Ok guys, so technically I’m not supposed to be telling anyone this, but I feel like this needs to be shared. I do feel a bit guilty, but someone needs to hear this, and nosleep seems like the perfect place to put this.
So my grandpa is a pretty reserved man. He’s usually emotionally stoic and doesn’t regale the adventures of his past years too often. But once in a blue moon, you can get him to tell you one of his killer stories. I’ve heard plenty of stories from my grandpa before, all of them have been either incredibly amazing or just utterly bewildering. My mom says that best stories my grandpa has are from his war days and when he was a police officer. Last night it was just me and my grandpa at home together, and we got into a pretty deep conversation while sitting in the living room. We somehow ended up on the topic of his law enforcement days. I knew my grandpa didn’t like dwelling on this particular topic, but my nagging curiosity got the better of me.
“Hey grandpa, what do you think was the worst thing you saw being a cop? Aside from like murders and stuff I mean.”
“Suicide.”
His answer was curt and emotionless. I knew he was trying to avoid the topic entirely, but the nosy bitch in me still wanted to hear the details.
“How many cases did you see?”
“Just one.”
This time I could see a twinge of sadness creeping up into his eyes. What ever he was remembering was something he wanted to forget. As much as it pained me to see my grandpa like this, I had to hear this story. I asked as delicately as I could.
“What happened?”
He stared at the wall for second before sighing and turning slowly to face me.
“Bug (my grandpa’s nickname for me), promise me you won’t repeat this to anyone, and I mean anyone. Not your mother, not your friends, not your sister, not even your grandma. No one.”
That last part kind of shocked me. From what I’ve heard from my mom, my grandma knew absolutely everything that happened to my grandpa when he was in both the service and the police force. There wasn’t anything he told my family that she hadn’t heard before. But apparently, she didn’t know about this. I agreed to keep his vow of silence (which I’m breaking right now, with genuine guilt I assure you all), and leaned in to hear my grandpa’s unspoken tale. This is what he told me …
My grandpa was working late when a message came in through his radio about assistance being needed with a home investigation on the other side of town. A call had come into the station from a worried woman, saying that she hadn’t heard from her neighbor in over two weeks, and was beginning to think something terrible had happened. My grandpa, as well two other cruisers of officers, were dispatched out to the house of the man in question. According to my grandpa, the man’s house was up in a place known as Pill Hill. The area had been nicknamed as such by the locals because the only people who lived up there were excessively wealthy doctors. When my grandpa arrived, the other two officers were already there. There was no answer when they knocked on the door, so they had to forcibly enter the guy’s home.
My grandpa said that this place was one of the biggest houses he’d ever seen. By the looks of everything, this guy probably wiped his ass with 20 dollar bills. The walls seemed to go on for miles in practically every room, and priceless antiques and expensive looking furniture littered the place. As nice as the house was, my grandpa said something about it was right. All the furniture (couches, chairs, tables, etc.) had been turned upside-down, or clustered in front of the all the closet doors.
Something even more unsettling my grandpa had noticed was that whoever had been in the house had taken all the mirrors off the walls, which were now resting on the floor, and covered them completely in black electrical tape, or broke them. Aside from the weird placement of the furniture and the mirrors, the house looked normal. There was no sign of a struggle or forced entry, the placed looked virtually untouched by any kind of criminal activity. The house was enormous, and had dozens of different rooms that needed to be explored. Since there was only three men on site, taking the time to look in every room was a pretty time consuming task. The longer my grandpa looked, the more he began to feel uneasy. The house looked inhabited, but there was no one to be found.
About 10 minutes into the search, my grandpa took the liberty of heading upstairs alone (he was armed so he didn’t require full assistance) while the two other officers were still spread out across the massive lower floor. It only took my grandpa a few minutes to realize that something upstairs was very wrong. There was shattered glass everywhere, and all the furniture was destroyed. Upon further inspection, all the glass scattered around appeared to be mirror shards. Every single one of the rooms were trashed, and nothing was in one piece. My grandpa called for the guys downstairs to come up to the second floor and look through all the mess he was standing in. The three of them began to look in all of the various rooms in hope that the owner of the home was upstairs somewhere. That’s when things began to get unsettling.
As my grandpa investigated the upper level, himself and the other officers were seeing something unusual. In almost every single one of the rooms, there was a recurring phrase scratched into the walls;
‘We many. I many’
What those words mean, I have no idea, and neither does my grandpa. Needless to say, everyone in the house was beginning to feel uneasy. Something was indeed very wrong. My grandpa tried to calm his nerves by rationalizing that maybe this man had a history of mental illness, or took some sort of medication that made him act erratically. Obviously who ever owned this house was the culprit of all the disarray. But where the hell was he? At this point in the story, it was clear that my grandpa was beginning to relive everything that happened that night. The ending was close, I could tell, and it wasn’t going to be good. I just stared at my grandpa, practically leaning inches from his face to hear the climax. He looked me straight in the eyes with, an expression of honest fear and horror seeping from his aged face. He let out a ragged breath.
“That’s when we found him…”
My grandpa was the first one to enter what appeared to be the man’s master bedroom. Blood. There was blood everywhere. It stained the floor like a gruesome tie-dye. The officers who were following closely behind my grandpa stood stock still in utter horror, slowly turning their heads to gaze upon the vast quantity of blood that was spilled inside the room. One of the officers quickly radioed the station to dispatch a team of paramedics, and any additional officers. Something awful happened here. Looking closer at the blood, it appeared that there was a long stain that led into a small passage branching off of the room. Moving painfully slow, my grandpa in the lead, the men made their way into the passage that appeared to lead to another room. After following the trail of blood to its end (which wasn’t that far), my grandpa and his fellow officers ended up in the master bathroom. Then is when they saw him.
The missing man, was lying sprawled out in the large claw-foot tub, dead. He was stark naked, and was hanging over the left side of the tub, his arm limp, and his curled fingers pressing against the stained tile. Just like the bedroom, the bathroom was covered in an unnatural amount of blood. It was running down the walls, slathered across the tiles, and even formed a small puddle in the sink. How that much blood could come out of one human being, I have no idea. And in like every other room, the same words were written on the wall. Only this time, they were smeared in blood, in barely legible English, and were missing the first half.
‘I many’
This is where my grandpa began to get shaky. I could see the tremors he was trying to so hard to suppress wrack his hands and lower lip. I could hear the crack in his voice when he spoke.
“And his face… Oh God his face…”
The man’s head was lolled to the side, his face was directed towards the door of the bathroom, where my grandpa and the other two men were standing. According to my grandpa, his eyes were wide open, and the corners of his mouth were pulled up into a twisted smile, like he was laughing at the expressions of horror spread across the living officer’s faces. Although every officer present was terrified, they had to do their job, and figure out how this poor soul had died, and whether this had been a murder.
Upon further inspection, it appeared the man had slit his wrists. The cuts were inflicted with a rather large shard of glass, which was found lying inside the tub, and ran almost the full length of his arm, starting at his wrist and stopping near his elbow. Both arms had been cut, and it was obvious that his wounds were self inflicted. This was a suicide. A very gruesome suicide.
Not long after the man had been discovered, the paramedics arrived, along with two other policemen, and all of the officers ventured downstairs to convey what had transpired. My grandpa said he had a hell of a time trying to explain to the paramedics what lie waiting for them upstairs. Being a respectful man, my grandpa decided to wait to leave until the deceased man was brought downstairs and taken out of the home. Wanting to be alone for a moment to collect his thoughts, he wandered into the living room to sit down for a bit. He pulled a lone chair away from a cluster of various furniture pieces and took a seat. With closed eyes, he craned his head back in an attempt to rid his mind of the disturbing scene that he had just bore witness to. When he opened his eyes, that’s when he saw them.
Footprints. Human handprints and footprints covered the ceiling. All of them done in blood.
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Credits to: reddit user sassybananas
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