Last year all through October I worked at one of those Halloween stores that carried everything from costumes for children and adults to dancing skeletons that you can hang outside of your house. This was a particularly large store in a very rural area, so it was the only one around for miles. I know that Halloween will never be the same for me since my experience there, and I am still trying to piece together the entire event in my mind. Maybe writing all of this down will help me to organize my thoughts and gain some kind of insight into the seemingly impossible and horrifying things that I witnessed.
It was Halloween night and I was scheduled to work a shift at the store. I was too old for trick r’ treating and I hadn’t been invited to any parties or anything like that, so working that night didn’t seem like such a bad thing. All of the last minute shoppers came in looking for costumes for themselves or their children, but by then a lot of our inventory had been cleared out. I watched as teenagers snatched up evil clown masks, vampire teeth, and fake blood. Around 7 o’clock the stream of customers began dwindling down and the other girl that was working with me was told to go home, leaving me to finish out my shift with just the manager.
I was messing around on my phone behind one of the cash registers when I noticed a very tall and stocky man stroll into the store wearing a plaid shirt, jeans, and a filthy burlap sack tied around his head with small holes cut where his eyes and mouth were. He glanced over at me for what seemed like an hour and grabbed a shopping cart, whistling as he began looking around. It wasn’t altogether unheard of to get people coming into the store on Halloween with their costumes on. After all, this was a rural area and there wasn’t a whole lot to do. Maybe he was just killing time and wanted to look around at some of our hokey Halloween decorations, I thought. The store didn’t have a policy that forbade this, so I just quietly watched as this man made his way through the store, whistling an eerie tune while looking at some wooden tombstones and fake spider webs.
The man in the burlap sack walked around the store at a leisurely pace, but quickly began looking more and more impatient, as if he was searching for something in particular. Usually when I see someone who looks like they need help finding something I go over and ask them, but this time I wasn’t about to do that. I stood firmly in place behind the register like a stone statue, my eyes fixated on this man who looked like he had stepped directly off the set of a horror movie.
After about 10 minutes or so of being in the store, the man with the sack on his head stopped abruptly when he saw a selection of rubber human limbs. Our store had a wide variety of bloody arms, legs, and even a few heads for customers to choose from. The man bent down and picked up a couple arms and a leg, putting them in the cart. He began to whistle his chilling tune again as he made his way to the very back of the store. I saw him disappear into the men’s restroom, which was not something our manager allowed. We were specifically told that no customer can go into the bathroom with merchandise, but my manager was nowhere in sight and I wasn’t about to go in there and tell this guy he was in violation of store policy.
Thirty minutes later the man came out of the restroom with his cart and limbs inside, walking towards the registers while still humming to himself. All I could think as he approached is how this is probably going to be the most difficult transaction I have ever made with a customer, but I tried my best to steady my hands which were now shaking. The man passed right by the cash registers and went straight out the exit, the automatic doors clearing his path.
On my first day working there I was instructed never to engage or follow a customer leaving the store with unpaid merchandise, and there was no way I was going to confront this guy. After I shook myself free of the hypnotic spell the man’s eerie presence had cast on me, I immediately started looking for my manager, Rob. I checked the back office and didn’t find him, so there was only one other place to look, the bathroom.
I slowly pushed open the door to the men’s restroom and was confronted with a scene that sent a wave of terror shooting through my entire body that felt like ice water filling my veins. I froze up completely and my mouth dropped open as I surveyed the carnage that surrounded me. There was a body lying on the floor in a massive puddle of blood. Both of the man’s arms and one of his legs had been completely severed, and in their place were rubber limbs resting against the stumps. I covered my mouth with one hand and carefully leaned over the body to see a shirt tag with the name “Rob” on it.
—
Credits to: photofreecreepypasta
Comments