that was a regular weekend for us). It was clearly abandoned, with boarded up windows, doorknob removed and the neighbours' poo poo dumped on the lawn, but I recognised it as David's old house. A quick glance at Connor told me he had too, and he looked scared. I never did have a proper conversation with Connor to figure out how much he knew about what was up with David, there's a good chance he saw stuff that I didn't. Outwardly he was cajoling the rest of us into going in though, so there was no chance of me saying anything. Only the other girl, Simone, was resistant. "That's not empty," she kept saying. "Of course it's loving empty," Connor said, "look at that." "It's not. Me and Tom went in the yard once and this gadje with a beard came out." She looked really uncomfortable. Something had been up with Simone for a while; when we'd first changed school's she'd been the 'hot' girl of our class (feels weird saying that about a twelve year old), but she'd stopped looking after herself or showing up to school regularly some time in year eight. I was trying to use this to weasel out of going in when Connor said something like 'for gently caress's sake' and barged in, so that was that decided. Once we got inside it was pretty clearly abandoned. The door swung right open but you could barely get through the hall. There were two bikes with no tires, paving slabs (?), splintered bits of table, a load of booze cans from some other young urban explorers and dust everywhere. Nobody had lived here for a bloody long time. Being a lovely terraced council house, there wasn't that much to explore. Some things were the same as I remembered, like the hearth and the bathroom, even if most of the furniture had been nicked long ago. There were big chunks of plaster out of almost every wall. I was on the lookout for rats (they scare the poo poo out of me) but the only inhabitants I could see were these little clusters of white worms that looked like tree roots. The fleeting image of David's mum staring at the wall was enough to keep me the hell away from the bedroom, but I had a look in the little box room that had been his. It was hard to see poo poo in there with the window boarded over, and the place was totally bare. Bed, dresser, table - gone. There were two big marks on the wall where David's bed had been. My nose was practically touching one before I figured out it was a fist-sized painting of an eye, and I had to use my phone's light to see that it had been pink under all the dust and mold. If it was David who painted them his art had come a hell of a long way before he left. Someone had spent a long time getting these eyes just right. I finally figured out what David had been trying to get across at school: plain old cruelty. The light also revealed some shallow scratches in the plaster across both of the eyes, with flecks of red in among the dust. I was already sure someone had tried to claw the wall with their bare fingers when I saw what I think were bits of broken fingernail in there too. I wanted to get the gently caress out of there, obviously, but I was a teen and there were girls, so I went back downstairs and smoked with the others for an hour or so, feeling freaked out and a little queasy the whole time. Nothing else went down apart from a brief little punch up between Connor and the other boy, but I was still the first to leave. If I'd made some of the connections then that I have looking back, I'd have been out of there a lot loving sooner.
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Jun 15, 2014 11:08
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This is awesome. Do you have any more?
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Jun 19, 2014 14:28
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I'll second that. An excellent story and a pretty solid setup for more, here's hoping you can stick the landing 
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Jul 3, 2014 20:48
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Well, I’ve enjoyed this thread and some of its previous incarnations for a while now but have yet to contribute, so I guess it’s finally time to share my story about the one truly weird thing that’s happened to me. This time about ten years ago, my cousin and I explored a pretty isolated part of our small Texas town and ended up bumping into some things that we didn’t expect and had trouble explaining on more than one occasion. Blue Flame Road Our town hasn’t really changed much over the years, save a new highway going in. As you would expect, business moved out there, and one place that was really hurt was the local mall that had been built in the early 80’s. That place (and the arcade inside) was a staple of my childhood, but by my teenage years, it was clearly on its last legs. Which is why I was more than a little surprised that my cousin wanted to swing by there one summer night. My cuz is a couple of years younger than me but is more a brother than a cousin, we were pretty much raised together and still see each other regularly to this day. He’d recently got his license and did what any teenager in a small town would do – begin exploring and using his newfound freedom. When we rolled past the mall, he told me what he wanted to show me wasn’t anything inside, but a road that he didn’t know existed out behind it. The back end of the mall has a smaller entrance that doesn’t get used much, and there is a road there that passes between the old highway and the new highway. A little ways away and running parallel to that road is an even smaller one that apparently serves a small residential area. “I didn’t know this road existed either, but what really is there to see?” I asked him. “Just wait, and you’ll see,” he told me. “Look around as we are driving through.” We passed a street sign that said “Blue Flame Road” and started through, and almost immediately the trees came up thick on both sides. You’d think you were driving into a forest if it weren’t for the haze and light being cast by some industrial building just a little ways back behind some of the trees. Not much further down the road, it quickly became apparent why the road was used so little. The pavement dropped off and it became all gravel, and not the nicely packed, oiled kind either. About the time it turned to gravel, the road started to wind pretty severely as it moved down into a little valley on its way out to the access road of the new highway. “I took a girl out joyriding here, you can actually slide a bit on the gravel if you go fast enough on the turns,” he told me as we wound around. “There’s some weird stuff out here, too, though.” It didn’t take long to see what he was talking about. As we rounded a turn, the headlights shown on a bunch of dilapidated old furniture piled up on the side of the road. It looked like it had been out there for years. Beat up furniture on the side of a little-traveled road wasn’t nearly enough to unsettle me, but the way it was arranged was….it wasn’t all in one pile. Looking a little more closely, I could see an even smaller gravel road/footpath that went deep into a wooded area, and the furniture was strewn all down it. At the very edge of the headlights, I could see a clearing; it looked like one of those clear cut areas where power lines pass through. I was pretty much done at that point. “OK dude, you’ve officially creeped me out, now it’s time to get out of here,” I said. “Don’t worry, it’s residential a little ways further down the road…this furniture isn’t really what I took you out here to see anyway,” he replied. We continued on and thankfully came to the residential part after just a few more curves. The road got straighter here. You could see the homes, but just barely; the trees were still pretty thick on either side, and the road was still gravel. The houses began to thin out, and we finally came to the last lot on the road. My cousin stopped the car and I looked out the passenger window. It was a fenced-in field with a shed on the back part of it. No home in sight. A ways up from the shed and closer to the road sat a wooden box mounted on a pipe. The box had a slit cut into the side near the top of the box, and out of that slit a cold, blue-violet light shone. “What is that thing?” I asked. “I don’t know man, I’ve thought about it for a while and there’s no explanation I can come up with.” “Maybe some sort of grow box for plants or something?” I mused. “I don’t think so,” he said. We both got absolutely silent as the shed door opened. A man-like shape emerged, but it looked entirely too small and sort of misshapen. Hunched over, perhaps. It started shuffling towards the box with the blue light. Needless to say, we cleared out of there right quick.
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Jul 4, 2014 06:36
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Yay! More stories in my favorite thread. Oh, BTW, a few weeks ago we visited some friends. There was a woman there I hadn't seen since 1985 at least. She started talking to me, and after a few minutes she asked, "Did they ever find out what happened to the telephone man?"
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Jul 4, 2014 09:37
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House for Sale A month breezed by, as summer months are wont to do. After a week of dissecting every possible theory about the box with the strange light inside and the shape that was headed towards it (clearly an eldritch abomination that stored the source of his power, the famed Necronomicon, inside the box, we decided), we worked up our courage again and eventually began using Blue Flame Road as you would expect teenagers to – joyrides to get the blood pumping at the end of the night, a place to scare dates, and the obvious culmination of a good game of Truth or Dare. Which is exactly why I wasn’t surprised when my cousin hatched a plan to find out a little more about Blue Flame Road. It was 2004, and the Internet was officially a big deal, even in small town Texas. Late one July night, my cousin had typed “blue flame road texas” into Google, and it yielded one curious result: a house for sale. No name, no number, just an address: 1626 Blue Flame Road. For sale by owner. “We’ve got to check this out,” my cousin said for the third time as he showed me the listing online. “I still don’t understand what you think we’re going to gain from this,” I replied. He sighed. “We’ll make up some bullshit story about your parents looking for a new house, and then inquire politely about the neighborhood, maybe ask about the furniture out on the side of the road. Maybe they’ll know something about that box at the end of the neighborhood. You’re just as curious as I am, dude, and you know it.” That settled it, then. Our summer days began when we rolled out of bed at 2pm, so the sun was already going down by the time we found ourselves passing the now familiar sights...the road turning to gravel, the weird furniture graveyard that continued indefinitely down the path into the forest, and finally (thankfully) the residential part of the road. “Just our luck,” my cousin said as we rolled up the gravel driveway of the house with the sign facing the street, which happened to be just shy of the field with the weird light box on it. “They’ll surely know something about what’s in that box on their neighbor’s field,” he said. That’s when I felt it. You know the feeling – your stomach drops and little fingers of ice start to crawl up your back. Something was way off. A glance at the “For Sale” sign only served to reinforce the jangling of my nerves. It was written in a childish scrawl, barely legible. No number listed. “Remember, your parents are looking for a new house and we just saw the sign and were curious,” my cousin rambled as he climbed up the steps to the porch. I took a deep breath and was about to voice a warning, but it was too late. He was already knocking on the door. The wind rustled through the trees. He knocked again, and still got no response from inside. The curtains were drawn and the house was still. He tried the door and it was locked. “I guess nobody is home,” I said, relieved. I knew that wouldn’t placate him, though, so I agreed to walk around the side of the house with him to see if we could spot a car in the garage or something. The garage was empty, but there was a window left open at the back of the house. Peering inside, we could see a bathroom that appeared to be just off the kitchen. I gritted my teeth. “I know what you’re going to say, so don’t even say it,” I said. “You know how I’m going to feel about it, but you also know that I’m not going to stay out here while you go in by yourself, so let’s just go,” I finished. We climbed inside. When we stepped out of the bathroom and into the kitchen, what hit us first was the smell. Ash and embers long gone cold. The sight of the living room told most of the story. The furniture was entirely absent, but you could easily tell where it was before, because the carpet was scorched everywhere but square and rectangle patches where the couches and chairs would have been. “This house shouldn’t be for sale, it should be condemned,” my cousin said. The fire damage was bad enough that I was surprised we hadn’t noticed from the outside. Pure teenage inertia carried us from the living room into the other part of the house. There was less fire damage here, but what was damaged didn’t really add up to your average electrical fire. Picture frames were shattered and strewn about the floor in the master bedroom. Table lamps were knocked over. “Looks like it might have been a gas line explosion or something,” I told my cousin. There was another bedroom at the end of the hall, but the sun was almost down outside. “Let’s go, man,” I said. We made our way back to the kitchen, and on a lark, my cousin opened up the pantry door. “Come on, dude, I bet not even the Twinkies will be in date,” I said as I slapped him on the arm. He didn’t respond or even move, and as I peered over his shoulder, I understood why. There was a metal trapdoor on the pantry floor. An open padlock glinted dully in the corner. “A wine cellar?” I mused as we stared. “The Twinkies may not be good, but the wine will be,” my cousin said. This is the part where we would start talking up what was sure to be down there before insulting each other’s manhood until we were finally wound up enough to open the door and head down, just like we’d done dozens of other times on little adventures like this one, but instead we stood in shock as violet light flooded the living room and kitchen from the backdoor. Silhouetted in the purple light was a hunched shape, and as we turned to run into the bathroom, the door began to open. We dove headfirst through the open window and flew down to the car as fast as our tennis shoes would take us. It wasn’t until we were breathing again and out on the access road minutes later that what I saw fully registered. As my feet had hit the ground outside and I turned to run away from the window, I caught a disturbing sight out of the corner of my eye. A man, hunched over and proportioned all wrong; the line of his back looked like scoliosis from hell. Every inch of exposed skin had what looked to be chemical burns, and one eye was swollen shut. In his hands, he carried a box with pale, bluish light emanating from it. By the time we got home, I finally had the image cleared from my head, and I’m sure it would have returned in my sleep if I had actually gotten any sleep that night. Looking back now, that’s definitely the night that we should have taken the hint and just left things well enough alone.
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Jul 7, 2014 04:21
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An excellent ghost story should make you wonder about whether or not it's really true, balancing on the tightrope of the unbelievable. I looked up this street in Texas, and there is in fact a house for sale, and it's creepy as gently caress, and I had dreams about it last night. You have succeeded in making an excellent story.
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Jul 7, 2014 13:01
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Stairs posted:An excellent ghost story should make you wonder about whether or not it's really true, balancing on the tightrope of the unbelievable. I looked up this street in Texas, and there is in fact a house for sale, and it's creepy as gently caress, and I had dreams about it last night. Thanks for the kind words and glad you're enjoying it My cuz and I had a couple more things happen to us back then, probably enough for two more posts. I'll have some time to type it all out here in a few days. In the meantime, I decided on a lark to drive down Blue Flame today and take some pictures for you guys (didn't go at night because gently caress y'all, I'm not going at night). I've avoided that road ever since all that stuff went down, and today I realized that I should probably continue to stay away from it   Starting down the road and that sense of dread is already rising like bile in my throat. There's an electric company on the corner, and the mall is behind me.  I'm maybe 60 yards in and it's already all gravel. Took this shot to show you guys how close the treeline is and how poor the sightlines are. You can barely tell, but the road curves to the left and down up ahead, it's hard to see until you're right on it. The road winds and the sightlines are bad for pretty much the whole road.  This sight definitely gave me the willies. This is the entrance to what used to be the Furniture Graveyard; you can see where the path cuts through the trees. Apparently some poor soul had to clean it up sometime in the last decade, and all that was left was that apt warning on the tire. Sorry I didn't get better shots; needless to say, I was in a hurry to get the hell out of there. Much to my dismay, the box was still out in the field with the shed. I tried a drive-by picture because I really didn't want to stop in front of that thing, and it was a pretty decent shot when I glanced down at my phone as I was putting it away. When I got back to the house and looked again, though, this is all I had: 
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Jul 9, 2014 03:40
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So whatever shines from the blue flame box hates cameras.
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Jul 9, 2014 08:25
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Just get out of the car and go look at it!!
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Jul 9, 2014 09:50
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Does anyone happen to know of the story about two people who were tasked to install wiring in some building and they had weird stuff happen to them? I vaguely remember them having the wire pulled and hearing noises. They later worked out there was a empty block of space between the rooms each of them were in and whatever was happening to them came from inside there.
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Jul 9, 2014 10:50
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Magazines, I think that's The Wireman.
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Jul 9, 2014 16:33
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Magazines posted:Does anyone happen to know of the story about two people who were tasked to install wiring in some building and they had weird stuff happen to them? I vaguely remember them having the wire pulled and hearing noises. I remember the one you mean. I think they were located in Ireland or Wales? It was a fun one. It definitely isn't the Wireman story, though.
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Jul 9, 2014 16:47
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Second sentence sounds like the Wireman, but the first sure isn't. 
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Jul 9, 2014 20:21
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Yeah, the wireman was about some girls renting a house. Not people like, working on it.
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Jul 9, 2014 20:25
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nope
Firstborn has a new favorite as of 22:40 on Jul 13, 2014 |
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Jul 9, 2014 21:14
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cowboythreespeech posted:Second sentence sounds like the Wireman, but the first sure isn't. Yeah it definitely wasn't the wireman. I'll try to dig around archives a bit more.
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Jul 9, 2014 21:52
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Yeah, you're all right. What Alain Perdrix said about the story taking place somewhere in the UK made me think I read it somewhere in that giant pdf file of stories by goons compiled by a goon.
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Jul 9, 2014 23:05
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I think someone else asked for it too. It took place in Ireland and I haven't been able to track it down despite searching for keywords like "security guard watching porn."
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Jul 10, 2014 00:42
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I know the one you guys are talking about. Goon and his boss go out to run cable (Cat5?) in a weird building, end up discovering a secret room, something starts pulling back on their cable from within the room. Can't find it anywhere, though.
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Jul 10, 2014 03:24
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JohnnyCanuck posted:I know the one you guys are talking about. Goon and his boss go out to run cable (Cat5?) in a weird building, end up discovering a secret room, something starts pulling back on their cable from within the room. We aren't talking about the story about the hidden room above...I wanna say a garage? and there were a bunch of drawings and a slightly disfigured girl ghost? That's the only secret room story I can remember that's been posted a few times.
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Jul 10, 2014 06:10
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ATM Machine posted:We aren't talking about the story about the hidden room above...I wanna say a garage? and there were a bunch of drawings and a slightly disfigured girl ghost? That's the only secret room story I can remember that's been posted a few times. -------- Secret Room Okay I haven't posted this story because even though things worked out okay I was terrified and thinking about how she looked and how I felt makes me feel the same way when I remember it. I lived in the second oldest house in my area near Waco, Texas, from when I was about 11 til I was 18. I don't know the significance of this really but I feel it's the only possible explanation for any supernatural presence. I'm not sure when the house was originally built but the rest of the houses around mine were built in the 40s and 50s so I supposed it's older than that. The house seemed normal when we first moved in. Only two families had lived there over the years so it wasn't like there was a high turnover rate. In fact no one really noticed or mentioned anything supernatural with the house. However, there was a "secret room." This room was actually a selling point for my parents to help us deal with moving. Even though my dad was in the military we had lived at our past house for quote awhile and didn't want to move. So of course when my parents said there was a secret passage connecting one of the possible bedrooms with a secret room we became excited about the new house. My sister and I fought for it but I won because the other bedroom already had flower wallpaper up. When I first saw my room I went straight to the closet to see the "Secret door." The secret door wasn't really secret, it was right in the back of the closet and plain to see. However it was a lot smaller than any normal door. Even when I was only 11 or 12 I had to squat down to get in. It looked like it was made for a child to use. Another interesting thing was that the door handle was not really built into the door, it was just a handle added as an afterthought. This made me think it was originally just some sort of attic or crawl space door and not meant for a room. The door was lockable by key from my side of the door, the other side had no handle or keyhole. When you open the door there's a very small hallway which is the same height as the door and not really fit for an adult, but it's just a few feet long and then you get into the room. The room was just an empty room added above the garage of the house. There was no way out except for the "secret passageway" to my closet. There were no windows, one light with a string used to turn it on hanging from the ceiling, and the room was completely white with seemingly new wallpaper. There was no furniture or anything left in the room from the previous owners, in fact I don't think the previous owners used it at all. I believe it was sealed before or soon after they moved in and wasn't touched since then, since it was pretty dusty, but who knows. The lock did seem very old and had a hard time moving as if it was rusted or the wood was warped or something. Now my parents thought the room could be me and my sister's own little toy room or whatever when they first saw it, but after moving in they had second thoughts. I'm not sure what it was but they said it was because they wouldn't be able to hear us if we got hurt in that room since it was so detached from the rest of the house. Of course since we wanted our own secret room so badly they gave in, but said that we had to tell them when we were playing in there and we had to keep the door to my room, my closet, and the secret room open at all times when we were there. So we went on and like I said earlier nothing much really supernatural happened in the rest of the house, and not even too much in the "secret room," at least not to me. My sister began having an imaginary friend. Whenever I wasn't in there I could hear her talking and whispering to someone. I noticed that although at first she used to have fun in there that as time went on she kind of seemed sadder when she was in there. However up til now this could all be coincidence so I didn't give it much thought. The only weird things that happened with me was at night I thought I could hear some sort of scratching on the walls behind my room, except it wasn't really with fingernails it was softer sounding. It wasn't on the door, but coming from inside the room. Now I believe that I only heard this at night because it was quiet at night, and the scratching rubbing sound was so soft that you normally couldn't hear it. I really had no idea what it was, I told my dad once and he looked around for some animal but couldn't find any so we just forgot about it and I lived with it. Like I said it was so soft it never really bothered me. It could be some far off tree rubbing against the house for all I knew. This rubbing happened consistently but like I said I never paid it much mind, at least until my sister went into the room one night. She knew about the rubbing too and never really said anything about it. One night though, probably about a year or so after moving into the house, the rubbing was going on as usual. I was in that limbo before falling to sleep when I thought that someone was in my room and unlocking the closet door. I thought it might have been a dream but I looked around and saw my door and closet door open, so I got up to check it out. I was a little scared but I realized it was probably mom or dad checking out the rubbing sound since I told them it still happened sometimes. I turned the light on in my closet and looked in. I saw a figure sitting in the room facing the wall. Now even when I was a kid, I had been pretty brave. I was still scared since I was pretty young, but I knew that you can't just run or you'll never know. I said "Hello?" and I heard "She wanted me to see" in what sounded like my sister's voice. The light was in the middle of the room, and it was tough taking even those few steps to get to it in the middle of that dark room. But like I said, I couldn't just leave so I just went there and turned it on. When I looked at the figure, it was indeed my sister, sitting and scratching at the wall paper. I touched her and she was crying so I pulled her up and took her out of the room. I'm really glad that I didn't just lock the door and run or else she'd be stuck in there all night (this is one reason why I never run away from anything abnormal). I locked the door, took her to her room and watched her as she went to sleep. I really thought she could've been sleepwalking or something although she never had before, and since it was over I didn't want to wake up my parents. I went back to sleep. The next day I asked my sister in the morning if she remembered going into the room and she looked freaked out. I told her she was probably just sleep walking but she said that "the girl" asked her to come look at her pictures. She didn't start crying but she was about to because she was so scared. I didn't ask who "the girl" was. I told her it was just a dream and went to prove it. She didn't want to enter the room again so I went in and saw where she was scratching on the wall. Only a little bit was scratched away, so I started peeling some more wallpaper off. Under the wallpaper were different pictures drawn in what looked like crayon. They were typical kid pictures of mainly cats, and houses, however there was one picture that I thought was weird. It was a little girl, a cat, a mom, and a dad. Now everything looked like a normal kid family portrait, except the dad had no face. It was just a circle. Of course my rational side said she just never finished it. But still the dad picture looked strangely out of place, like the lines were distorted like she had trouble drawing it. Anyway I told my parents and they yelled at me for pulling back the wallpaper. I didn't want my sister to get in trouble so I didn't say anything about her or what happened last night. My parents said we had to get it fixed now and were mad, and didn't let me play in there again as punishment. The whole thing still seemed normal to me. Kid draws on wall, parents put wall paper up to cover it up. I didn't realize until later that night when the scratching rubbing sound started up, that it sounded like a crayon. I really started thinking that it was "the girl" that my sister talked about was drawing on the wall. Now after this happened, I started believing that the girl was actually in there. Once I started acknowledging her presence, weirder things began to happen. It happened really slowly. I was about 14 or 15 after the episode with my sister, and the weird things were happening slowly over the course of the next years I lived in the house up until I was 18. The changes were so subtle that I didn't really notice that they were happening until much later. The drawing sounds increased a little bit and soon were audible even during the day. I also started hearing little pattering of feet. The more I heard these things the more emotional I felt about them. I started feeling angry the more I heard the sounds, especially when I was trying to sleep. However I always managed to control myself and try to think that this girl was obviously sad and just trying to have fun and I calmed myself down. However this was going on so long that I finally asked my sister when I was about 16. I asked her if she ever heard the sounds. She said that she did, although they were pretty quiet. Now I didn't think this was so weird since obviously I could hear them too, and I told her how annoying it was. She kind of looked at me as if she was hurt, and said that every time she heard the sounds she felt really sad. She had trouble talking about it, but I told her this is pretty important since it's going to affect the rest of my years left in the house. She told me that "the girl" was the girl that she used to talk to when she played in the room. She didn't know her name, but they used to play together. She said she looked just like a little girl about her age so they had fun together. However, as my sister got older, the little girl seemed to get older too, except very unnaturally. It was subtle at first but soon she began hating seeing her. She said she looked as if she "shouldn't have been alive anymore." I didn't really know what this meant. My sister said she wore the same dress the whole time, even when the girl grew out of it. I asked her why she went into the room that one night to find the pictures, and she said she really didn't want to but the girl made her feel so sad and she'd do anything to help her out. However this still freaked her out and I didn't ask anymore questions. Things got worse every night, and I hated hearing that sound. I was so mad that she wouldn't just shut up so I could sleep. The weird thing was I was scared at the same time, since I knew that whatever it was in there wasn't actually alive anymore. What also freaked me out was that the sound didn't annoy my sister, but I guess she had more tolerance than I did. I asked my parents who used to live here, and they said a family with two sons. Of course this didn't have anything to do with the room, since they had it locked off the entire time they were there. So I asked if they knew anything about the family before them. They said the original owners were the ones who had the house built and that they didn't know much about them, except that they had a daughter who died when she was 11. I asked if they knew how she died, but they said it was some sort of accident, so it wasn't murder or child abuse or anything. I also asked if she died in the secret room, but they said they didn't think so. I really think that this was the girl in the room, although I have no idea why she inhabited it still. Once I knew this I sort of had an idea with what I was dealing with. Last year was when things got the worst. I heard almost constant drawing and her jumping around inside the room. The footsteps sounded heavier and were louder. If I ever heard it I'd pound on the door to the room and she'd stop immediately, but I'd hear soft whimpering or crying. She'd also start drawing again later on. Sometimes I'd scream at her to shut up. I really got mad every time it happened since it had been going on for 6 years. However, I knew that I had to do something about this. I was a lurker by this time so I've read a lot of ghost story threads, and I remembered how pussy most of the goons were regarding ghosts and never checked anything out. So I knew that I had to at least understand what was going on exactly, and if possible end it. I didn't really have a plan but I knew I had to see the girl or talk to her or something. Last year, shortly before I turned 18, my parents went away for the weekend, so I took the key to the secret room from their room (they kept it ever since locking it that day when I took off the wallpaper). I was determined to see her so I stayed up expecting to hear sounds. I couldn't hear anything so soon I just fell asleep. It was about 1 am when I woke up to a loud bang, like someone jumped or fell. I heard her footsteps afterwards and of course the drawing. The first thing I felt before any fear was pure anger. I hated that she woke me up, even though this was what I wanted. I immediately grabbed the key and went to the door. I was pounding on it as I said "That's it!" and unlocking the door. The sounds stopped and I heard whimpering. I threw open the door and this was the first time I saw the room in years. The light coming from my room illuminated a figure in the room, much like when I saw my sister years earlier. This was when I began to feel a wave of different emotions. I was really angry, really scared, yet I also knew that I had to do this and remain calm. I went into the room and stood a few feet away from the figure which was standing in the corner. I turned on the light. What I saw was probably the most horrific sight I could probably have ever even thought of in my entire life. Any horror movie monster had nothing on how unnatural the girl looked. I finally realized why my sister described her in such a weird way. Her body was taller than she should have been. Her limbs were so lanky and bony and stretched like she kept growing past how tall she should have been. She was wearing a really small dress, and it was really tight on her body. Her face looked as if her head had continued to grow but her face had not. The skin was stretched and the eyes were sunk back into her head yet wide open and her small, childlike teeth were exposed since her lips were stretched back with the rest of her face. Her hair was down to her waist, her face had tears streaming down. I took all of this in in just a moment, and as soon as we met eyes she let out a wail as if she was crying and moaning at the same time. It wasn't a loud wail like most people describe ghosts, it was pretty soft and it was as if she was in terrible pain, but I couldn't tell her expression since her face was so unnatural and stretched. As soon as I heard the wail all the anger in my body was overcome by fear and I ran. I wish I could say I ran for a video camera, but I just ran. I know I've been talking about how much I hate when people don't investigate things but I was so terrified that I ran. Once I got out of my room I ran to my car and drove away and spent the night at a friend's house. Once I realized what happened I was in a cold shiver and scared out of my mind for the entire night. I was too scared to go back home until my parents came home. I waited until they came back on Sunday, and then I came over. They asked me why I took the key and left the closet door open and I just told them I wanted to see if I could sell any of my old toys on eBay. I took one last look in the room and locked the door. Ever since then nothing happened. I don't know why things stopped, but I'm always hoping its not because I "let her out" like in the Ring or something and that she's really evil. Since nothing has happened since then I do really hope that I helped her out in some way, but in all honesty I don't care. My parents moved after I went to college, and I have no intention of ever going back. I came up with a theory that the male family member in her life was really mean to her and hated her playing in there, and possibly beat her, while the female family member always felt sad (hence my sister, and the girls willingness to open up to her first). Anyway like I said that's just all theory but it kind of makes sense. This all happened last year, and the more I think about it the harder it is to remember. Sorry for typing such a long post, I didn't realize I had this much to tell.
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Jul 10, 2014 06:21
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That's basically the whole story anyway. I read a story the other day about this guys dead girlfriend sending him Facebook messages that was nice and creepy but now all I can find are other sites summarizing it. Dr_Amazing has a new favorite as of 09:18 on Jul 10, 2014 |
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Jul 10, 2014 07:37
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http://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/29kd1x/my_dead_girlfriend_keeps_messaging_me_on_facebook/ Tonight’s kind of a catalyst for this post. I just received another message, and it’s worse than any of the others. My girlfriend died on the 7th of August, 2012. She was involved in a three car collision driving home from work when someone ran a red light. She passed away within minutes on the scene. We had been dating for five years at that point. She wasn’t big on the idea of marriage (it felt archaic, she said, gave her a weird vibe), but if she had been, I would have married her within three months of our relationship. She was vibrant; the kind of girl that would choose dare every time. She was happiest when camping, but a total technophile too. She always smelled like cinnamon. That being said, she wasn’t perfect. She always said something along the lines of, “If I kark it first, don’t just say good things about me. I’ve never liked that. If you don’t pay me out, you’re doing me a disservice. I’ve got so many flaws, and that’s just part of me.” So, this is for Em: the music she said she liked and the music she actually liked were very different. Her idea of affection was a side-hug. She had really long toes, like a chimpanzee. I know that’s tangential, but I don’t feel right discussing her without you having an idea of what she was like. Onto the meat. Em had been dead for approaching thirteen months when she first messaged me. September 4, 2013.  This is when it began. I had left Emily’s Facebook account activated so I could send her the occasional message, post on her wall, go through her albums. It felt too final (and too un-Emily) to memorialise it. I ‘share’ access with her mother (Susan) - meaning, her mother has her login and password and has spent a total of approximately three minutes on the website (or on a computer, total). After a little confusion, I assumed it was her. November 16th, 2013.  I had received confirmation from Susan that she hadn’t logged in to Em’s Facebook since the week of her death. Em knew a lot of people, so I instantly assumed this was one of her more tech savvy ‘friends’ loving with me in the worst possible way. I noticed pretty much immediately that whoever was chatting with me was recycling old messages from Em and my’s shared chat history.  The ‘the wheels on the bus' comment was from when we were discussing songs to play on a road trip that never eventuated. ‘hello’ happened a million times. Around February 2014, Emily started tagging herself in my photos. I would get notifications for them, but the tag would generally always be removed by the time I got to it. The first time I actually caught one, it felt like someone had punched me in the gut. ‘She’ would tag herself in spaces where it was plausible for her to be, or where she would usually hang out. I’ve got screenshots of two (from April and June; these are the only ones I’ve caught, so they’re a little out of the timeline I’m trying to write out):   Around this period of time, I stopped being able to sleep. I was too angry to sleep. She would tag herself in random photos every couple of weeks. The friends who noticed and said something thought it was a hosed up bug; I found out recently that there have been friends who have noticed and didn’t say anything. Some of them have removed me from their Facebook friends list. At this point, some of you may be wondering why I didn’t just kill my Facebook profile. I wish I had. I did for a little while. On days when I can’t get out there, though, it’s nice having my friends available to chat. It’s nice visiting Em’s page when the little green circle isn’t next to her name. I was already socially reclusive when Em was alive; her death turned me into something pretty close to a hermit, and Facebook and MMOs were (are) my only real social outlets. On March 15th, I sent what I assumed was Em's hacker a message.  On March 25th, I received an ‘answer’.  It wasn’t until I was going over these logs a few months later that I noticed she was recycling my own words as well. My response seems kind of lacklustre here. I was intentionally providing him/her with emotional ‘bait’ (‘This is actually devastating’) to keep them interested in their game; I was working off the assumption that the kind of person to do this would be the kind of person that would thrive on the distress of others. I was posting in tech forums, looking for ways to track this person, contacting Facebook. I needed to keep them around so I could gather ‘evidence’. Before anyone asks, yes, I had changed the password and all security info countless times. 16th of April. I receive this.  This seems like word salad. Like all our conversations so far, it’s recycled from previous messages she’s sent. 29th of April.  I hadn’t discovered any leads. Facebook had told me the locations her page had been accessed from, but since her death, they’re all places I can account for (my home, my work, her mum’s house, etc). My response here wasn’t bait. ‘yo ask Nathan’ was an in-joke too lame worth explaining, but seeing ‘her’ say it again just absolutely loving crippled me. My reaction in real life was much less prettier. I’m not expecting my bond back. Her last few messages had started to scare me, but I wouldn’t admit it at this point. 8th of May. I don’t really have the words for this.  ‘FRE EZIN G’ is the first original word she’s (?) made. This has given me nightmares that have only started to kick in recently. I keep dreaming that she’s in an ice cold car, frozen blue and grey, and I’m standing outside in the warmth screaming at her to open the door. She doesn’t even realise I’m there. Sometimes her legs are outside with me. 24th of May.  I wasn’t actually drunk. She wasn’t an affectionate girl, and it always embarrassed her to exchange ‘I love you’s, cuddle, talk about how much we meant to each other. She was more comfortable with it when I was boozed up. I got fake-drunk a lot. Her reply is what prompted me to finally memorialise her page, thinking it might help curb this behaviour. It might seem innocuous compared to her previous message - it’s pasted from an old conversation where I was trying to convince her to let me drive her home from a friend’s. In the collision, the dashboard had crushed her. She was severed in a diagonal line from her right hip to midway down her left thigh. One of her legs was found tucked under the backseat. Going back in time. 7th of August, 2012.  These are logs from the day she died. She was usually home from work by 4.30. This, alongside a couple of voicemail messages, is the last time I talked to her under the assumption that she was alive. You’ll see why I’m showing you these soon. Yesterday. 1st of July, 2014.  I memorialised her page a couple of days after I received the message about walking. Until today, she’d been quiet; she wasn’t even tagging herself in my photos. I don’t know what to do anymore. Do I kill her memorial page? What if it is her? I want to puke. I don’t know what’s happening. I just heard a Facebook alert. I'm too afraid to swap windows and check it.
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Jul 10, 2014 09:13
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Hazo posted:http://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/29kd1x/my_dead_girlfriend_keeps_messaging_me_on_facebook/ This comment thread, and the reply to OP's comment by gabblox (you have to scroll a bit to get to it), add a little more weirdness to the story: http://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/29kd1x/my_dead_girlfriend_keeps_messaging_me_on_facebook/ciltip2 Oh, and this one too: http://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/29kd1x/my_dead_girlfriend_keeps_messaging_me_on_facebook/cim7u6j?context=3
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Jul 11, 2014 00:06
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My god, that's one of the best horror stories I've read as of late.
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Jul 11, 2014 03:44
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Super creepy, but god drat it is so hard to read reddit. The format is really awful.
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Jul 11, 2014 22:06
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Yeah, that's why I tried to fix it up best I could. Bonus, I finally rediscovered the cable story! Enjoy. ---------- by Mystery Steve My last major brush with whatever it was, was back in 2006. My last job was a data telecomms engineer. For about three months solid, I'd been working around Ireland in nearly all of the Tesco stores, installing access points for new wieghing scales for deli counters and wifi points for stock scanners. It was a pain in the arse. Thankfully many of these stores were new buildings. Which made running a cable from the A to B quite easy. However there were the smaller stores, in towns and villages, which were usually three or more old buildings, knocked into one, creating a bigger shop floor. Myself and my boss arrived there at about 12:30am. I can't remember the town, we made a mission to finish 3 stores a day, this being our last. This store was built into three very old buildings, I could tell from the shopfront, all glazed and shiny new. Where above the signage were three different styles of brickwork and window. I knew this job would be fun. The cable routes proved to be a challenge, the offices and upstairs being like a maze. The middle building upstairs didn't have any through ways to the back offices which meant going up and down 3 different flights of stairs to get to it from the offices either side. We thought we'd make a new route by passing from the first building (1st floor) to the middle, third then through the floor to our (G floor) locations. Easy. It was that or follow exhisting traywork zig zagging everywhere adding about 100ft+ to our cable length. So we worked out where we needed to drill and run our cables. We decided to run the cables from a box room though one of the original walls into the middle building. I lifted up the false ceiling tile to be greeted by a scratched sandstone wall with a foot long drill bit sticking out from it. Whoever had the same idea as us had been beaten and robbed of a drill bit. Judging by the growing rust it had been there an age. We brought out the DeWalt and starting hammering away. I must have been half way through when my boss who was footing my ladder tapped me on the calf. As the the dewalt scilenced I could hear a what sounded like a woman moaning inconsolably for just a few seconds. "Could you hear that? It sounded as though..." "-Yeah, it must be somebody outside theres a pub round the corner" What Dick! I'd tried my best to not think about how creepy this building really was. I could feel it the moment I walked into the stock rooms. As a rule I'd never think about stuff like that on a job (I've worked in a lot of creepy places) I'd just concentrate on what I was doing, I thought if "something" isn't screaming for my attention then I'm not going to give it any reason to give me any. Which worked, don't be a pussy, just get on with it. We paused for a moment to hear if it was some drunken party or something. Nothing. I pull the trigger and hammered at the wall. Then it died. "What the gently caress have you done to it?" I pulled it from the wall and tried again. Nothing. "Is it the battery?" Stupid question I knew it wasn't the battery because we'd both made sure it had been on charge at the last store, it was fine. We tried the spare battery then the cord. Nothing. The boss got quite irritated at this. He'd just had it serviced at a DeWalt Dealer. "He must have given you a dud motor?" So we had to settlle for the 110V beast which meant running to the van and back bringing all the 110 gear to power it. I eventually got the better of the sandstone wall. a nice hole half and inch in diameter. "Right pop next door and I'll feed you the cable" So off I lumbered out the room down unlit stairwell to the first stockroom thats when I heard it; ".. N O..." You know where you heart and stomach and arse leap into your mouth, thats how I felt. Some little invisible irish girl had said NO to me. In an unlit stairwell. In a closed store. There was only myself the boss in the building and one security guard who was permenantly sat in the other stockroom reading porn in his little cube. I'm getting shivers just typing this. I'm surprised I didn't break my ankles bounding down those steps, I went for the door, and I felt what seemed to be a luke warm hand very lightly holding my right hand. I can't say I've ever had a panic attack but I'm assume thats what I nearly had. I felt beter walking around through the lit shopping isles to the second stock room. The guard waved at me not taking his eyes away from his Razzle magazine. I felt like asking him "WHat the gently caress" but I told myself it was just the door making an odd sound as it closed behind me. The second set of stairs were lit and warm I found myself in the room opposite where I'd drilled. My boss spoke over the walkie making me jump. "Hang on I'm just moving these ceiling tiles boss" And there it was. A blank wall. "Forget the tiles! Keep pulling the cable your way, its clean!" "I'm not pulling the cable... I'm staring at a blank wall here." "Whatever, keep pulling like that, yeah steady, signal, when you've got enough!" "Boss I swear to you. I am not pulling any loving cable in here." Que a lot of arguing and quick run back to the box room up those loving stairs with my teeth chattering, I could see it on his face when I opened the door, he was still feeding the cable through the wall. His hands dropped at his sides and the cables became taut slowly dragging their boxes towards the wall then up it. My boss grabbed at the boxes and started yanking the cables back into the boxroom it came easy at first but then he was beginning to put more effort into it and the sheaving became torn exposing the rainbow colored cores, I got my snips and cut at the cables just to watch the wall slurp them up like spaghetti. "What the gently caress was that? Wheres that guard at?" "He's in his cube?" I can't remember much of the conversation but I don't think I'd ever seen anybody genuinly freaked out as much as me. We left the room and got the guard up and told him what had happened. He looked at us and said "you sure?" My boss cut a length of cable and fed it into the hole the three of us watched the cable zip up the wall above the false ceiling. Words failed me. The guard started shouting who was back there. He turned around, "It must be one of the staff loving about" he led us to the room opposite, again a blank wall. Then the office next to it, The door read Manager. "We'll try in here" "I hope theres a manager locked in here with a lot of cable" My boss grunted. The guard unlocked the office and found nothing. None of us spoke, we trapsed back next door to the only other room left worth checking an office next to the boxroom. The opened it up. It wasn't noticable straight away. A second glance and it clicked. This room had more depth. We' had drilled into a void. No way. There had to be something else the guard really wasn't sure what to do. My boss checked around where this void was. Inside and out. Even scaling the roof of the building to see if it was there, pehaps a seagull had been pulling at the cable? Again nothing. He made me check underneath the room no void. Only concrete. We all had a coffee and decided to use the exhisting trunking, gently caress that room and it secret. The guard spent the rest of the job talking to us and bringing our spirits up, we finished up quite quickly and began collecting the gear. The DeWalt began working again and once or twice I could feel my hand being held by the fingers, only in that stairwell. My boss and I didn't speak about what happened it was too loving weird. I haven't told many people about this it was just so surreal, I feel like we should have knocked that wall through. But I suppose it wasn't our problem really. edit -I'm a terrible writer this is just thought this might help. Some of you my be wondering Why we just didn't got throught the other office into the managers, well these were locked off to us and off limits, however by the time we had stopped freaking out and looking for people loving with us we'd already wasted enough time and the other drill mysteriously broke yet to work again later.
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Jul 11, 2014 22:26
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The creepy Facebook girlfriend is honestly one of the best ghost stories I've read in a long time. I sure hope there's more, because I feel like he can get even creepier with a setup as good as that. As promised, here's more of what happened to my cousin and I on Blue Flame Road, if anyone's interested. The Furniture Graveyard We didn’t talk about what had happened for a whole week. When the subject was finally broached, I piped up and told him about what I’d seen in my peripheral as we were running away. Much to my relief, he believed me. We just sort of dropped it after that…one of those unspoken things where we both knew that we never intended to set foot on that road again, but neither wanted to admit it for fear of impugning our own manhood. Months passed. I began my senior year and started to prepare myself for college applications and all that awful bullshit. Halloween, my favorite holiday, approached and we found ourselves at a party one weekend, where the topic of conversation eventually turned to creepy poo poo that people had seen and ghost stories. My cousin caught my gaze but didn’t tell our story. Neither did I. The following Saturday, he finally broke the silence. “You know we’ve got to figure out what all that weird poo poo is on Blue Flame Road,” he said. “I’m not going to be satisfied until I have some idea of what the hell is up, and I know you aren’t either,” he said as he crossed his arms. I sighed and put up a bit of token resistance. “We should go to the library, see if we can find anything about the road in the microfiche they’ve got of the paper,” I offered. He just shook his head. “Let’s check out that furniture, it’s right off the road and we can make a quick escape if we get any weird vibes,” he countered. “If it’s burned, then we know it came from that house, and maybe there will be some office furniture and documents too,” he said. Out to the car we went. It was a bright midafternoon as we drove; both of us understood that if we were still out there for some reason when the sun began to go down, we’d get the hell out. We passed the road sign and I took a deep breath in a futile attempt to calm my nerves. The furniture was still there, soaked from a recent rain. We parked and began making our way down the footpath. A bedset. A nice oak desk (no documents). All of it looked old but intact. As we went further, though, the degradation worsened. A singed chair. A thoroughly charred couch. Kitchen items burned almost beyond recognition. My anxiety only grew worse as we continued to walk, and by the time we got to the kitchen stuff, I was almost sick to my stomach. All I could think about was the man with the burns, hunched over awkwardly with that glowing box in his hands. Finally, I broke the silence. “These are definitely from that house,” I said. “The burn patterns are almost identical to what we saw there.” “But what does it mean?” my cousin responded. “I still think the most likely explanation is a gas line explosion…maybe that’s what happened to that dude,” I offered. We continued walking, and the furniture began to thin out. We were rapidly approaching the clearing at the back end of the footpath, and the closer we got, the more strongly I felt that we were being watched. I stared intently at the treelines, and no one was in sight, but you know how it is when you feel like you’re being watched. Even if you can’t see anyone, it doesn’t make it any less creepy. My cousin tromped another step or two and then stopped. I looked down at his feet. A baby doll lay there, most of its face burned. Half terrified, half exasperated, I stared at my cousin. “Listen, dude,” I said, “I’ve seen Blair Witch and I drat well know when it’s time to get the hell out of someplace. Let’s go.” He turned without protest and we both began to walk back towards the car. And that’s when we heard it. Whimpering. Like someone was about to start sobbing. We both scanned the treeline and came up empty. “What the hell is that?!” my cousin barked. “I’m done,” I said, as I got ready to jog towards the car. The little panic meter in my brain was peaking out, a sense of imminent doom throbbing in my whole being. As I turned towards the car, a preteen girl emerged from the woods, tears streaming down her cheeks. Her eyes, glazed over with cataracts, stared vacantly at us, and her skin was a gnarled mess – almost the same pattern of chemical burns I’d seen on the man as we’d fled from that house a few months ago. Her singed hair was planted atop her head like a mop. Our lizard brains took over, and we both took off at a jog towards the car. The girl matched our pace and followed. Truth be told, though my nerves were pretty well shot at this point, I wasn’t scared of her. She looked utterly pathetic and in dire need of help, and I was absolutely sure that she knew more of what had happened with that man and the box. My cousin and I could easily overpower her, and I started formulating a plan for how we could subdue her. If we could gain control of the situation, we could surely help her out. I glanced over my shoulder, and what I saw got me running. At the treeline behind her, a pit bull burst forth at a full run, foam cascading down its neck. My cousin had obviously seen it as well, because his pace more than doubled. Have you ever felt deep, soul-level fear? I’m sure you’re familiar with the fight-or-flight response, and I bet you think you’ve felt it before, but I’m sure you haven’t. The fight-or-flight response is all consuming and primitive, and though the experts won’t admit it, the result is almost always “flight” instead of “fight,” at least in anything that hopes to live. As I ran towards the car as fast as the adrenaline could carry me, I forgot my name and my history. The lingering hunger I’d felt since about 2:30 or so faded completely out of the picture, and my entire being screamed out with one overwhelming thought: Run. My cousin and I hit the car at the same time. We were inside before I’d even registered that we’d made it, and my cousin stomped the pedal. As the car lurched forward and accelerated, I glanced back at the footpath strewn with furniture. The girl and the dog were nowhere to be seen. The fear subsided and was replaced with anger. As we made our way home, my determination was set: we’d figure out what was going on with Blue Flame Road, one way or the other. Your Sledgehammer has a new favorite as of 07:15 on Jul 13, 2014 |
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Jul 13, 2014 04:08
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I shitposted in this thread back in its GBS days, but there's been some great stuff posted since then and I'm enjoying it a lot.  I don't think this story's been posted here yet, but it was one of my favourites from the defunct creepypasta thread so I thought I might as well share it: "The Goat Man" (not the one you're thinking of) by 4chan user Anansi. -- Here's my story: >be 16 >be black and have family down in Alabama >they farm and own a huge amount of land down in Huntsville >uncle owns a big house and a bunch of trailers they put out in the woods for hunting or camping >down south cousins suggest that we go out there to camp >know I'm a city kid from Chicago so they tease the gently caress out of me >collect food, kill a pig and some chickens, and bring necessities to camp out for a few days >we get to the camp and it's obvious something is weird >air has this weird electric smell like right before a storm, like ozone >we think nothing of it and unpack and go down to a little creek to swim for a few hours >All of a sudden some older white guy and a white teenager come out of the bushes >he has a shotgun in the crook of his arm and says hello and ask us what we're doing this far back in the woods >tell him about my uncle, who he knows, and say we're camping out >he tells us we need to be real careful out here and stick together there was a big animal in the woods >His son, who is my age asks if he can stay and hang out with us >he says OK I'm going to stop greentexting because the story is fairly long and the format is harder to write in. So we end up playing football. Dicking around with me, there's the white kid "Tanner", five of my cousins, and then four of their friends. In total, there were five girls and six boys. We all were around 15-17. We ended up just dicking the day away. So, we head back to the camp and pulling out some stuff for a campfire, even though the trailers both had kitchenettes. Tanner says that his family's property sits up against my uncle's. He wants to run home and ask his dad if he can come out camping with us. My cousin Rooster says he's going to go with him since it's going to get dark soon. One of the girls also wants to tag along. It's about 7 o'clock, and it's starting to get pretty dark. They take flashlights and take the trail toward Tan's property. The rest of us chill. We make smores, drink and kiss on the girls. About thirty or forty minutes later, there's the smell of ozone again. You could smell it over the smell of the fire we had started. This really nasty, coppery smell like right after you've had a nosebleed and it's stopped. It wasn't exactly like dried blood, but it was that nasty metallic, back-of-your-throat smell. We immediately think that it's some kind of electrical malfunction, or someone left a hotplate on or some poo poo. We search the trailers and nothing is on, and we can all smell it. All of a sudden, we can hear people booking down the path toward us, and Rooster, Tan and the girl all come running into the clearing, out of breath. And they don't even break stride; they all run into the trailer, right by where the fire is. We all get the gently caress outta there and into the trailers. They end up calming down; even Rooster is crying his loving eyes out at this point. All the while, the fire is guttering lower and lower, so my other cousins say gently caress it and are about to go outside to get the generator out of a shed between the trailers. Tanner goes, "gently caress no! Lock the front door, ain't nobody else going outside!" He's been crying too, and his eyes are bloodshot and puffy and his pants are dirty as poo poo. He goes on to tell us that they went up to his house. His father said sure, he could go out camping, but to make sure they were careful on the way back, and that maybe they should take one of the hunting rifles just in case. Evidently, Tanner had seen something in their yard a few days before. One of their pigs had come up, ripped up and half eaten. They assumed it was just some big cats or coyotes, even though they don't usually gently caress with live animals. He had gone upstairs and packed his stuff, and told his dad they would be OK without the rifle because coyotes avoid people. So they started walking back toward where we were camping. So, Rooster finally stops crying and shaking; the girl already had, but she was just staring out the window with a dumb look on her face. He says they had gotten halfway into the woods toward the camp when they started to hear poo poo in the forest. It was almost pitch black by this time, so they weren't sure at first what the gently caress it was. The girl says that she heard something in the bushes right off the trail and they all beamed their flashlights over there and there was someone standing back in the woods in a little hollow. Rooster said they shouted at him and told him that he was scaring the gently caress out of them and what a dick he was. He says that's when he realized that the guy was facing away from them. So they keep walking, and they start smelling the nasty coppery ozone smell. They say that they look off into the forest on the opposite side, and it's a dude standing in the forest, backward slightly closer to the path. So now they start powerwalking and Tan keeps going, "I should have taken the loving rifle." As they're telling the story, the smell is still super strong even inside the cabin. They say that after they started walking faster, a kind of low gibbering had started coming from both sides of the wood. And as they started booking it back to the trailer, the girl said she had flashed her flashlight out into the woods to the side of them and had seen something jerking itself through the woods. The gibbering just got louder and louder, and when they could see the light from our camp fire, something had come out of the woods about 40 yards behind them onto the track, and they had just flat out ran as hard as they could to the trailer. So we're out in the loving woods, and we're assuming at this point it's some rednecks or some poo poo trying to gently caress with us. All of a sudden, my other cousin, Junior, starts going on about how he went to school with a native kid that was telling him about the 'Goatman' or some poo poo. We promptly tell him to shut the gently caress up because we don't need any spooky talk right now. But he just keeps going on and on about how it's the loving 'Goatman,' and how we're in his woods and blah blah blah. Now at the time, I had never heard of this goat man or any of that, but then a couple years ago -- the year before I graduated from college -- I had a Menom for a roommate and I ended up asking him about it. And to sum it up, it's basically a loving man with the head of a goat and he can shape shift and he gets among groups of people to terrorize them. It's also supposed to be kind of like the Wendigo, and it's bad mojo to even talk about it and even worse if you see it. Keep in mind, I didn't know this back when I was sixteen. So my cousin is going, "The goat man's going to get in and loving get us." The girls are all terrified and my cousins and I are all loving trying to figure out if it's just some hillbillies or if it's some animal. So all of a sudden the smell just goes away. Like to this day, I haven't even experienced anything like it. Like, usually smells fade away or lessen. It just literally was there one second and then not the second. So it's after an hour, making it around 9 or 10. We've stopped making GBS threads bricks enough to go back outside and stoke the fire again. We figure it was just some assholes trying to gently caress with us, so we don't go back home, because we think if we do, they'll chase us through the woods or some crazy poo poo. Nothing else weird happens that night. And we stay another night, and for the main part of the night nothing happens. At about 1 in the morning, we're outside getting drunk and telling ghost stories. As someone is finishing some 2spooky story -- I don't remember what about -- the smell comes back. It's so loving strong, that one of the girls literally starts vomiting. I stand up, and you can actually feel how clammy the air is. I say we should get inside and this isn't right; we should have just loving left. We all go back inside, and we're standing around. My cousin just keeps going on about how it's the goat man. And my cousin Rooster tries to shut him the gently caress up, and all the while I'm just feeling that something is wrong, and I can't figure out what the gently caress it is. We end up sitting in there for a while; the smell is just as strong, and we're terrified and all huddled in this camper. We end up cooking brats for everybody because nobody wants to go outside. It's one of those packs with 4 brats. We have a total of 3 packs. I grill them up on the stove and give everybody a hot dog. I get mine. After a while, one of my cousins gets up and goes over to the pot to get another one. He starts grumbling about about how I get two brats and everybody else only got one, and I look at him like he's loving stupid. I tell him that everybody only got one because there were only 12 brats, if he wants more he should open up a new pack and cook some more. That's when the girl that had been out with Rooster and Tan just starts screaming, "OH JESUS, OH LORD, GET IT OUT!" She's crying and shivering, and then it dawns on the cousin standing up what the gently caress is wrong. Me and him both glance around the room, and then I feel my heart loving sink. I run the gently caress out of the cabin and the girl runs out with us. The trailer door is banging against the side of the trailer as everybody books out of the cabin. One of my cousin's friends ask us what the gently caress was wrong. I start counting us. There's only 11 now. "I poo poo you not," my cousin verified. There had been twelve people in the cabin. But being that everybody didn't really know each other well, nobody had really noticed the whole loving time that there was an extra person. And then I realized earlier that I had kind of noticed something was off. You know how when you're just dicking around having a good time that you don't sweat the smallest poo poo, and you don't always keep track of certain stuff? I'm dead sure that someone else had been in the trailer with us, and that they had been there for at least a loving day, eating with us. What makes it worse is, I could figure out which one because I don't think anyone ever actually interacted with the other person/the Goat-man. The girl kept praying to Jesus and we're all sitting outside; eventually we get big-rear end sticks and go back in the cabin, but there's nobody in there. We count again, and there's 11 people. We go back into the trailer and lock the door. We explain what the gently caress happened, and the girl says that she realized too, and that when he was about to say something, the person sitting next to her had grabbed her leg hard and leaned over toward her and said something she couldn't understand. So we are pretty much scared as gently caress as we huddle together, and I fall asleep. When I wake up, the sun is just coming up, and half the people are asleep and the other half are packing our poo poo up. We all want to walk back home, but like 4 people want to stay until the sun is all the way up. And some people think that we're just loving around and still want to stay at the trailers. I just want to get the gently caress out of the woods. The girl's name was Keira, the one that the Goat-man had touched. Anyway, I asked her if she really thinks it was something bad, and she says she just wants to go home and she doesn't want to be out in the woods alone for another night. So we decide to split up; the 4 that want to go can go, but I have to stay because I have the keys to the cabin and it's my uncle's and I have to lock up. I'm super pissed at this point, because I feel like people aren't taking this poo poo seriously, and I definitely didn't want to be out in the woods for another night. I spend the rest of the day trying to convince the rest of the people -- now 4 girls and 4 guys -- to get the gently caress out of dodge. Tanner leaves with them to go get a rifle and says he's going to be back. So there are just 7 of us left by 4 PM. At around 5 PM he hasn't made it back yet, and we're getting extremely loving antsy, and the only reason I stopped begging them to go back was because he went to get a gun. it's about 5:30 PM or so, when the one cousin that did stay says that the girl Keira is outside. We all look outside, and sure enough, she's standing by the firepit with her back to the cabin. I'm thinking to myself, if she was so loving scared, why the hell would she come back? And then I get this nasty feeling in my gut. Keep in mind, the whole time the coppery smell has been gone. Now I realize I can smell just a twinge of it. I say this to the rest of them and everybody -- and these are the people that wanted to stay in the loving woods after we had the goddamn Goatman in our midst -- is laughing at me and asking if I set this up to scare them. I'm looking at them like, "I'm not loving bullshitting you at all right now." I ask them why the gently caress would I play like that? So one of the girls goes outside to get Kiera. She gets halfway to her and stops cold. Keira starts heaving; I don't know how the gently caress to describe it. Sort of like if someone with their back turned was laughing without actually making any sound. It was this fact that made me realize there was not a loving sound in the whole woods; it was dead silent. This was like later in September, so it was still fairly hot at the time, but it was super chilly some days too. And you could usually hear big-rear end geese honking or some kind of birds or squirrels chitchatting. So I step out the door and tell her to come back in the loving trailer right goddamn now. She backs up into the trailer and we lock the loving door. We pull down all the shades except one, and put a guy there in a chair to watch her. She stands there for another 20 minutes or so. The guy turns to say that she's still there. And there's a HUGE loving bang on the door. We all jump the gently caress up and scramble around the living room of the trailer. The banging is super loving loud. So now my cousin is holding one of the girls and the other two are kinda giggling with nervous laughter and me and the other two guys are making GBS threads brix. Then we hear Tan. He's screaming. LET ME THE gently caress IN STOP loving PLAYING! So we go over to the door and open it, and he stumbles in with a rifle. There's nobody else outside. Evidently, he had walked up to the campsite. Nothing weird happened in the forest, but he had seen a girl. Mind you, he said it was not Keira standing there. When he had gotten to the edge of the clearing, she had turned toward him with the slackjawed look and just stared him down, slowly tracking him as he walked around the outside of the clearing towards the camp. He said it wasn't till he was almost halfway to the trailer he had realized that she was getting closer to him. She had started off by the fire, and without him even seeing her move she had been turning, inching closer. He said he just ran the rest of the way back to the cabin thinking it would open. And when he got to the door and it was locked, he turned and it was about half the distance to the door. He looks around the room and then gets super pale. He pulls me to the side and whispers in my ear, "You know there are only seven of us in here, right?" I get that feeling where you stomach drops to your nuts. It had been back inside the trailer while we were sorting out who was going where, and then when we all went outside to talk earlier in the day. It has just slipped right back in. We looked out the window and there is nobody out there. So we recount everyone and then basically, I go over and ask everyone how many people were here earlier. And everybody says 8. I say, "Well, how many are here now?" They all do the count and then realize there are only now 7 people in the cabin. So Tan had brought back a couple boxes of ammo and his rifle. And he had told his dad that there was some kind of animal in the forest because he didn't think his dad would believe him if he said it was Goatman. He says that his cousin is supposed to be coming down in a few hours and that in the morning we can all go back to his place and his cousin will drive us home. Now I'm really loving terrified, but I at least feel better because we can be American and shoot the gently caress out of whatever it is if it comes back. But then my cousin gets into this huge argument with one of the girls because she thinks that I'm trying to be funny and prank them, and that she's getting really scared and that I'm not funny. He keeps telling her I'm not that kind of person, and she says, "Well, how do we know the girl wasn't just Tanner in a wig? Or if it's really the Goatman, how do we know that this is the real Tanner and that Goatman just didn't kill Tanner in the woods and take his gun?" So we loving get into a huge argument about this, where me and Tan are like, "we could seriously be in danger because at the very least someone has been sneaking themselves into our loving trailer without us knowing and mingling with us, and at worst, something bad is in the forest loving with us." One of the girls is crying and saying she wants to go right now, and we're trying to tell her we shouldn't because none of us are walking through the woods in the middle of the night. At this point the sun is starting to go down and it's getting a little cloudy out. We eat something and turn on the radio for a while, but we can't really get a station out there with anything decent. So we turn it off at about the time that Tan's cousin shows up. He was like 19, I think. At this point, the sun is just barely over the horizon and he has one of those heavy duty lantern flashlights and another rifle. He walks up to the trailer and we whisper to Tan asking if he's sure that's his cousin and he says yes. The guy looks behind him and all around the camp, then walks in. He kind of glances at all of us and looks a little confused. He says, "Where's your other little buddy at? I figured she would meet me up at the cabin. Is she a little slow or something?" He also asked whether we had been cooking blood in the cabin, because it smelled like blood and hot pans all the way up the trail. We are all like loving "NOPE." But we ask him what the gently caress he's talking about with the girl he saw. He had come down the same trail Tan had been using and he had come up on "one of youse guy's buddies" standing in the middle of the trail, looking at him slack jawed. He had asked her a bunch of questions, but all she did was just look at him. Then, she smiled at him and he said he kept walking. She couldn't seem to keep up with him and kept lagging a little behind him. He said he asked her if she was hurt or something, and if she needed any help. But, she had continued to stare. Eventually, he had been walking and turned around a bend in the trail. But when he turned around and went back to see if she was okay, the trail was empty. He'd assumed she had taken some short cut through the woods to our trailer. We tell him the whole story of what's been going on. I half expected him to say we were full of poo poo, but he just listened and then sat down on the couches in the living room. Tanner's cousin gets back to the girl. He says, when she had kept trying to lag behind him, it had kinda weirded him the gently caress out, so he tried to keep her in front of him, but no matter how slow he walked, she was always lagging a little behind. And that he smelled this nasty smell, and it got stronger as he got to the camp. Eventually it got really strong. She had said something really low that he didn't catch, and when he had turned around she had been right the gently caress up on him, and he stepped back from her. It was at this point he asked her if she was okay, and if she wasn't, him to carry her back the rest of the way, and she just kept staring. He said he reached out for her, as in to grab her on the shoulder, but he must have "misjudged the distance" because she was off to the side of where he had put his hand, like she had moved while he was looking dead at her. So at this point, we know this poo poo's real, unless Tan is playing a joke, which we can tell he's not because he's almost pissing his pants. So they load up their rifles, we eat some more, and we just kind of sit around until about 11. To this loving day, every time I think about this, I really pray to God that it's some huge prank that my cousins played on me and just never revealed so I would poo poo for the rest of my life. At 'round 11, the stink of copper turns into an actual nasty gross blood-like smell, like cooking blood and singed hair. Tan and his cousin, Reese, get the gently caress up instantly and grab the rifles. There's like a half-knocking, half-clawing at the door, and I poo poo you not, there's this voice, and it sounds like when you see those YouTube cats and dogs whose owners teach them how to "talk." It says in this halting, weirdly toned voice, "Let me the gently caress in, stop loving playing." It made my loving nuts creep up against my body, and one of the girls just starts crying and calling on Jesus. It was so loving obviously not a person talking. It didn't have the right cadence, and that's some poo poo that I never realized until that moment, but all people have a certain cadence when they talk, no matter what language. All people have a certain kind of rhythm to talking. This poo poo didn't have any kind of cadence or rhythm. One of those YouTube cats, that's what the gently caress it sounded like outside the door. So now I'm in full on terror mode. We keep yelling outside "Who is it? Stop loving around man!" and it just keeps saying, "in" or "Let me the gently caress in" for almost 15 minutes. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qff9V27Weaw It sounded like this almost, just not funny. Sorry for being on a tangent, but if you can't imagine how this poo poo sounded, then you can't imagine how hosed up the whole situation was. So then the smell goes away for a while. And for the next hour or so, you can hear someone basically creeping around in the woods and poo poo. Every couple minutes it'll come back into the door, and say something. Finally when the smell fades away, it's around 2 in the morning right now. Reese says, "Man, gently caress this!" and opens the door and walks outside with his rifle. He fires a shot into the air, and says something to the affect of, "In the name of Jesus Christ, go away!" He fires two more times, and then from the woods right up against the river across from the trailer, it sounds like something is slowly jibbering and hooting. Then it starts screaming and it sounds almost like a woman and a cat in a bag screaming together. Like I seriously have never heard any poo poo like that, and you can hear the brush over that way start to shake, Reese fires over into the treeline and then starts backing into the house. We lock the door, and we can hear this poo poo keening and screaming. Reese says something had come out of the bushes, super low to the ground and crawling toward the cabin. He had shot at it. Pretty much, that was how the rest of the night went; it was literally screaming constantly for the next 2 hours, and we could hear poo poo moving out into the treeline. But it never came back up to the cabin until everyone had finally fallen asleep. Tan had been sitting in the chair watching the door with his rifle; nobody else heard or saw this, and he told me two days later, after the whole thing was over. He said he had been nodding off after the screaming and noises finally stopped, and he had been almost asleep when he saw someone come out of the bathroom and then lay down in the middle of the floor and go to sleep. He just assumed it was one of us and he had nodded off. Then he said he kind of realized something was wrong, and while pretending to be sleeping, he counted us. There were 9 people in the cabin. He basically didn't want to try to shoot at the loving thing in the cabin and have it kill us all then and there, or have Reese wake up and start shooting and then we kill ourselves. So he just stayed awake all night, pretending to be asleep. He said sometimes, it would stand up and kind of do this weird jittery thing, or heave like it was laughing. But then it would lay back down. The story closes pretty weak, because from my perspective nothing happened. We woke up. And I noticed that Tan was a little jittery, and that he was avoiding looking at all of us. But we ate some breakfast, packed up and started walking to his house. He stayed last in the cabin and said he'd lock up and bring me my uncle's keys; to just start walking and he'd catch up. Which I didn't really want to loving do. We got a little bit up the path, and when he came running up, basically we just jogged back to his house. His cousin took us home. There was a window in the bathroom. Tan had gone back to lock up and looked in there. We were too stupid to lock a screenless window. The window was loving up when he went in there. I'm guessing it had been doing that all along, waiting for us to fall asleep or slip up and then getting in among us. It walked with us all the Goddamn way back to his house, and then he said it lagged to the back of the group and looked him dead in the eyes before walking into the woods.
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Jul 13, 2014 13:01
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That's incredible, hadn't read that one before, thank you for posting!
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Jul 13, 2014 18:50
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The only thing that stuck out to me in that one is that the guy's cousin says "youse guy's." If the story takes place in the middle-of-nowhere Alabama, the guy would've said "y'all's." Maybe it's just because I'm from the middle of nowhere Alabama but that one little detail stuck out to me. Other than that is was good. The cat-talking part and the sleeping in the middle of them parts got to me.
Double Plus Good has a new favorite as of 22:32 on Jul 13, 2014 |
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Jul 13, 2014 22:30
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Yeah the cat-talking was really creepy because I've seen videos like that and it was a perfect description. Anyone remember that story about the Sound in the woods? I remember the teller and his friend blacked out or something and then his friend refused to ever discuss it again?
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Jul 14, 2014 00:06
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Here's the last of the Blue Flame Road weirdness. My cousin and I never actually went back to the road itself after seeing that girl, but we did do a little bit of poking around, and what we found out put some of our strange experiences in context, even if it didn't really explain them. -------------------------- What We Found Out at the Library I saw that burned girl every time I closed my eyes for the next week. The following Friday, two days before Halloween, my cousin and I decided we’d make one more go of explaining it, and then we’d be done with Blue Flame Road for good. Fortunately, sanity won the day, and we acted on one of my earlier suggestions. We went to the library. The librarian was a bright-eyed woman who looked to be in her mid-50s, and she listened patiently as we described what we were looking to do (minus all the stuff about weird blue light boxes and horribly scarred, blind mute people, of course). Luckily for us, the library had just digitized their collection of the local paper, and it would be much more easily searchable. No loving around with a microfiche. She set us up at a computer with the searchable archive and turned to leave. She stopped herself, though, and looked at each of us. “You know,” she said, “that road wasn’t always called Blue Flame. When the mall opened in 1981, it was Haller Street.” She smiled sweetly and left. We decided on three search terms – Blue Flame Road, the mall, and Haller Street. With the entrance to the road being that close to the mall, maybe some strange things had happened there that could shed some light on what we’d seen. We started with Blue Flame Road. Much to our chagrin, we only got a handful of results, and all of them looked uninteresting and unrelated to what we’d experienced. They were just a bunch of listings for houses. My cousin hovered the mouse over the back button. “Hold up!” I nearly shouted. “Look just a little bit closer at those,” I told him. The listings appeared intermittently every few years and stretched all the way back to 1987. And all of them, every last one, was for one house: 1626 Blue Flame Road. The house that we went to back in the summer. We both sat there agape. I started reading them one by one, and my skin crawled with goosebumps. Each listing was written in a childlike tone, with clipped sentences and some bizarre diction. Some of them were even duplicate listings, years apart. It was abundantly obvious that one person had written them all. “This isn’t clearing anything up; in fact, it’s just making me feel worse about everything,” I said. My cousin responded by hitting the back button and running a search on the mall. Most of the results were your typical local newspaper pablum – new stores opening, stories about the local economy, etc. A few robberies here and there. However, a couple of results stood out. In 1998, six years ago, a pack of feral dogs had started showing up on the back parking lot. They were spotted often enough that customers were getting concerned, so the mall managers finally called in animal control. Animal control managed to catch three dogs, but not before an animal control officer got bitten, which prompted a rabies test on the dog. Fortunately for the officer, the test came back clean – no rabies. But the bloodwork on the dog was way off, and when the other two dogs died the next day, the animal shelter did a thorough veterinary analysis of the dog. What they found floored them. The dog was suffering from very acute radiation poisoning. It died shortly thereafter, and apparently the city hushed it up right quick, because there were no follow-up stories. The other unusual result was a suspected kidnapping in the fall of 1995. A three-year-old girl was gone in such a short amount of time that she’d almost seemed to vanish. Her mother had looked away for a moment or two as she was shopping, and when she turned back her little girl was gone. No one had seen her, and no one suspicious had been spotted nearby, either. The police had no leads and the case went unsolved. “Maybe that area is just a magnet for weird happenings, like a tiny version of the Bermuda Triangle?” my cousin offered. “I could see it, this town is weird enough for something like that to be the case,” I replied. He hit the back button and entered the last search term, Haller Street. One entry flashed up. After reading the first couple of lines of the article, each of us settled into a stony silence. My palms got cold and wet, and I could feel my heart fluttering in my chest. The story was about an explosion on Haller Street, which left one house condemned. A man named David Hinckley, a chemistry professor at the local college, was inside the house when it happened. Interviews with other faculty painted the picture of a kooky and reclusive character, and fellow chemistry faculty strongly suspected that David was conducting some unsanctioned research on his own time, out of a lab he’d built under his house. He’d started off merely joking about it, but his colleagues had slowly become convinced that the jokes were just a smokescreen. They were correct. Hinckley didn’t live alone – he had a five year old daughter, who he had sole custody of after his divorce. After a late night in his lab, he’d apparently left it unlocked accidentally, and at approximately 7:02 a.m. on August 14, 1985, his daughter had wandered down there and triggered a massive explosion. She was killed instantly, and all they could find of her were powdered bone fragments and a chunk of burnt hair. Fire had quickly gutted the living room, but Hinckley had apparently been relatively uninjured by the initial blast. Investigators suspected that he’d sustained his injuries in a vain attempt to rescue his daughter. The injuries were quite severe, indeed. 3rd degree burns over 98% of his body, some from acid and some from flames. A second explosion had broken his spine so badly that spinal fusion surgery would fail, though he eventually walked again. He’d lost an eye, and was unconscious when firemen found him. After a flurry of surgeries, he’d awoken, but refused to speak despite obviously understanding those around him. A psychologist would eventually be brought in, only to conclude that he had a condition somewhere between locked-in syndrome and autism, though the psychologist could not decide if it was truly a result of faulty brain chemistry due to the injuries, or if it was something that David was imposing on himself. When the surgeries and therapy were through, the hospital had no caretaker to release David to. He had no family members, and his ex-wife wanted absolutely nothing to do with him. Despite his severe psychological issue, David could take care of himself just fine, and the hospital could find no compelling reason to hold him or put him in some kind of mental ward. He was released from the hospital. We never did figure out what was in that box.
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Jul 17, 2014 04:06
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God drat you. e: regardless of the veracity of that story, it was super well done.
cowboythreespeech has a new favorite as of 06:34 on Jul 17, 2014 |
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Jul 17, 2014 06:29
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Hey can you guys recommend some of your favorite collections of ghost stories and such for purchase? I have a kindle and the amount of crappy horror fiction anthologies out there is staggering.
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Jul 17, 2014 08:04
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Not sure if they're on kindle or not, but there's the 2 goon ones. http://www.amazon.com/Goonbumps-Volume-1-John-McCarthy/dp/0557691893 http://www.amazon.com/Humper-Monkey-John-McCarthy/dp/0557708834/ref=pd_sim_b_1?ie=UTF8&refRID=09YY529CDS59ZRA0D3G2
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Jul 17, 2014 12:56
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PSWII60 posted:Not sure if they're on kindle or not, but there's the 2 goon ones. Seconding Goonbumps. Your Sledgehammer, did they ever explain why they changed the road name?
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Jul 22, 2014 06:40
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| # ? May 4, 2024 09:11 |
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don't you have to do rabies testing post-mortem because the way you do it is by testing brain tissue
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Jul 22, 2014 17:25
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