CREEPY STORY THREAD

I have two supernatural stories that were experienced by me/my grandma

When I lived at my parents house, my bedroom was in the basement.  One night I awoke for no reason at 3 in the morning and sat up, looked about 10 feet in front of my bed and noticed a white figure that seemed to be that of an old lady leaning over a chair.  As soon as she noticed that I was noticing her (no akon), she turned her head and we immediately made eye contact, she then 'floated' towards the door and I didn't see her again.  bricks were %@@!.  The following morning, I told my mom the story and she quickly said "what chair was she leaning over" and  I showed her, she then explained that the chair was my great grandmothers.  This experience made me a believer.



The next story, my Grandmother experienced it.  She was in the hospital because she broke her hip, then she caught phenomena while being there.  For those that know, having phenomena and being 85 years old is almost guaranteed death, especially after having surgery.  One morning, in the hospital she picked up the phone to call my mother.  She dialed our house number and some lady answered.  My grandmother didn't recognize the voice and said "who is this".  The lady on the other end kept asking my grandma if she had repented her sins, and my grandmother would answer yes.  The lady would reply with "then everything will be alright".  My grandma finally got her to say that her name is "Maria, her guardian angel", my grandma then dropped the phone in amazement.  She tried my mother again, and got through.  I remember my mom saying that my grandmother is very frantic and out of breath.  The next day Maria showed up in my grandmas hospital room and recited a prayer and left.  My grandma asked the nurse if they have ever seen her before and they said no, there was also nobody by the name of Maria on the sign in sheet.
 
Where Bad Kids Go

I must have been six or seven when I lived in Lebanon. The country was ravaged by war at the time, and murders were common and frequent. I remember during a particularly vicious era, when the bombings rarely stopped, I would stay at home sitting in front of my television watching a very, very strange show.
It was a kids' show that lasted about 30 minutes and contained strange and sinister images. To this day I believe it was a thinly veiled attempt on the part of the media to use scare tactics to keep kids in place, because the moral of every episode revolved around very uptight ideologies: stuff like, “bad kids stay up late,” “bad kids have their hands under the covers when they sleep,” and “bad kids steal food from the fridge at night.”

It was very weird, and in Arabic to top it off. I didn't understand much of it, but for the most part the images were very graphic and comprehensive. The thing that stuck with me the most, however, was the closing scene. It remained much the same in every episode. The camera would zoom in on an old, rusted, closed door. As it got closer to the door, strange and sometimes even agonizing screams would become more audible. It was extremely frightening, especially for children's programming. Then a text would appear on the screen in Arabic reading: “That's where bad kids go.” Eventually both the image and the sound would fade out, and that would be the end of the episode.

About 15 or 16 years later I became a journalistic photographer. That show had been in my mind all my life, popping up in my thoughts sporadically. Eventually I'd had enough, and decided to do some research. I finally managed to uncover the location of the studio where much of that channel's programming had been recorded. Upon further research and eventually traveling on site, I found out it was now desolate and had been abandoned after the big war ended.

I entered the building with my camera. It was burnt out from the inside. Either a fire had broken out or someone had wanted to incinerate all of the wooden furniture. After few hours of cautiously making my way into the studio and snapping pictures, I found an isolated out-of-the-way room. After having to break through a few old locks and managing to break the heavy door open, I remained frozen in the doorway for several long minutes. Traces of blood, feces, and tiny bone fragments lay scattered across the floor. It was a small room, and an extremely morbid scene.

What truly frightened me, though, what made me turn away and never want to come back, was the bolted, caged microphone hanging from the roof in the middle of the room...
 
Bump for the Holiday !!!






Ok not really a ghost story but still kinda creepy...


A few years ago I had a friend that was in the market for a new car. I tipped him off that there was a very nice Cadillac Eldorado for sale in the back lot of a dealership down the street from his house for only 4k. Keep in mind this was over 5 years ago and the average price for a nice Eldo was about 10k. Strange thing was the dealer seemed weary and standoffish almost as if he didnt really want to sell the car. He kept saying "well... we were actually just about ship it off to another dealership thats why its in the back lot". I didnt think much of it other than maybe he was trying to fish for a higher offer since the price was so far below KBB. My friend test drove the car and after some negotiations bought the car for 4K.

Fast forward about a month... Im sitting in the backseat for the first time and notice the leather in the back looks BRAND NEW. Then I realize its not the entire backseat that looks new but just the lower portions of the leather halfway up the back. No big deal... right? Someone probably replaced the worn out sections of leather with fresh material... right ? But then why didnt they replace the worn section of the drivers seat too ? ... Why not replace the entire backseat ? Why only half ?

Fast forward another few weeks when Im in the backseat again.... My lighter falls out of my pocket and into the crease in the seat cushions.... While fishing in between the seats for my lighter, I pull out the middle lap belt that was rolled and tucked in between the cushion.... I look at the belt and THE SEAT BELT IS BLOOD STAINED DARK BURGUNDY :wow:


IM just like... OK..... Now I know why the car was so cheap, why the dealer was acting like he had something to hide and why portions of the backseat were brand new. [ cue weebay gif ]



I tell my friend and we look up who owned the car before him... I wont mention real names but the car was previously owned by "JL" , a rather notorious Mobster in KC.

Something definitely happened in that car but what exactly we have no idea.
 
^^
eek.gif


I'm scared of owning dead peoples belongings.
 
Ghenges said:
Not my story..

In the late 70's, my Uncle was studying medicine at the University of Chicago. After a morning class, he decided that he would hitchhike back home to Lincoln Park on the North side instead of pay for a taxi. A man drove up in a Plymouth Satellite and offered my Uncle a ride. The man looked normal and seemed friendly...lighthearted even, so my Uncle got in the car and they started driving towards Lake Shore Drive. However, once they got there, the man drove South on Lake Shore instead of North, towards Lincoln Park. My Uncle told the man he was going the wrong way and to turn around and head North. The man looked at my Uncle, put his hand on his knee and said, "No son, you are coming with me" and smiled darkly at him. My Uncle froze in panic, and when they hit traffic near the South Shore, he quickly unlocked the passenger door and ran away without looking back.

A year or two later on a cold December day, my Uncle was having coffee in a cafe with my future Aunt when he caught something on the TV that made his blood run cold. He saw the man that had picked him up from school that day the year before. He had been arrested for the suspected rape and killing of over 20 young men and boys. The man on the television was John Wayne Gacy. And he had removed the door handle off the passenger side door to prevent the men he picked up from escaping.
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
Story had me shook just reading it, especially the ending. 
 
The Tape

During the summer of 1983, in a quiet town near Minneapolis, Minnesota, the charred body of a woman was found inside the kitchen stove of a small farmhouse. A video camera was also found in the kitchen, standing on a tripod and pointing at the oven. No tape was found inside the camera at the time.

Although the scene was originally labeled as a homicide by police, an unmarked VHS tape was later discovered at the bottom of the farm’s well (which had apparently dried up earlier that year).

Despite its worn condition, and the fact that it contained no audio, police were still able to view the contents of the tape. It depicted a woman recording herself in front of a video camera (seemingly using the same camera the police found in the kitchen). After positioning the camera to include both her and her kitchen stove in the image, the tape then showed her turning on the oven, opening the door, crawling inside, and then closing the door behind her. Eight minutes into the video, the oven could be seen shaking violently, after which point thick black smoke could be seen emanating from it. For the remaining 45 minutes of video, until the batteries in the camera died, it remained in its stationary position.

To avoid disturbing the local community, police never released any information about the tape, or even the fact that it was found. Police were also not able to determine who put the tape in the well, or why the height and stature of the woman in the video didn’t come close to matching the body they’d found in the oven.
 
[h3]The Curious Case of Smile.jpg[/h3]
I first met in person with Mary E. in the summer of 2007. I had arranged with her husband of fifteen years, Terence, to see her for an interview. Mary had initially agreed, since I was not a newsman but rather an amateur writer gathering information for a few early college assignments and, if all went according to plan, some pieces of fiction. We scheduled the interview for a particular weekend when I was in Chicago on unrelated business, but at the last moment Mary changed her mind and locked herself in the couple’s bedroom, refusing to meet with me.

For half an hour, I sat with Terence as we camped outside the bedroom door, I listening and taking notes while he attempted fruitlessly to calm his wife. The things Mary said made little sense, but fit into the pattern I was expecting: though I could not see her, I could tell from her voice that she was crying, and more often than not her objections to speaking with me centered around an incoherent diatribe on her dreams – her nightmares.

Terence apologized profusely when we ceased the exercise, and I did my best to take it in stride; recall that I wasn’t a reporter in search of a story, but merely a curious young man in search of information. Besides, I thought at the time, I could perhaps find another, similar case if I put my mind and resources to it.

Mare E. was the sysop for a small Chicago-based Bulletin Board System in 1992 when she first encountered smile.jpg and her life changed forever. She and Terence had been married for only five months. Mary was one of an estimated 400 people who saw the image when it was posted as a hyperlink on the BBS, though she is the only one who has spoken openly about the experience. The rest have remained anonymous, or are perhaps dead.

In 2005, when I was only in tenth grade, smile.jpg was first brought to my attention by my burgeoning interest in web-based phenomena; Mary was the most often cited victim of what is sometimes referred to as “Smile.dog,” the being smile.jpg is reputed to display.

What caught my interest (other than the obvious macabre elements of the cyber-legend and my proclivity toward such things) was the sheer lack of information, usually to the point that people don’t believe it even exists other than as a rumor or hoax. It is unique because, though the entire phenomenon centers on a picture file, that file is no where to be found on the internet; certainly many photo-manipulated simulacra litter the web, showing up with the most frequency on sites such as the image-board 4chan, particularly the /x/-focused paranormal sub board.

It is suspected that these are fakes because they do not have the effect the true smile.jpg is believed to have, namely sudden onset temporal lobe epilepsy and acute anxiety. This purpoted reaction in the viewer is one of the reasons the phantom-like smile.jpg is regarded with such disdain, since it is patently absurd, though depending on whom you ask, the reluctance to acknowledge smile.jpg’s existence might be just as much out of fear as it is out of disbelief.

Neither smile.jpg nor Smile.dog is mentioned anywhere on Wikipedia, though the website features articles on such other, perhaps more scandalous shocksites such as goatse (hello.jpg) or 2girls1cup; any attempt to create a page pertaining to smile.jpg is summarily deleted by any of the encyclopedia’s many admins.

Encounters with smile.jpg are the stuff of internet legend. Mary E.’s story is not unique; there are unverified rumors of smile.jpg showing up in the early days of usenet and even one persistent tale that in 2002 a hacker flooded the forums of humor and satire website Something Awful with a deluge of Smile.dog pictures, rendering almost of the forum’s users at the time epileptic. It is also said that in the mid-to-late 90s that smile.jpg circulated on Usenet and as an attachment of a chain email with the subject like “SMILE!! GOD LOVES YOU!”

Yet despite the huge exposure these stunts would generate, there are very few people who admit to having experienced any of them and no trace of the file or any link has ever been discovered. Those who claim to have seen smile.jpg often weakly joke that they were far too busy to save a copy of the

picture to their hard drive.

However, all alleged victims offer the same description of the photo: a dog-like creature (usually described as appearing similar to a Siberian Husky), illuminated by the flash of the camera, sits in a dim room, the only background detail visible being a human hand extending from the darkness near the left side of the frame. The hand is empty, but is usually described as “beckoning.” Of course, most attention is given to the dog (or dog-creature, as some victims are more certain than others about what they claim to have seen). The muzzle of the beast is reputedly split in a wide grin, revealing two rows of very white, very straight, very sharp, and very human-looking teeth. This is, of course, not a description given immediately after viewing the picture, but rather a recollection of the victims, who claim to have seen the picture endlessly repeated in their mind’s eye during the time they are, in reality, having epileptic fits.

These fits are reported to continue indeterminably, often while the victims sleep, resulting in very vivid and disturbing nightmares. These may be treated with medication, though in some cases it is more effective than others. Mary E., I assumed, was not on effective medication.

That was why, after my visit to her apartment in 2007, I sent out feelers to several folklore- and urban legend-orientated newsgroups, websites, and mailing lists, hoping to find the name of a supposed victim of smile.jpg who felt more interested in talking about his experiences. For a time, nothing happened and at length I forgot completely about my pursuits, since I had begun my freshman year of college and was quite busy. Mary contacted me via email, however, near the beginning of March 2008.

To: jml@****.com
From marye@****.net
Subj: Last summer’s interview

Dear Mr. L.,

I am incredibly sorry about my behavior last summer when you came to interview me. I hope you understand that it was no fault of yours, but rather my own problems that led me to act out as I did. I realized that I could have handled the situation more decorously; however, I hope you will forgive me. At the time, I was afraid.

You see, for fifteen years I have been haunted by smile.jpg. Smile.dog comes to me in my sleep every night. I know that sounds silly, but it is true. There is an ineffable quality about my dreams, my nightmares, that makes them completely unlike any real dreams I have ever had. I do not move and do not speak. I simply look ahead, and the only thing ahead of me is the scene from that horrible picture. I see the beckoning hand, and I see Smile.dog. It talks to me.

I thought for a long time about my options. I could show it to a stranger, a coworker… I could even show it to Terence, as much as the idea disgusted me. And what would happen then? Well, if Smile.dog kept its word, I could sleep. Yet, if it lied, what would I do? And who was to say something worse would not come for me if I did as the creature asked?

So, I did nothing for fifteen years, though I kept the diskette hidden amongst my things. Every night for fifteen years Smile.dog has come to me in my sleep and demanded that I spread the word. For fifteen years I have stood strong, though there have been hard times. Many of my fellow victims on the BBS

board where I first encountered smile.jpg stopped posting; I heard some of

them committed suicide. Others remained completely silent, simply

disappearing off the face of the web. They are the ones I worry about the most. I sincerely hope you will forgive me, Mr. L., but last summer when you contacted me and my husband about an interview I was near the breaking point. I did not care if Smile.dog was lying or not; I wanted it to end. You were a stranger, someone I had no connection with, and i thought I would not feel sorrow when you took the diskette as part of your research and sealed your

fate.

Before you arrived, I realized what I was doing: I was plotting to ruin your life.

I could not stand the thought, and in fact I still cannot. I am ashamed, Mr. L., and I hope that this warning will dissuade you from further investigation of smile.jpg. You may in time encounter someone who is, if not weaker than I, then wholly more depraved, someone who will not hesitate to follow Smile.dog’s orders. Stop while you are still whole.

Sincerely,
Mary E.

Terence contacted me later that month with the news that his wife had killed herself. While cleaning up the various things she’d left behind, closing email accounts and the like, he happened upon the above message. He was a man in shambles; he wept as he told me to listen to his wife’s advice. He’d found the diskette, he revealed, and burned it until it was nothing but a stinking pile of blackened plastic. The part that most disturbed him, however, was how the diskette had hissed as it melted. Like some sort of animal, he said.

I will admit that I was a little uncertain about how to respond to this. At first, I thought, perhaps it was a joke, with the couple belatedly playing with the situation in order to get a rise out of me, but a quick check of several Chicago newspapers’ online obituaries, however, proved that Mary E. was indeed dead. There was, of course, no mention of suicide in the article.

I decided that, for at least a time, I would not further pursue the subject of smile.jpg, especially since I had finals coming up at the end of May. But the world has odd ways of testing up. Almost a full year after I’d returned from my disastrous interview with Mary E., I received another email:

To: jml@****.com
From: elzahir82@****.com
Subj: smile

Hello
I found your e-mail address thru a mailing list your profile said you are interested in smiledog. I have saw it it is not as bad as every one says I have sent it to you here. Just spreading the word.

:smile:

The final line chilled me to the bone. According to my email client there was one file attachment called, naturally, smile.jpg. I considered downloading it for some time. It was most likely a fake, I imagined, and even if it weren’t I was never wholly convinced of smile.jpg’s peculiar powers. Mary E.’s account had shaken me, yes, but she was probably mentally unbalanced anyway. After all, how could a single image do what smile.jpg was said to accomplish? What sort of creature was it that could break one’s mind with only the power of the eye?

And if such things were patently absurd, then why did the legend exist at all? If I downloaded the image, if I looked at it, and if Mary turned out to be correct, if Smile.dog came to me in my dreams demanding I spread the word, what would I do? Would I live my life as Mary had, fighting against the urge to give in until I died? Or would I simply spread the word, eager to be put to rest? And if I chose the latter route, how could I do it? Whom would I burden in turn? If I went through with my earlier intention to write a short article about smile.jpg, I decided, I could attach it as evidence, and anyone who read the article, anyone who took interest, would be affected. And, even assuming the smile.jpg attached to the email was genuine, would I be capricious enough to save myself in that manner?
 
Bedtime

(I think it's one of the best pastas I've ever read.)
Bedtime is supposed to be a happy event for a tired child; for me it was terrifying. While some children might complain about being put to bed before they have finished watching a film or playing their favourite video game, when I was a child, night time was something to truly fear. Somewhere in the back of my mind it still is.

As someone who is trained in the sciences, I cannot prove that what happened to me was objectively real, but I can swear that what I experienced was genuine horror. A fear which in my life, I’m glad to say, has never been equalled. I will relate it to you all now as best I can, make of it what you will, but I’ll be glad to just get it off of my chest.

I can’t remember exactly when it started, but my apprehension towards falling asleep seemed to correspond with my being moved into a room of my own. I was 8 years old at the time and until then I had shared a room, quite happily, with my older brother. As is perfectly understandable for a boy 5 years my senior, my brother eventually wished for a room of his own and as a result, I was given the room at the back of the house.

It was a small, narrow, yet oddly elongated room, large enough for a bed and a couple of chest of drawers, but not much else. I couldn’t really complain because, even at that age, I understood that we did not have a large house and I had no real cause to be disappointed, as my family

was both loving and caring. It was a happy childhood, during the day.

A solitary window looked out onto our back garden, nothing out of the ordinary, but even during the day the light which crept into that room seemed almost hesitant.

As my brother was given a new bed, I was given the bunk beds which we used to share. While I was upset about sleeping on my own, I was excited at the thought of being able to sleep in the top bunk, which seemed far more adventurous to me.

From the very first night I remember a strange feeling of unease creeping slowly from the back of my mind. I lay on the top bunk, staring down at my action figures and cars strewn across the green-blue carpet. As imaginary battles and adventures took place between the toys on the floor, I couldn’t help but feel that my eyes were being slowly drawn towards the bottom bunk, as if something was moving in the corner of my eye. Something which did not wish to be seen.

The bunk was empty, impeccably made with a dark blue blanket tucked in neatly, partially covering two rather bland white pillows. I didn’t think anything of it at the time, I was a child, and the noise slipping under my door from my parent’s television, bathed me in a warm sense of safety and well-being.

I fell asleep.

When you awaken from a deep sleep to something moving, or stirring, it can take a few moments for you to truly understand what is happening. The fog of sleep hangs over your eyes and ears even when lucid.

Something was moving, there was no doubt about that.

At first I wasn’t sure what it was. Everything was dark, almost pitch black, but there was enough light creeping in from outside to outline that narrowly suffocating room. Two thoughts appeared in my mind almost simultaneously. The first was that my parents were in bed because the rest of the house lay both in darkness, and silence. The second thought turned to the noise.  A noise which had obviously woken me.

As the last cob webs of sleep withered from my mind, the noise took on a more familiar form. Sometimes the simplest of sounds can be the most unnerving, a cold wind whistling through a tree outside, a neighbour’s footsteps uncomfortably close, or, in this case, the simple sound of bed sheets rustling in the dark.

That was it; bed sheets rustling in the dark as if some disturbed sleeper was attempting to get all too comfortable in the bottom bunk. I lay there in disbelief thinking that the noise was either my imagination, or perhaps just my pet cat finding somewhere comfortable to spend the night. It was then that I noticed my door, shut as it had been as I’d fallen asleep.

Perhaps my mum had checked in on me and the cat had sneaked in to my room then.

Yes, that must have been it. I turned to face the wall, closing my eyes in the vain hope that I could fall back to sleep. As I moved, the rustling noise from underneath me ceased. I thought that I must have disturbed my cat, but quickly I realised that the visitor in the bottom bunk was much less mundane than my pet trying to sleep, and much more sinister.

As if alerted to, and disgruntled by, my presence, the disturbed sleeper began to toss and turn violently, like a child having a tantrum in their bed. I could hear the sheets twist and turn with increasing ferocity. Fear then gripped me, not like the subtle sense of unease I had experienced earlier, but now potent and terrifying. My heart raced as my eyes panicked, scanning the almost impenetrable darkness.

I let out a cry.

As most young boys do, I instinctively shouted on my mother. I could hear something stir on the other side of the house, but as I began to breath a sigh of relief that my parents were coming to save me, the bunk beds suddenly started to shake violently as if gripped by an earthquake, scraping against the wall. I could hear the sheets below me thrashing around as if tormented by malice. I did not want to jump down to safety as I feared the thing in the bottom bunk would reach out and grab me, pulling me into the darkness, so I stayed there, white knuckles clenching my own blanket like a shroud of protection.  The wait seemed like an eternity.

The door finally, and thankfully, burst open, and I lay bathed in light while the bottom bunk, the resting place of my unwanted visitor, lay empty and peaceful.

I cried and my mother consoled me. Tears of fear, followed by relief, streamed down my face. Yet, through all of the horror and relief, I did not tell her why I was so upset. I cannot explain it, but it was as though whatever had been in that bunk would return if I even so much as spoke of it, or uttered a single syllable of its existence. Whether that was the truth, I do not know, but as a child I felt as if that unseen menace remained close, listening.

My mother lay in the empty bunk, promising to stay there until morning. Eventually my anxiety diminished, tiredness pushed me back towards sleep, but I remained restless, waking several times momentarily to the sound of rustling bed sheets.

I remember the next day wanting to go anywhere, be anywhere, but in that narrow suffocating room. It was a Saturday and I played outside, quite happily with my friends. Although our house was not large we were lucky to have a long sloping garden in the back. We played there often, as much of it was overgrown and we could hide in the bushes, climb in the huge sycamore tree which towered above all else, and easily imagine ourselves in the throws of a grand adventure, in some untamed exotic land.

As fun as it all was, occasionally my eye would turn to that small window; ordinary, slight, and innocuous. But for me, that thin boundary was a looking glass into a strange, cold pocket of dread. Outside, the lush green surroundings of our garden filled with the smiling faces of my friends could not extinguish the creeping feeling clawing its way up my spine; each hair standing on end. The feeling of something in that room, watching me play, waiting for the night when I would be alone; eagerly filled with hate.

It may sound strange to you, but by the time my parents ushered me back into that room for the night, I said nothing. I didn’t protest, I didn’t even make an excuse as to why I couldn’t sleep there. I simply and sullenly walked into that room, climbed the few steps into the top bunk and then waited. As an adult I would be telling everyone about my experience, but even at that age I felt almost silly to be talking about something which I really had no evidence for. I would be lying, however, if I said this was my primary reason; I still felt that this thing would be enraged if I

so much as spoke of it.

It’s funny how certain words can remain hidden from your mind, no matter how blatant or obvious they are. One word came to me that second night, lying there in the darkness alone, frightened, aware of a rotten change in the atmosphere; a thickening of the air as if something had displaced it. As I heard the first casual twists of the bed sheets below, the first anxious increase of my heartbeat at the realisation that something was once again in the bottom bunk, that word, a word which had been sent into exile, filtered up through my consciousness, breaking free of all repression, gasping for air screaming, etching, and carving itself into my mind.

“Ghost”.

As this thought came to me, I noticed that my unwelcome visitor had ceased moving. The bed sheets lay calm and dormant, but they had been replaced by something far more hideous. A slow, rhythmic, rasping breath heaved and escaped from the thing below. I could imagine its chest rising and falling with each sordid, wheezing, and garbled breath. I shuddered, and hoped beyond all hope that it would leave without occurrence.

The house lay, as it had the previous night, in a thick blanket of darkness. Silence prevailed, all but for the perverted breath of my, as yet, unseen bunkmate. I lay there terrified. I just wanted this thing to go, to leave me alone.

What did it want?

Then something unmistakably chilling transpired; it moved. It moved in a way different from before. When it threw itself around in the bottom bunk it seemed, unrestrained, without purpose, almost animalistic. This movement, however, was driven by awareness, with purpose, with a goal in mind. For that thing lying there in the darkness, that thing which seemed intent on terrorising a young boy, calmly and nonchalantly sat up. Its laboured breathing had become louder as now only a mattress and a few flimsy wooden slats separated my body from the unearthly breath below.

I lay there, my eyes filled with tears. A fear which mere words cannot relate to you or anyone else coursed through my veins. I would not have believed that this fear could have been heightened, but I was so wrong. I imagined what this thing would look like, sitting there listing from below my mattress, hoping to catch the slightest hint that I was awake. Imagination then turned to an unnerving reality. It began to touch the wooden slats which my mattress sat on. It seemed to caress them carefully, running what I imagined to be fingers and hands across the

surface of the wood.

Then, with great force, it prodded angrily between two slats, into the mattress. Even through the padding, it felt as though someone had viciously stuck their fingers into my side. I let out an almighty cry and the wheezing, shaking, and moving thing in the bunk below replied in kind by violently vibrating the bunk as it had done the night before. Small flakes of paint powdered onto my blanket from the wall as the frame of the bed scraped along it, backwards and forwards.

Once again I was bathed in light, and there stood my mother, loving, caring as she always was, with a comforting hug and calming words which eventually subdued my hysteria. Of course she asked what was wrong, but I could not say, I dared not say. I simply said one word over and over and over again.

“Nightmare”.

This pattern of events continued for weeks, if not months. Night after night I would awaken to the sound of rustling sheets. Each time I would scream so as to not provide this abomination with time to prod and ‘feel’ for me. With each cry the bed would shake violently, stopping with the arrival of my mother who would spend the rest of the night in the bottom bunk, seemingly unaware of the sinister force torturing her son nightly.

Along the way I managed to feign illness a few times and come up with other less-than-truthful reasons for sleeping in my parents’ bed, but more often than not I would be alone for the first few hours of each night in that place. The room where the light from outside did not sit right. Alone with that thing.

With time you can become desensitised to almost anything, no matter how horrific. I had come to realise that, for whatever reason, this thing could not harm me when my mother was present. I am sure the same would have been said for my father, but as loving as he was, waking him from sleep was almost impossible.

After a few months I had grown accustomed to my nightly visitor. Do not mistake this for some unearthly friendship, I detested the thing. I still feared it greatly as I could almost sense its desires and its personality, if you could call it that; one filled with a perverted and twisted hatred yet longing for me, of perhaps all things.

My greatest fears were realised in the winter. The days grew short, and the longer nights merely provided this wretch with more opportunities. It was a difficult time for my family. My Grandmother, a wonderfully kind and gentle woman, had deteriorated greatly since the death of my Grandfather. My mother was trying her best to keep her in the community as long as possible, however, dementia is a cruel and degenerative illness, robbing a person of their memories one day at a time. Soon she recognised none of us, and it became clear that she would need to be moved from her house to a nursing home.

Before she could be moved, my Grandmother had a particularly difficult few nights and my mother decided that she would stay with her. As much as I loved my Grandmother and felt nothing but anguish at her illness, to this day I feel guilty that my first thoughts were not of her, but of what my nightly visitor may do should it become aware of my mother’s absence; her presence being the one thing which I was sure was protecting me from the full horror of this thing’s reach.

I rushed home from school that day and immediately wrenched the bed sheets and mattress from the lower bunk, removing all of the slats and placing an old desk, a chest of drawers, and some chairs which we kept in a cupboard where the bottom bunk used to be. I told my father I was ‘making an office’ which he found adorable, but I would be damned if I’d give that thing a place to sleep for one more night.

As darkness approached, I lay there knowing my mother was not in the house. I did not know what to do. My only impulse was to sneak into her jewellery box and take a small family crucifix which I had seen there before. While my family were not very religious, at that age I still believed in God and hoped that somehow this would protect me. Although fearful and anxious, while gripping the crucifix under my pillow

tightly in one hand, sleep eventually came and as I drifted off to dream, I hoped that I would awaken in the morning without incidence.

Unfortunately that night was the most terrifying of all.

I woke gradually. The room was once again dark. As my eyes adjusted I could gradually make out the window and the door, and the walls, some toys on a shelf and…Even to this day I shudder to think of it, for there was no noise. No rustling of sheets. No movement at all. The room felt lifeless. Lifeless, yet not empty.

The nightly visitor, that unwelcome, wheezing, hate-filled thing which had terrorised me night after night, was not in the bottom bunk, it was in my bed! I opened my mouth to scream, but nothing came out. Utter terror had shaken the very sound from my voice. I lay motionless. If I could not scream, I did not want to let it know I was awake.

I had not yet seen it, I could only feel it. It was obscured under my blanket. I could see its outline, and I could feel its presence, but I dared not look. The weight of it pressed down on top of me, a sensation I will never forget. When I say that hours passed, I do not exaggerate. Laying there motionless, in the darkness, I was every bit a scared and frightened young boy.

If it had been during the summer months it would have been light by then, but the grasp of winter is long and unrelenting, and I knew it would be hours before sunrise; a sunrise which I yearned for. I was a timid child by nature, but I reached a breaking point, a moment where I could wait no more, where I could survive under this intimately deviant abomination no longer.

Fear can sometimes wear you out, make you threadbare, a shell of nerves leaving only the slightest trace of you behind. I had to get out of that bed! Then I remembered, the crucifix! My hand still lay underneath the pillow, but it was empty! I slowly moved my wrist around to find it, minimising as best I could the sound and vibrations caused, but it could not be found. I had either knocked it off of the top bunk, or it had…I could not even bear to think of it, been taken from my hand.

Without the crucifix I lost any sense of hope. Even at such a young age, you can be acutely aware of what death is, and intensely frightened of it. I knew I was going to die in that bed if I lay there, dormant, passive, doing nothing. I had to leave that room behind, but how? Should I leap from the bed and hope that I make it to the door? What if it is faster than me? Or should I slowly slip out of that top bunk, hoping to not disturb my uncanny bedfellow?

Realising that it had not stirred when I moved, trying to find the crucifix, I began to have the strangest of thoughts.

What if it was asleep?

It hadn’t so much as breathed since I had woken up. Perhaps it was resting, believing that it had finally got me. That I was finally in its grasp. Or perhaps it was toying with me, after all it had been doing just that for countless nights, and now with me under it, pinned against my mattress with no mother to protect me, maybe it was holding off, savouring its victory until the last possible moment. Like a wild animal savouring its prey.

I tried to breath as shallowly as possible, and mustering every ounce of courage I could, I reached over slowly with my right hand and began to peel the blanket off of me. What I found under those covers almost stopped my heart. I did not see it, but as my hand moved the blanket, it brushed against something. Something smooth and cold. Something which felt unmistakably like a gaunt hand.

I held my breath in terror as I was sure it must now have known that I was awake.

Nothing.

It did not stir, it felt, dead. After a few moments I placed my hand carefully further down the blanket and felt a thin, poorly formed forearm, my confidence and almost twisted sense of curiosity grew as I moved down further to a disproportionately larger bicep muscle. The arm was outstretched lying across my chest, with the hand resting on my left shoulder as if it had grabbed me in my sleep. I realised that I would have to move this cadaverous appendage if I even so much as hoped to escape its grasp.

For some reason, the feeling of torn, ragged clothing on the shoulder of this night time invader stopped me in my tracks. Fear once again swelled in my stomach and in my chest as I recoiled my hand in disgust at the touch of straggled, oily hair.

I could not bring myself to touch its face, although I wonder to this very day what it would have felt like.

Dear God it moved.

It moved. It was subtle, but its grip on my shoulder and across my body strengthened. No tears came, but God how I wanted to cry. As its hand and arm slowly coiled around me, my right leg brushed along the cool wall which the bed lay against. Of all that happened to me in that room, this was the strangest. I realised that this clutching, rancid thing which drew great delight from violating a young boy’s bed, was not entirely on top of me. It was sticking out from the wall, like a spider striking from its lair.

Suddenly its grip moved from a slow tightening to a sudden squeeze, it pulled and clawed at my clothes as if frightened that the opportunity would soon pass. I fought against it, but its emaciated arm was too strong for me. Its head rose up writhing and contorting under the blanket. I now realised where it was taking me, into the wall! I fought for my dear life, I cried and suddenly my voice returned to me, yelling, screaming, but no one came.

Then I realised why it was so eager to suddenly strike, why this thing had to have me now. Through my window, that window which seemed to represent so much malice from outside, streaked hope; the first rays of sunshine. I struggled further knowing that if I could just hold on, it would soon be gone. As I fought for my life, the unearthly parasite shifted, slowly pulling itself up my chest, its head now poking out from under the blanket, wheezing, coughing, rasping. I do not remember its features, I simply remember its breath against my face, foul and as cold as ice.

As the sun broke over the horizon, that dark place, that suffocating room of contempt was washed, bathed in sunlight.

I passed out as its scrawny fingers encircled my neck, squeezing the very life from me.

I awoke to my father offering to make me some breakfast, a wonderful sight indeed! I had survived the most horrible experience of my life until then, and now. I moved the bed away from the wall, leaving behind the furniture I had believed would stop that thing from taking a bed. Little did I think that it would try to take mine…and me.

Weeks passed without incidence, yet on one cold, frost bitten night I awoke to the sound of the furniture where the bunk beds used to be, vibrating violently. In a moment it passed, I lay there sure I could hear a distant wheezing coming from deep within the wall, finally fading into the distance.

I have never told anyone this story before. To this day I still break out in a cold sweat at the sound of bed sheets rustling in the night, or a wheeze brought on by a common cold, and I certainly never sleep with my bed against a wall. Call it superstition if you will but as I said, I cannot discount conventional explanations such as sleep paralysis, hallucination, or that of an over-active imagination, but what I can say is this: The following year I was given a larger room on the other side of the house and my parents took that strangely suffocating, elongated place as their bedroom. They said they didn’t need a large room, just one big enough for a bed and a few things.

They lasted 10 days. We moved on the 11th.
 
Lightning
We had just moved into a little ranch house in the suburbs. Storybook neighborhood – quiet, friendly neighbors, picket fences, the whole nine yards. Suffice it to say that this was supposed to be a new start for me, a recently single dad, and my three-year-old son. A time to move on from the previous year’s drama and stress.

I viewed the thunderstorm as a metaphor for this fresh start: one last show of theatrics before the dirt and grime of the past would be washed away. My son loved it anyway, even with the power out. It was the first big storm he’d ever seen. Flashes of lightning flooded the bare rooms of our house, imparting unpacked boxes with long creeping shadows, and he jumped and squealed as the thunder boomed. It was well past his bedtime before he’d finally settled down enough to go to sleep.

The next morning I found him awake in bed and smiling. “I watched the lightning at my window!” he proudly announced.

A few mornings later, he told me the same thing. “You’re silly,” I said. “It didn’t storm last night, you were only dreaming!” “Oh…” He seemed somewhat disheartened. I ruffled his hair and told him not to worry, there should be another storm soon.

Then it became a pattern. He would tell me how he watched the lightning outside his window at least twice a week, despite there being no storms. Recurring dreams of that first memorable thunderstorm, I figured.


It’s easy to hate myself in hindsight. Everybody assures me there’s nothing I could have done, no way I could have known. But I’m supposed to be the guardian of my child, and these are useless words of comfort. I constantly relive that morning: making my coffee, pouring milk over my cereal, and picking up the newspaper to read about the pedophile local authorities had just arrested. It was front-page stuff. Apparently this guy would select a young target (usually a boy), stake out their house for a while, and take flash photos of them through their window while they slept. Sometimes he did more. My stomach sank as the connection was made.

At the time, it was merely something from a child’s imagination. In retrospect, it is the scariest thing I’ve ever heard. About a week before the predator was caught, my son came up to me in his pajamas. “Guess what?” he asked.

“What?”

“No more lightning at my window!”

I played along. “Oh, that’s nice, it finally died down huh?”

“No! Now it’s in my closet!”

I’ve yet to see the photos police have collected.
The Night Springs Cemetery
An orange sun lowered steadily into a pit of evergreen teeth, valiantly spilling it’s last light upon the Night Springs Cemetery while it still could. If he had noticed, middle-aged Simon Willis might find himself grateful for this light so he might continue overlooking his mother’s grave in peace. After all, the cemetery was dangerous after dark. Not for any mysterious reason, mind you. The forest outlining Night Springs Cemetery was one of the only places wolf sightings have been reported in all of Pennsylvania.

“You know about the wolves, don’t you?”

Simon jumped at the voice and twisted his body at the intruder with anger. He managed to calm himself as he recognized the kindly-looking old man who approached him as the groundskeeper for the cemetery. His cold annoyance further melted when he saw the old man raising his hands in apologetic surrender.

“Sorry. Didn’t mean to scare you like that. I assumed my creaky legs would’ve given me away for a mile.”

The old man laughed and continued to approach, as Simon allowed himself a small grin for the first time all day. For a minute, the groundskeeper stared silently at the grave beside him, in solemn reverence. Despite politely declining similar offers from friends and family, Simon appreciated the man’s company here. The groundskeeper brought a sense of practiced officiality to Simon’s mourning and gave him a reason to stay rooted to the spot. The man even seemed to know the appropriate time to break the silence.

“I dug this grave you know. I dig all the graves around here. It keeps my body younger than I really am.” he said, eyes winking with pride. It was true too. Simon knew the man was well into his eighties at least, because he remembered the site of him as a child. He didn’t seem to have aged much in that time. He looked like he could be just barely approaching sixty.

“I’ve had this job for forty years now. Got it from my father after he died. I must’ve been about the same age as you when it happened. My name’s Jeremy Carter, if you’re wondering what to call me. Plain ‘Carter’ does most people just fine.”

“‘Carter,’” Simon repeated vaguely. “How’d your father pass? If you don’t mind me asking.”
“No, no, it’s fine. He just got tired of living, I s’pose. Probably smoked too much tobacco and buried too many good people.” He changed the subject here. “I didn’t know your mom much–could recognize her from passing in town, but I never knew her name or nothing. I heard she was taken by cancer.”

“Yeah.” Simon’s voice sounded so hollow and he wondered if that’s how it’d always sound from now on.
“A terrible way to go, cancer. Wasting by inches. You’re tired of hearing this, but you have my sympathies all the same.”

Carter was right. The “thanks” that tumbled out of Simon’s mouth was smoothed from overuse. The word felt like an overworked muscle–raw and lifeless–and Simon wanted nothing more than to hide away from all the apologetic well-wishing that demanded response and give the word time to rest until it’s meaning could be salvaged once more.

Simon wanted to talk about his mom to this man. He even managed to push out a forced “She–” before he realized he had no words to follow it and found his throat dry. Somehow, the old man seemed to understand this and brought the subject closer to his mother.

“I know your mother always lived here, so am I right in assuming you grew up in Night Springs too?”
The question offered direction and Simon gratefully seized upon it.

“Yeah, I never knew my dad so I grew up here alone with my mom.” He corrected himself. “Well, not alone you know. There’s the whole town, of course, and I used to know just about everybody here. My mom never had another kid or remarried though so it was always just us two in the house.”

Simon paused a moment, reflecting, then realized he needed to speak more to properly convey his mother.

“It was great though. My mom was a great woman. The house was small compared to others, but just fine for the two of us and my mom worked her *** off to made sure we always had it. Mr. Anderson at the bank–I don’t know if he still works there anymore–he wasn’t at the funeral today–Mr. Anderson was always good enough to give my mom an extension on the loan if she needed it. He helped out a lot when I was going through college. My mom had two jobs back then so I wouldn’t have to do any work myself and could focus on my education. Got a business degree and then went to law school and later became a lawyer working out of Chicago. I stopped seeing her and the town so much, since then. I tried to come back for the holidays, you know, but something started coming up and I missed more than I ever should have allowed.”

“I was crushed when I found out my mom had cancer. I tried to get her to move in with me–get her better medical care, you know?–but she was dead set on staying in Night Springs. She always loved this town. I couldn’t wait to get to college, but she was always happy living here. I thought of moving closer, of course, but I couldn’t just abandon all my clients and practice. And my mom insisted Debbie next door was taking good care of her. They were always like sisters to each other. I offered to pay Debbie as a nurse, but she wouldn’t hear of it. You know how people in this town are.”

The two men grinned in shared understanding for a moment. The sun was nowhere to be seen now. You could make out some orange lingering in the night right at the edge of the horizon, but no more than that. It was getting very dark.

“She fought it for a while. I was… am very proud of her. Seven months later though, that was it. I visited a lot in that time. At least a dozen times, though never more than for a weekend. Still, I just figured she’d pull through somehow. I never let myself consider that she might actually go like this until the last couple weeks.”

Simon realized he was finished. The man clasped him on shoulder and said “You were a good son. I talked to Debbie, you know, and she told me that all your mom’d do is talk about you and how hard you were trying. She’s very proud of you.”

Simon didn’t cry, but he couldn’t speak either. A long pause and then Carter broke the silence once more. “Well, I best be leaving now. A gravekeeper’s work is always plentiful. You’d best be getting back soon too. They howl up a storm some nights, but I’ve never known the wolves to actually attack anyone unprovoked. There ain’t no lights around here though and you’d be best be careful if you want to avoiding cracking your head on someone’s grave.”

“Thanks. I’ll be heading out soon. If it’s okay, I think I might stay another few minutes.”

Carter patted the man’s shoulder one last time and said “Of course son.” With that, he dipped away through the moonless night, leaving Simon to mourn his mother in solitude once more.

Simon was good to his word. He waited a few minutes. He thought some final words to his mother, hoping she would hear them, wherever she was. He tried to remember every good time they ever had together and did his best to press out intruding images of his sickly mother wasting away on her death bed. He was just about to leave when he heard the scream.

A howl was heard just moments before, then a quick shout followed by agonizing screams of a voice he recognized.

“MR. CARTER!” he shouted, running in the direction of the scream as they

grew more frenzied.

It didn’t take long for the small, black headstone to trip him up, sending him hurtling into a freshly-dug grave. Simon Willis died instantly.

Only fifty paces away, shrouded in darkness, an old man tossed his dog a treat. His throat was a bit raw from screaming, but he made sure to say “Good boy,” to his pet wolf for acting on cue.
Slowly and methodically, Jeremy Carter made his way through the labyrinth of graves and finally approached the one he had just finished an hour ago.

He had filled the bottom with wooden spikes about three feet tall placed every six inches or so.

He shook his head in mild disappointment as he peered at the body, punctured and bloody. He was good kid, he thought. Almost wanted him to just run and save himself. A strange thought for Carter. Maybe he had buried too many good people too. Still, he drunk deeply from the energy leaving the man’s body and moaned in relief as his ailing joints seemed to strengthen somewhat.

Maybe he would call it quits soon, but his father was only a hundred and twenty when he passed and he was determined to make it a bit longer than that. Besides. A gravekeeper’s work is always plentiful.

A wolf howled into the night as Jeremy Carter set about filling the hole he made in the earth.
 
I don't know the full story, but my older siblings would always tell me a murderer lived in our childhood house before he was arrested. They would always tell me he would cut up the bodies, burn them, and then bury them beneath the basement or foundation. Always had me scared as a kid. 
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The Door
I’m a first year resident at the local hospital, so I often work long hours and I’m always sleep-deprived.  I do make decent money, if not nearly as much as a licensed doctor, but on account of student loans I live in a crappy apartment.

The bedroom of this apartment is tiny and the only spot for my dresser is immediately to the right of the entrance.  It’s just a bit too long for the space, so the door only opens halfway before it starts pressing against the corner of the dresser, and it makes an awful splintering noise when you’ve gone too far.  This happened often enough my first month here that I’ve already left some big dimples in the wood.  Outside, the bathroom is down the hall on the left, the living room to the right.  The hallway is just wide enough for the bedroom door, with a couple of inches leeway on either side for the frame.

Why is this important?

About two weeks ago, the door to my bedroom moved.  I’m not sure how else to describe it.  I had just worked my second thirty-hour shift in three days, and on four hours of sleep I was getting up for another one.  When I pulled open the bedroom door something struck me as off, and it took me a minute to realize what it was– the door had opened completely.  I looked to see what had happened, discovering that while my dresser was still flush against both walls, there was an extra inch of space between the dresser and

the door.

I shrugged, chalked it up to some fluke of the apartment walls, and proceeded down the hall to shower before heading into work.  When I got home thirty hours later, exhausted and desperate for sleep, the door was

pushing against the dresser same as always.

Nothing unusual happened for a couple of days, but on Thursday morning I was going out for another long shift when the door opened even wider.  It looked like the doorway had shifted even farther left, far enough that I could see a half-inch of the hallway wall sticking out beyond the door frame.  It was as though the contractor had miscalculated when he built the place, slightly displacing the doorway from the hall.  An inch more and I’d have been able to

see insulation and wiring.

I stared at that sliver of drywall for a few minutes, dumbfounded, while my mind tried to come up with some rational explanations.  The building was old, settling, and this was just the result of natural wall tensions easing.  This disjunction had been there this whole time, and I had been too busy or too tired to notice.  I’d slept through an earthquake, during which my room got displaced a couple of inches from the hall.  All of the explanations seemed

plausible.

With work coming up in half an hour I really just wanted to get some coffee and get out of there, so I decided to call the super after I got off.  However, when I got home the next morning the door was back to normal, and I was tired enough to not even care.

Everything was ordinary the next day, too.

On Saturday, I was headed to the hospital again when I found that although my door only opened halfway, grinding against the dresser as usual, the hallway itself had shifted a good foot.  The entire wall and then some was clearly visible.  To the left of the wall, where I should have been looking into my bathroom, there was this black, inch-wide gap.  The light from my room only went a couple of inches into that shadowy space, but I could see a floor that looked to be made of concrete – smooth, featureless, and gray.  This musty smell emanated from inside, like from an old, dry basement, or maybe

an attic that had been left untouched for too long.

My first instinct was to just close the door.  Clearly this was a hallucination brought on by working too many hours with too little sleep, but…the doorknob clattered against solid drywall.  My door wouldn’t close.

Confused and more than a little disturbed, I initially thought to just leave.  Get the hell out of there and worry about the details later.  The need for a rational explanation, however, coupled with a morbid sense of curiosity, kept me from bolting out the front door.

I called out of work for the first time in almost a year, saying that a pipe had burst in my apartment and that I needed to let the repairmen in to fix it.  Next, I called the super and asked him to come by.  Then, while waiting for him to arrive, I shined a flashlight into that sliver of space.

There wasn’t much to see.  The area ended at a cinderblock wall roughly where my hallway turned, and although I was blocked from seeing how far the room extended to the left, I got the impression that it was big, maybe bigger than my entire apartment.  Even if I was wrong, though, the fact remained that there was a strange space where my bathroom was clearly supposed to be.  I even looked to be sure – everything looked perfectly ordinary from my bathroom.

The super arrived less than half an hour later, but in the time it took for me to answer the door and escort him back to my room, everything had gone back to normal.  As you can imagine, I got pretty agitated, even frantic.  However, when the super saw how upset I was he actually asked me outright whether or not the walls seemed to be moving on their own.

While I gaped at him, he explained that the previous tenant – a young woman who had also worked at the hospital – had complained to him about something similar.  She had claimed that the wall sometimes extended an inch or more past the frame of the doorway, but whenever he came to investigate nothing was out of the ordinary.  The young woman eventually became hysterical, on the verge of moving out, but at his suggestion took a leave of absence from the hospital instead.  After that, there had been no more complaints.  She stayed until her lease was up and then left without incident.

The super gave me a sympathetic look after he told me this story, and asked whether I had been working particularly long hours recently, or perhaps also felt trapped by my work schedule.

I mean, what could I say to that?  I agreed with him, informed him that I would be taking a break from work as well, and apologized for wasting his time.  The super was cool about it, since I guess he had experience with this sort of thing, and even said that he was glad to help, that the hospitals work us residents too hard.  After he left, I called work to let them know I’d be out tomorrow as well, and then decided to turn in early to make up for lost sleep.

It was nearly midnight when I awakened.  I’d been dreaming about something – I don’t remember what it was, but it must have been a nightmare because I woke up with this sense of utter dread washing over me.  It was like when you’re alone in the early hours of the morning, silence hanging over your room like a sheet, and out of nowhere you get the feeling that someone is in the room with you.  Standing behind you.  Watching you.  That was the feeling I had upon waking up in the stillness of my bedroom at midnight.

And then I heard the scratching.

It was faint at first, so faint that I thought I was imagining it, but gradually grew in volume until it was clearly audible from across the room.  Something was scratching at my bedroom door.  That in itself shouldn’t have been so alarming – I’d had mouse troubles at the apartment before.  I’d even heard them scratching at the walls at odd hours of the night.  After the events of the previous days, however, the sound jolted me awake, that sense of dread deepening into real fear.

I slowly got out of bed and tiptoed toward my door.  Up close, the sound was unmistakable – the scratching was coming from the bottom of the other side.  Well, mouse or not, I reached over and, quietly as I could, locked the door.  Then I grabbed the flashlight from the top drawer of my dresser, got onto my hands and knees, and shined it through the half-inch space underneath the door.

The scratching stopped almost immediately.  Then something reached in through the bottom of the door.  I was so startled that for a moment I didn’t even realize what it was, and then it felt like someone had punched me in the gut.  Three fingertips curled against the bottom of my door frame, wriggling slightly as though trying to push the door open.  The fingers were gray and skeletally thin, stained the rusty brown any medical student could tell you was dried blood.  Their nails were long and ragged, clearly broken numerous times, with the splitting and pitting characteristic of malnutrition.

And then I heard something else coming from just outside, carried on that musty, dry-basement smell.

“Help me…”

The voice was so soft as to be barely audible, but it was clearly a woman, and I could hear panic running through it, quiet sobs underneath the words.  And then I could hear something else, a sound like soft footsteps approaching from somewhere far away.  And all the while the voice continued whispering, never growing any louder but getting more urgent, more rapid.

“Help me…please, please, please help me…it’s coming…pleasehelpmepleasepleasehelpmepleaseit’scomingit’scomingpleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepl–”

Then the fingers vanished, as though whomever they belonged to had been violently jerked away.  I could hear the sound of something being dragged along the ground, something scraping frantically against the concrete, but that noise quickly faded into the distance.

And then I heard the soft sound of footsteps approaching again.  It stopped outside my door, and for a while there was only silence.  Then, as I watched by the trembling light of my flashlight, the lock slowly began to turn.  Somehow, it was being unlocked from the other side.

I jumped up and slammed my shoulder against the door, dropping the flashlight in my haste, and scrambled to lock the door again.  Something resisted my frenzied attempts to turn that little dial, and my fingers were so sweaty that they kept slipping off.  Before I finished turning the lock, the knob twisted in my grip and whatever was back there hit the door hard enough that the whole thing shuddered.  Raw terror flooded my system, and I pushed back as hard as I could, my body leaned almost parallel to the ground even as I continued fumbling with the lock.  Whatever it was hit the door again, harder this time, such that it actually opened for a split second.  I was almost sobbing at this point, but my bare feet found purchase on the linoleum floor and I shoved back with all my strength, somehow slamming the door back closed.  At the same time, my fingers were finally able to wrap themselves around the lock and turn it.  Using the time that bought me, I ran to my dresser and dragged it in front of the door, then sat down with my back against it.

The pounding continued, even more strongly than before, but with my dresser in the way the door stayed closed.  After a few minutes, it simply stopped, and there was another minute or two of silence before the soft sound of footsteps finally moved away.  Still, I continued sitting in front of the dresser, back braced against it, too terrified to even think of opening the door or heading back to bed.  The only window in my bedroom was too small to climb through, and I’d left my phone on the kitchen counter.  There was nothing to do but sit and wait, which I did until the grayish light coming through my window announced the arrival of morning.

It took me a while to finally muster the courage to push the dresser aside, and even then I just stood there for a few minutes staring at the doorknob.  In the end, the need to know overcame the fear of the unknown, and I pulled the door open just a crack.  My hallway sat outside, same as always, with no sign that anything was unusual.  Even the other side of the door was pristine, with no evidence that any violence had been directed toward it during the evening.

With the door halfway open, pressing against the dresser as usual, I slipped outside the bedroom and into the hallway, heart pounding even though I was already doubting my own mind.  Could it all have been just a nightmare?  Had I suffered a psychotic episode in the middle of the night, terrified of nothing more than a mouse scratching at my bedroom door?  Did I spend the entire night camped out in front of my dresser on account of a hallucination?

As I stood there, doubting, I let my bedroom door close behind me, and my nostrils filled with that dusty basement smell.

I ran.  I took off into the hallway, practically clawing against the wall as I dashed for the living room, and tore the front door open when I got there.  Just before I launched myself outside, I heard the splintering noise of my bedroom door pressing against the back corner of my dresser.

It’s been over a week.  I haven’t gone back – not for my things, my clothes, nothing.  I’m crashing on a friend’s living room couch instead.  He brings me takeout when he comes home from work.  I extended my leave of absence from the hospital, citing a death in the family.  I tried finding the woman that used to live in my apartment, the previous tenant that had also complained about the moving walls, but her address forwarding had long since expired.  Searching for her by name turned up no results – not on any social networking site, nor search engine, nor people finder.  The super didn’t know any of her friends or family.  I even checked the FBI’s Missing Persons page, with no luck.  I hope she’s out there somewhere, merely beyond my ability to find.

But I have nightmares every night, ones in which those emaciated fingers and soft, pleading voice reach out to me from a dark, endless space.  Still, I insist that every door in the apartment stays open, because the last time I opened the front door, there was a tiny cross-section of wall exposed, as though the doorway had been displaced a half-inch from its usual spot.
A Parent's Love
We were all there that day. The day they released him. Me and Kent, Bonnie and Simon, Nora and Anthony, Dustin and Patrick, and Darlene. We didn’t bring the kids. I think it was Nora’s idea to leave them at home. And it was Patrick’s idea to go watch the release. Chad Lamb strode from the prison, wearing the smirk that had won us over six long years ago. He stopped at the gate, spotting us. Dustin waved. Darlene raised a finger to her throat and slowly dragged it across in the classic execution motion. Lamb scowled, exited the gate, and turned west, heading for the bus stop. There was an empty lot across from the prison where we waited by our cars. Lamb, I was happy to see, continuously checked over his shoulder as we watched him walk away. He wasn’t afraid, but he was cautious. When he disappeared from view, Nora said flatly, “It’s time. We need to go to her now.”

Three years ago, the kids had started having nightmares. They woke up crying, but would refuse to say why. They’d started making up excuse to avoid going to school. And they’d reacted with fear around Mr. Lamb, their charming, engaging new teacher. Finally, over the summer, Patrick and Dustin had taken their adopted daughter Yuan to a consular, who’d convinced her to open up. Lamb had touched her. Had touched several other students. With a little more pressing, Yuan gave a few more names. Dustin and Patrick had gone to their parents, gone to us. It was hard. I didn’t want to believe it, but Stan had been so scared. He’d evaded us, refused to answer the questions at first, but finally broke down. He’d been convinced he’d get in trouble. So had Violet, Eddie, and the twins Tyler and Beatrice. Lamb had done a real number on them. The police had been wonderful. Slowly, gradually, the children built up their courage to testify. My stomach twisted as I recalled Violet breaking down in tears on the stand in court. Poor, sweet Violet. Then again, Violet wasn’t sweet anymore. She went from a shy, helpless seven year old victim to a ten year old black belt with a mean streak. Six year old Kayla had the meanest, toughest sister in school. If only Beatrice had been so strong. Once again, I thanked God it hadn’t been my Stan. Then felt horrible for the thought. I heard the car stop, and looked up. We were in front of her shop. I could see the other parents waiting in front of the emerald door. “Come on.” Kent said wearily. “She hates it when we’re late for our appointments.”

The shop was crowded with books, animal bones, statues of gods and fairies, strings of strange plants, and several ancient weapons. The glass counter at the back separated the public shop from the private meeting room. Darlene trudged to the counter and hit the bell once. A black curtain, emblazoned with purple eyes, was pulled aside, revealing Coda. “Heya parentals! Today’s the day, ain’t it!” Coda was always cheerful, no matter what. He had long, sharp teeth, and nails to match, with eyes as yellow as candle flames. If I’d cared, I might have wondered what he was. The boy wasn’t human. She had confirmed that. “I’ll get The Bone Woman, ‘kay?” Coda offered, disappearing back behind the curtain. “Come on!” He called, and we followed. As we always had. Nora had found her. I never asked how. The Bone Woman’s might had been proven to me, and her effectiveness was all that mattered to me. We each took our usual seats around The Bone Woman’s table, and waited. Eventually, Coda returned, leading his master by the hand. The Bone Woman’s glass eyes gazed sightlessly over us as Coda gently helped her into her massive, throne like armchair. She had a thick book, bound in a shining white material. We’d seen the book before. She’d shown it to us the first time we’d visited her. The Caligo Veneficus. The Darkest Magic. One of only thirteen in the world. Bound in the flesh of a murdered priest, the stitching done in human hair, taken from a mother who died in childbirth, and the ink it was written in mixed with the blood of a hanged man. “Are you sure?” She asked, breaking the silence. “We’re sure.” We said in unison. She nodded grimly, flipping the book open to a page near the center. The Iratus Motuus. The Angry Dead. Nora and Anthony looked grim and determined. Bonnie put her hand on Nora’s shoulder. “Are you sure, honey? Completely sure?”

“This is the only way to put things right.” Anthony said, and Nora nodded. The Bone Woman shooed Coda away. “I will need the item.” She said as he left. Nora reached into her pocket, and removed a silver necklace. A heart shaped chunk of aquamarine winked cheerfully in the fire and candle light. Anthony swallowed, tears in his eyes, as soon as he saw the necklace. I remembered that necklace. Beatrice’s favorite. She’d been wearing it even when they found her in her room, hanged by her belt. A news article proclaiming Chad Lamb’s coming release from prison clutched in her hand. Nora regretfully handed the jewelry to The Bone Woman. The shaman took it, inspected it, and nodded. “Her soul has left a mark upon this object. It will work. It will call to her.” Coda came back, holding several bottles, cans, and herbs. He dropped these unceremoniously onto the table, and then turned to a shelf in the room, fetching a brass pot from it. He set this on the table too, and vanished again.

As we watched in silence, The Bone Woman went to work. She seemed to not need eyes to identify what was what. She seized a decanter of dark, red wine, pouring it into the pot, and began to chant. Three yellow rose blossoms, a pinch of salt, seven rabbit bones, a lock of red human hair, a handful of grave yard dirt, snake fangs, on and on and on. The brew began to smoke and steam without being boiled, and The Bone Woman’s chanting grew faster and louder. I heard Beatrice’s name sprinkled in the foreign chant. Lamb’s name as well. Finally, she reached the finally stage of it. “Arise, my child, arise, arise, arise! Your killer now walks free, and justice has done not its duty. The time of justice is gone, now comes vengeance. Arise, my child, arise, arise, arise!” There was a burst of sound, and lavender smoke poured from the pot, filling the room and blinding us. A tortured, horrified scream split the air.

The smoke cleared, and The Bone Woman looked at us gravely. “It is done. She shall be waiting for you at the agreed upon place. Go to her. But, Nora, Anthony, be warned. This is not your daughter. This is an instrument of revenge and unholy justice. Remember that.”

The coffin stank. And the body was disgusting. Why did she get this gig? She’d wanted a fresh corpse. The body slowly reassembled, stitching itself back together via the Shamaness’ dark magic. The Bone Woman. Ah. Her. One of the strongest. Soon, the hands were fully reformed, and she’d slammed upwards, tearing open the coffin’s cherry wood lid. She pushed up, up, up, through the soft, icy Earth, and into the midnight air. The throat fixed itself, and she gulped down oxygen. She didn’t need it, but it felt nice for the body. She pulled herself up, settling her feet on the frosty grass. She knew where to go. She rolled her still repairing shoulders, and walked. Heading for the iron gates, down the dirt road, towards an abandoned barn that her master had ordered her to proceed to. “They, shall, be, waiting.” He rumbled.

The white dress was tattered, torn, the lace slightly yellowed. She’d lost a shoe on the trip up, and the another on the walk down the hill the grave was on. It was two hours to the barn, and the legs were stiff. The arms swung limping, the feet shuffling and shambling. It grew to be too much effort to keep the mouth closed, and she let it fall open, the tongue lolling out. She felt restless. She wanted to rip, tear, kill, devour. She wanted to get the job over with and go home to the fiery, sulfur-scented fields of home. The crumbling barn appeared, and she vaguely spotted several cars parked. She grimaced. Damn. Late. As she approached, she heard shouting. “The damn witch cheated us! Nothing’s here! God damn it Nora, how could you—“ She got to the door, reached up, and ripped it open. Nine living humans looked over at her, startled. One of them took a hesitant step forward. “Be-Beatrice?” The human whispered. She said nothing. Only a raspy moan for an answer.

The human drew back, gathering together, whispering. “What did she say for us to do?”

“Uh…We send her to Lamb, I think. Yeah.”

“Okay, okay.” They broke apart, and another one approached. “Es…es vos iratus…mortuus?” He fumbled out uncertainly. His Latin was awful, but she nodded once. She pulled back the blackened lips, showing the sharp teeth granted by the spell. She held up the hands, the black, claw like nails casting shadows. She gave another raspy, hungry moan, and one of the humans burst into tears. “Send her away, send her away.” She wailed. The one before her pointed back out into the night. “Chad Lamb.” He said firmly. “5831 Carmen Lane. Soon. Within a week. Understood?” She nodded, moaned, and turned, shambling away. Some instinct, evolved from the earliest days of her people, led her back outside, towards town. She did not run. She had time. So much time.

She took back roads, moving like a shadow through trees and backyards, quickly approaching Lamb’s house. She got hungrier with every step. She needed to eat! Good, she was sure the nose was picking up his scent. Finally, thank you high dark master, there was the house. There was her meal.

Chad was still up. On his computer, surfing his ‘special’ sites. Thank God that the American government still hadn’t started monitoring what registered sex offenders looked up on the web. He was so engrossed in a newly posted video, that he didn’t hear the back door open. Nor did he hear the sound of dirty, cold feet padded across his kitchen floor, through his front hall, up his stairs, down his hall, stopping in front of his closed office. He did finally hear the office door open, and looked up. “WHAT IN THE HELL??!!” Beatrice Mastin was standing in his doorway, standing in at him with puffy, sticky eyes. She smiled at him, her dirt stained fangs filling her mouth. She shuffled through the door, holding out her arms, curling her claws in and out. Chad fell off his chair, his pants around his ankles, scrambling backwards, until her ran into the far wall. Beatrice reached him, and stopped, staring down at him.

The girl, from far away in another world, asked her to say something, and she complied. After all, fear made the meat taste better. “I’m hungry, Mr. Lamb.” The man’s screams were almost as sweet as his skin.
Interference
Let me start by saying that this is a very true story from my childhood, and if you visit the big library in the Nottingham City Centre, and check out their newspaper records, you will actually find information about the events detailed here.

This story takes place around 15 or 16 years ago. I was just 7 years old, and my cousin Dale, was around 9, maybe 10. He was staying with me while his mother was away looking after a sick relative. Since I was an only child, I didn’t have many toys, and my Sega Genesis was busted, and so we didn’t have much things to do that were entertaining.

Our days consisted of watching cartoons on our cable television, followed by Dale teling me scary ghost stories at it turned night-time. My mother, sympathysing with us, and wanting us to do something more active decided to purchase a pair of walkie talkies for us to play with. We had fun with them, journeying to a neighbouring Strelley Village, and hiding far apart in the woods, while the other person would try and find them by using the walkie talkie. Since we were quite young however, we weren’t allowed out of the house for very long, and so we had to be home by 5pm. We returned home later (about 6) and had our dinner. By this time it was around 7pm. We decided we would call it a night, and packed all of our toys away and got ready for bed.

However, we didn’t pack the walkie talkies away. Dale was staying in the spare room, and I had my own room, and so we planned to talk to each other through the walkie talkies until we fell asleep. That’s when we heard the thing that would change us forever. It was about 11 at night, and we had been telling ghost stories over the walkie talkies for hours. All of a sudden, whilst Dale was telling me a story about a monster that supposedly haunts the same woods we had been at earlier in the day, his voice was cut off, and replaced with the usual static noise the walkie talkies produced when the talker had accidently let go of the button used to speak. I waited for a few seconds for Dale to carry on speaking, when I heard a faint mumble coming from the small speaker. “That’s odd.” I thought. The speaker was still emitting static, but I could definately hear some kind of movement and speech. All of a sudden, the sound of crying could be heard through the static. This was very creepy to me, and so I dived out of my bed, and rushed to the room Dale was staying in. He was sat bolt upright in bed, also listening to his walkie talkie, which was emitting the same sounds, if not a second or so behind mine. The crying grew louder. “What is that?” Dale asked. “I thought you were playing a prank.” When I told him I wasn’t, his face dropped. He switched his off. The sound still emitted from the walkie talkie I was holding in my hand, making it impossible for my walkie talkie to be picking up sound from his. “This is creepy” said Dale. The crying and mumbles through the static seemed to get slightly clearer, and louder. I switched mine off too and went back to bed.

All kinds of ideas were flowing through my head. Perhaps I was picking up the sounds of the afterlife? Perhaps my walkie talkie were simply broken and producing weird sounds that just sounded like crying and mumbling? I tried not to think anything of it, and went to sleep.

I was awoken the next day by a massive bang which seemed to be coming from downstairs. It was around 6 in the morning, and I rushed downstairs to find my mother and cousin Dale looking out of the living room window at our neighbours house next door. A large police van had pulled up outside, and our neighbour Jessie was being led outside by several officers. She was screaming profanities and insults, and even tried to run from the officers at one point before being pushed into the back of the van and handcuffed. We were shocked by what had happened, and generally confused. Jessie had been a new neighbour, recently moving into the house next door with her baby after our old neighbour had died of old age. She had kept herself to herself, and as far as we had known she was very quiet, and didn’t seem like the type of person that would be arrested for any reason.

It wasn’t until the next day when we recieved our daily newspaper that we found out what had happened. Jessie had murdered her baby after apparently seeing horrible apparitions of an elderly person in her house that had tormented her for weeks and she had finally snapped and turned loopy. This wasn’t the disturbing part though. The disturbing part was that fact that the baby monitor in the room the murder took place had been switched on during the murder.
 
In June of 1972, a woman appeared in Cedar Senai hospital in nothing but a white gown covered in blood. Now this in itself should not be too surprising as people often have accidents nearby and come to the nearest hospital for medical attention. But there were two things that caused people who saw her to vomit and flee in terror.

The first, being that she wasn’t exactly human. She resembled something close to a mannequin, but had the dexterity and fluidity of a normal human being. Her face, was as flawless as a mannequins, devoid of eyebrows and smeared in make-up. That’s the other reason people were throwing up or fleeing in terror.

She had a kitten clenched in between her teeth, her jaws clamped so unnaturally tightly around it to the point where no teeth could be seen, the blood was still squirting out over her gown and onto the floor. She then pulled it out of her mouth, tossed it aside and collapsed.

From the moment she stepped through the entrance to when she was taken to a hospital room and cleaned up before being prepped for sedation, she was completely calm, expressionless and motionless. The doctors had thought it best to restrain her until the authorities could arrive and she did not protest. They were unable to get any kind of response from her and most staff members felt too uncomfortable to look directly at her for more than a few seconds.

But the second the staff tried to sedate her, she fought back with extreme force. Two members of staff holding her down as her body rose up on the bed with that same, blank expression.

She turned her emotionless eyes towards the male doctor and did something unusual. She smiled.

As she did, the female doctor screamed and let go out of shock. In the womans mouth were not human teeth, but long, sharp spikes. Too long for her mouth to close fully without causing any damage…

The male doctor stared back at her for a moment before asking “What in the hell are you?”

She cracked her neck down to her shoulder to observe him, still smiling.

There was a long pause, the security had been alerted and could be heard coming down the hallway.

As he heard them, she darted forward, sinking her teeth into the front of his throat, ripping out his jugular & letting him fall to the floor, gasping for air as he choked on his own blood.

She stood up and leaned over him, her face coming dangerously close to his as the life faded from his eyes.

She leaned closer and whispered in his ear.

“I…am….God….”

The doctors eyes filled with fear as he watched her calmly walk away to greet the security men. His last ever sight would be watching her feast on them one by one.

The female doctor who survived the incident named her “The Expressionless”.

There was never a sighting of her again.



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in the 4th grade i attended summer school at this school across town...

there was one of the boys bathrooms that had the windows boarded up and and it also had bars around where the entrance was...

the story i had heard when i was playing pop warner was that some kids were practicing baseball at a nearby field 10 years prior

some kids that were jealous of him from his own team followed him and had their bats with em and caught the kid in the bathroom and beat him to death...

it was away from all the other buildings and classrooms and it just had this weird energy to it...

i specifically asked to go to summer school there cuz i wanted to see for myself...i tried numerous times to get in but it was impossible..

something must have happened there..ya know? why would they put bars around the entrance to a bathroom and for that many years...
 
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