There Was No Baby

Be Careful What You Wish For

Hughes

The Worst Thing About Australia

You might think that the most terrifying things about Australia are the spiders, or the snakes, or the fact that most of us don’t own guns. But in all honesty, those aren’t scary things to most of us. You get used to it. Oh, great, a redback, I’ll swat it with a shoe. Oh, great, a snake in my toilet, better call the snake catcher (we have a local one where I live, he’s very busy). As for the guns, well. I’ve never needed one.

In actuality, the scariest thing about living in Australia is the silence. I live pretty far out of the way, in a teensy little inland town in Queensland. I used to live in a rural town (still only about 5,000 people there), and what really gets me about living further in is how fucking quiet it gets. You stand outside on a summer night in 35 degree heat and you won’t hear a peep. You might hear a cricket, maybe. Or a bird. But mostly you won’t hear anything. Just the empty, empty quiet of the land.

You probably know where this story is going, if you’ve seen Wolf Creek. Hear me out though. It’s important.

I went travelling when I was twenty with a couple of mates. Just me, my best friend Anna, her boyfriend Kyle and his brother Tyson. We had a shitty Holden Commodore that we really shouldn’t have taken into the outback, not on those tires, but we figured we’d be fine. We weren’t city kids; it’s not like we were going to have any trouble we couldn’t handle.

We drove for days, nothing eventful happened for about a week. We got further and further inland. We were kind of aiming for Alice Springs, but we didn’t really care how long or roundabout of a route we took to get there.

Unsurprisingly, our car broke down on the way. We came prepared; we had a satellite phone and supplies. We had four one man tents in the back. We set ourselves up, called one of our parents to come get us. We knew our co-ordinates, we had a GPS. It was no problem, though they did laugh at us. They’d told us something like it would happen.

They told us it’d be four days before they could come get us, even driving as the crow flies. We had enough supplies to last. We told them it would be fine. We were so stupid. So fucking stupid.

The area we set up camp in was about ten metres from the car and sheltered by a couple of eucalyptus trees, the best shade we were going to get out there. The soil was red, more sand than dirt. There was no grass. But we could clearly see the car from where we were, even if the bottom half was hidden by a little rise. And that was all that really mattered.

The first night we drank some beers, talked about stupid shit. Kyle joked about proposing to Anna. Anna looked really freaked out by that, and Tyson managed to get Kyle to stop. Tyson started going on about his electrician apprenticeship. Kyle told him that was boring shit and to talk about something interesting. No, Tyson didn’t tell a ghost story. He started talking about sexual exploits instead. Anna and I got pissed, he wouldn’t quit it, we went to bed early. Normally we all get along fine, but being stuck out here, with no working car, was getting on everyone’s nerves.

I was restless, couldn’t get comfortable. I kept thinking about the quiet. The fucking quiet got me man. That fucking dead silence, no sound, not even wind, no sound but our breathing. I guess I fell asleep eventually, but I don’t remember sleeping. Do you ever have a night like that, where you swear to god you only blinked? Where you don’t even wake up slowly, so it leaves you confused and swearing, honest, that you really didn’t sleep a wink?

I felt like that the next morning. But it made no sense, you see. Because we woke up the next morning, and Tyson was gone. But I didn’t hear a sound. Nothing but our breathing.

So I had to have slept, right?

Anyway. We woke up, and Tyson’s tent was empty. His sleeping bag was rumpled, but nothing was disturbed or taken. If he’d wandered off, he hadn’t taken anything with him. Kyle flipped the fuck out. He was yelling, swearing at the top of his lungs. I think I was in shock. Anna just kept crying.

I tried to call the parent who was supposed to be coming to get us on the satellite phone, but I couldn’t get anything. I couldn’t reach anyone. I checked the inside of the phone, and sand had gotten all through it. The battery was corroding. I didn’t understand how that could happen. It was in a sealed bag the whole night. It was in a fucking bag.

I started to cry.

We stayed in the shade the whole day. Kyle just kept muttering to himself. I hugged Anna and prayed.

We went to bed long after it got dark.

The same thing as the night before; that quiet. That silence. My friends’ quiet respiration. There was no noise. I blinked, and it was morning. I blinked, and Kyle was gone too.

The same thing as with Tyson. Sleeping bag rumpled, nothing missing, nothing disturbed. Anna started rocking back and forth in her tent. I patted her hair and told her it would be okay. I didn’t think it would be.

I started to worry that maybe I was the one who made Kyle and Tyson disappear.

Maybe the blink-sleeps I was experiencing were blackouts. Maybe I was dangerous.

I comforted Anna as best I could. She was teetering on the edge of madness though. It doesn’t take much out in the outback. Not alone, not under those circumstances.

That night I made her bind my wrists and ankles with zip ties. It was the only thing I could think of. If it was me, she would be there in the morning to free me, and she could bind me again the next night. If it wasn’t…well, I didn’t want to think about that. Because that would leave me alone, trussed up like some kind of roast meat, just waiting for whatever the fuck was taking us to get me. I was so scared. I was so fucking scared.

And then it was quiet, and all I could hear was steady breathing.

Then I blinked, and it was morning, and she was gone.

I dragged myself out of the tent using my elbows and knees. It hurt so much. I was wearing shorts and a singlet because of the heat. I couldn’t reapply sunscreen with the zip ties on. I started to burn in the sun. I started to cry, hysterically. I don’t know how long I cried for. I heard a car in the distance. I screamed for help, desperately. Sand flew into my throat. I recognised the car. The parent was a day early. They pulled up, ran to me. I was babbling. I don’t know what I was saying. They used a knife to cut the zip ties. It took a while to get the circulation back. I started to calm down. The parent (I’ll call her Sam) went to look at the car. She knelt down to look underneath it.

She started to scream.

I know, if she’d been able to, that she would have spared me the knowledge of what happened. I know, if she’d been coherent, that she would have stopped me from looking. But I looked.

I hadn’t been able to see the bottom of the car, because of the rise. I hadn’t been able to see what happened to my friends.

They were buried in the sand. They had been stabbed, several times, and buried in the sand under the car. Their mouths and noses had been left uncovered. They hadn’t been able to scream, because one of the stab wounds had been in the back of the neck. Remember the head-on-a-stick thing from Wolf Creek? That’s what happened to them.

They were buried in the sand, and all they could do was breathe. I had heard them, every night. I had listened to them dying while I went to sleep.

That’s what gets me, man. That’s what keeps me awake. They were fucking silenced. They were so quiet, I didn’t know they were still alive.

—
(By Concubus)

I Need to Believe in Ghosts

The elevator door opened and I stepped out.

The lights were out, for some reason. My apartment unit was somewhere further down, near the end. It was a walk I had taken so often, every single day, without even thinking. But never in the dark.

I began walking, eyes turning involuntarily to each passing doorway.

Then I heard it.

Scraping. Dragging. And a noise that I convinced myself, oh so hard, was due to an old air-cond unit starting up.

Until I saw it. Emerging from the doorway.

Hollow eyes. A flayed mask for a face. Ruined, fingerless hands, reaching forward.

And oh so much blood.

I had stumbled back two steps, nearly falling over, before the reptile brain kicked in and I sprinted for the elevator.

Behind, I heard it croaking. And the scraping. Dragging itself after me.

I didn’t look back. I punched the elevator button over and over and over.

Scrape

Then, mercifully, the doors opened, flashing a ray of light into the hallway.

I dashed in, hitting the wall, nearly weeping in relief.

Then I realized that I hadn’t closed the doors.

It was still crawling on. Inch by inch. Toward me.

I smashed my fist on ><, and prayed.

The last thing I saw before the doors closed were its eyes. Bloodshot. Lidless. Staring straight at me.

It’s been a month.

I believe in ghosts now.

I believe that there are monsters who haunt this world.

I believe that what I saw wasn’t human.

And I must, must, ignore the newspaper reports that she had crawled on her stumps, bleeding gallons, dying only inches away from the elevator door.

By: thebestcreepypasta

The President Is Human

Philip started the video clip as soon as Rose closed the door to the editing bay. Charlie Clark, the newly elected President’s head speech writer moved on screen. He was familiar to the small group in the sound-proof room; he had worked at their news station for three years before taking his current position in November of 2016. He was dressed nicely and spoke eloquently enough, but his hands betrayed his nerves. He kept running fingers through his hair, straightening his tie, and sipping water.

“…and, unlike the President, I can say whatever I want,” Charlie quipped onscreen to the laughter of the assembled journalists. “But seriously, the goal of a speech writer is not to tell the President how he feels – we are not in danger of running the world accidentally – it’s to put the President’s feelings, the feelings he was elected to have, into the perfect words.

“Say the President is fuming over a human rights violation. The President is human, he’s allowed to be angry. In fact, he’s so angry his commendable diction slips. It’s my job to craft a statement that encapsulates the President’s anger – is the verbal embodiment of his sense of injustice – so he can deliver that to the world.”

Philip stopped the video and spoke. “As the Secret Service led us away from this conference, one of them pressed a paper into my hand. It was a code Charlie and I used as war correspondents in Afghanistan. It says the phrases made when he touched his tie were false.”

Philip played those segments. “I can say whatever I want.” “We are not in danger.” “The President is human.”

By OsoBrazos

What Are Nightmares?

What are nightmares? We all have them. I know why everybody has those messed up dreams that they want to get out of. It’s not something but someone. I will tell you who makes and controls your nightmares.

It is based on what type of gender you are. If you are a girl, your nightmare is a girl. On the other hand, if you are a guy, your nightmare is a guy. The creepiest and unsettling part about it is that he or she is you. Well it’s actually not you.

It looks like you, but you can’t see it because our dreams are in first person. He or she has your same hair, nose, hands, everything except your eyes. No your eyes are not cut out or anything. Your eyes actually have no pupils that are just blank, white eyes. But read and listen very closely because I will tell you something about how the nightmare takes over your dreams.

They know where you are going to sleep at. How? Well when you wake up, they follow you all day trying to figure a way to creep you out. When you go to bed it’s above you, facing you.

When you lay down it is floating above you. When you fall to deep slumber it descends towards you and goes inside your body. It goes up your brainstem into your brain. He or she uses the things it has seen and uses it against you. You’re probably wondering why we have good dreams if the nightmares take over our dreams. It’s because the nightmare can’t think of anything so they set you off to a good dream.

I bet your wondering how I know all of this. I know this because when I have conquered my nightmares, my nightmare actually came to me and told me this information in my dream. As you are listening to this, make sure that he or she is not behind you, watching you.

World’s Best School Psychologist

When I was twelve, I came to the conclusion that everyone in the world, including my own family, was against me. I was never a problem child, but my parents sure treated me like one.

For example, I used to need to be home by 5:00pm every day. This clearly restricted my amount of “play time” outdoors. I wasn’t allowed to have friends over to play at the house, nor was I allowed to go over anyone else’s. I had to finish homework directly after I came home from school, no matter how long it took. My parents refused to buy me video games and forced me to read books and then write a book report on them to prove I actually read it!

Now, even though those rules listed above were quite frustrating to me as a child, they aren’t what upset me most. What really hurt me was the lack of compassion on behalf of my parents. My mother was a bitter woman who always made me feel guilty of accidents or mistakes I’ve made. My father only knew one emotion: frustration. The only time he spoke to me was when he screamed at me for receiving poor test scores or beat me for misbehaving.

But enough about them, let’s talk about my school’s psychologist. For his own privacy, we will call him Dr. Tanner. Like most junior high schools, a psychologist is always available on campus during school hours to assist any students in need of counseling whether it is emotional, academic, social, behavioral, etc.

To be honest, I have never seen any students talking with Dr. Tanner. Every day, I would walk past his office on my way the cafeteria and peek through his door’s little window. He would always be alone in there, working on some paperwork.

I guessed that most kids were too afraid to speak about their problems to an adult who was practically a stranger. For this reason, it took me three weeks to muster enough courage to go into his office. March 2nd, 1993, was the day I decided to voice my troubles to Dr. Tanner. During lunch break, I stood in front of his office door and knocked.

Through the window, I could see him raise his head, smile, and motion for me to come in. I did.

He greeted me by introducing himself and asking for my name. Dr. Tanner was a very soft spoken man who seemed to radiate kindness. In less than thirty minutes, I rambled to Dr. Tanner about how mean my parents were to me and how they didn’t care about me at all. After a while, my voice began to quaver and I stopped speaking. The psychologist listened patiently to my whole spiel, arms folded and head nodding. I half expected him to begin talking about how everything I had just said was untrue and that my parents loved me dearly and blah blah blah. But he didn’t.

Dr. Tanner leaned towards me with a grin on his face and said “You know… I’m the best school psychologist in the world. I promise we will fix this.”

I rolled my eyes. “Okay, but how?” I asked.

“I have my ways!” he replied. “I’m a man of my word. I promise that within just one month, the relationship between you and your parents will change for the better. Forever.”

After a brief pause, he continued; “Although, I do need you to make me a promise.”

“You have to promise me that you’ll come back to my office after school tomorrow and that you won’t tell anyone that we had this conversation today. It’ll be our little secret.”

I promised.

---

The following day, I returned to Dr. Tanner after school. It was around 4:00pm when I entered his office. After a warm welcome, he asked me to have a seat in front of his desk once again.

Upon sitting down, I watched Dr. Tanner close the blinds of the door’s tiny window. “There,” he smiled, “now we have all the privacy we need!”

We began to talk about my likes and interests, my favorite subjects in school, my least favorite teachers, and things of the like. About an hour into the conversation, Dr. Tanner offered me a soft drink.

I gladly took the offer, considering my parents never allowed me to drink soda. Dr. Tanner reached over to his mini-fridge and fidgeted around before setting down two open cans of soda on the desk.

Afterwards, we continued to talk about what was going on in my life but it wasn’t long before I passed out from whatever drugs Dr. Tanner placed in my drink.

---

It took me a minute or so to adjust my blurred vision upon waking…

… And when it did, I had no idea what to think.

I was handcuffed to a bed and my mouth was sealed with duct tape. I immediately began to panic- squirming and tugging at the cuffs- but gave up soon after.

My eyes widened in disbelief after looking around the room. There were posters of superheroes pinned up along the walls and photographs of famous athletes on shelves. In the middle of the room was an old television and Super Nintendo, various game cartridges stacked alongside it.

I didn’t know what to think. Here I am in a room filled with items most kids would die to play with. I would have probably cried from joy hadn’t I been handcuffed to a bed frame.

My stomach sank once again as the door opened and Dr. Tanner walked inside. He sat down on the edge of the bed.

“Now listen,” he said, “remember that I’m here to help you and I would never hurt you, okay?” Dr. Tanner gently removed the tape from my mouth and then the cuffs from my hands.

My first instinct was to begin crying but something about Dr. Tanner made me feel safe. He smiled at me. “You’re going to be staying here for a while,” he continued, “and during this time, you’re allowed to play with any toys in this room while I’m here at home.”

“But when I leave the house, I’ll need to cuff one of your hands back to the bed. You can still watch the television, but I want you to only watch the news channels when I’m away.”

I sat in silence, still trying to process the information he had given me.

“So!” Dr. Tanner yipped, slapping me on the knee. “You go ahead and knock yourself out; I’ll be back when it’s time for dinner.”

He got up from the bed, walked across the room and clicked the TV’s power button before locking the door behind him.

Several more minutes passed before I realized that Dr. Tanner wasn’t joking. All that was left for me to do was boot up the Nintendo and play Mario until nightfall.

At about 7:00pm, Dr. Tanner returned to the room carrying two plates of mashed potatoes and chicken strips. I finally gathered up the courage to ask him how long I’d be staying in this room. “Well, about a month,” he replied, “give or take a few weeks. I just have some work I need to do.”

---

The following morning, I awoke to Dr. Tanner’s hand patting my head. “Hey bud, you don’t have to wake up right now if you don’t want, but I am going to need to put this back on,” he whispered, clamping the cold steel handcuff onto my wrist.

I gazed up at him. He was wearing a collared shirt and slacks, a coat draped over his shoulder and a suitcase at his side. He looked just how he always did when I saw him around school. Before leaving he placed the TV’s remote next to me and told me to turn it on and watch the news.

The first thing I saw upon turning it on was a “breaking news” segment. An important looking police officer stood at a podium surrounded by people with microphones. I happened to begin viewing half way through his speech.

“A statewide Amber Alert has been issued as of this morning. We have several investigators working towards identifying potential abductors, but as of right now there is not much evidence. Faculty members state that the boy had been last seen around four or five in the evening on-“

I began to feel nauseous as a photograph of me appeared on the screen. It was my yearbook picture from last year. Captions for the photograph displayed my name and age, my school, and my town. Above my picture were alternating titles: FBI BEGINS SEARCH FOR CHILD and KIDNAPPING SUSPECT UNKNOWN and POTENTIAL RUNAWAY.

The live footage continued and two figures I soon recognized as my mom and dad stepped up to the podium. Both appeared to have reddened eyes. Tears streamed down my mother’s face as she took hold of a microphone.

I’d never seen so much emotion come from my mother before as she wept on live television, stuttering on sentences such as “please return my baby back to me” and “I’m so sorry” and “please come home to us”.
When my father took the microphone, I nearly expected his attitude to be stone cold, but he too had tears in his eyes. He pleaded to the world to bring his son home safely and lastly begged for my forgiveness! “I know I haven’t been the best father, but goddamn it do I wish I had been now. Please bring my boy back.”

I turned the power off shortly after. My emotions were mixed for I had never once seen my father cry.
I felt miserable that my parents were being put through so much, but at the same time I felt relief. I now know how much mom and dad love me.

---

Nearly four weeks have passed and Dr. Tanner has been treating me with the utmost respect. He leaves me in the morning cuffed to the bed frame, but returns in the afternoon to eat lunch and dinner with me, talk, and play games. I never would have guessed how good Dr. Tanner was at Monopoly and Scrabble.

But one morning when Dr. Tanner woke me before heading off to work, I noticed a stern look on his face. I also realized that it was three hours earlier than when he usually wakes me.

“You need to watch the news today. No exceptions. I want you to keep the television on all day and pay close attention to it,” he stated grimly.

I, of course, complied and watched him exit the room.

About two hours later, a breaking news segment interrupted the toothpaste commercial I was watching. The title:

HUMAN REMNANTS FOUND

Two staunch looking men in suits stood aside one another and began speaking:

“We are displeased to bring up such unfortunate news this morning regarding our missing child case from earlier this month.”

One of the men bowed his head while the one speaking shuffled through some papers. He continued:

“Remains of a body have been found in a garbage bag beneath a highway overpass. The body appears to be that of a child, although not much of it is left. The body has been decapitated and much has been burnt to ash and bone.”

The screen shifted over to a helicopter view of the freeway, dozens of police cars gathered near the bottom of a tall overpass. The man’s voice could still be heard:

“Within the bag police found a junior high school identification card labeled as such.”

The screen showed the school ID card I always kept in my backpack. The plastic was sort of melted away, but my photograph and name were intact.

After the two men dismissed themselves, the camera panned over to my parents. They were sitting among reporters; my mother’s face held a painful grimace and my father sulked his head down at his knees.

I shut the television off.

---

Dr. Tanner returned home very late. He hurried into the room, unlocked my cuffs, and placed a bottle of fizzing water into my hand.

He placed his hands onto my shoulders and smiled.

“I made you a promise, didn’t I?”

I nodded, tears squeezing their way out my eyes.

“You need to make me a promise again,” he whispered.

He told me that I needed to drink all the water in the bottle- it would help me sleep- and that from here on, I am never to tell anyone that I ever met him. I promised.

“I told you I’m the best school psychologist in the world, didn’t I?”

---

And he was right.

I awoke later that night to find myself lying in the middle of a park, stars shining brilliantly across the night sky. I recognized the park; it wasn’t too far from my school.

A mile or so down the road, I saw my house. The lights were off inside, but I could make out my father sitting on the step leading to the front door.

I hesitantly called out to him. He lifted his head slowly, but when he saw it was me, he sprang to his feet, ran towards me arms open, yelling my name. My mother erupted from the house behind him.

Dr. Tanner was right. Things have changed with my family and I. My parents smile more often and treat me lovingly. I could not ask for a more perfect ending.

Every now and then, I see Dr. Tanner on campus- talking to and from his office. Rarely do we ever make eye contact, let alone speak to one another, but sometimes he’ll shoot me a wink and a smile.

I’ll always keep my promise to him and pretend I never met him, but there will always be one question forever floating in my mind: who did Dr. Tanner decapitate and throw off the overpass?

-By CreepyCarbs

The Ghost of the Hollywood Sign

Imaginary Friends

I’m Retiring

I run a niche online shop called Pulled Threads. You may have heard of it if you’re into the Deep Web. It’s a second-hand store that only sells things people have died in.

Some call it sick. Macabre. Unethical. I agree. But I also find it so damn fascinating. It’s a way of remembering someone, of carrying a torch through to the next generation. You get to wear their legacy.

Pants, shirts, jackets. Accessories, too, like watches and ties, belts and shoes. No underwear, socks, or hospital gowns. And definitely no baby clothes, that’s just depressing.

The majority of the items come from people who died of natural causes. You know, old fashioned clothes from old people. Tweed, corduroy. Lots of pajamas. A few work clothes, like coveralls and uniforms (army, fire, police). Sometimes people kill themselves and leave donation instructions in their suicide notes. Car accidents are another source. And, of course, murders.

Each item comes with an envelope. I call it the Proof Pouch. Inside is (ideally) some information about the person whose clothes you’ll be stepping into, like their name, job, passions, beliefs, etc. Enough to get to describe them at a party. And then there is the actual evidence, the proof that this person died in the item as advertised. This is, almost always, a photograph of a corpse.

Without the Proof Pouch, I could just grab anything off the shelf at Goodwill. The Proof Pouch is the hook. It seals the deal. And the fuller the Proof Pouch, the more lucrative the item.

And yes, it is lucrative.

Prices start high and go higher. Suicide is the low bar at around $200 an item, and I get a few of those daily. Accidents do especially well if the clothes are torn up in an interesting way, and while blood gets sterilized for sanitary reasons, it’s like the patina of an antique - it adds value.

Murder, though, murder is where the money is. Shirt with a stab hole? A thousand, easy. Bullet holes? Even more. And the highest ever? An autographed Yankees cap with a bullet hole burned right through the logo. A lifelong Red Sox fan bought it for $28,900, plus S&H.

Who sells me the clothes? Widows and widowers who need money for funeral services. Sometimes the deceased’s friends. And I know a few police officers who are good at losing evidence.

Who buys them? Germans and Japanese, mostly. Affluent hipsters. A Norwegian heavy metal band that only wears Pulled Threads. And it’s also become a goth right of passage - but they only buy from suicides.

I’ve been in business for almost a decade, but that’s it. I’m done. It’s a shame. I really loved doing this, for a lot of different reasons. But today will be my last day on the job. And hopefully I’ll outsell that Yankee cap.

See, I get threats of violence pretty frequently. Sometimes they tell me I’m going to burn in hell. Sometimes they say they’re going to send me there themselves. If I had to guess, I’d pin them on relatives who think what I’m doing is beyond reprehensible, and, honestly, I’d probably agree if I was in their shoes. But I always dismissed them as empty threats. I never took any seriously.

And then this morning I found a package on my door. Hand delivered. On the outside, in thick black Sharpie, it said, “I warned you.”

I opened it. A gold bracelet and an especially thick Proof Pouch fell out. I started crying. Inscribed inside the bracelet: “Jerry + Linda Forever”. I’m Jerry. Linda is my wife. It was her Christmas gift this year.

I didn’t open the Proof Pouch.

An hour later, I finished crying and drove slowly down to my storage unit off the highway. I thumbed through the neatly organized racks and pulled out a black tuxedo in a clear plastic bag. It didn’t fit as well as it did on my wedding day, but I managed. Then I typed out this message. And finally I slung a rope over the beam that crosses my home office, just above my desk chair.

Suggested retail prices?

Tuxedo: $22,000.

Dress shirt: $5,000.

Shoes: $6,500.

Cufflinks: $2,500.

And I’d jack the price of the necktie up to $15,000. It’s only fitting.

—
Credits to: photofreecreepypasta

The Mine in the Mountains of Pennsylvania

It’s hard to tell where to begin, so I’ll just begin with me, and my friend. We’re spelunkers. I don’t know if you could call us ‘professional’ spelunkers, but we’ve done some of the pretty insane things you see on National Geographic or Discovery or whatever. Y’know, like squeezing through caves hundreds of meters down in the darkness, or doing cave diving, where you put on scuba gear and go through flooded and underwater caves. I’ve seen some pretty breathtaking things, but nothing like what I’ve come to tell you about now.

I’m getting ahead of myself. I’m Collin, and my partner is Craig. We’re just twenty-somethings with crappy jobs who are always looking for a new ‘fix’, a new place to discover. I think we were drawn to caves because, unlike mountains, nobody yet knows what’s the biggest challenge, or what’s the best cave. We all know about Carlsbad or Mulu, but unlike Everest or K2, we don’t know if Carlsbad is one of the biggest caves. You never know when you’re going to stumble onto the mega-Everest of caving, way deep down. That excitement sticks with you on every expedition, I promise, and it’s what keeps us coming back as often as we can. So, when Craig got a tip that some old Appalachian mines might lead to some insanely deep and undiscovered natural caverns, we knew we had to give it a shot. The caving community is very helpful, and a lot of people had been out there trying out other caves. Craig tracked down a mining ledger for a company that had been used in the 1890s. It detailed employees, locations, and yields, but what interested us what one shaft that had been closed due to ‘mysterious circumstances’. Seriously, it said that shit on the paper. It’s in a town called Coalsborough, Pennsylvania, and I’m still in that shithole now, working with whatever passes for internet. All we knew going in is that nobody else reported ever caving there. We were excited to get the chance to be the first people down there in 120 years.

We shipped our gear ahead of us, flew out, rented a car then head out. It was dark, and chilly. A blanket of fog lay thick on the roads, so we couldn’t see more than fifty feet in front of us. Craig drove. I watched the streetlamps and headlights pass by like yellow ghosts in the mist. I’m not easily spooked, but as we slowed off the paved roads and got on the backwood dirt roads through the mountains, with black trees towering above us, I have to admit I felt a shiver go up my spine.

We go to Coalsborough sometime in the middle of the night. It was everything you’d expect from an Appalachian mining town that hadn’t had a mine for over a century. Only a few hundred surly people. We unpacked our things and headed to the only motel in town, a flickering ‘vacant’ neon sign the only thing that guided us.

A frumpy woman managed the counter, looking half-dead herself. She didn’t greet us when we came in the door - just stared, with drooping eyes.

"We need a room," Craig said helpfully.

"What for?" She asked roughly, even as she got a key from the (full) rack behind her.

“‘Cause we want to sleep, lady,” I replied. Her face didn’t even register my smarm - which wiped the shit-eating grin off of mine. “We’re here to survey the mineshaft in town. It’d actually be great if you could give us directions to it?”

She looked between the two of us, as if thinking. “No,” she finally replied. “We teach our boys t’stay away from there. For good reason. Ain’t nobody’s gone down there that’s come back. Ain’t none. Two city-slickers don’t belong here. I’ll give you a room for free tonight, if you promise to high-tail it first light.”

Craig and I exchanged a look. “Listen, lady…” he began, leaning on the counter, but she cut him short.

"No, listen to me, fancy-pants. Every time a fellow goes down there, they don’t come back… and when they don’t, we hear this… howling.” She looked out the window. The light outside only illuminated a wall of fog, pressing up against the glass, as if it were listening to us. “Howling in them hills,” she whispered. “Howling, for hours. Days. Like the Devil’imself is torturin’ souls down there. I tell you what, there’s something down there. Something t’ain’t meant to be found.”

Craig put down his pack. Bless that mine, he has a way with words. Or lies. Whichever. “We’ll leave in the morning, Mrs…?” He flashed a charming smile. The ass.

"Floyd," she said flatly. His charm was lost on her, but she gave us a key, and we even paid her for the room, despite her offer. Nobody can accuse us of being dishonest.

We flopped down onto the shitty retro mattresses from the 40s. “What’re we gonna do?” I asked, half to myself, half to Craig.

"We’re going in anyway," he said matter-of-factly. "I’m not gonna let hillbilly superstition keep me out. We already spent hundreds on the trip out here, man! Why wouldn’t we go in?"

I shrugged, looking at the yellowed ceiling and the feebly rotating ceiling fan. “Howling in the hills, I guess.”

Craig rolled onto his side. “C’mon, man, you didn’t buy Mrs. Loyd’s spiel, did you? That mine’s been closed for over a hundred years. Of course there are gonna be some ghost stories, but that’s just all the more reason to check it out. See what’s making the noises.”

"Yeah, I guess," I agreed. I didn’t mention the disappearances she had mentioned. Maybe she had made it up, maybe not. I didn’t want to believe her, but I felt something was wrong. Craig did not share my concerns. Maybe it was the fog, or the sad look she gave us when he promised we wouldn’t go. I think she knew he was lying. I think she knew we wouldn’t listen to her. I think, maybe we should have.

We got up early. Packed our things, left the keys on the counter with a note, and we drove up the hills. The mine was close, an overgrown trail of stone and foliage that our Honda could barely navigate. We emerged into a clearing, and we saw it: the reticent Cobalt Co. Shaft 1. It was the only one they dug. It was like an ugly maw, with rotted teeth of wood and rusted iron. The opening was ten meters wide, and it had been boarded and taped up, reading ‘CAUTION’ and ‘PRIVATE PROPERTY’. A sign nearby stood alone, warning that trespassers would be shot.

We unpacked.

Spelunking isn’t as simple as hiking. We had helmets, overcoats, kneepads, belts of tools and batteries. It took us almost an hour to get dressed, and all the while that shaft taunted us, daring us to enter. Once we had triple-checked our gear, we began.

The wood was hammered haphazardly to the opening of the mine, and it had been rotted for, likely, decades. We didn’t even need any tools - we kicked aside the barricade and slipped inside, to be greeted by abject darkness. Behind us, light and safety. Ahead, darkness and the unknown.

We turned on our headlamps.

The walls of the shaft were covered with decaying supports which creaked ominously as we walked past. Beneath our feet a wide railway stretched into the darkness, but only the red, rusted iron, as the wood had long ago rotted entirely away. We walked in silence. We had no idea how far down the mine went, but we had resolved to try to get to the end of it before we went back to the surface, so we could at least plan to find the alleged ‘cave’ that Craig’s source had told him about.

We passed by a minecart less than ten minutes of walking in. It was just as rusted as the rails it sat on. It rose out of the darkness and nearly gave me a heart attack, and once we passed it it faded back into the blackness again, to return to being forgotten.

We trudged along, accompanied only by the sound of our feet scraping the dirt and the darkness that constantly threatened to overwhelm our light. On all sides, it felt like the darkness was pressing in on me, trying to suffocate me. Even with a wide beam, it still felt like I could barely see a few feet in front of me. It felt like it was getting worse. “Hey Craig,” I called, hoping my voice wouldn’t betray my nervousness. “Is your lamp getting dimmer, too, or is it just me?”

I heard a grunt from beside me. I looked at him and nearly jumped. His face was stony and humorless, and he didn’t even spare a sideways glance at me as my light hit him. “We need to keep going,” he said.

I wasn’t so sure, anymore. “No, man, maybe we shouldn’t,” I said, stopping. Our footsteps stopped echoing, and my ears rang in the dead silence that settled between us. “Look at these support beams, man, it’s a wonder this place hasn’t collapsed. I don’t think this maybe-cave is worth maybe-dying over, Craig.”

With a weird look, he looked at the support beam closest to him. He almost looked surprised, as if he hadn’t seen it before. Reaching out, he grazed his hand across its surface - and pulled it away when the wood crumbled beneath his fingers.

"See man, I told you this shit isn’t safe," I pointed out. I felt like I was being a stick in the mud, but I couldn’t deny I was feeling full-blown fear at this point. Even as we stood there, I felt my light growing dimmer. I reached into my waist belt and pulled out the spare lamp. Turning it on did nothing. It wasn’t the lamp. It was the mine. "Seriously, Craig, we need to -" I paused. Craig was just standing there, his burly framed turned away from me. He was just taking handfuls of wood from the support beam - and that’s when I realized that it wasn’t wood.

It was mushrooms.

He was pulling big, broad, flat black-capped mushrooms off of what must have once been the support beam but was now no more than mulch. They weren’t like mushrooms I’ve ever seen before. When he dropped them, they withered rapidly, like watching decay in fast-forward, and they were practically dust by the time they reached the ground. Spores drifted in their wake, up to Craig and into his nose.

It also occurred to me that these mushrooms were the only thing keeping the mineshaft open. I looked up, and sure enough, every piece of ‘wood’ was actually just a thick colony of mushrooms. And Craig was tearing that support down. “What the fuck!” I yelled at him, backing away. “Stop, you’ll bring down the fucking roof! We. Need. To. Go!”

Craig paused his destruction - and he jerked his head towards me. Quite literally - I heard it crack as he looked over his shoulder to me. Even in the dim light with a haze of spores around him, I could see the way his pupils dilated, the way his eyes seemed to be as empty and as dark as the mine we were in. “No,” he said. “We must go deeper.” He turned and began to walk methodically forward, inward, like a man being marched to death row.

That’s when I saw the eyes.

Not his eyes… I saw others, in the darkness. I turned to watch him go, nonplussed, when the light from my lamp reflected back at me from two, head-level height points in the darkness, right where Craig was walking to. I froze, and they froze, for only a heartbeat, before they turned and disappeared once again into the ocean of impenetrable darkness. Craig marched diligently on, his own headlamp becoming dimmer and dimmer until his silhouette disappeared, melding imperceptibly with the darkness. I was too frightened to call after him. I was left alone, with only the sound of his distancing steps and the cloud of spores moving steadily towards me, filling the passage between me and him.

I ran.

I felt warm urine on my leg. I’ve never been much of a sprinter, but I sprinted for every damn yard to the exit. The calm dripping of water and patter of footsteps was replaced with the pounding of my heart and my feet. I thanked every god I knew when I saw the light of the barricade, even though I didn’t think anything was following me. I wormed through the entrance we had made, and then put the wood back into place, breathing hard.

I hopped into the car, not bothering to take off my gear, and drove back into town. Now I’m in the bar on my laptop. I had to beg, but the bartender let me onto his internet that he uses for taxes.

The sun is just now beginning to set, and ever since I was a kid I’ve never been so afraid of nightfall. The idea of any darkness… it terrifies me. I fear I’ll look outside and see those horrible eyes looking back at me, only to disappear again. I’m writing this because I can’t leave Craig, and as afraid as I am, that man is my friend. If I were down there, I think he’d come and help me.

So, I’m going back in tomorrow. Alone, it would seem, because nobody here can help me. I even thought about calling the police, but, we were trespassing - and I don’t think that they’d be too keen on going in, especially since they’ve never gone in after the other people who’ve disappeared in there before.

I want help. I’ve never dealt with this before and nobody here can help me and nobody else will believe me. I’ll come back and write about what I hopefully discover tomorrow. I don’t know what caused Craig to go crazy like that, but I’m going to find out.

—
Credits to: photofreecreepypasta

Sleep Paralysis

Many of you probably know what sleep paralysis is, and if you have ever experienced it you know how terrifying it can be. But for you folks who don’t know what sleep paralysis is I shall tell you in a vague way.

Sleep paralysis is closely linked to lucid dreaming, but instead of a dream its actually happening. It is when your mind wakes up, but your body is still asleep, therefore causing you to feel paralyzed, as you cannot move anything due to it not being awake. Now that is sorta creepy on its own, but what makes it even worse, is when this happens, you tend to hallucinate both visually and auditory. On very rare occasions people get something funny like a group of penguins stumbling upon each other (just a random example), but almost every time what you hallucinate is terrifying. People often refer it to a very bad trip on some form of Hallucinogenic or Psychedelic. So if you have ever experienced that you can sorta relate.

Now to my story…

If I remember correctly I was around 11 years old when this happened, and i had just gotten a room to myself for the first time after sharing with my older brother for the longest time. I was never really scared of the dark, but like any other kid I did get nervous or creeped out sometimes. Now on one of my first nights, I went to bed promptly finishing my nightly routine and all was normal.

Now a little back-story. I used to have this one nightmare very often when I as younger. I wont go into so much detail, but basically it was me having to get something inside tis building, but there was always this devilish looking creature in there and it would chase after me.

So on this night I had this nightmare and I jolted awake, yet I didn’t really wake up. I had entered sleep paralysis. No at first I didn’t know I couldn’t move because I didn’t really try I just woke up and had this weird eerie feeling like something was watching me. As I examined my room something caught my eye. In the corner of my room, I saw a black figure standing there. Now having it be a new room and all I had no decorations or anything that could’ve been mistaken as a person standing there.

Completely convince that what I was seeing was a person, I called out “Anthony?” (Brothers name) but got no reply, “Anthony? Is that you” “Dude come on stop messing with me.” Nothing, no movement, no sound, nothing. A few minutes went buy and I could do noting but stare at this…. thing. All of a sudden a huge pressure came over my chest, as if someone was pushing down on it, as I tried to reach and pull my blankets off and sit up, I realized that I couldn’t move. No matter how hard I tried I could not move, and then I started to have a panic attack, breathing heavily, as this black shadow starred at me, I could do nothing but wait.

After about ten minutes of trying to spit out words to call for someone, and to move just an inch, the black figure fell, completely disappeared, and the white wall that rest behind it became slightly visible with the very little moonlight. It was over I thought to myself. A breath of relief, and a calming of my heartbeat, it was over… or so I thought. Thinking I could move once more I tried to pull the covers of and go and get a drink of water, but that was still not possible. This wasn’t over. I examined my room for the dark figure but it wasn’t there. I was so confused. But then the heavy pressure on my chest came again and as I lost my breath I felt as if a hand was crawling up my leg. I’m not sure if that’s what it was but I new something was touching my leg, stopping at my kneecap.

This next part is something I still have nightmares to this day. I felt the cold “hand” hover over my knee and all of a sudden…1 finger…. 2 fingers…. 3 fingers rolled across my knee not softly, but so hard I could feel it through my entire leg. This must of shocked my body because once I felt this my body jolted out of bed and I jumped so high and got the fuck out of there as quickly as possible.

I haven’t had an experience like this before, and I pray to God that I don’t, because it was the most terrifying thing, that has ever happened to me. For those trying to Lucid Dream, make sure you know what you are doing, and that the method you are using is safe. I know of a few methods that cause sleep paralysis, and let me tell you, it’s not something you ever want to encounter.

—
Credits to: photofreecreepypasta

Practice Makes Perfect

"You’re not even trying. Again!"

My calloused hands dance across the keyboard. A finger slips and the piano groans.

"Your father would be ashamed. Again!"

My blurred vision falls from the yellowed sheet music to the faded ivory. I miss another note.

"Faster. Again!"

I stumble once more as the tempo increases.

She rises from the bench. “Absolutely worthless. You’re done for today.”

I hang my head in shame. I know what’s coming.

The floorboards creak as Mother returns from the kitchen. I wince.

It’s hard enough to play with three fingers. It’ll be even harder with two.

By reddit user whiteddit

Personal Experience

This is a personal experience and I haven’t really talked about it since it happened. Before I go on, I want to say that there’s no way my cats did this since my room was well below 0 degrees Celsius at night since it wasn’t insulated and had holes in the walls. They stayed upstairs where it was habitable.

A while ago, I had this dream where I was looking at myself from above my body. That’s not unusual for me, and I watched myself sleep on a bed that wasn’t mine. There wasn’t anything in the dream besides the bed and myself, but there wasn’t a darkness or emptiness surrounding me either, it was just vast nothingness.

Pretty abruptly, I was surrounded by this incredibly dark purple with lighter spots that weren’t exactly spots, more like where light comes in when you peek through blinds. 6 human-ish figures with cloaks were on each side of the bed, with another, larger figure at the foot. They never moved. They just hurt me by wanting to, as in they wanted me to have a giant gash in my leg and so I did. I knew which ones were hurting me somehow, and the largest was clearly happy about what was going on.

Time didn’t work right in this dream. Normally I’ll feel like whatever’s happening takes a few minutes and then I wake up. Time seemed to work the way it does when I’m awake and it seemed like hours went by where they just hurt me then healed me enough that I’d feel the most pain.

The largest one shrunk to my height and took his cloak off. He was the person I’m dating and he told me about how he only wanted to earn my trust so this would hurt more when he finally did it. Usually I only remember what I say in dreams and whether or not people ignore me, not what they say.

They hurt me more, and while I couldn’t move anyway, I didn’t see a reason to after what he said. This is another thing that was odd. While I’m very meek is real life and try to stay silent unless it’s absolutely necessary not to, in dreams I always speak up and fight back.

Eventually I was just lying there on the bed alone with a small cut on my foot and one on my leg. I started moving towards the body I was looking at and the bed looked more and more like the one I had fallen asleep in. Once I finally merged with the body I’d seen getting hurt I woke up.

I talked to the guy in the dream about it and he seemed pretty upset  by how upset I was and comforted me. I calmed down and tried to forget about it until I got ready to take a shower and saw scars where the two cuts had been in the dream.

(This was an anonymous submission)

The Bathroom

The Old House

Foolish

Ears, Nose, and Throat

I woke up Monday morning with a little bit of a tickle in the back of my throat. We’re all familiar with that wonderfully non-specific symptom that can mean you have a cold or are suffering from allergies or you’re going to die next week. I assumed it was my seasonal allergies acting up so I started my Monday off with a heaping helping of antihistamines.

They didn’t end up working and I resigned myself to becoming sick with something truly awful sooner rather than later. I could only hope that I got better quickly because I was unreasonably busy at work. Those TPS reports weren’t going to file themselves.

On Tuesday I tried to ignore it the best I could but I could feel this growing, throbbing pain beginning to accompany the nearly constant tickling. I tried to cough it out but had no luck. I began to think it was a sinus infection which was just wonderful. I usually get one or two a year but apparently this was my lucky year because it was number 3. As I sat at my desk I vaguely wondered if I should call a doctor but decided to tough it out because I’m an idiot.

Wednesday came and I decided to call a doctor. There was no way this was going away on its own. I also was beginning to think it wasn’t a normal sinus infection. If you’ve ever had one you’d know the mucus that comes out of your face is generally greenish and pus like. The stuff coming out of me wasn’t even remotely similar. It was more viscous and slimy. It was also perfectly clear. There was also this strange crunchy and crackling sound constantly in my ears. It was almost as if someone had pumped puffed rice cereal into my sinuses. I’d never experienced something like that before and a strange symptom was less than comforting. Luckily my ENT had an appointment Friday morning so I could get this awfulness taken care of.

I called out Thursday and spent the day thrashing around in bed trying to sleep despite the constant crackling roaring through my head and tickling in my throat.

Friday morning I crawled out of bed feeling not great but not as bad as I had felt Thursday. The tickling in my throat had become less and it seemed that there was very little mucus coming, the crackling was less loud, and the throbbing feeling had stopped. I almost cancelled my appointment, thinking it was stupid to waste my doctor’s time on what may have just been a cold.

I went anyway. I was informed that there was a 25 dollar cancellation fee when you cancel less than 24 hours before the appointment. Since my copay was cheaper and I already had the day off I just said “screw it” and decided to waste the doctor’s time.

As I sat in the waiting room my nose started to feel stuffy, but the crackling and tickling had almost completely stopped. It became worse and worse until the pressure was almost too much. I quickly scanned the waiting room for a tissue and spotted a box us on the far edge of the front desk. I went up and grabbed a few sheets and returned to my seat.

I blew my nose. Suddenly there was sweet, sweet relief. All the stuffiness, all the pain, all the tickling, all of the crackling, they were gone completely. I felt wonderful. I was almost ready to take the 25 dollar hit to cancel the appointment and stroll on out and grab some breakfast; then I looked at the tissue.

Pupae. Hundreds and hundreds of pupae lie in the tissue along with some of their younger squirming maggot brothers. I was too shocked for words but I wasn’t too shocked to scream.

—
Credits to: photofreecreepypasta

The Ghost of John

Have you seen the ghost of John?
Long white bones and the rest all gone
Ooh,ooh-ooh-oh, oh, oh
Wouldn’t it be chilly with no skin on?

--:--

Behind folklore and legend, lies truth. Sometimes it is pretty truth. Sometimes it is partial truth. Sometimes it is ugly truth. Many folk songs have ugly, disturbing truth hidden behind their seemingly innocuous facade.
Consider the nursery rhyme, “Rock-a-bye baby.”

It starts out nice enough:
“Rock-a-bye baby, in the treetop
When the wind blows, the cradle will rock”

And then it turns subtly sinister.
“If the bow breaks, the cradle will fall
and down will come baby, cradle and all”

Death. It finds its way into even the most innocent things. It’s woven into the very fabric of life; the one thing that every person on earth will experience at one point or another is DEATH.

I tell you this story, not because I want to, but because I have to. You see, some curiosities are better left unresolved. As the old adage goes, “Curiosity killed the cat.” Of course, the standard rebuttal is that “Satisfaction brought him back.” However, cats have nine lives, don’t they? We don’t.

Odd, how you can begin reading deeply into myth and legend, folklore, and it all begins to unravel itself. Curiosity of course killed our feline friend, and of course satisfaction brought him back, considering that folklore claims that he has nine lives. Folklore intersects and contradicts until it all begins to unravel at the seams. Or perhaps it knots and tangles itself up?

Behind folklore and legend, lies some sort of truth. It’s rather terrifying if you consider the implications of that. Something existed at some point to cause these stories. Why, in every part of the world, were there ancient stories of dragons? From whence sprang the terror of the bloodsucking vampire? If you read between the lines, it all begins to come undone. I fear that we may one day truly unravel these fictional tales, and find the fact behind them.

And I fear that the truth will be worse than the fiction.

I’m rambling. I apologize for that.

I’m thirty-seven years old. The events of which I’m about to tell happened twenty-seven years ago. They rendered me blind, until two years ago when I became the candidate for a corneal replacement surgery. The surgery was successful.

Oh, how I wish it hadn’t been. I’m in no direct hurry to complete this memoir, but nonetheless I don’t want to waste time; time has a rather nasty habit of running out faster than anticipated when you do. And I am on a schedule. My deadline by my count is this evening, around eleven o’clock. Or perhaps one o’clock tomorrow morning. These things don’t have a set of guidelines I can follow or read through. Eleven is the safe number to assume. Hope for the best, prepare for the worst. You may be wondering what is setting this deadline; I’ll get to that soon enough. For now I’m going to explain the circumstances behind me losing my vision for the better part of three decades.

When I lost my sight, I was only ten years old. The hospital said it was corneal burn trauma. They didn’t believe my story. The shrink assumed I had subconsciously made up my story as a coping mechanism, and simply blocked out the “true” accident.

I can say now just as I could twenty-seven years ago that it was not corneal burn trauma. I did not make this story up to cope with an accident that didn’t happen. This is the true story of how I lost my sight, and how I am going to die tonight at either eleven o’clock or one o’clock.

The first time I heard the song Ghost of John was about a week before Halloween, when I was nine. I loved it. The sense of melancholy, the hint of dread. For that week, the song was all I could think about. I hummed it constantly. Sang it under my breath often. I was a child who grew up reading everything horror from Poe to Lovecraft to Stephen King. The song spoke to me.

Halloween came and went, as it does, and I forgot about the song soon after. A year went by. I became ten, and acquired a vested interest in learning to pilot. I read books about it, I watched movies about it. It became my absolute dream to become a pilot. I tell you this not to illustrate the bitter irony in my losing my vision not long after that, but to explain just how obsessive I could become over one subject when it captured my interest.

Halloween drew nearer. My best friend, Ivan, and I would stay up late on weekends telling each other horror stories. Ivan had the first two Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark books and I had the third one and a collection of Edgar Allen Poe short tales, so there was almost always material to draw upon. Sometimes his Dad would set up his four-person tent and a couple of cots and a campfire and we would tell stories around it. Most times we were in my living room or his telling our stories to the light of the TV. Sometimes we watched horror movies, but they didn’t have the same magic as a good scary story.

I heard the song again a couple of weeks before that Halloween. Back to singing it. Ivan had moved in from Illinois in November of the previous year, so he hadn’t been privy to my previous obsession with the song. It wasn’t as bad this time around as it was the previous year, but I sang it often enough for him to notice. It turned out that he had heard it back in Pawnee as well. It was a common song.

We were sitting in his living room when he noticed me humming it.

“Are you humming Ghost of John?” he asked.

“I am,” I said, “it’s a great song. Creepy.”

Ivan smiled. “I thought I recognized that. It’s really creepy. But I bet the real Ghost of John is even creepier than the song.” I grinned a little and said, “I don’t think he’s real. But even if he were, he seems nice enough in the song. He’s not sad. It says so in the song.” Ivan eyeballed me for a second, and then quietly said “not being sad doesn’t mean you’re nice. I heard from my uncle that there’s a way to summon the ghost of John.” I gave a rather loud snort of laughter at that, and then asked “yeah, but didn’t this same uncle also say that Bigfoot and werewolves are real?”

Ivan, looking affronted, opened his mouth to reply but before he could make a sound the hallway light came on. We turned to look at it. Ivan’s Dad walked down the hallway and, looking annoyed, said “hey guys, it’s almost two in the morning. I think it’s time for you two to go to bed. Wouldn’t you agree?”

“Alright Dad,” “Goodnight Mr. T” in unison, and then I was laying on one couch and Ivan the other.

Here’s the part where I’m supposed to say that Ivan dropped right off to sleep while I tossed and turned for hours wondering if the Ghost of John really was real.

That didn’t happen. First off, it’s borderline impossible to toss and turn on a couch. There’s just no room. Second, I completely forgot about the Ghost of John thing when Ivan’s dad came down the hall. It’s rare for him to have to say anything to us for not behaving, and he had told us to be in bed by twelve-thirty. We were caught red-handed. Being admonished by any friend’s Dad is awkward and embarrassing, but being admonished by Ivan’s dad was worse. After that, I was asleep in minutes.

The next day we were busy all day, and didn’t bring up the Ghost of John once. I think I started to at one point, during a lull in church, but then the preacher (of the hellfire and brimstone sort) began to boom out condemnations against the upcoming pagan holiday and all who would take part in it. That’s all that preacher ever did, was boom. A short, fat man of about seventy, nobody really liked him. Unfortunately, in a town as small as ours, there was only one church to go to, and everybody was religious.

After the morning service, we left to go to a pumpkin carving party hosted by a local bakery. They charged five dollars entry and collected the pumpkin pulp to bake into pies. There were inflatables, a tent with a big TV playing horror movies (an additional two dollars, and you had to be fifteen to enter), and lots of games to play. We were there for most of the day, before leaving at nightfall to go back to church.

The plan was for me to ride home with my parents after the service, but they never showed up. I found out later that night that my brother had come down with a stomach virus. As such, Ivan and his family gave me a ride home, though not after his dad spoke with the preacher. Mr. T had arrived about a month too late last year to catch the fear-mongering that Father Davis spewed around Halloween. I distinctly remember Davis’s look of apprehension when he noticed him approaching. Everyone knew Davis was a racist dinosaur, and I imagine that George Thompson looked like the very definition of “bad news” walking towards him.

You see, Mr. T was a black man, and back in the mid eighties he was about six-foot-four, muscled, mustachioed, and had an afro that added a good three or four inches to his height. Since then he’s put on a good amount of weight, shaved all the hair off, and shrunk a bit. I know this because I spoke to him last year when I went looking for Ivan. Ivan, who I fear may be dead. Ivan, who I never found. Ivan, who got me into this whole mess. I don’t blame him, of course. We were kids, and I’m as much at fault as him, if not moreso.

I’ve long since forgotten the conversation Mr. T had with Father Davis. What I do remember is how Father Davis reacted to Mr. T. He seemed to almost shrink, looking down at the floor and speaking to his shoelaces. I remember Mr. T saying something along the lines of “needlessly scaring kids,” and, at one point when Father Davis looked annoyed and cut him off, “DON’T interrupt me.”

I wish I could remember more, because Ivan and I were completely blown away by it, and both found it hilarious. I remember Father Davis’s sneer when Mr. T began talking to him. I remember how quickly Mr. T wiped that sneer off of his face. I remember him looking at the ground and blubbering out some form of apology, and I remember how his fat cheeks and jowl were quivering when we walked off.

I remember a lot of visual details from those last few weeks. For twenty-five years they were all I had, and I went over them with a fine-toothed comb.

It wasn’t until the next weekend that we got back on the subject of the Ghost of John. Ivan’s uncle Dale was on a business trip in a large city a little over two hours away, and would be able to make a visit during the weekend.

Uncle Dale believed in Bigfoot, werewolves, and the Ghost of John. Uncle Dale believed curiosity killed the cat. And if you tried to tell Uncle Dale that satisfaction brought the cat back to life, he would remind you that cats have nine lives to waste, and we only have one. Everyone liked Uncle Dale, superstitions and all, and Ivan and I were excited to learn he was coming that weekend.

I went with Ivan after school that Friday, and Uncle Dale showed up a few hours after that. Mr. T set up the tent, and we all camped out. I didn’t know then that it would be the last time I ever went camping.

We started out with scary stories from the books, and then the two adults started making up their own. Most of the time they weren’t as good as the ones in the books, but some of them were. It was late when Ivan asked Dale about the Ghost of John. Uncle Dale smiled, and said “What if I told you that there’s more to the song?” No one said anything, and then, quietly, Dale began to sing it.

“Have you seen the Ghost of John? Long white bones, and the rest all gone. Oh, ooh-ooh-oh, wouldn’t it be chilly with no skin on?”

He kept on, slowly getting louder until concluding in a loud, dramatic low note.

“Now, that’s just a song. It’s a scary song, right?” We both agreed. “But there’s more to it. There’s more to everything than meets the eye, but especially to innocent little songs like this one. Any old story has some truth to it. A lot of them do. There’s a real Ghost of John. And you can see him, if you’d like.”

At this point Ivan elbowed me in the side, and winked at me.

The details of what Uncle Dale told us elude me. It’s been the better part of thirty years, after all, since then. I remember the basics; the person who wants to meet the Ghost of John must go into the woods at exactly eleven o’clock on All Hallow’s Eve (as he put it), carrying a certain type of flower. When this person hears a crow cawing, he must close his eyes and sing the song. When he’s done with the song, he opens his eyes. If he did it right, he won’t know for some time. John won’t show up until the thirteenth hour– one o’clock in the morning– and then he will speak to the person, if they’re still there.

“But be careful not to make eye contact,” Uncle Dale warned. “If you do, one of two things will happen. If you’re lucky, you’ll never be able to see again. If you’re not… he kills you and keeps your soul.” Then he smiled at us, and added “If I were you two, I just wouldn’t try it. Too damn risky, right?” We both agreed it was too risky, but I didn’t believe a word of it.

Uncle Dale died not long after that. He came to visit me in the hospital after what happened and apologized for telling that story to me. I couldn’t see, but he sounded like he might have been crying. After that he flew home, parked in his garage, and ate a bullet. His body sat there for four days before anyone found him. He didn’t leave a note.

Halloween came that Friday night. Both of our families did trick or treating together. A student in our class’s parents were having a Halloween party for her classmates. Me and Ivan were invited, and our parents dropped us off there at nine o’clock.

Around ten, Ivan brought up the song.

“You know, if you don’t believe it, you probably wouldn’t have a problem going into the woods and testing it. If I didn’t believe it, I wouldn’t,” Ivan said at around ten-fifteen. “It’s just dumb to go into the woods period,” I came back with.

Other kids joined in, and by ten-thirty I had been convinced.

I was never one to back down from a challenge, and besides – I was curious.

This girl was named Bethanne, and her parents were both doctors. Her house was tucked back into the woods, so it wasn’t a challenge to find them. Her mom was an avid gardener, and happened to have the flower I needed.

At ten-fifty-nine I was at the treeline. All I had was the flower. I had been walking for about ten minutes before I realized that if I wasn’t careful I wouldn’t be able to find my way back. So I stopped and waited. I remember being glad that my watch had glowing hands.

At around twelve-fifteen, I heard a crow cawing, and closed my eyes and began to sing. When I finished, nothing happened. I sat there with my eyes closed, waiting. Finally I opened my eyes and checked my watch. Twelve thirty. Only another half hour, and then I could go back. At twelve forty I noticed a particularly disgusting smell. It was faint, but it was there. I didn’t know what it was then, but I do now – decay.

The smell was getting stronger when I heard a faint sound above the breeze. Was that – singing? I wasn’t sure. It sounded like it was getting closer. It was definitely getting louder. Then I realized what was happening. There were several voices singing Ghost of John. It put me on edge. I tried to convince myself that the voices were those of my classmates, and that if I just called out, they would stop. One part of me, however, wouldn’t let me call out. Because to do so would be to announce my position, and what if these weren’t my classmates?

They started singing from the beginning again.
“Have you seen the ghost of John?
Long white bones and the rest all gone
Ooh,ooh-ooh-oh, oh, oh
Wouldn’t it be chilly with no skin on?”

No, better to stay quiet and let it pass. My brain could be playing tricks on me, right? Except now, the voices were near me, all around me. They were getting close to the end of the song. “John’s not sad, he has had his day. Smile that’s fixed in a rigid way.” I wanted to scream, but didn’t dare. They were still getting louder, still getting closer. I looked down at my watch, and as I did, the voices all became quiet. One was directly behind me, and finished the last three words of the song just behind my ear: “he is dead.”

It was one o’clock.

The ringing silence was almost as unnerving as the singing. I looked up, slowly, and saw a pair of old fashioned dress shoes. They were on the ground, but not all the way on the ground; it looked like they were being dangled to where they were touching, but the weight wasn’t on them.

They were facing to the left. I looked up further and saw an old suit, covered in mold and maggots. The pants were ripped. The jacket looked too big. It hung off the skeletal frame like an old sheet. Looking up further, I saw his face.

He wasn’t all bones like the song said. His face was rotting, blackened skin. I could see his teeth through the sides of his cheeks. They were uneven, and he was missing a few. The remaining ones were blackened and dead. His eyes weren’t really there, not really. They were far from empty sockets, but they weren’t eyes anymore. They were dark colored mush. I gasped at this, and his head snapped towards me. I looked down before he locked eyes with me.

“Are you the boy who woke my children?” he asked. His voice wasn’t ghost-like at all. It was a hoarse rattle, barely audible. I didn’t recognize it then, but he spoke in what sounded like an antebellum era southern accent. I didn’t answer. I was crying, hard, staring at my lap.

“ANSWER ME BOY!” John roared, and I peed myself. The flower – I remember now that it was a black rose – fell to the ground. “N – no sir.” I stammered out, still crying. “You lying to me, boy? I don’t much appreciate being lied to.” John snarled, and then from somewhere off to the side I heard “I think he IS lying, pa!” John walked closer to me. He had jerky movements, like a marionette puppet on strings.

I didn’t think I could take anymore screaming, and I had always been taught to tell the truth, so before John got any angrier I said, “Well, yes sir, I might have woke them up, but I didn’t mean to!”

“Ah, look at that! You’ve gone and pissed yourself!” John said scornfully. Then I felt a hand land on my shoulder. It didn’t have any weight, but I could feel it, and it burned a little.

“Look at me, son.” John commanded. I shook my head no. The hand tightened. It didn’t hurt, and I couldn’t feel pressure, but I felt the tightening. I thought – and still think to this day – “If I don’t look at him, he can’t hurt me, and I’ll be fine.”

Of course, saying and doing are two different things. And when he started screaming for me to LOOK AT HIM! LOOK AT HIM RIGHT GODDAMN NOW and the voices in the woods started screaming the same, I broke down and looked up.

“That’s more like it,” he said. But I noticed he wasn’t saying anything. His mouth didn’t move. The words just came out of his – its – throat.

My eyes were locked with the black gunk that was his. I remember, in some other, happier world, Ivan’s Uncle Dale telling me not to make eye contact with the Ghost of John. I don’t think Uncle Dale himself believed the story he was telling, but here I was, with the ghost staring me in the eyes. “You’ve got some sand to you, don’t you boy?” He asked almost humorously. As if that creature was capable of humor. “I like that. What I don’t like is a boy who won’t listen. No sir, I don’t like that at all. Your momma and daddy didn’t raise you right. I don’t want you. I won’t have you. But dammit I WILL teach you your lesson before I leave you. No child disrespects me. You hear me? NO CHILD WILL DISRESPECT ME. NO CHILD WILL DISRESPECT ME!!”

That was when I felt an agonizing burst of fire in my eyes. It felt like bombs went off on the inside of them. He let go of me, and I toppled backwards screaming at the top of my lungs. I heard him laughing, cackling really, and then all the other voices joined it. The same voice from earlier shouted“Boy, pa! You sure showed him a lesson!”

I kept screaming. Eventually I became so hoarse that I couldn’t manage it anymore, and it was then that I noticed that the laughter was gone. There were no sounds at all. Not even a cricket. The pain had started to ebb away as well.

I tried opening my eyes. Everything was a listless gray color. I could see some shapes, and the moonlight, but that was fading away as well. Eventually everything was black. I laid down and cried. I cried until I fell asleep, and I stayed asleep until the search party found my the next day.

The rest is history. The hospital claimed some kind of burn trauma. The therapist didn’t believe my story, and neither did my parents. They assumed I had blocked out the memory. For twenty-five years my world was inky blackness, and no one would listen to why.

Ivan never spoke to me again, not with any meaning. He felt guilty. He visited me in the hospital, but eventually we drifted apart. He left home at 18, and kept up contact with his family. Home on Thanksgiving and Christmas. Two years ago, not long after I got my vision back, he came back once, and then disappeared for good. No one has seen him since. I tried to find him, but, no luck. I’ve got this pit in my stomach; I think I know what happened to him. I’ll get to that soon.

All of this leaves me, now. As I’ve been writing, it’s gotten dark. Eleven o’clock came and went thirty minutes ago, which gives me another hour and a half. That should be enough time. I’m at terms with what’s about to happen. All of this here on out is my theory as to what’s happening; as I said in the beginning, there’s no real way of knowing what the rules are. These aren’t humans, and if they were once, it’s all gone. My demons have finally caught up to me, and why should I be surprised? Did I ever think John would really stop watching me?

No. Deep inside, I always knew he was real and was nearby. Even past the part of my brain that convinced me that the therapist and my parents were right, I knew that he was the truth. In the hand that sometimes stroked the back of my head as I sat in my chair, in the whispers I sometimes heard from the corner of the room, in the singing I sometimes heard from far, far off in the woods. From the moment I locked eyes with him, I was his. He saw in me that he could make me more miserable in darkness than in afterlife. And then he’d take me anyways. In the afterlife, I feel those poor souls find some semblance of happiness. Strange, I know, but I think once you’ve forgotten the simple joys of life, you can find simple joy in non-life. It’s a half-existence, I’m sure; I guess I’ll know soon.

Two years ago, I had my operation. It was a success. My eyesight returned, and I was able to work myself back into the world of the seeing. I’ve even retained my excellent hearing, which I considered a bonus back then. Now, not so much. It could be the wind, but I think I can hear snatches of Ghost of John. Just hints of it, but I’d recognize that tune anywhere.

I’d recognize those haunted voices anywhere.

When I got my sight back, I was as happy as could be.

I even had myself convinced that my loss of vision was a bad accident when I was younger. I had completely forgotten about John, completely forgotten about the song, forgotten about most of what happened that night. It was what happened about a week after I was discharged from the hospital that brought it all back in a flood of painful, fear-drenched memories.

I looked out the window that night and saw John standing at the edge of the woods, about 400 yards away. Standing behind him, in the trees, was a small army of small people. Children who made the same mistake I did? Probably. I have a theory that John collects even the ones he blinded as well as those he killed right off the bat. I think he makes them little kids again once he has them. I don’t know for sure, but I think I’m gonna find out soon; I can hear the singing, loud and clear now.

I can smell the death.

Every night for most of that year, John and his children were at the edge of the woods, watching. Then last Halloween came. I didn’t see them that night. That was the day that Ivan saw his family for the last time. After then, John started moving closer. Every night, they were a little bit closer to my house. After three months, they were well past the trees, and much closer to my home. That was when I started searching for Ivan.

Mr. T didn’t remember Uncle Dale’s story, and I didn’t expect him to. He didn’t know where Ivan was. None of his family did.

I think – and I pray this isn’t the case – that John the Ghost was stalking Ivan as well as me, and on that Halloween he took Ivan’s life and soul, forcing Ivan to join his army of children. I think he did it to punish me for what I did. I reversed his punishment, and now I must pay. The singing is becoming unbearable. It’s almost time now. Twelve-fifty-six. I’m not scared. I’m beyond it. I’ve had an idea this was coming for a long time. Today was Halloween, you see, and I assumed he would come again on Halloween.

I was right.

They’re getting closer now. As I wrote that last line, I heard footsteps and saw a small dead girl, no older that eight, walk past my doorway. Her eyes were blank and listless. She was bleeding from her ears, her eyes, everywhere. She walked in the same jerky marionette manner that John did all those years ago.

I see – I’m sad to say that it looks like I was right about this, too – a young, dead looking Ivan standing in the room behind me. I hope he’ll understand my apology. I never wanted this to happen to him. I should have known not to try to undo what John did, but I was blind. Literally and figuratively. One o’clock is two minutes away. I can see a black rose on the desk beside me. I’m certain it wasn’t there a moment ago. It’s not truly black, though. It’s simply dead.

I guess this ends this, then. If you’re reading this, don’t take folklore for granted. There’s truth behind it. The Ghost of John, curious cats, everything. It’s one o’clock and there’s a knock at my front door. I’m curious, who could be calling at such a late hour?

I guess I’ll go check.

—
Credits to: photofreecreepypasta

Sewers

A laptop computer was found in the city sewers on Monday, April 22nd of 2013, after screams were heard echoing from below. As far as authorities could tell, there was no owner. All picture files on the hard drive were corrupted, and forensics failed to reconstruct all but one of them. The reconstructed photo partially revealed a terrified man in his late teens or early twenties, and some sort of face behind him.

Analysts have disputed whether or not that actually is another face, or simply image noise created as a result of the reconstruction of the photo. Apart from the single image, all that remained on the laptop was a cryptic word file left open, unsaved. Some see this as the suicide note of a deranged lunatic. Others see it as a prank. All that is known for sure is that over the past three months, there have been over twenty disappearances, all leaving no trace.

**********

I just hope I can finish this. I need to tell it. I can’t NOT tell it. But I don’t have time to finish it. And that’s what’s horrifying. Because, if I don’t tell, then it might get the rest. I HAVE to. I’m on very limited time, but I’m gonna be as detailed as possible. So it doesn’t get the rest. Please bear with me, please listen to me.

I guess it all started three months ago, when we found that secret room. The room in the sewers with the little trap door under the rug. When that happened, everything went wrong. But I’m getting ahead of myself, I have to tell the full truth. Or else it will get the rest.

I’m nineteen years old. Me and my three best friends have always been fond of the sewers. We would go down there and explore, at first using rope, then chalk signs, then nothing at all as we learned every twist, turn, and passage to the point where we could find our way around in pitch darkness, something we’ve had to do on at least three occasions when our flashlights died.

Now, what’s strange, is that we never found the room. It was when James asked to join us that the room was discovered. James was more of an acquaintance than a friend, but we often found him hanging out with us. We never told him about our excursions to the sewers; most people thought of that as strange. We had known James for probably six months before he overheard us speaking about the sewers.

Of course, he wanted to know what we were talking about. So we told him, about how we went down into the sewers every now and again to explore. He, of course, wanted to join our next expedition. We said it was fine, and we went early the next Saturday.

James wasn’t very good with darkness. We found that out the hard way. Or maybe it was the darkness coupled with claustrophobia. I don’t know. But, once we got into the deeper levels of darkness, where the daylight ceased to exist, and the tunnels became black, he began to hyperventilate.

At first, it was almost unnoticeable. His breathing got quicker, and he moved closer to me. Then, without warning, he began to breathe wildly, and he dropped his flashlight. It hit the ground and went out, and just like that, he was sprinting, sprinting and screaming for help, down the dark tunnels.

We chased after him. Following his screams, we started to lose all of our sense of direction. We went deeper than we thought possible. We thought we knew these tunnels. But there was one small niche, that we had never noticed before, that led into an even older series of tunnels. We had to crawl on our stomachs to get through it, and it opened into a tunnel not much bigger than that. We had to crouch down to the point of being on our hands and knees to traverse it.

It’s in those same sewers that I’m sitting now, with hundreds of white Christmas lights strung up around me, and stretching down the tunnel. These won’t last forever. The battery I’m running them off of can only keep them lit for a few hours. But they keep me comfortable, and serve as a warning. The thing can’t stand to be in light. It’s coming for me, I know it. But the lights will go out before it can get to me, so I’ll know.

I’m hiding here because this is the last place it will expect me to go. It’s looking for me. But it wouldn’t think that I would go into its sewers, its very back yard. I know that it will find me, and soon. But I just hope that this will prolong the inevitable. Long enough for me to get my story out. I’ve got my phone programmed to dial 911 in two hours. And I’ve got a camera, with night vision, ready to record when it shows up. So the cops will know, to stop it.

I just hope they can.

We eventually tracked down James, and he was sitting outside a big rusty door. It looked like it hadn’t been touched in years. Somehow we convinced ourselves to open it and oh my god I just wish we hadnt this crap would have NEVER HAPPENED IF NOT FOR THAT STUPID DOOR OH MY GOD IM GONNA DIE AND

I have to stop. Panicking won’t do anything to help me. I’m past help. Have I told you our names? There was me- Curt, and then James, Alan, Josh and Chris.

Writing down facts help me calm down. Just bear with me. I’m almost there.

We went in the door. That was a mistake. In the room, was an ancient chair, and a threadbare rug. Not much else, except a table full of disturbing instruments. And a calendar. The calendar was old and faded, and a dark yellow, but I could just barely make out dates in the faded ink.

The calendar was dated for 1903. Over a hundred years prior.

The table had what looked like torture tools set on it. I recognized a thumbscrew. Josh cut himself on some kind of twisted knife-hook-thing. Hammers and nails. I shudder thinking of what some of the other instruments were used for. There was what looked like the remains of a skeleton on another table in the corner of the room.

A rectangular table with Metal rings at each corner, and decayed ropes through those metal rings. I felt sick.
We decided then that we needed to get out, but Alan tripped over the rug and kicked it to the side. There was a trap door under it. Again, curiosity got the best of us, and we opened it, against James’s protests. It was pitch black down there. An old ladder led down, but that was it. We shined our lights in, and there were several things that might have once been human remains, but were now nearly dust.

At this point, something came over James. He climbed down the ladder into the hole, against our protests. After a moment, his light flickered and then died. Nothing but silence from down below. We were just beginning to panic when he casually walked into view.

He smiled up at us.

His eyes were just empty bleeding sockets.

We all just stood there in stunned silence, and then our lights wavered and flickered out. Mine flickered back on for a split second, and we saw some THING standing behind him. I don’t know what it was. Yes I do.

It was IT. The thing that’s been hunting me and my friends.

It looked very angry. It looked horrifying. It was dead blue skin and decomposing face. I could see its skull through its cheeks. It looked female. It had long decayed hair, and a bony frame. What looked like slashes in its dead cheeks, and gashes around its empty sockets. It was the most terrifying thing I’ve ever seen in my life. I think, that if I would have seen it for more than a split nanosecond, I would have gone insane. Gone insane or dropped dead.

The light lasted for a fraction of a second, a fraction of a second that has haunted me every minute of every day since then, and then everything was dark and James was screaming. I ran. Everyone else ran too, but I was the first. We scattered. Floundering in the dark, in the unknown. I don’t know how long I was down there. It felt like centuries.

Eventually, I made it to the surface. It was pitch dark in the dead of night. I remembered that we had gone in during the early morning hours.

I went home. It was four o’clock in the morning. All I remember is turning every light in the house on, blasting Looney Tunes on the TV, and then passing out.

The next day, I found out that only Alan and Chris had made it out the previous night. We went to the police and they organized a manhunt. Twenty people went into the sewers that night. Me, Alan, and Chris were not among them. We vowed to never step foot in those tunnels again. The manhunt never found that room.

We never told them about it. We agreed to tell them that we had found a section of sewer that we hadn’t explored before, and gotten separated and lost.

The search was unsuccessful. After a week, the police were forced to call it off. And the rest is history. Over the next several months, everyone who went into those sewers has disappeared, without a trace. Alan, Chris, gone. I’m the only one le

Oh fuck I think a light just went out. The darkness is coming, and I think I can see her or it whatever the fuck it is shit

Im the only one left you cant go into the sewers. They need to find the room and SHUT THE TRAPDOOR and SHUT THE OTHER DOOR so it cant get out

oh god the lights are going out oh shit oh fuck fuck look for my camera and shut the doors PLEASE YOU HAVE TO

**********
Police found a dropped camera deep within the sewage tunnels. No one has spoken about what footage is on the camera, and all to see the footage have committed suicide soon thereafter. Police are currently working with city records to conduct a coordinated search of the sewer system to find the location spoken of in the file….
**********

Detective Alexander Sherridan sits down in front of the television. He had requested a copy of the tape that has so disturbed anyone who has watched it, and now he has it. He feels apprehension building. Should he watch this? Some think it is cursed. However, Sherridan is not a superstitions man. He puts the tape in and presses play. A young man comes on the screen, the same from the picture. He is screaming, while behind him the lights are rapidly going out, moving in sequence towards him. What he is screaming is mostly incoherent, and what Sherridan is able to make out is simply more of the same of what he said in the word document– “close the doors.”

Suddenly the last lights flash out spectacularly, and there is a small glimpse of the laptop before the camera goes dark. What ensues are some of the most horrifying screams that Sherridan has ever heard, but he only barely registers these. He refuses to believe what he thinks he saw. To be sure, he rewinds the video, and plays it again. And again. And again.

Finally, he pauses it and goes forward frame by frame, until he sees the image he feared. Just as the lights flash for the final time, there is a woman grabbing the young man. Except he is not sure that she is a woman. It has no eyes. They look like they were gouged out at some point. There are slashes in her face, or what is left of its face. It is mostly decayed bone, with some skin stretching over it. The teeth are worn nubs. Sherridan averts his eyes. He can’t look at this thing anymore.

He notices at that moment, in the background, stand other things. People that have disappeared. All decaying. All with no eyes. They seem to be looking directly at him, accusingly almost. He tells himself that that is impossible, as they have no eyes. Then he notices motion.

The woman holding the young man pulls her face in some caricature of a smile. Then, she begins digging her fingers into his face. He begins screaming, as she literally rips his eyes out of his head. Sherridan runs forward and presses the power button on the TV. Nothing happens. The woman/thing continues to rip the eyes out of the man’s head, and Sherridan begins screaming with him, as he feels his sanity begin to slip. He rips the plug to the TV out of the wall.

Nothing happens. He retches as the thing pulls the remains of the eyes out, and begins pressing them into her own sockets. He turns and runs full force towards the wooden baseball bat mounted on the wall. He grabs it. He intends to destroy the TV. As he runs back towards the television, the he raises the bat. Just as he’s about to swing and destroy the screen, the thing winks at him with its new eyes.

Whatever vestiges of sanity that are left in Alexander Sherridan shatter at that moment. He drops the bat and stumbles backward into the next room. All he knows is that that thing knows where he is and how to get to him. And he knows that he doesn’t want that to happen.

As he presses the barrel of his police issue Glock into his temple, he vaguely recalls some urban legend or quote or something he’d heard somewhere about how if someone dies a violent death, their spirit stays there, angry, forever. “Fuck that,” he says out loud, before squeezing the trigger.

On the television screen, all that is seen is a terrified young man in a bright flash of light. Nothing more.

Credit To – Matt M. – read more of his work at http://mattmhorror.wordpress.com