A History of Violence

The green pills were vitamin supplements, which were important because they didn’t get to go outside for exercise and sunshine. The white ones made them calm, and the blue helped them sleep.

Katie hated it there—the bolted-down beds, unopenable windows, cafeteria food. The worst was “Sharing.” They all told their stories, basically the same, brimming with violence.

"Remembering engenders rehabilitation," the doctors said.

Whatever.

Her parents were clueless. “Frustration is normal…blah…blah…right trajectory…blah…blah…blah…stay on course….” That was her dad.

“I hope you appreciate how fortunate you are to be here,” her mom would say. “Things could’ve gone very differently.”

One day, Katie overheard her mother’s voice, just before the door clicked shut.

"If I’d known this would happen, I would’ve aborted her."

Astonished, Katie decided to investigate. That night, she pretended to take her meds, then spat the bitter red pills into the toilet. She feigned sleep until last check, then slipped into the hallway. It was her lucky night; everyone was asleep. She went to the computers, finding one unlocked. She read the words on the screen.

Spaceship New Mayflower
Final Log, 1/4/2224

All fuel supplies are exhausted. Our destination is unreachable. Earth remains uninhabitable.

We, the passengers of the only remaining Earth Escape Vessel, have voted unanimously to enact Protocol RED999: Every person aboard has ingested euthanasia pills. We’ve done this for our children, without their knowledge, to spare them agonizing deaths and to allow them to die as they lived, with hope in their hearts. Humankind ends thus, with love and dignity.

Katie looked out the window into the blackness of space and tried to remember if she’d flushed the toilet.

—
Credits to: photofreecreepypasta

I Found Something Living In My Attic

Three weeks ago my fiancé, Jenny, and I moved into a beautiful old home in the outer suburbs of Boston. Jenny and I met ten years ago at Boston College and have stuck together as I toiled through medical school and she supported the two of us with her job as a paralegal. I bought this old house to celebrate finishing my residency and as a way to thank Jenny for working so hard to provide for us while I chased my dream of becoming a doctor. The house is more than one hundred years old, has been sitting empty for more than ten years, and needs a lot of work. I probably paid more than I should have for a house needing so much extra work, but I could imagine Jenny and I raising a family and living here for the rest of our lives. Well, that changed soon after we moved in and I found something terrible living in our attic.

The first few days in our new home passed in a blur as we coordinated furniture deliveries, stocked the house with food, and planned for future renovations. By the fifth night the high of moving into our new home had worn off. Only then did I begin to notice signs of habitation in the supposedly vacant house. On the fifth night Jenny and I fell asleep after an exhausting evening of unpacking and moving furniture around. I awoke in the middle of the night with a full bladder and groggily shuffled towards the bathroom to relieve myself. I stopped dead in my tracks only a few steps from the bathroom. Faint moans floated through the vents in the ceiling and I could have sworn that I heard the distinct sound of chains rattling from above. I quickly entered the bathroom and splashed cold water onto my face before stepping up onto the toilet and placing my ear up to the ceiling. I strained to my neck closer to the vent when all of the sudden the bathroom light flashed on. I fell from my perch and landed hard my side.

“What the hell are you doing?” Jenny said, stifling a laugh as she helped me up.

“I heard something up there.” I muttered sheepishly. Looking up I saw a crooked grin on her face and said indignantly, “Whatever, I need to piss.”

She laughed and headed back to the bedroom while I emptied my bladder. As I flushed the toilet I could have sworn I heard heavy breathing floating down through the vent. I shook my head and told myself that I needed to get back to sleep. I had a ten hour shift at the hospital the next day but promised myself that I would thoroughly search the attic on my day off later in the week.

The next few days passed uneventfully as I focused on work. I eventually convinced myself that the noises I had heard were common to old houses and that creepy noises are what I signed up for when I bought the house. On my day off I puttered around the house trying to make some headway on the long list of home improvements. I hoped to cross a few of the easier tasks off the list before Jenny got home from work. After fixing the window in the kitchen I moved upstairs to start working on the leaky faucet. However, I remembered that I had promised myself that I would check out the attic. Forget the noises I had heard earlier in the week; innocent curiosity got the better of me.

Unfortunately someone had sealed the ceiling trap door leading to the attic. I fetched a stepladder, flathead screwdriver, and attempted to pry the door free from whatever held it. The trap door refused to give, and I slammed my palm against the ceiling in frustration. At that moment I heard definite movement above my head as well as the soft clink of metal against metal. The movement continued for a few moments and then stopped. I beat my fist against the ceiling to try to arouse another reaction, but none came. I figured that there must be a raccoon or some other sort of large vermin stuck in the attic, and it sounded like it was caught in some sort of trap. I decided to head over to the hardware store to pick up a crowbar so that I could get the animal out before it died and stunk up the house.

As I pulled back into the driveway I saw Jenny’s car parked in the garage. I headed into the house, crowbar in hand, excited to prove that I was right about something living in the attic. I couldn’t find Jenny on the first floor so I headed upstairs. As I neared the top of the staircase I noticed that the attic trapdoor was open. I called out for Jenny as I approached the ladder but received no response. My heart raced as called out for Jenny to stop playing around. I mounted the ladder, crowbar in hand, and began to climb. A sickening stench met me halfway up the ladder and I struggled to maintain my composure.

My head cleared the top of the ladder and I nearly lost my grip on the ladder as my eyes took in the horror before me. Human heads in varying states of decomposition adorned the slanted walls of the attic. The only source of light came from a small, open window. A slight movement in the corner of the room pulled me back to the present situation. Find Jenny. I moved towards the corner, my right hand tightly gripping the crowbar, and found Jenny lying on an old bloodstained table. She was unconscious with a head wound and it appeared as though something had been gnawing on her foot. Suddenly the trapdoor slammed shut behind me and I heard the metallic click of a lock sliding into place.

A large, dark figure emerged from the opposite side of the attic. In his hands he held a heavy chain, at the end of which was a small emaciated dog. They slowly crept forwards and I realized, to my horror, that it was not a dog at the end of a chain but an old man crawling on all fours. There wasn’t any dramatic showdown that you usually see in the movies. There wasn’t time for that.

The next few moments passed in a blur as is typical when a person is forced into a fight or flight situation. Obviously I wasn’t going to leave Jenny behind, so I immediately charged the gruesome duo with the crowbar raised high above my head. I quickly closed the distance between us and brought the crowbar down upon the crown of the man with a sickening crunch. The large man toppled to the round and the old man scurried back into a dark corner, dragging the chain behind him. I unlocked the trapdoor and half carried half dragged Jenny out of the attic and down onto the second floor after which I immediately called the police.

I have been awake for the past 24 hours and am sitting in the hospital next to Jenny right now. The doctors tell me that she will likely be released tomorrow. Her wounds were mostly superficial; a nasty gash on her head and some skin torn off her foot. Thankfully she doesn’t remember much due to the blow she took to the head. A detective interviewed both of us a few hours ago. The whole situation is sickening. The large figure I had struck in the head was dead, thank God. Police have not been able to identify the man. He had no identification and his fingerprints did not show up in the system. The old man in chains was the previous owner of the home, who along with his entire family had disappeared fourteen years earlier. The detective’s working theory is that the large man had killed the family living in the house fourteen years ago and moved into the house, keeping the old man as a pet.

There is no way in hell that Jenny and I are moving back into that house. I plan to call my lawyer in the morning and make plans for declaring bankruptcy. We will be moving back to Boston as soon as Jenny is released from the hospital. Our suburban experiment has come to an abrupt and terrifying end. Whether we buy or rent next I can say for sure that it will be brand new. No hidden surprises.

—
Credits to: photofreecreepypasta

Odd Purchases

I have an odd gift that I’ve never been able to explain, but it’s helped a lot of people, so I don’t complain. Too much.

The very first time it happened, it was a cup of coffee. I don’t drink coffee. Hate the stuff. But in my dorm room, I had the urge to go to the student center and order a cup of coffee. I distinctly remember telling the barista, “Whatever. Just as hot as you can make it.” A few minutes later, as I was walking back to my dorm room, I heard a scream. A woman, someone from my dorm, in fact, was being attacked. I took the lid off of the cup of coffee and threw it in her assailant’s face. His face was horribly burned; my hand got some of the coffee on it, too. I still have a surprisingly wicked scar to this day.

Whenever I feel the urge to make one of these purchases, I always use it within about ten minutes. I always save someone in the action. Either a prevented rape, or an abduction, or a murder… But there’s always a cost. I’m injured in the process. Every time. Nothing terrible yet, just a burn or splinters… the worst injury I’ve gotten so far was a deep cut from a glass dinner plate, bought at Wal-Mart, I used to slit a kidnapper’s throat. My wound needed stitches.

But today, I as stand in this liquor store in this sketchy neighborhood and buy a corkscrew, I can’t help but wonder who I’m going to help and how it’s going to hurt me this time.

—
Credits to: photofreecreepypasta

Fatigue

Exhaustion is my constant companion. Every single day, I am forced to grip the wires, as they bite greedily into the flesh of my palm, leaving a pearly tapestry of scars. Gloves don’t help any, as they leave the wires slippery, hard to tame. I bend my back to the point of breaking, as every fiber of my being wails in agony.

If it were just the physical exertion, that would be fine. I can ignore the fatigue turning my limbs to jelly. But no, in this line of work, the true killer is the complaining. Every person I help wants something more, demands a different level of service. They insist they could do better, in my position. It never bothered me at first, all of their complaints. I let it wash off my back, and held the wires sturdy. But, as long as I’ve been in this position, a fog of fatigue has blanketed my mind. The little nagging voices have crept in, doubt crippling my every action.

Yet, still, I do my job. Though those I help are ungrateful. However, I’m starting to worry. You see, along with fatigue came something else.

Apathy.

I’ve forgotten why I cared to hold the wires, in the first place. I remember when I first made the conscious decision to let one wire just … slip. To lighten the load.

Below me, the world cried out in terror as the Earth shuddered in it’s place in the universe. I felt a dull sense of guilt, but I’ve come to my decision.

It’s time to let go.

I am a tired God.

—
Credits to: photofreecreepypasta

I Hate My Students

I know that’s a horrible thing to say, but it’s true. My class is a teacher’s worst nightmare, because my students are IMPOSSIBLE to control.

They scream at me and spit in my face. They hurl insults at me and laugh cruelly if they see that they struck a nerve. They even get violent sometimes, pulling my hair and knocking me to the ground, where they pin me down and describe in great detail all of the awful, inhumane ways they’d love to kill me.

It’s absolutely terrible.

But I still work up the courage to go back to what is left of that burned, abandoned school building every year. It’s the least I could do for them after the tragedy they underwent years ago.

I sometimes bitterly think it’s the electrician who should be coming to pay this debt every year on the anniversary of that sad day, taking the abuse that these kids yearn to inflict on the cause of their agonizing deaths. After all, his faulty wiring is what caused the fire.

But, then…

I remember how angry I had been when, after I’d smelled the smoke and tried to tell the class what was happening, my voice couldn’t be heard over the incessant talking and obnoxious giggling.

They’d never shown me any respect during lessons, deciding early on that nothing I had to say was deserving of their attention. And now they were so used to ignoring me that they hadn’t even heard my panicked warning.

Of course it was frustrating. But as my students harshly remind me, with their charred and melted faces twisted in fury, I was an absolute bitch for leaving them to discover the danger on their own.

And especially for locking the door on my way out.

—
Credits to: photofreecreepypasta

I Shouldn’t Have Said Yes

I died yesterday. I know I did. I know I did… I was walking across the street when suddenly a horn started blasting out of nowhere. The next thing I knew, I was laying on my back staring up into a cloudy sky. All the noises around me began to fade and soon enough, I was enveloped in calm silence. It was almost peaceful. I could feel a surge of warmth and, right as I closed my eyes for what I knew would be the last time, I heard a voice as clear as day. It resonated in that silence as it said, “Remember our deal.”

So, you see, I know I died. I know that the events that caused my death yesterday actually happened. I know they did because, when I woke up this morning alone in my bed, I felt as though I had been hit by a truck. I looked over my battered body. I had lumps and bruises and cuts that I knew were the result of the accident that killed me. Yet, here I am. Alive, breathing. I checked the online news and there’s a report of an “unidentifiable man” being struck and killed by a truck yesterday. It was me. It had to have been me. I stood up in a daze and shuffled into my bathroom. Flipping on the light, I saw a piece of tattered paper taped to my bathroom mirror. It was singed along the edges and written in what appeared to be scratches. A blackened, burned series of scratches which somehow were legible enough for me to decipher. The scratches read, “Another day for fun. You are mine. We’ve just begun.”

I know what this is. I can’t believe this is actually happening. I didn’t think anything of it when I made the deal. As an atheist, I thought the joke would be on them. My wife died in childbirth. She had just delivered my little girl when a nurse approached me. She looked… She looked like a shadow. A shadow with hints of features when in the light, but as soon as the light shifted and darkness returned, the features disappeared and a grey mist was all that remained. She asked me if I wanted my daughter to live. My daughter was premature and in critical condition. Her words jerked me away from the edge of becoming completely catatonic and I yelled out, “Absolutely, yes! Of course!” She told me I would have to make a trade. My soul for my daughter’s life. I didn’t hesitate. I didn’t even think. I just kept saying “yes,yes” over and over to her. She told me my daughter would never know me. That she would be given to a family with a mother to care for her. That I wouldn’t be enough and didn’t know enough to care for her by myself. I didn’t understand. This was my child, but if I didn’t agree, there would be no child. I had to agree. I had to say yes.

Now my soul isn’t mine anymore. It has become some kind of toy for something I never even believed to truly exist to play with as it pleases. As I realized what was happening, I became more and more depressed. I just tried to kill myself. I went up to the roof of my building, ten stories up, and with tears in my eyes, I jumped off the ledge.

Yet, here I am. Again. In my bed, more sore than I was before. I can see another note on my bathroom mirror. I don’t need to read it. I already know what it says…

—
Credits to: photofreecreepypasta

Breakfast in Bed

It’s a Saturday morning, just like any other. My father and I are sitting side by side at the kitchen table in our apartment, eating breakfast. Coffee for him, juice for me. Toast for him, cereal for me. It’s still early, but the sun is already high in the sky, illuminating my father’s newspaper with muted rays of light as he reads today’s business section. As usual, we eat quietly, our silence broken only by the small clinks of glassware and the rustling of paper as my father turns the pages of The New York Times.

I get up to pour myself another cup of juice, and my father watches me over the metal frames of his glasses.

“Sleep okay?”

“Yeah, but I’m still kind of tired,” I reply, grabbing the O.J. from the refrigerator. “Did you?”

“Not bad,” says my father, stretching in his seat. His hair is all messed up, matted down in the front and sticking up wildly at the crown of his head. His upper lip is slick with Vick’s Vapo-Rub. “But your mother was tossing and turning all night. She’s still not feeling well.”

“That’s too bad. Is she still asleep?”

“Not sure. Why don’t you go check?”

I tip-toe to the other side of the house, knowing better than to be loud. My father gets mad if I wake her up too early.

Slowly, I open the door to my parents’ bedroom, willing it not to creak. It’s dark in there, the shutters closed and the blinds tightly drawn over all the windows. I wait a few moments, listening for any sounds of movement. I don’t hear anything, apart from the hum of the dehumidifier and the slight puff of the plug-in air freshener. A heady wave of pine scent washes over me.

“Mom?” I whisper, but there’s no answer. She must be asleep.

I shut the door quietly and shuffle back to the kitchen, my slippers scuffing against the carpet.

My mother’s not well. She hasn’t left the bed in almost a year, not since she got pneumonia last winter. But my father and I take good care of her. Our medicine cabinet is as well-stocked as any pharmacy, and every other night my father gives her a sponge bath. During the day, we roll the TV into the bedroom so she can catch up on her soaps.

“I’m the luckiest woman in the world,” she always tells us. “Two handsome men to wait on me hand and foot.”

Back in the kitchen, my father is finishing his last slice of toast.

“How is she?” he asks. His voice is casual, but I know he worries about her. My parents have been married for 19 years, going on 20 this May. If she’s better by then, my father’s going to surprise her with a trip to France.

“Sleeping,” I say. I clear the dishes without asking, like I’ve been taught.

“Well, we might want to wake her up soon. Can’t forget about her antibiotic…” My father furrows his brow, probably calculating dosages in his head. “Hey, why don’t we bring her breakfast in bed?”

“I think she’d like that.” I put a scoop of decaf in the coffee maker and open the fridge, surveying its somewhat meager contents. Ever since Mom got sick, my father has done all the grocery shopping. I don’t think he’ll ever get the hang of it.

“I’ll make some eggs,” I say finally, grabbing two big ones from their cardboard nests. “Why don’t you make a couple pieces of toast?”

“All right,” says my father, putting down his newspaper. “Hey, did you know that the Jets won last night?”

I groan. “Not again!”

My father and I watch football together a lot. My mother has no interest in any of it- she calls it “male bonding time.” Which I guess it is.

Once the food is ready, I arrange it all pretty on a wooden tea tray. I even pluck a flower from the planter outside and stick it in a small glass vase. It’s a purple pansy, my mother’s favorite color.

“Just like room service!” my father says, squeezing my shoulder. It makes him happy when I do little things like this for Mom. “We can bring it to her together.”

The breakfast tray balanced on one hand, I open my parent’s bedroom door for the second time. Mom’s still asleep, the covers piled high over her still form.

As I set the tray down on the bedside table, my father opens the blinds halfway, letting some light enter the room. He plugs in another air freshener, this one floral. I gingerly sit down on the edge of the bed and slide an arm under the covers, feeling for my mother’s hand. The sheets are slightly damp. Despite the blankets covering her, my mother’s fingers are cool- another symptom of her illness, my father says. I squeeze them gently, but she doesn’t lift her head from the pillow. Her eyes are closed, and I can almost see them flickering back and forth beneath the lids. It’s a sign of REM sleep, which we learned about in school last week. I wonder what she’s dreaming about.

“I feel bad waking her up, Dad,” I say, smoothing a lock of hair from her forehead. There’s a small bubble of dark liquid at the corner of her mouth, and I wipe it away. “She looks so peaceful.” And she does. She’s still beautiful, even though the sickness has made her skin as pale and fragile as parchment. Every night my father rubs a special cream on her arms and legs to help the circulation.

My father sits down gently at the foot of the bed. “You’re right,” he says, his eyes never leaving her face. “We’ll let her sleep a while longer. We can leave the food as a surprise when she wakes up.”

His hand clenches involuntarily at the covers, and I immediately know what he’s thinking. He’s been under a lot of stress at work lately, and Mom’s condition isn’t helping. She’s been waking up later and later each day, and I know he must be worried. Sometimes he shuts himself in their room for hours while she’s sleeping, just watching her.

“It’s okay, Dad,” I say, reaching over to touch his hand. “You said yourself that she was restless last night. She’s probably just tired.”

My father is quiet for a while. “You’re right,” he says finally, standing up. “She needs all the rest she can get.”

He pulls the covers up around her chin, and a familiar yeasty odor fills the air, like the smell of slightly spoiled bread.

“Did you bathe her last night?” I ask, and immediately regret it. An annoyed expression briefly flickers across my father’s face.

“Of course I bathed her.”

“Just making sure,” I say quietly.

There’s this sore on her tailbone that just won’t heal, no matter how many times we dress it. I worry that it’s because she’s been in bed for so long. Sometimes it leaks white stuff, and we have to change the sheets.

My father closes the blinds again and we silently leave the room, leaving the tray of food behind. I worry that it’ll be cold when she wakes up.

The morning goes on as usual. My father washes the dishes, and I do a load of laundry. I begin working on my history presentation that’s due on Monday. Around noon, my father wheels the TV into my mother’s room, and soon I hear the familiar opening credits of Days of Our Lives. When he comes back out, he’s holding the now-empty breakfast tray.

“Your mother wants me to tell you that breakfast was delicious,” he says with a smile. “Especially the eggs.”

“Good,” I say, relieved that her appetite is back. “How is she feeling?”

“She’s doing okay,” he replies. “But she’s still exhausted. She’s asked us not to bother her for the rest of the afternoon.”

“Okay,” I say. This isn’t unusual. My mother needs a lot of sleep, probably more than the both of us combined.

It’s almost three o’clock when someone knocks on the door.

My father looks at me. “Are you expecting anyone?”

“No,” I say. You never let me have anyone over, I bite back the urge to add. Not since Mom got sick.

My father hesitates a moment, and then gets up to look through the peephole. Something visibly changes in his posture. Slowly, he opens the door.

“Adams residence?” Standing on our doorstep are two policemen, fully uniformed.

“Yes,” says my father, his face unreadable. I am suddenly aware of my father’s shabby appearance, how he’s still in pajamas even though it’s the middle of the afternoon. How his too-short pants expose his knobby ankles.

“I’m Officer Gibbs, and this is Officer Handel,” says the shorter policeman, stepping forward slightly. His belly bulges over his belt, and a gun glints at his right hip.

“How can I help you?” asks my father. One of his hands is fiddling with the closure on his bathrobe, and I wonder if he’s aware that he’s doing it.

This time Officer Handel speaks. “Well, Mr. Adams, this is just a routine visit,” he says, and I follow his eyes as they sweep around the interior of our kitchen. “To put it bluntly, your landlord has received some complaints from other tenants about a strange odor coming from your apartment. And despite informing you about it on several occasions, nothing has changed. I know it’s a hassle, but in the state of New York it’s protocol to send in an investigator when multiple complaints have been filed. Just to make sure everything’s in accordance with code.” He looks at us expectantly.

“Of course,” says my father, his face contorting into something resembling a smile. “Come inside.”

Officer Gibbs’s nose wrinkles up as he steps inside our kitchen, but I can’t smell anything.

“So, it’s just the two of you then?” asks Officer Handel.

“No,” I pipe up, and my father gives me a hard look. I shut my mouth.

“My wife is in the bedroom,” my father says finally. “She’s been sick for a while. Please don’t disturb her.”

The policemen exchange a glance.

“Well, Mr. Adams, we’re going to have a look around, if you don’t mind,” says Officer Gibbs. He has a thick mustache, like cops in the movies.

My father nods and takes a seat at the kitchen table. He opens the newspaper as if to read it, but his eyes are staring off into space.

I trail behind as the officers make their way through our apartment. They’re meticulous, opening every door and peering under every piece of furniture. Officer Gibbs even looks inside our refrigerator and washing machine.

Now they’re in the living room. Officer Handel looks uncomfortable. His face is screwed up and his eyes are watering when he turns to ask me, “Is your mother in there?” He points to the closed door of my parents’ room, the faint sounds of the television emanating from within. I nod.

“Please stand back, son,” says Officer Gibbs. He unclips his radio from his belt and mutters something unintelligible into it.

I watch as Officer Handel slowly opens the door, his right hand hovering above the gun within its holster.

The bedroom is dark, the only source of light the faint glow from the television. Days of Our Lives is playing again, a rerun. I can make out the lumpy shape of my mother in her bed, swaddled in blankets like a baby. Dangling from the ceiling is a mobile of air fresheners, the kind you hang from your rearview mirror. Little green trees. One of the policemen makes a stifled gagging sound.

I hover in the doorway, watching as the two officers approach the bed. Their boots are loud even on the carpet, and I want to tell them to be quiet. They’ll wake her up if they’re not careful.

They’re at her bedside now, and my eyes have adjusted to the dim lighting enough that I can see that my mother is almost completely buried beneath the covers, only a coil of hair protruding onto the pillow. A single pale hand dangles off the edge of the bed, her wedding band visible on the ring finger. There’s that smell again, this time almost cloying.

I glance behind me. In the kitchen, my father is still seated at the table, his head in his hands. Somewhere in the distance, I hear sirens.

Slowly, Officer Gibbs pulls aside the blankets.

“Oh, Jesus,” says Officer Handel, the color draining from his face. “Oh, Jesus… it’s been months.”

And I step forward, unable to stay quiet any longer.

“Please, don’t wake her,” I say. “Please. She needs her rest.”

—
Credits to: photofreecreepypasta

The Light in the Window

I’m a very nocturnal person. I tend to stay up until very late just browsing the internet or playing games on Steam. Last night, at around 4 AM, something weird happened.

I own a desktop PC that is located underneath my desk. I also own a pair of speakers which are slightly old and don’t always work properly. Sometimes they stop working and I have to plug them out and plug them back in. It is a tedious an annoying task because you can’t see anything at night underneath my desk. Thus, I have a flashlight always handy with me.

Anyways, this happened last night and I did the usual routine. When I was done, I pointed my flashlight at the window (which is to the left of my desk, just a meter away) and started fidgeting with it. I am a nervous person and I was waiting for my speakers to start working again, so I was just playing with my flashlight turning it on and off. That’s when I noticed something.

Right in front of my building there was a light being turned on and off in a similar fashion from the apartment building across the street. I live in the second floor of a big apartment building, so I wasn’t really freaked out at first. Just in case, though, I stopped fidgeting with my flashlight. The light stopped. Seemed like the reflection from my flashlight was just playing tricks on me right? No. It flashes a couple times and stops. I do the same. Then it answers by mimicking the same flashes from before.

Let me just say, it’s 4 AM. This is pretty fucking weird and I want nothing to do with it. So, I closed the blinds and went to sleep. I wasn’t scared but I was a little freaked out that there was someone in front of me with such a weird schedule. The other weird thing is that the lights from that apartment are always turned off…

Anyways, here comes the real eerie part. I met up with some friends earlier and on my way back I decided to check out who lives there. So, I went to the base of the apartment building and looked at the names on the intercom. No name listed at all. Now it’s getting pretty late and I can see a light flashing from the same apartment trying to catch my attention. I don’t know what to do. Is it dangerous to respond? Someone help.

—
Credits to: photofreecreepypasta

My Parents Never Believed Me

My parents never believed me when I was 2, when I would wake them in a state of hysteria, trembling and covered in sweat. Instead, they put me back to bed.

My parents never believed me when I was 5, when I would frantically try to explain the incomprehensible noises I heard coming from underneath my floor. Instead, they told me it was the sound of the floorboards shifting with the wind.

My parents never believed me when I was 7, when I relayed to them the messages the voices would say to me. Instead, they told me I just needed some more sleep.

My parents never believed me when I was 9, when I would wake up with cuts on my arms and legs and chunks of hair pulled out of my head. Instead, they told me it was something I merely did in my sleep.

My parents never believed me when I was 12, when I made eye contact with a grinning creature in my doorway, never breaking it for what seemed like hours until he slowly shut my door. Instead, they told me it was my imagination.

I never believed my parents when I was 15, when their screams pierced the air like knives, turning from terror into pain. Instead, I told myself it was only the wind. Perhaps my imagination. Maybe I just needed more sleep?

Thinking back, I only remember one thing: I was smiling.

—
Credits to: photofreecreepypasta

People in the Basement

Excuse the formatting, I am typing quickly on mobile. I have to be quick, I need to sleep before the night comes.

My mother is schizophrenic, and when she used to come see me at my grandmother’s house, she would hear voices in the vents; she saw people in the basement.

This happened when I was younger, maybe 10 years ago. Anyway, lately as I have been staying with my grandmother more often, I have been hearing things at night. I need to tell someone about this. In case I do not survive the my investigation I am planning for tonight. The voices from the vents have been getting louder.

I cannot sleep at night, I stay up till the sun rises. I can hear them, and I am afraid soon I will see them. I am beginning to think my mother wasn’t being as crazy as it seemed.

Under the staircase downstairs, there is a closet, one with one of those chain locks so you can lock it from the outside. I have asked my grandma about it and she said it had been there since she moved in. The voices seem to come from there.

Tonight I will be investigating. I will go to the basement, perhaps the voices will be more than just a droning, maybe they will tell me something.

Will update tomorrow, wish me luck.

—
Credits to: photofreecreepypasta

Curtains

Now, this is not going to be a particularly scary story, but it is very unsettling, I think. Here’s what happened.

When I was six, I used to spend a lot of time at my grandparents’. They moved around quite a bit- money issues, I’m sure. During this time they were living in an extension of another family member’s house. I wasn’t related to the family that owned the house, so I don’t remember much about them. I do remember one of the members was a very old man who was always in bed, hooked up to an oxygen tank. But that’s all.

So, the way the house was set up, the section that my grandparents inhabited didn’t have a bathroom. We had to walk through the rest of the house to get to it. Normally, my youngest aunt, Maya, would walk me to the bathroom. I don’t remember why, exactly, but I figure it’s because I was a ‘fraidy cat and couldn’t do anything on my own.

Anyway, on this one particular night, I had to use bathroom, so I asked Maya to take me. The kitchen was on the way, and she stopped to chat with someone who was cooking. I really had to go and started to bug her to hurry with her conversation, but she insisted I go on my own, saying she’d be right where she was when I returned. So I went alone. Everything was fine and dandy until mid pee.

That’s when I heard it. A whisper from behind the shower curtains.

They were closed and I couldn’t see anything, but I will never, never forget what was said to me. “Whiiite snooow.” It made no sense whatsoever. Not to me at least. It didn’t have to, I was outta there faster than I could pull my pants on. Not much happened after the incident.

Needless to say, no one believed me. Everyone I told tried to convince me I’d just heard someone’s tv through the bathroom wall, or that someone was hiding in the shower, playing a prank on me. Grown ups, right? Idiots.

Time passed and I tried to convince myself it was only in my head; that I imagined it and shouldn’t be afraid. But I have a very, very active and terrifying imagination, so I never used the bathroom with a shower curtain closed ever again. Ever. Not only did the curtain have to be drawn, I’d also twist it and make it so thin nothing and no one would be able to hide behind it. I did this for years. Eighteen years to be exact. Which brings us to yesterday.

I live on my own now. It’s only been about 5 months that I’ve had my own place, but I honestly can’t imagine it any other way. I love my solitude and freedom so damn much, there is no time to be lonely or afraid.

Yesterday, I had some errands to run. They were going to take a couple of hours, so I used the bathroom right before I left, twisting the curtain to its usual noodle shape. I left it that way, as I normally do. My mom used to scold me and say I was wrinkling her curtain, but this was my curtain and I didn’t give a damn if it was wrinkled. So I left to do my adulty-deeds.

I returned about two hours later, feeling lazy and wanting to watch American Dad in bed, so that’s what I did. Because I am a grown up. About two hours and two glasses of Sprite later, I had to use the bathroom.

Now, you can imagine my surprise (and loss of bladder control) when I walked into my bathroom, flicked on the light and saw my shower curtain had been pulled closed.

—
Credits to: photofreecreepypasta

The Terrifying Truth

My mother grew up in a coal-mining town. That sounds like a bad opening line to a country song but it’s true. She’s one of the reasons I love to tell stories; I grew up listening to hers. My mother has a lot of stories. I hope I tell this one right.

Did you know in some mining towns, they build houses over the mines? Then they strip the mine clean, dig out everything of any value, and move on. Years go by and the mines collapse. The houses on top of the mines, they crumble like sandcastles into the gaping hole in the earth.

Anyway. Just trying to set the stage.

My mother lived at the bottom of a big hill in this coal-mining town. She had a nice house and a large grassy yard to play in. Her father worked at the steel mill and her mother was a homemaker. She had three sisters and two brothers.

Summers were the best, she says. She’d spend all day out in the yard, playing with her sisters, making up stories and games until the light got low and the fireflies came out. Then her mother would call them in, they’d have dinner, and she’d go to bed.

She liked to keep her window open because it got so hot at night. Not all the way, just enough to let the summer breeze float through and keep her cool.

In this story, my mother was 6 years old, and one night when she woke up, there was a face in the window.

It was one of those things, she says, where you’re not awake and then suddenly you are, your eyes wide open and staring. Maybe it’s some leftover bit of instinct from our days as cavemen, something to protect early man from predators. Whatever it is, it hit her hard that night, and for good reason.

A man stood at her window, his eyes huge and glassy in his pale, gaunt head. He was wearing what she said looked like loose white pajamas. He stared at her, and she stared back.

My mother was too afraid to scream. She said her throat just closed up and she couldn’t move, couldn’t run. Her sister, asleep in the bed beside her, went on sleeping.

After a few long, horrible minutes, the man simply turned and walked away.

She began crying then and her sister woke up. When she asked what was wrong, my mother told her she’d seen a ghostie. Her sister told her she was being stupid and went back to sleep.

The next morning, in the light of day, my mother thought maybe she was being stupid. Ghosties weren’t real. Maybe it was just a bad dream.

But the next night, there was another one.

This time it was a lady. My mother heard tapping and when she looked, a lady in a baggy white dress was staring at her, drumming her fingers lightly against the glass of the window. There were tears running down her face.

“Hello, darling,” the lady said, and my mother began to cry. She said the lady looked sad, but she didn’t leave and she kept tapping.

“Poor darling,” the lady murmured. “Would you like to come with me, little darling?”

My mother shook her head. She began crying and hoped the sound would wake her sister, but it didn’t.

Still too scared to jump out of bed like she should have, my mother instead pulled the blankets up over her eyes. It was better not to see the lady. She was fairly sure ghosties couldn’t come inside, couldn’t get her under the blanket, but a child’s logic is rarely sound.

The tapping went on for what seemed like forever but finally it stopped, and when my mother looked again, the lady was gone.

The next morning, she tried to tell her older brother. She said there were ghosties outside her window, two nights in a row now. He said she should probably shut the window because ghosties ate little girls. Her brother wasn’t a very nice boy, and he’s not a very nice man either.

The week went on like that, the longest week of summer my mother can remember. Every night, a new ghostie outside her window. Sometimes they looked, sometimes they tapped, sometimes they passed by without even giving her a second glance. She began to think that perhaps their house at the bottom of the hill was on the way to heaven; the ghosties of people who’d died were just following their path home.

Her siblings didn’t believe her. She was fairly certain her parents wouldn’t, either, so she didn’t even try. Instead, she decided to be nice to the ghosties, because they were probably scared after dying and she wanted them to know they’d be okay soon, they’d be in heaven. One night when she saw an old man in a white coat with funny arms, she waved. He waved back and smiled, and that made her feel good.

They weren’t ghosties. I’m sure you know that by now.

My mother learned this when she and her sisters were playing in the yard on a fiercely hot day in July. The sun was up, and ghosties couldn’t come out in the sun, so my mother was surprised when she saw one walking down the hill towards their house.

He was a younger man, pale with dark circles under his eyes – it seemed all the ghosties had dark circles under their eyes – wearing those funny white pajamas. He walked with a slow staggering gait like a sleepwalker.

The girls stopped jumping rope and watched as the man came closer. He walked right up to them, his eyes glassy and dazed, and when he spoke his voice was cracked at the edges.

“Which way to Peoria?” he asked weakly.

Peoria was the nearest big city, the best place to get a job if you weren’t a coal miner, and my mother knew where it was. She pointed to the road that headed out of town just past their little house on the hill.

“Thanks,” he said, and continued on, his bare feet shuffling through the sunbaked grass.

As soon as the man was gone her sisters ran inside, screaming for their mother.

Her mother called their father, and their father called the police. The house was filled with hushed whispers for the next few days, and no matter how hard she tried my own mother wouldn’t be told what was happening. The adults simply told her it was nothing, everything was fine, and her sisters said they didn’t want to scare her.

But her brother did. I told you, he’s not a very nice man.

Her brother told her that at the top of the hill, the one above their house, was an insane asylum. The biggest one in the state. Over the past week or so, there’d been a breach in security. One of the many tunnels that ran from the asylum to the nearby buildings, the ones they used in winter when the snow piled up, someone left a door unlocked. Just went outside to smoke a cigarette, probably, and forgot all about it.

Word spread fast.

Some of the patients, the ones lucid enough to tongue their meds into their cheek and avoid electroshock therapy, they waited until the time was right. At night, when the nurses weren’t watching. They left their cells, snuck into the tunnels, and escaped.

The quickest way out, the best place not to be found, was Peoria. At the bottom of the hill.

My mother has a lot of stories. This is just the one she can only tell in the daylight.

By M.J. Pack

The Hound

In my tortured ears there sounds unceasingly a nightmare whirring and flapping, and a faint distant baying as of some gigantic hound. It is not dream - it is not, I fear, even madness - for too much has already happened to give me these merciful doubts.

St John is a mangled corpse; I alone know why, and such is my knowledge that I am about to blow out my brains for fear I shall be mangled in the same way. Down unlit and illimitable corridors of eldritch phantasy sweeps the black, shapeless Nemesis that drives me to self-annihilation.

May heaven forgive the folly and morbidity which led us both to so monstrous a fate! Wearied with the commonplaces of a prosaic world; where even the joys of romance and adventure soon grow stale, St John and I had followed enthusiastically every aesthetic and intellectual movement which promised respite from our devastating ennui. The enigmas of the symbolists and the ecstasies of the pre-Raphaelites all were ours in their time, but each new mood was drained too soon, of its diverting novelty and appeal.

Only the somber philosophy of the decadents could help us, and this we found potent only by increasing gradually the depth and diablism of our penetrations. Baudelaire and Huysmans were soon exhausted of thrills, till finally there remained for us only the more direct stimuli of unnatural personal experiences and adventures. It was this frightful emotional need which led us eventually to that detestable course which even in my present fear I mention with shame and timidity - that hideous extremity of human outrage, the abhorred practice of grave-robbing.

I cannot reveal the details of our shocking expedition, or catalogue even partly the worst of the trophies adorning the nameless museum we jointly dwelt, alone and servantless. Our museum was a blasphemous, unthinkable place, where with the satanic taste of neurotic virtuosi we had assembled an universe of terror and a secret room, far, far, underground; where huge winged daemons carven of basalt and onyx vomited from wide grinning mouths weird green and orange light, and hidden pneumatic pipes ruffled into kaleidoscopic dances of death the line of red charnel things hand in hand woven in voluminous black hangings. Through these pipes came at will the odors our moods most craved; sometimes the scent of pale funeral lilies; sometimes the narcotic incense of imagined Eastern shrines of the kingly dead, and sometimes - how I shudder to recall it! - the frightful, soul-upheaving stenches of the uncovered-grave.

Around the walls of this repellent chamber were cases of antique mummies alternating with comely, lifelike bodies perfectly stuffed and cured by the taxidermist's art, and with headstones snatched from the oldest churchyards of the world. Niches here and there contained skulls of all shapes, and heads preserved in various stages of dissolution. There one might find the rotting, bald pates of famous noblemen, and the flesh and radiantly golden heads of new-buried children.

Statues and painting there were, all of fiendish subjects and some executed by St John and myself. A locked portfolio, bound in tanned human skin, held certain unknown and unnameable drawings which it was rumored Goya had perpetrated but dared not acknowledge. There were nauseous musical instruments, stringed, brass, wood-wind, on which St John and I sometimes produced dissonances of exquisite morbidity and cacodaemoniacal ghastliness; whilst in a multitude of inlaid ebony cabinets reposed the most incredible and unimaginable variety of tomb-loot ever assembled by human madness and perversity. It is of this loot in particular that I must not speak. Thank God I had the courage to destroy it long before I thought of destroying myself!

The predatory excursions on which we collected our unmentionable treasures were always artistically memorable events. We were no vulgar ghouls, but worked only under certain conditions of mood, landscape, environment, weather, season, and moonlight. These pastimes were to us the most exquisite form of aesthetic expression, and we gave their details a fastidious technical care. An inappropriate hour, a jarring lighting effect, or a clumsy manipulation of the damp sod, would almost totally destroy for us that ecstatic titillation which followed the exhumation of some ominous, grinning secret of the earth. Our quest for novel scenes and piquant conditions was feverish and insatiate - St John was always the leader, and he it was who led the way at last to that mocking, accursed spot which brought us our hideous and inevitable doom.

By what malign fatality were we lured to that terrible Holland churchyard? I think it was the dark rumor and legendry, the tales of one buried for five centuries, who had himself been a ghoul in his time and had stolen a potent thing from a mighty sepulchre. I can recall the scene in these final moments - the pale autumnal moon over the graves, casting long horrible shadows; the grotesque trees, drooping sullenly to meet the neglected grass and the crumbling slabs; the vast legions of strangely colossal bats that flew against the moon; the antique ivied church pointing a huge spectral finger at the livid sky; the phosphorescent insects that danced like death-fires under the yews in a distant corner; the odors of mould, vegetation, and less explicable things that mingled feebly with the night-wind from over far swamps and seas; and, worst of all, the faint deep-toned baying of some gigantic hound which we could neither see nor definitely place. As we heard this suggestion of baying we shuddered, remembering the tales of the peasantry; for he whom we sought had centuries before been found in this self same spot, torn and mangled by the claws and teeth of some unspeakable beast.

I remember how we delved in the ghoul's grave with our spades, and how we thrilled at the picture of ourselves, the grave, the pale watching moon, the horrible shadows, the grotesque trees, the titanic bats, the antique church, the dancing death-fires, the sickening odors, the gently moaning night-wind, and the strange, half-heard directionless baying of whose objective existence we could scarcely be sure.

Then we struck a substance harder than the damp mould, and beheld a rotting oblong box crusted with mineral deposits from the long undisturbed ground. It was incredibly tough and thick, but so old that we finally pried it open and feasted our eyes on what it held.

Much - amazingly much - was left of the object despite the lapse of five hundred years. The skeleton, though crushed in places by the jaws of the thing that had killed it, held together with surprising firmness, and we gloated over the clean white skull and its long, firm teeth and its eyeless sockets that once had glowed with a charnel fever like our own. In the coffin lay an amulet of curious and exotic design, which had apparently been worn around the sleeper's neck. It was the oddly conventionalised figure of a crouching winged hound, or sphinx with a semi-canine face, and was exquisitely carved in antique Oriental fashion from a small piece of green jade. The expression of its features was repellent in the extreme, savoring at once of death, bestiality and malevolence. Around the base was an inscription in characters which neither St John nor I could identify; and on the bottom, like a maker's seal, was graven a grotesque and formidable skull.

Immediately upon beholding this amulet we knew that we must possess it; that this treasure alone was our logical pelf from the centuried grave. Even had its outlines been unfamiliar we would have desired it, but as we looked more closely we saw that it was not wholly unfamiliar. Alien it indeed was to all art and literature which sane and balanced readers know, but we recognized it as the thing hinted of in the forbidden Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred; the ghastly soul-symbol of the corpse-eating cult of inaccessible Leng, in Central Asia. All too well did we trace the sinister lineaments described by the old Arab daemonologist; lineaments, he wrote, drawn from some obscure supernatural manifestation of the souls of those who vexed and gnawed at the dead.

Seizing the green jade object, we gave a last glance at the bleached and cavern-eyed face of its owner and closed up the grave as we found it. As we hastened from the abhorrent spot, the stolen amulet in St John's pocket, we thought we saw the bats descend in a body to the earth we had so lately rifled, as if seeking for some cursed and unholy nourishment. But the autumn moon shone weak and pale, and we could not be sure.

So, too, as we sailed the next day away from Holland to our home, we thought we heard the faint distant baying of some gigantic hound in the background. But the autumn wind moaned sad and wan, and we could not be sure.

Less than a week after our return to England, strange things began to happen. We lived as recluses; devoid of friends, alone, and without servants in a few rooms of an ancient manor-house on a bleak and unfrequented moor; so that our doors were seldom disturbed by the knock of the visitor.

Now, however, we were troubled by what seemed to be a frequent fumbling in the night, not only around the doors but around the windows also, upper as well as lower. Once we fancied that a large, opaque body darkened the library window when the moon was shining against it, and another time we thought we heard a whirring or flapping sound not far off. On each occasion investigation revealed nothing, and we began to ascribe the occurrences to imagination which still prolonged in our ears the faint far baying we thought we had heard in the Holland churchyard. The jade amulet now reposed in a niche in our museum, and sometimes we burned a strangely scented candle before it. We read much in Alhazred's Necronomicon about its properties, and about the relation of ghosts' souls to the objects it symbolized; and were disturbed by what we read.

Then terror came.

On the night of September 24, 19--, I heard a knock at my chamber door. Fancying it St John's, I bade the knocker enter, but was answered only by a shrill laugh. There was no one in the corridor. When I aroused St John from his sleep, he professed entire ignorance of the event, and became as worried as I. It was the night that the faint, distant baying over the moor became to us a certain and dreaded reality.

Four days later, whilst we were both in the hidden museum, there came a low, cautious scratching at the single door which led to the secret library staircase. Our alarm was now divided, for, besides our fear of the unknown, we had always entertained a dread that our grisly collection might be discovered. Extinguishing all lights, we proceeded to the door and threw it suddenly open; whereupon we felt an unaccountable rush of air, and heard, as if receding far away, a queer combination of rustling, tittering, and articulate chatter. Whether we were mad, dreaming, or in our senses, we did not try to determine. We only realized, with the blackest of apprehensions, that the apparently disembodied chatter was beyond a doubt in the Dutch language.

After that we lived in growing horror and fascination. Mostly we held to the theory that we were jointly going mad from our life of unnatural excitements, but sometimes it pleased us more to dramatize ourselves as the victims of some creeping and appalling doom. Bizarre manifestations were now too frequent to count. Our lonely house was seemingly alive with the presence of some malign being whose nature we could not guess, and every night that daemoniac baying rolled over the wind-swept moor, always louder and louder. On October 29 we found in the soft earth underneath the library window a series of footprints utterly impossible to describe. They were as baffling as the hordes of great bats which haunted the old manor-house in unprecedented and increasing numbers.

The horror reached a culmination on November 18, when St John, walking home after dark from the dismal railway station, was seized by some frightful carnivorous thing and torn to ribbons. His screams had reached the house, and I had hastened to the terrible scene in time to hear a whir of wings and see a vague black cloudy thing silhouetted against the rising moon.

My friend was dying when I spoke to him, and he could not answer coherently. All he could do was to whisper, "The amulet - that damned thing -"

Then he collapsed, an inert mass of mangled flesh.

I buried him the next midnight in one of our neglected gardens, and mumbled over his body one of the devilish rituals he had loved in life. And as I pronounced the last daemoniac sentence I heard afar on the moor the faint baying of some gigantic hound. The moon was up, but I dared not look at it. And when I saw on the dim-lighted moor a wide-nebulous shadow sweeping from mound to mound, I shut my eyes and threw myself face down upon the ground. When I arose, trembling, I know not how much later, I staggered into the house and made shocking obeisances before the enshrined amulet of green jade.

Being now afraid to live alone in the ancient house on the moor, I departed on the following day for London, taking with me the amulet after destroying by fire and burial the rest of the impious collection in the museum. But after three nights I heard the baying again, and before a week was over felt strange eyes upon me whenever it was dark. One evening as I strolled on Victoria Embankment for some needed air, I saw a black shape obscure one of the reflections of the lamps in the water. A wind, stronger than the night-wind, rushed by, and I knew that what had befallen St John must soon befall me.

The next day I carefully wrapped the green jade amulet and sailed for Holland. What mercy I might gain by returning the thing to its silent, sleeping owner I knew not; but I felt that I must try any step conceivably logical. What the hound was, and why it had pursued me, were questions still vague; but I had first heard the baying in that ancient churchyard, and every subsequent event including St John's dying whisper had served to connect the curse with the stealing of the amulet. Accordingly I sank into the nethermost abysses of despair when, at an inn in Rotterdam, I discovered that thieves had despoiled me of this sole means of salvation.

The baying was loud that evening, and in the morning I read of a nameless deed in the vilest quarter of the city. The rabble were in terror, for upon an evil tenement had fallen a red death beyond the foulest previous crime of the neighborhood. In a squalid thieves' den an entire family had been torn to shreds by an unknown thing which left no trace, and those around had heard all night a faint, deep, insistent note as of a gigantic hound.

So at last I stood again in the unwholesome churchyard where a pale winter moon cast hideous shadows and leafless trees drooped sullenly to meet the withered, frosty grass and cracking slabs, and the ivied church pointed a jeering finger at the unfriendly sky, and the night-wind howled maniacally from over frozen swamps and frigid seas. The baying was very faint now, and it ceased altogether as I approached the ancient grave I had once violated, and frightened away an abnormally large horde of bats which had been hovering curiously around it.

I know not why I went thither unless to pray, or gibber out insane pleas and apologies to the calm white thing that lay within; but, whatever my reason, I attacked the half frozen sod with a desperation partly mine and partly that of a dominating will outside myself. Excavation was much easier than I expected, though at one point I encountered a queer interruption; when a lean vulture darted down out of the cold sky and pecked frantically at the grave-earth until I killed him with a blow of my spade. Finally I reached the rotting oblong box and removed the damp nitrous cover. This is the last rational act I ever performed.         

For crouched within that centuried coffin, embraced by a closepacked nightmare retinue of huge, sinewy, sleeping bats, was the bony thing my friend and I had robbed; not clean and placid as we had seen it then, but covered with caked blood and shreds of alien flesh and hair, and leering sentiently at me with phosphorescent sockets and sharp ensanguined fangs yawning twistedly in mockery of my inevitable doom. And when it gave from those grinning jaws a deep, sardonic bay as of some gigantic hound, and I saw that it held in its gory filthy claw the lost and fateful amulet of green jade, I merely screamed and ran away idiotically, my screams soon dissolving into peals of hysterical laughter.

Madness rides the star-wind... claws and teeth sharpened on centuries of corpses... dripping death astride a bacchanale of bats from nigh-black ruins of buried temples of Belial... Now, as the baying of that dead fleshless monstrosity grows louder and louder, and the stealthy whirring and flapping of those accursed web-wings circles closer and closer, I shall seek with my revolver the oblivion which is my only refuge from the unnamed and unnameable.

The Jonestown Tape

Shortly after November 18, 1978, a tape emerged from the ruins of Jonestown. It appeared to be an audio recording of the actual death scene.

This transcript is made from a tape recording produced by the International Home Video Club, Inc. of New York, an operation which has since ceased to exist. It is not clear how IHV got the tape in the first place. This transcript was made by Mary McCormick Maaga in Hearing the Voices of Jonestown (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1998)

JIM JONES: How very much I’ve tried my best to give you a good life. But in spite of all of my trying a handful of our people, with their lies, have made our lives impossible. There’s no way to detach ourselves from what’s happened today.

Not only are we in a compound situation, not only are there those who have left and committed the betrayal of the century, some have stolen children from others, and they are in pursuit right now to kill them because they stole their children. And we are sitting here waiting on a powder keg.

I don’t think that’s what we had in mind to do with our babies. It is said by the greatest of prophets from time immemorial: “No man may take my life from me; I lay my life down.” So to sit here and wait for the catastrophe that’s going to happen on that airplane. It’s going to be a catastrophe.

It almost happened here. Almost happened when the congressman was nearly killed here. You can’t steal people’s children. You can’t take off with people’s children without expecting a violent reaction. And that’s not so unfamiliar to us either, even if we were Judeo-Christian. The world suffers violence, and the violent shall take it by force. If we can’t live in peace, then let’s die in peace.

(Applause.)

We’ve been so betrayed. We have been so terribly betrayed. But we’ve tried and if this only works one day it was worthwhile.Thank you.

(Music and singing)

Now what’s going to happen here in a matter of a few minutes is that one of those people on that plane is going to shoot the pilot, I know that. I didn’t plan it, but I know it’s going to happen. They’re going to shoot that pilot and down comes that plane into the jungle. And we had better not have any of our children left when it’s over because they’ll parachute in here on us.

I’m going to be just as plain as I know how to tell you. I’ve never lied to you. I never have lied to you. I know that is what’s going to happen. That’s what he intends to do, and he will do it. He’ll do it.*1

What’s with being so bewildered with many, many pressures on my brain, seeing all these people behave so treasonous, there was too much for me to put together, but I now know what he was telling me. And it’ll happen. If the plane gets in the air even.*2

So my opinion is that you be kind to children and be kind to seniors and take the potion like they used to take in ancient Greece and step over quietly because we are not committing suicide. It’s a revolutionary act. We can’t go back; they won’t leave us alone. They’re now going back to tell more lies, which means more congressmen. And there’s no way, no way we can survive.

Anybody. Anyone that has any dissenting opinion, please speak. You can have an opportunity, but if the children are left, we’re going to have them butchered. We can make a strike, but we’ll be striking against people that we don’t want to strike against.

What we’d like to get are the people that caused this stuff, and some, if some people here are prepared and know how to do that, to go in town and get Timothy Stoen, but there’s no plane. There’s no plane. You can’t catch a plane in time.

He’s responsible for it. He brought these people to us. He and Deanna Mertle.*3 The people in San Francisco will not be idle. Now, would they? They’ll not take our death in vain you know. Yes, Christine.

CHRISTINE MILLER: Is it too late for Russia?*4

JONES: Here’s why it’s too late for Russia. They killed. They started to kill. That’s why it makes it too late for Russia. Otherwise I’d say yes, you bet your life. But it’s too late. I can’t control these people. They’re out there. They’ve gone with the guns. And it’s too late. And once wekill anybody, we become the problem. At least that’s what I’ve always put my lot with you. If one of my people does something, it’s me.

And they say I don’t have to take the blame for this, but I don’t live that way. They said deliver up Ujara*5, who tried to get the man back here. Ujara, whose mother’s been lying on him and lying on him and trying to break up this family, and they’ve all agreed to kill us by any means necessary. Do you think I’m going to deliver them Ujara? Not on your life. No.

MAN 1: I know a way to find Stoen if it’ll help us.

JONES: No. I can’t live that way. I cannot live that way. I’ll die for all.

(Applause.)

I’ve been living on hope for a long time, Christine, and I appreciate you’ve always been a very good agitator. I like agitation because you have to see two sides of one issue, two sides of a question.

But what those people are gonna get done once they get through will make our lives worse than hell. They will make the rest of us not accept it. When they get through lying. They posed so many lies between there and that truck that we are done-in as far as any other alternative.

MILLER: Well, I say let’s make an airlift to Russia. That’s what I say. I don’t think nothing is impossible if you believe it.

JONES: How are we going to do that? How are you going to airlift to Russia?

MILLER: Well, I thought they said if we got in an emergency, they gave you a code to let them know.

JONES: No they didn’t. They gave us a code that they’d let us know on that issue. They said that if they saw the country coming down they agreed to give us the code. You can check on that and see if it’s on the code. Check with Russia to see if they’ll take us in immediately, otherwise we die. I don’t know what else you say to these people. But to me, death is not a fearful thing. It’s living that’s cursed.

(Applause.)

I have never seen anything like this before in my life. I’ve never seen people take the law in their own hands and provoke us and try to purposely agitate mother of children. There is no need, Christine; it’s just not worth living like this. Not worth living like this.

MILLER: I think that there was too few who left for twelve hundred people to give them their lives for those people that left.

JONES: Do you know how many left?

MILLER: Oh, twenty-odd. That’s a small amount compared to what’s here.

JONES: Twenty-odd. But what’s going to happen when they don’t leave? I hope that they could leave. But what’s going to happen when they don’t leave?

MILLER: You mean the people here?

JONES: Yeah. What’s going to happen to us when they don’t leave, when they get on the plane and the plane goes down?

MILLER: I don’t think they’ll go down.

JONES: You don’t think they’ll go down? I wish I would tell you you’re right, but I’m right. There’s one man there who blames, and rightfully so, Debbie Blakey for the murder of his mother*6 and he’ll stop that pilot by any means necessary. He’ll do it. That plane will come out of the air. There’s no way you can fly a plane without a pilot.

MILLER: I wasn’t speaking about that plane. I was speaking about a plane for us to go to Russia.

JONES: Russia? You think Russia’s going to want us with all this stigma? We had some value, but now we don’t have any value.

MILLER: Well, I don’t see it like that. I mean, I feel that as long as there’s life, there’s hope. That’s my faith.

JONES: Well, everybody dies. Some times that hope runs out because everybody dies. I haven’t seen anybody yet that didn’t die. And I’d like to choose my own kind of death for a change. I’m tired of being tormented to hell, that’s what I’m tired of. I’m tired of it.

(Applause.)

I have twelve hundred people’s lives in my hands, and I certainly don’t want your life in my hands. I’m going to tell you, Christine, without me, life has no meaning.

I’m the best thing you’ll ever have.

I’m standing with Ujara. I’m standing with those people. They are part of me. I could detach myself. I really could detach myself. No. I never detach myself from any of your troubles. I’ve always taken your troubles right on my shoulders. And I’m not going to change that now. It’s too late. I’ve been running too long. Not going to change now.

(Applause.)

Maybe the next time you’ll get to go to Russia. The next time round.*7 What I’m talking about now is the dispensation of judgment. This is a revolutionary suicide council. I’m not talking about self-destruction. I’m talking about that we have no other road. I will take your call. We will put it to the Russians. And I can tell you the answer now because I am a prophet.*8 Call the Russians and tell them, and see if they’ll take us.

MILLER: I said I’m not ready to die.

JONES: I don’t think you are.

MILLER: But, ah, I look about at the babies and I think they deserve to live, you know?

JONES: I agree. But also they deserve much more; they deserve peace.

MILLER: We all came here for peace.

JONES: And have we had it?

MILLER: No.

JONES: I tried to give it to you. I’ve laid down my life, practically. I’ve practically died every day to give you peace. And you still not have any peace. You look better than I’ve seen you in a long while, but it’s still not the kind of peace that I want to give you. A person’s a fool who continues to say that they’re winning when you’re losing. (Inaudible.) What? I didn’t hear you ma’am. You’ll have to speak up. Ma’am, you’ll have to speak up.

WOMAN: (Inaudible.)

JONES: That’s a sweet thought. Who said that? Come on up and speak it again, Honey. Say what you want to say about that.*9 No plane is taking off.

Suicide. Plenty have done it. Stoen has done it.*10 Somebody ought to live.I’ll talk to San Francisco and see that Stoen does not get by with this infamy. He has done the thing we wanted to do. Have us destroyed.

MILLER: When we destroy ourselves, we’re defeated. We let them, the enemies, defeat us.

JONES: Did you see “I will fight no more forever?”

MILLER: Yes, I saw that.

JONES: Did you not have some sense of pride and victory in that man? Yet he would not subject himself to the will or whim of people who tell them they want to come in whenever they please and push into our house. Come when they please, take who they want to, talk to who they want to. Is this not living? That’s not living to me. That’s not freedom. That’s not the kind of freedom I sought.

MILLER: Well I think where they made their mistake is when they stopped to rest. If they had gone on they would’ve made it. But they stopped to rest.*11

JIM MCELVANE: *12 Just hold on, we would have made that day. We made a beautiful day, and let’s make it a beautiful day.

(Applause.)

JONES: We win when we go down. Tim Stoen has nobody else to hate. He has nobody else to hate. Then he’ll destroy himself. I’m speaking here not as the administrator, I’m speaking as a prophet today.*13 I wouldn’t talk so serious if I didn’t know what I was talking about.

Has anybody called back? The immense amount of damage that’s going to be done, but I cannot separate myself from the pain of my people. You can’t either, Christine, if you stop to think about it. You can’t separate yourself. We’ve walked too long together.

MILLER: I know that. But I still think, as an individual, I have a right to…

JONES: You do, and I’m listening.

MILLER: … to say what I think, what I feel. And think we all have a right to our own destiny as individuals.

JONES: Right.

MILLER: And I think I have a right to choose mine, and everybody else has a right to choose theirs.

JONES: Yes.

MILLER: You know?

JONES: Yes. I’m not criticizing…. What’s that?

(Inaudible woman’s voice.)

MILLER: Well, I think I still have a right to my own opinion.

JONES: I’m not taking it from you. I’m not taking it from you.

MCELVANE: Christine, you’re only standing here because he was here in the first place. So I don’t know what you’re talking about, having an individual life. Your life has been extended to the day that you’re standing there because of him.

JONES: I guess she has as much right to speak as anybody else, too. What did you say, Ruby? Well, you’ll regret that this very day if you don’t die. You’ll regret it if you do, though you don’t die. You’ll regret it.

WOMAN 1: You’ve saved so many people.

JONES: I’ve saved them. I saved them, but I made my example. I made my expression. I made my manifestation, and the world was ready, not ready for me. Paul said, “I was a man born out of due season.” I’ve been born out of due season, just like all we are, and the best testimony we can make is to leave this god damned world.*14

(Applause.)

WOMAN 1: You must prepare to die.

MILLER: I’m not talking to her. Would you let her or let me talk?

JONES: Keep talking.

MILLER: Would you make her sit down and let me talk while I’m on the floor or let her talk?

JONES: How can you tell the leader what to do if you live? I’ve listened to you. You asked me about Russia. I’m right now making a call to Russia. What more do you suggest? I’m listening to you. You’ve yet to give me one slight bit of encouragement. I just now instructed her to go there and do that.

(Voices.)*15

MCELVANE: Alright now, everybody hold it.Hold it. Let law be maintained.

(Voices.)

JONES: Lay down your burden. I’m gonna lay down my burden. Down by the riverside. Shall we lay them down here by the side of Guyana? What’s the difference? No man took our lives. Right now. They haven’t taken them. But when they start parachuting out of the air, they’ll shoot some of our innocent babies. I’m not lying. I don’t want to (inaudible). But they got to shoot me to get through to some of these people. I’m not letting them take your child. Can you let them take you child?

VOICES: No, no, no, no.

WOMAN 2: Are we going to die?

JONES: What’s that?

WOMAN 2: You mean you want us to die …

JONES: I want to see (voices shouting) … Please… Please!

WOMAN 3: Are you saying that you think we could have smaller blame than other children were? Because if you’re saying …

JONES: Do you think I’d put John’s*16 life above others? If I put John’s life above others, I wouldn’t be standing with Ujara. I’d send John out, and he could go out on the driveway tonight.

WOMAN 3: Because he’s young.

JONES: I know, but he’s no different to me than any of these children here. He’s just one of my children. I don’t prefer one above another. I don’t prefer him above Ujara. I can’t do that; I can’t separate myself from your actions or his actions. If you’d done something wrong, I’d stand with you. If they wanted to come and get you, they’d have to take me.

MAN 2: We’re all ready to go. If you tell us we have to give our lives now, we’re ready. All the rest of the sisters and brothers are with me.*17

JONES: Some months I’ve tried to keep this thing from happening. But I now see it’s the will of Sovereign Being that this happen to us. That we lay down our lives to protest against what’s being done. That we lay down our lives to protest at what’s being done. The criminality of people. The cruelty of people.

Who walked out of here today? See all those who walked out? Mostly white people. Mostly white people walked. I’m so grateful for the ones that didn’t, those who knew who they are. I just know that there’s no point to this. We are born before our time. They won’t accept us. And I don’t think we should sit here and take any more time for our children to be endangered. Because if they come after our children, and we give them our children, then our children will suffer forever.

MILLER: Do you mind if I get up?

JONES: I have no quarrel with you coming up. I like you. I personally like you very much.

MILLER: People get hostile when you try to…

JONES: Oh, some people do. Put it that way. I’m not hostile. You had to be honest, but you’ve stayed, and if you wanted to run, you’d have run with them ‘cause anybody could’ve run today. What would anyone do? I know you’re not a runner. And your life is precious to me. It’s as precious as John’s. And what I do, I do with love and justice. And I’ve weighed it against all evidence.

MILLER: That’s all I’ve got to say.

JONES: What comes now folks? What comes now?

MAN 3: Everybody hold it. Sit down.

JONES: Say peace. Take Dwyer on down to the east house. Take Dwyer.*18

WOMAN 4: Everybody be quiet, please.

JONES: (Inaudible) … got some respect for our lives.

MCELVANE: That means sit down, sit down. Sit down.

JONES: They know. I tried so very, very hard.*19 They’re trying over here to see what’s going to happen. Who is it? (Voices)

Get Dwyer out of here before something happens to him. Dwyer. I’m not talking about Ujara. I said Dwyer. Ain’t nobody gonna take Ujara. I’m not letting them take Ujara. It’s easy, it’s easy.

Yes, my love.

WOMAN 5: At one time, I felt just like Christine herself. But after today I don’t feel anything because the biggest majority of people that left here today for a fight, and I know it really hurt my heart because…

JONES: Broke your heart, didn’t it?

WOMAN 5: It broke my heart completely. All of this year the white people had been with us, and they’re not a part of us. So we might as well end it now because I don’t see …

JONES: It’s all over. The congressman has been murdered.

(Music and singing.)

Well, it’s all over, all over. What a legacy. What a legacy. What’s the Red Brigade doing that ever made any sense anyway? They invaded our privacy. They came into our home. They followed us six thousand miles away. Red Brigade showed them justice. The congressman’s dead.

Please get us some medication. It’s simple. It’s simple. There are no convulsions with it. It’s just simple. Just, please get it. Before it’s too late. The GDF*20 will be here, I tell you. Get moving, get moving.

WOMAN 6: Now. Do it now!

JONES: Don’t be afraid to die. You’ll see, there’ll be a few people land out here. They’ll torture some of our children here. They’ll torture our people. They’ll torture our seniors. We cannot have this.

Are you going to separate yourself from whoever shot the congressman? I don’t know who shot him.

Voices: No. No. No.

(Music.)

JONES: Let’s make our peace. And those that went, they had a right to go. How many are dead? Aw, God Almighty, God. Huh? Patty Parks is dead?

WOMAN 7: Some of the others who endure long enough in a safe place could write about the goodness of Jim Jones.

JONES: I don’t know how in the world they’re ever going to write about us. It’s just too late. It’s too late. The congressman’s dead. The congressman lays dead. Many of our traitors are dead. They’re all laying out there dead.

I didn’t kill them, but my people did. My people did. They’re my people, and they’ve been provoked too much. They’ve been provoked too much. What’s happened here’s been since Tuesday’s been an act of provocation.

WOMAN 8: What about Ted? If there’s any way it’s possible to, eh, have and to give Ted something to take then, I’m satisfied, okay?*21

JONES: Okay.

WOMAN 8: I said, if there’s any way you can do before I have to give Ted something, so he won’t have to let him go through okay, and I’m satisfied.

JONES: That’s fine. Okay, yes. Yes. Yes.

WOMAN 9: Thank you for everything. You are the only. You are the only. And I appreciate you.

(Applause.)

JONES: Please, can we hasten? Can we hasten with that medication? You don’t know what you’ve done. I tried.

(Applause, music, singing.)

They saw ithappen and ran into the bush and dropped the machine guns.

I (inaudible) never in my life.*22 But not anymore. But we’ve got to move. Are you gonna get that medication here? You’ve got to move. Marceline, *23 about forty minutes.

JUDY JAMES OR JOYCE TOUCHETTE:*24 You have to move, and the people that are standing there in the aisles, go stand in the radio room yard.*25 Everybody get behind the table and back this way, okay. There’s nothing to worry about. Everybody keep calm and try and keep your children calm. Let the little children in and reassure them. They’re not crying from pain. It’s just a little bitter tasting. They’re not crying out of any pain. Annie Miguel, can I please see you back …

MCELVANE: … Things I used to do before I came here. So let me tell you about it. It might make a lot of you feel a little more comfortable. Sit down and be quiet, please.

I used to be a therapist. And the kind of therapy that I did had to do with reincarnations in past life situations. And every time anybody had the experience of going into a past life, I was fortunate enough through Father to be able to let them experience it all the way through their death, so to speak. And everybody was so happy when they made that step to the other side.

JONES: It’s the only way. That choice is not ours now. It’s out of our hands.

(Children crying in the background.)

MCELVANE: If we have a body that’s been crippled, suddenly you have the kind of body that you want to have.

JONES: A little rest, a little rest.

MCELVANE: It feels good. It never felt so good. You’ve never felt so good as how that feels.

JONES: And I do hope that they will stay where they belong and don’t come up here.

It’s hard, but only at first is it hard. Hard only at first. Living is much, much more difficult. Raising up every morning and not knowing what’s going to be the night’s bringing. It’s much more difficult. It’s much more difficult.

(Crying and talking.)

WOMAN 10: I just want to say something for everyone that I see that is standing around or crying. This is nothing to cry about. This is something we could all rejoice about. We could be happy about this.

They always told us that we could cry when you’re coming into this world. So we’re leaving it, and we’re leaving it peaceful. I think we should be happy about this. I was just thinking about Jim Jones. He just has suffered and suffered and suffered. We have the honor guard, and we don’t even have a chance.

I want to give him one more chance.There’s many more here. That’s not all of us. That’s not all yet. That’s just a few that have died. I’m looking at so many people crying. I wish you would not cry. Andjust thank Father.

(Sustained applause.)

I’ve been here about one year andnine months. AndI never felt better in my life. Not in SanFrancisco. But until I came to Jonestown. I had a very good life. I had abeautiful life. I don’t see anything that I could be sorry about. We should be happy. At least I am.

(Applause, music.)

WOMAN 11: It’s good to be alive today. I just like to thank Dad because he was the only one that stood up for me when I needed him. And thank you, Dad.

WOMAN 12: I’m glad you’re my brothers and sisters, and I’m glad to be here.

(Voices.)

JONES: *26 Please. For God’s sake, let’s get on with it. We’ve lived as no other people lived and loved. We’ve had as much of this world as you’re going to get. Let’s just be done with it. Let’s be done with the agony of it.

(Applause.)

It’s far, far harder to have to walk through every day, you die slowly and from the time you’re a child ‘til the time you get gray, you’re dying.

They’re dishonest and I’m sure that they’ll pay for it. They’ll pay for it. This is a revolutionary suicide. This is not a self destructive suicide. So they’ll pay for this. They brought this upon us. And they’ll pay for that. I leave that destiny to them.

(Voices.)

Who wants to go with their child has a right to go with their child. I think it’s humane. I want to go, but I want to see you go, though. They can take me and do whatever they want to do. I want to see you go. I don’t want to see you go through this hell no more. No more. No more. No more.

We’re trying. If everybody will relax. The best thing you can do is to relax, and you will have no problem. You’ll have no problem with this thing if you just relax.

MAN 4: … A great deal because it’s Jim Jones. And the way the children are laying there now. I’d rather see them lay like that than to see them have to die like the Jews did, which was pitiful anyhow. And I just like to thank Dad for giving us life and also death. And I appreciate the fact of the way our children are going. Because, like Dad said, when they come in, what they’re going to do to our children. They’re going to massacre our children. And also the ones that they take capture, they’re going to just let them grow up and be dummies like they want them to be. And not grow up to be a person like the one and only Jim Jones. So I’d like to thank Dad for the opportunity for letting Jonestown be not what it could be, but what Jonestown is. Thank you, Dad.

(Applause.)

JONES: It’s not to be feared. It is not to be feared. It is a friend. It’s a friend sitting there. Show your love for one another. Let’s get gone. Let’s get gone. Let’s get gone.

(Children crying.)

We had nothing we could do. We can’t separate ourselves from our own people. For twenty years lying in some old rotten nursing home.

Taking us through all these anguish years. They took us and put us in chains and that’s nothing. That business… there’s no comparison to this.

They’ve robbed us of our land, and they’ve taken us and driven us and we tried to find ourselves. We tried to find a new beginning. But it’s too late. You can’t separate yourself from your brother and your sister. No way am I going to do it. I refuse. I don’t know who fired the shot. I don’t know who killed the congressman. But as far as I am concerned, I killed him. You understand what I’m saying? I killed him. He had no business coming. I told him not to come.

WOMAN 13: Right, right.

(Music and crying.)

JONES: I, with respect, die with a degree of dignity. Lay down your life with dignity. Don’t lay down with tears and agony. There’s nothing to death. It’s like Mac*27 said, it’s just stepping over to another plane. Don’t be this way. Stop this hysterics. This is not the way for people to die. No way for us to die. We must die with some dignity. We must die with some dignity. We will have no choice. Now we have some choice. Do you think they’re going to allow this to be done, allow us to get by with this? You must be insane.

Look children, it’s just something to put you to rest. Oh, God.

(Children crying.)

Mother, Mother, Mother, Mother, Mother, please. Mother, please, please, please. Don’t do this. Don’t do this. Lay down your life with your child. But don’t do this.

WOMAN 14: We’re doing all of this for you.

JONES: Free at last. Keep your emotions down. Keep your emotions down. Children, it will not hurt if you’ll be quiet.

(Music and crying.)

It’s never been done before, you say. It’s been done by every tribe in history facing annihilation. All the Indians of the Amazon are doing it right now. They refuse to bring any babies into the world. They kill every child that comes into the world. Because they don’t want to live in this kind of a world.

So be patient. Be patient. I tell you, I don’t care how many screams you hear. I don’t care how many anguished cries. Death is a million times preferable to ten more days of this life. If you knew what was ahead of you, you’d be glad to be stepping over tonight.

Death is common to people. And the Eskimos, they take death in their stride. Let’s be dignified. If you quit tell them they’re dying … if you adults would stop some of this nonsense. Adults, I call on you to stop this nonsense. I call on you to quit exciting your children when all they’re doing is going to a quiet rest. I call on you to stop this now if you have any respect at all. Are we black, proud, and free, or what are we? Now stop this nonsense. Don’t carry this on anymore. You’re exciting your children.

No, no sorrow. It’s all over. I’m glad it’s over. Hurry, hurry my children. Hurry.We are free from the hands of the enemy. Hurry, my children. Hurry. There are seniors out here that I’m concerned about. Hurry. I don’t want to leave my seniors to this mess. Quickly! Quickly! Good knowing you.

No more pain now.No more pain. Jim Cobb*28 is lying on the airfield dead at this moment.Remember the Oliver woman said she’d come over and kill me if her son wouldn’t stop her? These are the people who are the peddlers of hate. All we’re doing is laying down our lives. We’re not letting them take our lives. We’re laying down our lives. We just want peace.

(Music.)

MAN 5: All I would like to say is that my so-called parents are filled with so much hate…

JONES: Stop this. Stop this crying, all of you.

MAN 5: Hate and treachery. I think you people out here should think about how your relatives were and be glad about that the children are being laid to rest. And all I’d like to say is that I thank Dad for making me strong to stand with it all and make me ready for it. Thank you.

JONES: All they’re doing is taking a drink. They take it to go to sleep. That’s what death is, sleep. You can have it. I’m tired of it all.

WOMAN 15: Everything we could have ever done, most loving thing all of us could have done, and it’s been a pleasure walking with all of you in this revolutionary struggle. No other way I would rather go to give my life for the People’s Temple, and I thank Dad very, very much.

WOMAN 16: Right. Dad’s love and nursing, goodness and kindness and bring us to this land of freedom. And his love will go on forever unto the fields of glory.

JONES: Where’s the vat? Where’s the vat with the Green C on it? The vat with the Green C in. Bring it so the adults can begin.*29

Don’t fail to follow my advice. You’ll be sorry. You’ll be sorry. If we do it ourselves, then it’ll be better than whatever they do to us. Have trust. You have to step across. We used to think this world was not our home. Well, it sure isn’t.

He doesn’t want to tell them. All he’s doing is trying to reassure these kids. Can’t some people assure these children of the relaxation of stepping over to the next plane? They set an example for others. We said… we have one thousand people who said, we don’t like the way the world is.

VOICE: Take some.

JONES: Take our life from us. We laid it down. We got tired. We didn’t commit suicide; we committed an act of revolutionary suicide protesting the conditions of an inhumane world.

(Music.)

End Notes

1.     Jones is referring to Larry Layton and the apparent plan to shoot the pilot of one of the airplanes that was to transport Ryan and his entourage, including the defectors, back to Georgetown from Port Kaituma. In fact, before the plane could take off, the men from Jonestown inside the tractor-trailer opened fire, and Layton never carried out the plan.
2.     This line suggests that Jones was aware of the plan for the ambush at the airstrip. Perhaps Larry Layton was sent in case the trailer did not arrive in time, or maybe, Layton was sent as a “message” for his sister, Debbie Blakey, but his ability to carry out the murder(s) was enough in question that the gunmen in the trailer were sent as a backup plan. Given that Layton was not asked to come to Guyana until after his sister had defected, one wonders if he were sent for to participate in some activity (not necessarily this one) that would demonstrate to his sister and family that Larry Layton was more loyal to Peoples Temple than to his biological family.
3.     Deanna Mertle, a.k.a. Jeannie Mills, along with her husband, Elmer, organized the Human Freedom Center after their defection from Peoples Temple in 1975 and were very active in the Concerned Relatives organization.
4.     Miller was a sixty-year-old black woman who was born in Texas and who joined Peoples Temple out of Los Angeles. She had worked as a clerk before she moved to Jonestown and had some college education. She was among those “single residents” at Jonestown.
5.     Don Sly, the man who attacked Congressman Ryan with a knife, was known as “Ujara” within the Peoples Temple community.
6.     Jones is referring to the death of Lisa Layton, the mother of Debbie Blakey and Larry Layton. She had died of cancer the previous summer; several months after her daughter had left Jonestown. Jones is here asserting the idea that grief over her daughter’s defection had hastened Lisa Layton’s death and that her son, Larry, wanted revenge for it.
7.     The belief in reincarnation was part of the Peoples Temple theology.
8.     Jones is asserting his authority as charismatic leader in opposition to the logic of Christine Miller.
9.     Jones’s speech begins to sound slurred and garbled at this point.
10.     Timothy Oliver Stoen represented the worst form of villainy and betrayal for Peoples Temple because he had been at the highest levels of the inner circle, had defected, and had been at the forefront of the efforts of Concerned Relatives to disband Jonestown. In essence, the community’s “revolutionary suicide” was seen by Jones and the leadership as an act of murder by Stoen.
11.     Miller is apparently referring to the people in the film Jones had just mentioned.
12.     Jim McElvane was a black man who had arrived in Jonestown only two days earlier (John R. Hall, John R. 1987. Gone from the Promised Land: Jonestown in American Cultural History. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 279.) He was among a small group of blacks, including Rev. Archie Ijames, whose authority was respected throughout Peoples Temple. He had served as security chief during the California years. He had not moved to Jonestown with the rest because he was involved in running the stateside operation (Reiterman, Tim, with John Jacobs. 1982. Raven: The Untold Story of the Rev. Jim Jones and His People. New York: E. P. Dutton, 322).
13.     Jones is appealing to the role as prophet (charismatic leader) that he had fulfilled in California in an attempt to gain the authority to ask people to kill themselves. He is attempting to distance himself from his role as administrator (bureaucratic functionary) that he had increasingly shifted into at Jonestown.
14.     Jones has strength of delivery in his speech, starting with his quote from St. Paul, not present previously.
15.     Jones has exhibited impatience with Christine Miller for the first time. Unintelligible female voices in the background are arguing, probably the woman arguing with Miller and Miller herself. From this point on in the tape many inaudible, high-intensity, conversations are going on in the background.
16.     John Victor Stoen, the child in the midst of the custody battle between Jones and Tim and Grace Stoen.
17.     This man’s statement, delivered with tears in his voice, changes the mood of the group. The next words of Jones are spoken with solemnity.
18.     Richard Dwyer worked for the U.S. embassy in Guyana and had accompanied Congressman Ryan’s entourage to Jonestown earlier in the day. He had visited Jonestown several times before 18 November and was seen by the leaders of Peoples Temple as a supporter. Jones was interested in getting Dwyer out of the way so that he could not interfere with the suicides; nor could he be harmed.
19.     Jones voice is once again slurred.
20.     Guyanese Defense Force.
21.     This is a young woman obviously talking about her son.
22.     Jones sounds incoherent.
23.     1 am not 100 percent certain that Jones addresses Marceline here, but that’s the most likely interpretation of the word. There is a pause just before he says this answer. I suspect that she had just asked him how long the whole process would take, and his answer was “about forty minutes.”
24.     Stephan Jones speculates that the voice was that of Indiana-born Joyce Touchette, because he was told by one of the people who escaped into the jungle that Larry Schacht and Joyce Touchette were involved in readying and distributing the poison. John Hall identifies the voice as Judy Ijames, Indiana sect member and nurse at Jonestown, based upon the testimony of eye witnesses (Hall, 285). Whether it was Joyce Touchette or Judy Ijames, either one would have had authority both with the Indiana sect and the black church members: Joyce Touchette because she and her husband Charlie had been two of the original pioneers of Jonestown and Judy Ijames because she had provided health care for the elderly in the community.
25.     In my view, there were two pivotal moments during the suicide meeting when events could have turned another direction had people with authority not spoken in support of Jones and the decision to commit suicide. The first was when Jim McElvane intervened with Christine Miller (see above) and the other is here when Judy Ijames or Joyce Touchette organizes the process for committing suicide. Jones’s speech right before her instructions is slurred, and he sounds incoherent. These instructions focused the mood of the gathering. The suicides began just moments later.
26.     Jones speaks here and later with renewed energy and clarity.
27.     Jim McElvane.
28.     Jim Cobb was one of the “Gang of Eight” who had defected in 1973. He was not, in fact, dead.
29.     The suicides were so well organized that the potion for the children was prepared in a different container (at a lesser strength, I assume) than the potion for the adults.