The Novella Life of Illuscia Nester Himawari

It started when I was 16. I was an only child, living with my mother and father. Every night I would wake up at 2:16 AM exactly. No dopiness, no tiredness, nothing. I would sit bolt upright, for a reason unknown to me, and I would listen. I would see nothing in the pitch black of my room, I would hear nothing in my silent house. For five minutes, until 2:21 AM, I would listen hard. At first, I heard generally; five minutes of being totally alert, totally unable to switch off, hearing not a single sound. Then, as quickly as the alertness came, it faded, and I'd fall fast asleep. This went on for a few weeks, every night, the same. I didn't think much of it. I wasn't scared very easily; this was more puzzling than anything else. Around a month or so into the awakenings, I heard the first sound. It was so close to being inaudible, I almost thought I imagined it. A soft footfall outside my door, on the stairs leading up to my attic room. The next night, another step taken, yet ...

It was a marionette, I think. It had a big head, the face was made of wrinkly, flesh colored rubber. The eyes were gigantic, bulging white orbs with red pupils. The hair was black, made of some hard substance that didn’t mesh with the rubbery head. The teeth were gigantic, pure white and capable of moving up and down. The body and limbs were wooden, painted to resemble clothes, but the paint was faded, you could see the wood’s natural brown in some places. Each arm and leg was a different length, but the hands and feet were pretty detailed. It made a loud clattering sound whenever it moved. That puppet... followed me. I don’t mean it got up and chased me. I mean it kept showing up in my life. My earliest memory of it is from my first birthday. I obviously don’t remember the full details of that day, but I remember my parents singing happy birthday and that puppet. I don’t know what it was there for; I just remember it scared me to death and I couldn’t stop crying. When I was able to ta...

Recently at the art gallery I work at, they had a new exhibition for local artists. It was the usual sort of thing; substandard paintings that only got a shoo-in because they were from the local community, paintings of local people and places and so forth. It was my job to decide which paintings got put on display, which entailed me sorting through around a hundred of these awful excuses for art. There was one, though, that really caught my attention. Unlike the others, it was not of a local scene or a local person; it was of a family. A father in a suit sitting in a chair, his dutiful wife behind him and his young son and daughter at his feet. By the looks of their clothes, they were from the 19th century, typically dressed for a middle class family of that period. Two things struck me about the painting; firstly the attention to detail and the quality of the artwork was impeccable (almost photogenic), and secondly was the shiver it sent down my spine. The people in the portrait had t...

There were two rules we had to follow, when we were living on the second floor of the old apartment building. First, lock your door at night, and second, be very careful at the top of the stairs. These were natural rules, since despite the front door being locked, you had to be really sure of two full floors of neighbors to leave the door unlocked, especially during the night. As I understood it, the management of the house used to be really strict about the locked doors thing, and had put up signs all over the place telling people to lock their doors. I heard from the man next door that they sometimes even went around at night and rattled all the doors, making sure that they were all locked, but of course they completely denied being so invasive as that. I had never heard them at it, but I had been known to sleep perfectly content through an earthquake, so that was no indication. As for the stairs, it was just a simple reminder; they were steep and slightly tricky stairs, and I heard ...

We're a small family of four: the two of us and two kids -- four and three years old. My daughter is the older one and for the last year has had nightmares off and on. Some mornings I'll wake up with her wedged firmly in between my wife and I, which is fine. We've all been there. I have no problem with it. What I do have a problem with is when she walks in twenty minutes after we've turned the lights off and the house is dark, just to stand next to the bed on my side and stare at me. I get the sensation that I'm not alone and wake up with a dark little silhouette right next to my face. Although at times it sends me into a slight panic or at least, leaves me with slight chills (not very manly or dad-like I'll admit), I'll break the silence. "Yes, sweetie?" She'll usually ask me if I'm awake and tell me she had bad dreams. I'll let her climb into bed with us at that point and that's the end of it. Well, last night, the same thing happ...

About ten years ago I was recently divorced and living alone in a one bedroom apartment. The place was clean and the rent was decent. One of those places that had a doorman, I felt safe here. I was alone and loving it, focused on my career and not on my clingy ex husband. Things were finally looking up for me. At the time I was working pretty late at the office and would often stumble into my apartment sleep deprived in the early hours of the morning and wake up by 6:30, 7ish to start the day. I started noticing that in the morning my door would be unlocked sometimes, I usually dismissed this as my sleep dead brain thinking that the bed looked more appealing than locking the door. Another thing that I noticed since moving in was that I seemed to misplace things more than I used to, little things like a hairbrush or nail polish, that sort of thing. It wasn’t really that big of a deal, just enough to be a slight annoyance in my day. The longer I lived there the more frequently I seemed t...

Please, I don't know what to do. I've tried to tell my wife about this, but she's a science teacher and thanks to my history of practical jokes, she thinks I'm just kidding. There is something stalking me. I don't know what it wants, but almost every night since I started seeing it, it has terrorized me. It doesn't touch me, it doesn't communicate in any sort of way, it just fills me with horror. If what I seem to ramble, please forgive me... I haven't slept in several days. We live in the second floor of a duplex with stairs down the back of the house to the basement where the laundry machines are. There's a door at the bottom of the stairs before the door to the basement that looks out onto our back porch and into the back yard. Six days ago, I was going down to the basement to bring up some laundry and I glanced out the door as I passed. There was a figure standing at the far edge of our yard. Her back was to me, and she was just standing there, l...

This story is 100% true, although I was only 8 years old at the time, I can recollect every chilling detail. I'd moved to a new town, this was a much nicer, cleaner, quieter town than the one I'd lived at before. Not the sort of town you'd expect to have... things wrong with it. There was a very big public park right in the centre, it housed rows upon rows of swings, slides infested with snake-like tunnels that weaved in and around the playground - providing a maze for children to lose themselves in their games. There was even a functioning merry-go round which seemed to always be slightly turning, inviting the children to hitch a ride on it's platform of twirls. I have to emphasize on the fact that it was a quiet, peaceful town. The kind of town where kids could leave the house on their own and take the short journey to the park. I had been given strict instructions by my parents that I should come home the second it started turning dark. My life was wonderful, or so i...

It was a dark and rainy day in February when I was hit by a small red pick up. February 15th. I was told I flew 15 feet before landing smack on my head. Apparently the driver was drunk and didn't see me crossing. I don't remember that day at all. Four weeks I slept, in a coma that many feared I would never come out of. I was placed in a ward of children and teens with major bodily harm or disease. My roommate was a boy named Mason. I never did find out his last name. For the time in which I slept, he found out bits and pieces of me from my various visitors. My favourite colour, what music I liked, and other random things. The day I woke up, I was showered with love and attention from my family and it took me almost an hour to realise the presence of the boy laying in the bed beside me. He flashed me a lopsided grin and quietly went back to the book he was reading. Eventually I was left in peace and after about 20 minutes of mental debate, I spoke up and asked him his name. His ...

I don’t really remember what happened before it all went dark. I think I was in the car? All I can remember was the loud noise, some screech of metal on metal and then nothing. I woke up in this beeping place. I’m not sure where I am because I can’t seem to open my eyes. Silly, isn’t it? I can definitely feel the blanket on top of me and the beep-beep-beep beside me but I can’t open my eyes or talk or move. People come to poke at me every now and then and I always try to talk to them. “Can someone tell me what’s happened to my eyes? I can’t open them.” I try to say but my vocal cords don’t seem to want to cooperate so I guess I’ll just wait. These people seem to know what they’re doing, they poke in the same places every time, sometimes with their fingers, sometimes with a sharp-thing-with-no-name. They don’t say much, these people. Just come, poke, sigh and go. Someone opened my eye today and held a flashlight over it. It hurt and I couldn’t tell them to stop but just the movement of ...

I've always wanted to share this experience with someone who could relate, and since the therapist I saw as a result of this happening couldn't, maybe r/nosleep can. When I was about 7-8 years old I lived with my grandparents in South Carolina. They had this big house that used to be a stop on the Underground Railroad and I used to love discovering all the cool passageways that ran all over the place. When I wasn't doing that, my grandfather took me fishing and hunting while my grandmother would teach me how to sew and cook. Kind of girly things for a little boy to be doing, but those skills definitely helped out in the long run. My folks were military, so rather than drag me around and traumatize me with multiple moves they had me stay at my grandparents'. My room sat at essentially the middle of the house. It was surrounded on all sides by thick walls which used to house passageways but had since been sealed off. I hung up pictures and cool things befitting an eight ...

I could feel him inside my head, burning, consuming, devouring. He crept through my entire body, dictating all that I did. It was like being constantly buried in sand up to your neck, unable to move your limbs without further entrenching yourself. For ten years, I felt as if I was always suffocating. I watched him for what seemed like an eternity, living my life in my house with my wife, and each day I thought to myself that I had to get rid of this imposter, this doppelganger that seized me from within and kept me from myself. I had to be rid of the being that had snatched my very existence from my grasp. I tried to reason with him more than once. I begged, I cried, I pleaded. I implored him to release me, but to no avail. He had no intention of relinquishing control of my body. I'm not sure he even realized that the battered man in his dreams was the person he had usurped. Soon I resorted to a more violent attitude - I would shout at him in his sleep, attack him, trying to fright...

This is rather long, but considering it spans nearly three decades, that’s to be expected. Much of this I don’t remember, for obvious reasons, but over the years I’ve spoken with my mother and other family members about everything, and I’ve written their accounts down as accurately as anyone could. Apart from that, I’ve gotten copies of all the police reports, and have written this using information gleaned from them. It all started, quite literally, the day I was born. I was in the nursery of the hospital, and my mom and grandparents were standing at the window. Being that I was born at a large hospital in a major city, there were seven or eight other babies there beside me. Next to my family, another woman was standing with a big smile on her face, not a creepy one, but the smile of someone who was genuinely happy at that particular moment. She was an average looking woman of maybe about 22, and had stringy blonde hair. My grandma said she looked like she hadn’t showered in days. Reg...

Do you ever get that feeling that you’re being watched? Well, I do all the time. I guess I’ve sort of always liked the edge of paranoia it gives me. That feeling has been getting worse and worse lately, though, and upon further investigation, I realized that the same white van circled around my neighborhood multiple times a day. I don’t know anyone in my neighborhood that owns a car like that, and so it’s a bit troubling. I’m worried for my son, especially being a young single mother. If anything ever happened to my baby, I’d ruthlessly hunt down and kill the person that did it. Galen’s only four years old; he has a life to live. December 15th, 2011 Okay, so maybe I don’t like that feeling anymore. The van seems to be circling around the block at least a dozen times a day now, and it sort of slows down as it goes by my house. It’s really disconcerting. Should I call someone? Am I just being really paranoid, or is this something to be worried about? I just don’t know anymore. I don’t wa...

Here I am, all alone. Without my sister, without my best friend in the world. I'm now being interrogated as though I murdered my sister and her friends. Because the statutes of limitations on murder don't exist, I could be facing the death penalty for keeping something to use as evidence for my campaign to save others from a similar fate. As I sit here, I think about what happened and how it all started. "Come on! The new show is starting; it's going to be exciting!" She begged me to watch it with her, but it wasn't something I'd be caught dead watching. It'd be boring for a grown male to be watching it, and that's exactly what I told her when I turned back towards my research and fixed my glasses. When I think about it now, this is probably the moment when I lost her. Over the weeks she had become obsessed with that disgustingly colorful show; it seemed to me that it was good that she had found something to keep her happy while I'm locked away...