My wife has always had a fascination with the occult. To be honest, we both have—our love of all things eerie is one of the first things we really bonded over as a couple—but while I am more interested in such a thing from a distance, my wife is much more… hands-on. She likely would have become an archaeologist, had her interest skewed more toward the historical and less toward the disturbing. While I like to watch creepy documentaries and make the occasional trip to a haunted museum, my wife likes to come face-to-face with as many macabre and unsettling objects as she can find. She likes to touch them, inspect them, analyze them… and even collect them.
Her collection started out small, beginning with her deceased grandmother’s favorite necklace and continuing with a few ominous objects that have been in her possession since long before we ever met. She kept them in a little box that her “spiritualist” friend had blessed for her, claiming to have imbued the container with protective qualities. I wasn’t so sure that her friend actually possessed the otherworldly know-how to adequately ward off the forces of evil, but my wife had insisted that her collection had never caused her any problems, and I found her assortment more fascinating than I did unsettling, so I decided to give her friend the benefit of the doubt and I accepted that the items in question were about as safely sealed away as they could be.
My wife brought this collection with her when we moved in together, and it remained with us in each new apartment that we found ourselves in. It didn’t grow much during those first few years—she’d only add a new object to it once in a blue moon, and even then she would only collect objects that could fit within the ever-shrinking space inside of the blessed container—but this selectiveness quickly went out the door as soon as we bought our own home.
Our new house came with a large, finished basement which was complete with more rooms than we had any use for (sometimes living in the boonies really pays off). My wife asked if I would be okay with her using one of these subterranean chambers as a new space for her collection. At first I was put off by such an idea, but I acquiesced when she said that her friend had already agreed to come by and bless the place so it would be ready to contain the ghastly assortment. I wasn’t particularly assured by this, but I figured her friend had done well enough with the first container, so I decided to put a little more faith in her this time around.
This would prove to be a huge mistake.
Once her “containment chamber”, as we started calling it, was good and ready, my wife christened the place by moving all of the objects from her box onto one of the room’s shelves. Her original collection served as the chamber’s only occupants for our first few months in the new house. It took us a while to fully unpack and adjust to our new place, during which time she had little opportunity to even consider her macabre assemblage. Her friend came by to bless the place every now and again, but the containment chamber stood largely untouched for a decently long while.
But then one day she brought home the first new object, and the expanded version of her collection began to take shape.
She had just returned from a trip to the supermarket, but she came inside with more than just a few bags of groceries in her hands. After putting her groceries away, she pulled a disk-shaped object out of her backpack. The object was wrapped in several layers of parchment paper sealed by a string tied around a bundle of sage. She untied the string and unwrapped the item to reveal an old, faded mask with a pale complexion and a blank, expressionless face.
The mere sight of the mask was immediately unsettling. When I asked where she had gotten such a thing, she explained that she had stopped by a thrift store down the street from our house that she had been meaning to check out since we’d moved in. At first she didn’t find much inside, and she was preparing to leave when she came upon something that had caught her eye. Tucked away in one corner of the store, hidden behind several twisting layers of shelves, was a wall labeled “Cursed and Haunted Items”. All of the objects on this wall were locked behind a glass barrier, and she had to request the assistance of the shopkeeper in order to open the case. She asked the shopkeeper if the sign was legitimate or just a strange marketing strategy, and he assured her that each object locked behind that window was “verified” to have been plagued by some sort of curse, hex, spirit or entity—malevalent or otherwise. Not many folks bought anything from that shelf, for obvious reasons, but anybody who did needed to be informed of the potential danger that those objects posed.
My wife was one of those unique few who was drawn to the unsettling objects on that equally unsettling shelf. She took an immediate interest in that mask, and she bought it without hesitation. I was less than thrilled to see such a thing casually sitting on our kitchen table as if she had bought it at Target, but she assured me that the lasting effects from the sage that had been used when wrapping the mask would keep any evil at bay until she could safely secure the object inside of her containment chamber. Again I acquiesced despite my reservations, and again I have come to regret this decision.
The mask’s presence didn’t seem to change anything at first, and for a while I assumed that her friend’s blessing had done its job. I largely forgot about the thing, and I wound up resigning it to the same place in my long-term memory where I keep all of my wife’s spooky objects: out of sight, out of mind. I wouldn’t need to think about it again for another month or so, until my wife made another visit to that thrift store, and returned with a new item to add to the dreaded collection.
The object in question was a ceremonial dagger that was either Mongolian or Mesopotamian in origin (my wife couldn’t say for sure, since the shopkeeper kept going back and forth between the two when talking about it). She didn’t and still doesn’t know much of anything about antique blades, but she liked the look of the thing anyway, and so into the containment chamber it went. I’ve never come in direct contact with it, but my wife insists that the weapon’s hilt is especially cold to the touch, even when held while wearing thick winter gloves. To this day I’ve been perfectly fine with taking her word for it, as I have no interest in verifying this fact for myself.
The next object she brought home was the diary of a Revolutionary War soldier. The shopkeeper was able to give her some information about its origins while he rang her up. He had turned it to its last marked page as he told her about it, and had directed her to the final paragraph, which was interrupted mid-sentence by a dark-brown splotch on the paper. Apparently the soldier in question had been midway through an entry when an unexpected cannonball removed his head from his shoulders. Luckily his diary had managed to survive the incident with minimal spatter over its pages, which is how it eventually ended up in my wife’s collection. She displays it opened to that final page—an act that is especially macabre, even for her—and she insists that sometimes, when she walks by it, she can hear the sound of a scribbling pen echoing through the air. I’ve passed by the book a handful of times on the odd occasion that I find myself in the containment chamber, and I have never heard such a sound.
Resting next to the journal, sandwiched between two bookends, is a 16th century Icelandic grimoire said to contain powerful necromantic spells and secrets, although this cannot be confirmed because the book has been intentionally sealed shut with wax and it cannot be opened without running the risk of destroying its contents. I’m not so sure I believe in any of those necromancy rumors, but looking at it for too long does tend to fill me with an odd sense of dread that I’m unable to properly explain. I can’t help thinking about death and dying whenever I’m near it, but I’m sure that’s just because I’m aware of its allegedly sordid origins, and my imagination is merely filling in the gaps that its presence creates.
Among the more disheartening items in the collection is a century-old photograph of a random mother, father and daughter sitting on a stone bench in what appears to be their backyard. It didn’t come from the thrift store’s Cursed and Haunted Items section, but my wife felt bad that such a memory had been abandoned by the descendants of its former owners, and so she opted to bring it home. While not officially labeled as haunted, I must admit that since she brought it into our house, I’ve started hearing the sound of a giggling child playing in the park across the street at all hours of the night. All glances out the window have revealed the park to be just as dead as the people in the picture are, and yet the sound of childlike merriment persists. I try not to think about it too much.
The next object is actually one that I brought home after my own trip to the thrift store. It’s an Edo-period wakizashi said to have belonged to a samurai of much renown—and also of much infamy. He was a particularly violent man, and the blade now in our collection had supposedly been used to take the lives of dozens if not hundreds of his opponents, before a single dishonorable act resulted in him turning the weapon on himself in a final display of ruthless savagery. It rests next to my wife’s Mongolian or Mesopotamian dagger, and I swear that I can sometimes hear the sound of metal scraping against metal when I walk by the containment chamber door.
Money became a little tight after I bought the wakizashi, which resulted in the collection remaining stagnant for close to a year. Our dry spell was finally broken when my wife came home with a steering wheel once belonging to a certain mid-century automobile that had met a rather unfortunate and infamous end. It is by far the most high-profile item in our collection. For some reason the shopkeeper decided to give it to her for dirt cheap, and we’ve determined that we’ll be able to turn a rather large profit on the thing in the future, should we choose to sell it. It remains in our collection for the time being, and ever since buying it I’m now occasionally awoken from my sleep by the violent, harsh sound of screeching tires that may or may not be the work of our obnoxious neighbor a few houses down.
I don’t remember when my wife bought it, but at some point a German gramophone found its way into the collection. I asked her about it a few months ago, and she seemed to be under the impression that I had been the one to buy it—but seeing as I have no memory of this, and also because it’s not really the kind of purchase that I would make, I think she must have been mistaken. The thing doesn’t work either way, but that hasn’t stopped me from hearing crackly, old-timey music drifting from our home’s air vents from time to time. The music always comes while I’m in the shower, when the sound of rushing water is just loud enough for me to wonder if the music I’m hearing is real, or if it’s just a figment of my imagination.
This is hardly an exhaustive list of the items in our strange, little collection. I have yet to mention my wife’s late-19th-century desk that was the only surviving object in a schoolhouse fire, or my set of vintage leather jackets that were present at the scene of a brutal double-homicide in a clothing store in the early 1950s. The point of me bringing up all of these examples is to illustrate just how vast the collection is. We have objects from all over the globe and from all different eras, all of which share a single thing in common: they all now rest in our containment chamber, which is precariously sealed behind a thin wooden door in our basement. And recent events have led me to believe that bringing all of these potentially bedeviled objects together under one roof and placing them all into the same room may have been the biggest, dumbest mistake of our lives.
As the collection has grown, I’ve noticed a certain presence in our house that has grown with it. It used to be much easier to overlook—to pass off as some vague feeling with no discernible origin—but each new addition to our grim repertoire has only made it that much more powerful, as well as that much more difficult to ignore.
At this point I will say that I firmly believe we have placed too much trust in my wife’s “spiritualist” friend. Her rites and incantations may have been enough to keep our collection in check back when it was a small assemblage of vaguely spooky objects, but the collection has clearly grown to a point where it has become too formidable for her blessings to properly contain it. Each new object adds to a collective surge of dark energy that has been whittling away at whatever mediocre shell that woman placed around the containment chamber, and that dwindling barrier is clearly set to shatter at any moment. I don’t think any of us—my wife, her friend, or I—are ready for what is bound to happen once the thin veil between those objects and our home is finally destroyed.
I’ve already started noticing strange things; ghastly manifestations that continue to seep through the ever-crumbling wall that stands between us and that amalgamation of wickedness. Things around the house will disappear, only to recorporealize in a completely different part of the building days or even weeks later. Voices will call out to me from rooms that are not occupied by a single living soul. I see figures out of the corner of my eye; sinister shadows that stand down the hall or in doorways and which disappear the moment I turn to look at them. Phantom smells and sounds and thoughts will assault my mind at all hours of the day; they transport me back to memories that I’ve never lived, and which I never should have had access to. Our home has never felt so inhabited, despite us hosting fewer guests these days than we ever have before.
Most of these experiences are less than what I would consider pleasant. Many of them are fairly innocuous, but some of them—a number that is on the rise—are actually quite concerning, to say the least. Loud noises, much like the screeching tires, will cause both of us to shoot out of bed in the middle of the night. The smell of death and decay and rot will waft so strongly through our home that we will be forced to go outside just to enjoy some breathable air; upon returning, we will be left with a residual scent that will linger for hours or even days. We are plagued by visions of horrific actions and tragic destinies that we cannot prevent or overcome—all we can do is hopelessly watch as they transpire right before our very eyes, again and again and again and again.
Things came to a head the other night when I was awoken by my wife, who was caught in a storm of heavy, inconsolable tears. After taking some time to calm her down, I managed to get her to tell me the source of her distress. She’d had a nightmare—or maybe she had already been awake—of her grandmother whispering horrible things in her ear about how she was in the midst of being tortured in the deepest depths of hell for sins that she had not confessed to or atoned for in life. The sound of the old woman’s agonized wails had forced my wife into the fit of hysterics that had ripped me from my sleep. Neither of us got any further rest that night.
Which is what brings me to my reason for telling this tale. After a long, emotional conversation, we have come to the difficult decision to get rid of our entire collection of cursed and haunted objects. But we don’t want to simply return all of these items to the thrift store where they will sit festering for an unknowable number of years (this option will soon no longer be available to us anyway, as the shopkeeper recently informed us of his unexpected intention to shut the place down and move out of state). We also don’t want to risk throwing them all away, thus potentially invoking the wrath of whatever entities are attached to them. For this reason, I would like to send out a plea for help from anybody who reads this. If either you or somebody you know has the means to properly contain this collection, and would also be willing to take it off our hands, please let me know. We want to be rid of all of this stuff as quickly as we possibly can. We wish to wash our hands of the collection that we have spent so much time and money gathering. I fear that if we wait for much longer, it will wind up becoming far too late for us to see this plan of ours through. In fact, it might already be too late. These objects seem to have a tendency to lay down roots and attach themselves to anybody foolish enough to take them in. It’s entirely possible that my wife and I are already far too involved with this collection, as well as whatever malevolent force has glommed onto it. Getting rid of all of these terrible objects might not end up benefiting us at all, but we have to try to free ourselves from this ever-deepening nightmare before it swallows us completely.
At this point I don’t know what else we can possibly do.
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