nosleep

This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/Vegetable-Host-9646 on 2024-09-25 16:39:40+00:00.

---

I’ve always been a night owl. College made it worse. I’d find myself up at 2 a.m., headphones in, trying to finish papers or mindlessly scrolling through social media. That night was no different. It was midterms week, so everyone in the dorm was either asleep or pulling all-nighters like me.

I lived on the second floor of my dorm. The building was old, creaky, and had been renovated so many times that it barely resembled the original structure. My room had a tiny window that overlooked the main courtyard, where a single, dim light flickered, casting eerie shadows on the sidewalk below. There was something unsettling about it, but after a few months of living there, I got used to it.

That night, I had my desk lamp on, headphones in, focusing on cramming for an exam. I had this playlist I always listened to while studying — instrumental, soft beats. But suddenly, in the middle of a track, my music cut out. I thought my headphones disconnected, but when I checked, everything was fine. I glanced at my screen, and there it was. The playlist had been paused. Not something I would normally freak out about, but I knew I hadn’t touched anything. My hands were busy typing out notes. I shrugged it off, thinking maybe it was just a glitch, and hit play again.

I got back into the zone, but a few minutes later, it happened again. This time, the volume bar started moving by itself. I stared at my screen, feeling my pulse quicken. My room was completely still. No air conditioner, no one else around. I restarted my laptop, trying to calm myself down. Technical issues, I told myself. Nothing more.

But when I opened my laptop again, things took a turn. My screen flashed — just for a second. It was quick, but I caught a glimpse of something. Someone. A shadowy figure, standing in the corner of the room on the screen, behind me. My breath caught in my throat. I spun around, heart pounding, but there was nothing. Just my messy bed and a pile of laundry. My heart hammered in my chest, but I tried to laugh it off, telling myself it was probably a reflection or a trick of the light.

I stood up and closed the blinds. The courtyard light flickered again as I did. The thought crossed my mind that maybe someone had been watching me from outside, but I quickly dismissed it. There was no way anyone could see up to my window.

An hour later, I decided to take a break. My roommate had gone home for the weekend, so I was alone. I grabbed my phone and headed to the communal bathroom at the end of the hall. The halls were eerily quiet at night, and the only sound was the faint buzzing of the old fluorescent lights.

As I entered the bathroom, I noticed one of the stalls was closed. The door was slightly ajar, but I didn’t think much of it. I went to the sink, splashed water on my face, and stared at my reflection, feeling the fatigue weigh on me. That’s when I heard it — the softest sound, like someone shifting their weight, coming from that stall. My stomach knotted. It was probably another student, I thought. But at this hour? I hadn’t seen or heard anyone else on my floor all night.

I waited a moment, but no one came out. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up. Trying to shake off the creeping dread, I dried my hands and turned to leave. As I reached the door, I heard it again — a slight movement. This time, though, the door to the stall slowly creaked open.

I froze.

It was dark inside the stall, but I could make out a shape. It looked like someone was standing there, but they weren’t moving. I couldn’t see their face, just an outline. My first instinct was to apologize, thinking I’d walked in on someone, but something about the stillness felt wrong. My voice caught in my throat. I backed up a step, my heart racing.

Then, without warning, the door slammed shut with a deafening bang.

I stumbled back, my mind racing, adrenaline pumping through my veins. My body screamed at me to run, but my legs felt frozen in place. My eyes were locked on the stall, waiting for something—anything—to emerge from the dark gap beneath the door. But nothing happened.

The air felt heavy, almost suffocating, and the buzzing of the lights overhead seemed to grow louder, drilling into my ears. The only thing that broke the stillness was the sound of my own rapid breathing. Then, in the silence, I heard something. It wasn’t a noise I could easily identify, just a faint… whisper. Like a voice, but not quite. It was as if someone was trying to speak, but the words didn’t fully form.

I bolted out of the bathroom, not daring to look back. The hallway felt even longer now, stretching endlessly before me as I sprinted back to my room. My hands shook as I fumbled with the key, finally getting the door open and slamming it behind me. I leaned against it, heart still pounding in my chest, trying to make sense of what had just happened.

I kept telling myself it was my imagination. Midterms stress, lack of sleep—it had to be that. But deep down, I knew what I saw. What I felt. I didn’t want to believe it, but it was impossible to shake the feeling that something was watching me.

For the rest of the night, I couldn’t focus. I sat at my desk, staring at my laptop, but every creak, every distant sound in the hallway, made my skin crawl. I tried listening to music again, hoping it would calm my nerves, but as soon as I hit play, my laptop froze. The screen flickered again, just like before. And there it was, clear as day—the reflection of that same figure standing behind me. Closer this time.

I didn’t turn around. I couldn’t. My eyes were glued to the screen, my breathing shallow, heart beating in my ears. My fingers hovered over the keyboard, too terrified to move. Suddenly, the figure leaned in closer in the reflection, and I could make out something that made my blood run cold. It wasn’t just a shadow—it had eyes. Dark, sunken eyes, staring directly at me.

Before I could scream, the screen went black. My laptop shut off on its own. I jumped up and ran to the light switch, flicking it on, bathing the room in harsh light. But when I turned around… nothing. My room was empty. No figure. No shadow. Just me, alone, in the dead of night.

I didn’t sleep. I couldn’t. The thought of closing my eyes and waking up to that thing hovering over me was too much to bear. I kept the lights on, my back pressed against the wall, waiting for the dawn to break.

The next morning, I decided to leave campus early and head home for the weekend. I didn’t tell anyone what happened. How could I? I’d sound crazy. But as I packed my bag, I noticed something odd. My window, the one I had closed the night before, was wide open. The blinds swayed slightly in the breeze. I rushed over and shut it, but the courtyard light outside was no longer flickering.

I told myself it was nothing. A mistake. I had probably just forgotten to latch the window properly. But as I grabbed my bag to leave, I caught something out of the corner of my eye. A piece of paper, folded neatly, was sitting on my desk. I knew for a fact it hadn’t been there the night before.

With trembling hands, I unfolded it. Scribbled in messy, almost childlike handwriting were three words:

“I see you.”

I dropped the paper, feeling a cold sweat break out on my forehead. There was no way anyone could have gotten into my room. No way someone had left that note without me noticing. My door had been locked all night.

The thought of staying another minute in that room made my skin crawl. I grabbed my things and practically ran out of the building, not stopping until I was safely in my car, on the road back home. But the whole drive, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I wasn’t alone. I kept glancing in the rearview mirror, half expecting to see those dark eyes staring back at me.

I never went back to that dorm after that weekend. I told my roommate I’d be staying with a friend for the rest of the semester, and I did. Whatever was in that room… I didn’t want to find out.

Even now, years later, the memory haunts me. I still wonder what I saw, what that figure was. And every once in a while, when I’m alone at night, I swear I hear the soft creak of a door, slowly opening behind me.

This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/iifinch on 2024-09-25 17:31:46+00:00.

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The gunman walked into the classroom. Everyone froze. He was too quick for anyone to receive a hero's death. All I remember were screams, the sound of bullets slicing through bodies, and the realization only a minute later that the shooter didn't notice I wasn't dead yet. He walked into the classroom to examine the bodies. Once he turned his back on me, I ran out. I was gone, and I was the only survivor in my college class.

I ran in the hallways. The intercoms blared for a complete school shutdown. 

"Let no one in."

As I ran in the halls, I realized I was bleeding out badly. I was dying. I banged on the doors of my classmates, of my friends, and they rightfully ignored me. I was well and truly alone.

It was terrifying.

I would not wish that fear on my worst enemy.

I knocked on so many doors for help. Eventually, the blood loss got to me, my energy faded, and I passed out alone and waiting to die.

Of course, I was eventually rescued; of course, I was given therapy; of course, I was forever changed.

I would do anything to not have that feeling again. I decided I'd never be alone. So, I became everything to everyone. The wealthy always have friends, so I switched my major to engineering. Good people always have friends, so I created charities to honor the lives of my dead friends, and I was at every service opportunity possible for most other charities on campus. The adventurous and degenerates always have friends, so I joined the wildest frat on campus.

Of course, the truth about life is that you can't have everything, but through a mix of energy drinks and other substances, I tried. I tried until my heart couldn't take it. For all my efforts, I would still face my worst fear: I would die alone.

I had a heart attack. I grabbed my chest, looked around, and I was alone in my room. I knew I was going to die. I didn't want to die alone. I didn't want to die and have no one find my body.

That was the day I realized, after moving to a new city upon graduation, I hadn't made genuine friends. I was still alone. I thought I had surpassed solitude. I thought I would always have someone around when I needed them.

If I died on my apartment floor on the first day, surely no one would come; on the second and third, the same. On the fourth, my body would bloat and distort, an unrecognizable change from the man I was. On the fifth day, my neighbor might ask to borrow a board game for the game nights he never invited me to. But if I didn't answer, he wouldn't care. The fifth, sixth, and seventh days, my bloated dead body would turn red. Maybe the smell would draw somebody.

If it didn't, in a month my body would liquefy, and all my life would equate to is a pile of mush, a stain in my rented apartment.

I hoped I left my window open so perhaps a stray cat would come in and lick me up so I wouldn't be a complete waste. The thought made me cry.

Thank God, that time it was just a scare caused by energy drinks and poor sleep. But once I got out of the hospital, I was determined not to die like that: alone and vulnerable.

Back in my apartment, I was lonely. Soul-crushingly lonely, and I didn't think it would stop. Working remote didn’t help. I hadn't been touched by a person in… what was my record, like a whole month? I hadn't had an in-person conversation with a friend in two months.

Life is hard in a new city. I needed more than a friend. I needed more than a girlfriend. I needed a wife.

I would do anything for one. I tried Hinge and Tinder and was either ghosted or dumped. It all ended the same. So, please understand I had no other choice.

I dug through the internet to find advice on how to get a girlfriend.

I found somewhere dark, a place I don't suggest you go. They were banned from Reddit and banned from Discord. This group was dedicated to good men —good guys, who weren't jerks, who didn't want to hurt anyone, who wanted true love—to find cults they could join to find wives.

They said the women there were loyal, kind, and really wanted love. That's the point of all religious belief, isn't it? Love.

Hell is mentioned 31 times in the Bible, but love 801 times. It's not the fear of Hell that drives them; it's the ache to be loved. I ached too, so why couldn't we help each other?

And in whatever cult we’d join, we'd be good too. We'd make sure there was no bad stuff like blackmail and kid touching. We were just looking for someone who would love us for us.

Someone who wouldn't leave.

After a couple of months in the group of helping other members find cults to join and patiently waiting for my assignment, I was told there was a new cult I could join. But I needed to wait for another one of our members to come back who was already in the cult. They said they lost communication with him. I couldn't take the emptiness of my apartment anymore, so I begged and pleaded to go. I even said I'd take two phones so if one didn't work, I'd always have the backup. 

I was persistent. They relented.

This is what they told me:

The Cult of Confession appears not to be an offshoot of any of the three major religions, nor of any minor ones we can find.

It really seems to have come from nowhere, so you're in luck; easy come, easy go. My guess is the cult won't last long, so find true love and get out.

You’ll be in the remote mountains of Appalachia, known for general strangeness. Be careful I wouldn’t leave the commune if I was you.

There are only two guys you need to watch out for: one named Confession and another named Zeus. The rest of the thirty-person cult is all women, except for our guy.

The danger of the cult is the two men since we don't really know what they want yet. In general, it could be death, sex, or human sacrifice.

Remember Rule #1: Be Kind—no one has ever joined a cult who wasn't hurting on the inside.

Remember Rule #2: It's okay to lie for the service of good.

Remember Rule #3 Know the truth, do not believe what you’re told in a cult.

Good luck, man. We're going to miss you.

He gave me the location of the city, and with that, I moved to join a cult.

I arrived 20 minutes late to the shack on the hill in Appalachia. The plan, in general, is to look flustered, nervous, and desperate to be accepted in any cult. But clean-cut enough to not be dangerous.

With a shaved head and a black suit, I stumbled into a church shack. A sound like muffled screams erupted from the doors.

No one sat in the pews. Beside every row of pews was a bent-over woman crying into the floor as if she was worshipping.

The man or thing they worshipped stood on stage. I was not aware humans could have so much bulk. He would have won every bodybuilding contest; he had muscle on top of muscle. It was grotesque; it almost looked like a tumorous skin infection.

The man was a pile of bulky, veiny flesh that looked immovable. A creature to the point of caricature in two layers of white robes.

His eyes locked on me, but his face did not move. It was frozen; I would never see it move. It was locked in a permanent scowl.

Fear, that feeling in my gut that I fought against now. That must be how he controlled them. The reality was that he could break their necks in seconds. Yes, that could do it.

It was important he felt he controlled me. That I was under his control. So, I played the part.

I was not terrified, but I played the part. It was easy to let fear win. It was easy to let fear make me drop to my knees to worship. It was easy to let fear stir me and shake me like the rest of the women. It was easy to pray to a God because—excuse my sacrilege—I felt as though I faced one right before me.

Eventually, the impossibly muscled priest clapped his hands. It sounded like thunder. We all rose and got into our pews.

The great priest walked away, going in the curtain behind him. The rest of the women gathered in their pews and said nothing. They instead read the material provided for them.

In front of me was a composition notebook. I opened it, and in it, I saw scriptures from something I had never heard of.

Someone tapped me on the shoulder. I jumped. A man with hair down his back and wearing all white stood behind me. He was the opposite of Confession: beautiful, slim, and his perfect teeth flashed a grin.

"You're not supposed to be here," his grin vanished.

"Um.... I thought all were welcome."

"To Heaven maybe. Does this look like Heaven?"

"I guess not."

In a flash, he moved to the other side of me. I flinched. He put a shockingly strong hand on my shoulder and said, "Stay." 

I obeyed, and he examined me from side to side, moving like lightning, so fast a literal breeze formed behind me. I looked forward at the women studying the word of Confession. This was true fear: being examined by a strange man and not understanding where that giant Confession was.

I panicked as he examined me more. He patted my shoulders, put his hand in my front pocket, and pulled at my ear. I did nothing in response; I froze. Mentally, I begged for my only ally in this group to come rescue me from this humiliatinge examination.

The women didn't seem to care; they just read the notebooks. I examined the room for my only ally in the mountains of Appalachia, the other guy. Where was he?

"What's your greatest mistake?" he asked me, loud enough for the church to hear. I turned to look at him. He palmed my skull and faced me forward again. "You don't have to look at me to answer a question. What's your greatest mistake?"

I did as he said and l...

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Content cut off. Read original on https://old.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/1fpa8t6/i_joined_the_cult_of_confession_to_find_a_wife/

This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/MangoNotBanana on 2024-09-25 11:44:51+00:00.

---

Ah Lang and I had always loved the outdoors. The wilderness felt like a hidden world, far removed from the concrete entrapment of Hong Kong. There was something magical in the silence of nature, a quiet that held secrets. This weekend, we’d decided to escape to one of the smaller islands near Lamma. It was perfect—just the two of us, away from the endless hum of the city. Alone, at last.

Our friends were supposed to join us later, but we opted for the earlier boat. A head start, we told ourselves. A bit of calm before the inevitable chaos of company. But as we stepped off the boat onto the island’s rocky shore, something... shifted.

The boatman was old, older than I had first realized. His skin was weathered, creased by countless sunrises, his eyes dark as if they’d seen too many things best left unspoken. He lingered as we gathered our gear, his gaze heavy, as though weighing something invisible. Ah Lang, usually so confident, shifted beside me, his unease palpable.

The boatman cleared his throat, the sound like sandpaper scraping against stone.

“You boys sure you want to camp here tonight?”

I forced a smile, perhaps a little too quickly. “Yeah, we’ve got it all planned out.”

The old man said nothing, but his eyes flicked upwards, scanning the dimming sky with the practiced gaze of someone who knows more than they ever let on. Finally, he spoke, his voice low, almost to himself.

“You know what day it is on the lunar calendar?”

Ah Lang shrugged, trying for casual. “We don’t really follow the lunar calendar, uncle. Is there something special about today?”

A sigh escaped the old man’s lips, the kind of sigh that carried years of forgotten stories, stories that lingered just out of reach. He looked at us again, more tired than before.

“If you need me,” he muttered, “just radio. I’ll come.”

And with that, he turned, his boat slipping away into the grey horizon, leaving behind a silence that felt too still, too deliberate.

The air, once lively with the whispers of the sea breeze, grew thick. The usual sounds of nature—birds, crickets, anything—were conspicuously absent. I could feel something watching, but from where, or what, I couldn’t say.

But we laughed it off. We had to. The quiet was unnerving, but it wasn’t enough to shake us yet. We hiked inland, trading half-hearted jokes, hoping they’d dispel the strange weight that had settled over us.

“You know,” Ah Lang said with a sly grin, nudging me, “once we set up the tent, we could reenact that one scene from Brokeback Mountain.”

I rolled my eyes, trying to match his ease. “You’re always thinking about that, aren’t you?”

“Can you blame me?” he laughed, the sound a little too loud in the empty space. “You make it hard to focus on anything else.”

We found a clearing by a stream, the kind of place that should’ve felt perfect—if not for the feeling. A low, nagging hum in the back of my mind, as though the trees themselves were watching, waiting for something to happen. But we ignored it. We had to.

The tent was up just as the sun dipped below the horizon, leaving behind a sky streaked with hues of burnt orange and purple. I checked my phone. The signal was weak, but enough for a message from Mei.

Sorry! Missed the last boat. We won’t make it tonight. We’ll catch the first boat in the morning.

Ah Lang groaned theatrically, flopping onto the ground. “Great. I was really looking forward to a hot meal with everyone.”

I chuckled. “We’ve still got plenty of sausage right here.”

He shot me a playful grin. “Maybe later, we’ll get to that.”

But later never came as we planned. The sun had slipped away completely, and the air grew cold—colder than it should have for this time of year. We fumbled through our supplies, preparing for dinner, only to realize the most essential thing was missing: matches.

“Looks like we’ll have to wait until morning for a fire,” I said, trying to keep my voice steady. But the cold had already started to sink deeper into my bones.

And that’s when Ah Lang noticed it.

“Do you see that?” he asked, his voice hushed, pointing down the hill.

A faint light flickered in the distance, soft and warm, like lanterns swaying gently in the breeze.

“I thought this island was supposed to be uninhabited,” I murmured, narrowing my eyes.

“Maybe there’s a village we didn’t know about,” Ah Lang suggested. “Where there’s a village, there’s food.”

We grabbed our flashlights, and I felt a pull, an inexplicable tug toward the lights. We descended into the darkness, the forest closing in around us, the soft crunch of leaves underfoot the only sound in a world that had gone eerily quiet.

At the bottom, we stumbled upon it: a roadside stall, dimly lit by lanterns that swayed like forgotten dreams. An old man stood behind a boiling pot, his face lined with age, his eyes sharp—too sharp.

“You boys just arrived?” he asked, his voice low, raspy, almost... amused.

“Yeah,” I replied, feeling a cold knot twist in my gut. “Just tonight.”

His eyes flicked over us, then softened, a shadow of something... pity, perhaps? “So young...” he muttered, almost to himself.

He gestured for us to sit, and soon, the rich aroma of wonton noodles filled the air, warm and savory. My stomach growled, and despite the unease gnawing at me, I ate. The broth was warm, the noodles perfect. But with each bite, the feeling grew heavier, pressing down like the weight of something long forgotten.

When Ah Lang offered him money—a hundred-dollar note—the old man’s eyes widened. His hands trembled as he pushed the bill back.

“No... no need,” he said, his voice quivering. “Just... leave. You shouldn’t be here.”

My stomach twisted, the unease now blooming into full dread. “What do you mean?” I asked.

He glanced around, eyes flicking into the shadows as if something was waiting just beyond the light. “Don’t ask questions. Just go.”

We left. We had no choice. As we walked, the village—if you could call it that—fell silent. The lanterns flickered, and I felt the weight of too many eyes on us. I whispered to Ah Lang, “Maybe it’s some kind of retirement village for rich folks.”

But as soon as I spoke, everything stopped.

The villagers, once slow-moving and frail, turned. Their eyes gleamed in the lantern light, sharp and unnatural. One old woman, her face a mask of decay and hunger, approached, sniffing the air like a wolf scenting prey.

“Fresh... humans,” she whispered, her voice rasping like dry leaves.

My heart stopped. Ah Lang took a step back, pale. “What the hell?”

The woman grinned, revealing sharp, yellowed teeth. “So much fresh Qi...”

The villagers moved then, their limbs jerking, twisting into shapes that no human should take. They surged toward us, their hunger palpable, their silence terrifying.

“Run!” Ah Lang shouted, and we bolted, the world a blur of shadows and flickering lights as we sprinted back toward the trees.

They were fast, impossibly fast. My lungs burned, my legs screamed, but I didn’t dare slow down.

“There!” I gasped, pointing to a rundown cabin hidden among the trees. “Hide inside!”

We threw ourselves into the cabin, slamming the door shut. The air inside was thick with rot, but we bolted the door and backed away, our hearts pounding in the oppressive silence.

Outside, we could hear them, whispering, scratching, their voices like the wind through dead branches.

“I can smell their Yang Qi...” one hissed.

I clamped my hand over Ah Lang’s mouth. We waited. The night stretched on, an eternity of whispers and scratches, until, slowly, the voices faded, leaving behind only silence.

When I woke, the cabin was gone. We lay on the cold ground, dirt and leaves scattered around us.

Ah Lang sat up, confused. “What the hell...? I swear we were in a cabin last night.”

I nodded, too stunned to speak. Then I saw it. A small, weathered shrine stood nearby, its roof covered in moss and vines.

“Wait,” I whispered. “This is a shrine to Tu Di Gong...”

Ah Lang looked at me, wide-eyed. “The Earth God? You think he protected us?”

“He must have,” I murmured. The realization sent a chill through me.

We packed up in silence, and as we made our way back, I glanced down the hill. What had been a village was now a sprawling cemetery, tombstones standing like silent witnesses in the morning light.

“It’s not a village,” I whispered. “It’s a cemetery.”

We rushed to the dock, where our friends were waiting. Mei smiled apologetically.

“Sorry again! None of the boatmen would take us here last night. They said it was the 14th day of the 7th lunar month.”

My heart sank. “The Ghost Festival?”

She nodded. “Yeah. They said the spirits were out... bad luck to be on the water at night.”

And that’s when it hit. The memory of the wonton noodles, the weight of the night, the gnawing dread that hadn’t left since we ate.

My stomach twisted, and I doubled over. Ah Lang, beside me, did the same. We coughed and retched, something thick and grainy forcing its way out.

It wasn’t food.

It was dirt.

Wet, foul-smelling, clumpy mud.

This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/Verastahl on 2024-09-24 21:02:54+00:00.

---

****

Previously, in Part Eleven

****

We were exhausted when we got home, and other than taking care of Nick and spending time together, we didn’t do much for the next couple of days.  Not so much as try to step outside.  Part of it was the fatigue, but only part.  We were also terrified.  In shock and horror from what we’d just lived through and in dread of what was ahead of us.

 

Because we’d discussed it, Gordon and I, and we knew things had to change.  This world was getting more dangerous the deeper we sunk into it, and we had to find a new way of pleasing our…benefactor…while keeping our family safe.  It sounded reasonable when we said it in hushed tones amongst ourselves, but I could see my own fear reflected in Gordon’s eyes.  Fear of reprisal, or worse, rejection, and what that might mean for our miraculous little life together.

 

So we stayed inside, spent time together as a family.  In some ways, it was a really magical time.  I remember having the thought at one point—I think we were laughing over a board game at the time—that it was as if we were living in some wonderful snow globe, protected and separate from the darkness of the world outside.

 

I didn’t know how right I was.

 

On the third day, I woke up to the sound of panicked, breathless cursing at the front of the house.  It was Gordon, tugging on the doors and windows, so angry and scared that it took me asking what was wrong several times before he even registered it and turned to look at me, eyes wide as dinner plates.

 

“It’s the house, Gracie.  It…none of the doors will open.  Windows neither.  Not like they’re stuck, but like they were never made to be opened.”

 

Something so strange should have brought questions or doubts, but I had none.  I trusted Gordon—he was no fool or coward, and if he was that close to losing control…well, there wasn’t really anything to discuss.  We just needed to get out.

 

So I picked up a fireplace poker and started trying to break or pry open a window or door.  When that didn’t work I got a softball bat from the closet.  Then an electric drill.  You could chip paint and scratch wood, but nothing deep.  And if you went back a few minutes later to an old wound, you’d find it had flowed together again like running wax.

 

Of course, by then we were starting to discuss things more.  If brute force wasn’t going to be the answer, then we needed to figure out what had caused this.  We discussed options both mundane and otherwise over the next couple of hours.  Nick had woken up by this point, so we had to keep the tone light and act to him like Gordon and I were playing some kind of strange game.  My smile and laughter seemed painfully brittle as we went over different possible scenarios.

 

Had we been drugged?  Was there some gas leak or toxin causing us to hallucinate?  It seemed unlikely, as we were seeing the same things and weren’t noticing any strange behavior in each other or Nick.

 

Was there something supernaturally wrong with the house?  While neither of us were against the idea of a house being haunted, we’d never had any sign of anything strange there before.  But if what we were seeing was, in fact, real, we’d gone past the point of it making sense without it being paranormal somewhere between him breaking the poker against a window and me drilling into the sealed back door with no effect.

 

The most obvious cause was right in front of us the whole time, of course.  Or right behind us, maybe.  But as my grandfather used to say, we were circling like flies dancing around a pile of shit.  Neither of us wanted it to be connected to the work, especially not to the last job, to the thing that slaughtered that whole family.  But when we’d run out of ways to circle, it was Gordon that said it first.  His face was still stiff with fear, but the anger was gone now.  In its place, was a sickly dread that made my stomach curdle as he said the words.

 

“It followed us home, didn’t it?”

 

I wanted to argue, but instead I nodded.  “I think so, yes.”  I lowered my voice, though I didn’t know that it would make any real difference.  “We have to get out of here.  We have to get Nick out of here.”

 

Gordon’s face darkened slightly.  “What do you think…”  He shook his head.  “No, I’m sorry.  You’re right, of course.  Nothing we’ve tried has worked, so we need to think of something we haven’t.”

 

Hand trembling, I pushed a sweaty strand of hair out of my face.  “Do you think it knows we’re here?  Our master?”  I usually avoided referring to it in such unvarnished terms, mostly because the idea of giving myself over so much to something so unknown was terrifying to me, but now wasn’t the time for word games or illusions.  I saw Gordon note the word in his expression before giving me a slow, tired shrug.

 

“I don’t know, Grace.  Maybe.  Maybe it knows but can’t do anything about it.  It clearly didn’t stop it from happening, if we’re right about the source of this…”  he gestured around at the room,  “…this trap.”  Shaking his head, he sat down on the floor.  “Or maybe it just doesn’t care.”

 

My tongue felt thick as I swallowed down his words.  We’d become so comfortable and confident in our special, protected status that even when we were scared, we were never hopeless.  We assumed that the dangers would be overcome, either by us or by our benefactor.  But what if it had cast us aside?  Or what if it wanted to help, but was just powerless to do so?

 

But no.  Hadn’t it saved Gordon?  Hadn’t it protected us from afar countless times before?  Even the rituals we did were largely just acts of showmanship for the clients.  That, and well, maybe a showing of faith and trust on our part as well.

 

“We should pray.”

 

Gordon glanced up at me with a frown.  “What?  To our…to the master?”

 

I nodded.  “Maybe it will reach him.”

 

He puffed out a breath as he looked up at the ceiling.  “I don’t know, Gracie.  We don’t worship it.  We just work for it.  I don’t know what you think that would do.”

 

I felt anger flare up in my belly, fueled by frustration and fear.  “I think that we don’t have the luxury of discarding ideas because they make us uncomfortable, and that the time for semantics is past.  Whatever else we are, we are its servants, and we don’t know unless we try.”  Falling to my knees, I clasped my hands tightly in a knot, heart pounding in my chest as I tried to find the right way to start.  Gordon wasn’t entirely wrong—we didn’t worship it, not really.  But I still felt like I needed to phrase things like I was speaking to a god.

 

“Please hear us.  Please help us.  Shelter us from this thing that has befallen us.  This thing that has trapped us while doing your work on your behalf.  We have been diligent servants and…we appreciate all the blessings and protections you have given us.  Please find us and help us now.”

 

I looked over to find Gordon had come to kneel next to me, his eyes wet and gleaming as he met my own.  Voice thick, he echoed the last of my words.  “Please find us.  Help us.  Please.”

 

Behind us, a voice blossomed in the dark.

 

“It will not help you or find you.  Not here.  Only I am with you.  So if you must pray, pray to me.”

 

We both turned toward the sound, my whole body shaking with fear.  I wasn’t sure what I expected to see, but I actually felt a pang of disappointment when I didn’t see anything at all.  But then no, that wasn’t quite right.  Because the far corner of the room was darker, wasn’t it?  A cobweb of shadow that clung to every surface, as though the light was afraid to go any farther in.  Looking into that shadow, I tried to keep my voice steady as I responded.

 

“What do you want?  What do you want from us to set us free?”

 

The darkness seemed to shift and swell slightly before deepening into a thicker patch of impossible night.  “What do you think I want, silly?”

 

Its voice had been loud and harsh coming from the corner of the room, but was soft as silk when it moved next to my ear.

 

“A sacrifice.”

 

****

“It has to be me.”

 

Gordon and I had been sitting together in the kitchen—it was a silly attempt at privacy, of course.  The thing that had trapped us in our home was, at least so far as we could tell, everywhere.  Still, being in the living room with that unnatural patch of shadow made my skin crawl, and I could tell Gordon was relieved when I suggested we move before talking.

 

It hadn’t said anything more after “a sacrifice”, but I think we both instinctively knew what that meant.  One of us had to stay.  To keep it company.  Or serve it.  Or feed it.  I was already trying find the best way to broach the topic when Gordon volunteered himself.  I felt my eyes widen as blood began to pound in my ears.

 

“What?  No, Gordon.  There has to be another…we’ll figure out something.”

 

His face hardened briefly, his eyebrows furrowing as he prepared to give some harsh rebuttal, some argument as to why he was right.  But then his face crumpled, tears coming to his eyes as he looked at me pleadingly.

 

“Gracie, I’m no good for him.  Not compared to you.  And I can’t bear the idea of you being stuck in here.”  He lowered his head as his eyes sank to the table.  “I won’t.”

 

I knew the “him” meant Nick.  Gordon meant to stay, but he also didn’t even consider any other po...

---

Content cut off. Read original on https://old.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/1fonbp1/they_take_away_your_nightmares_but_the_price_is/

This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/HeatConfident4673 on 2024-09-25 11:14:41+00:00.

---

My little sister Ella died a year ago. She was only 12.

The doctors said it was natural causes, but there was nothing natural about what happened to her. The truth is, our family killed her, slowly, over years of cruelty. It wasn’t sudden, but a slow, deliberate breakdown of her spirit—of her soul. They broke her.

Our father died when we were young, and my sister and I were taken in by his side of the family. It was supposed to be temporary, until our mother could get back on her feet. But it wasn’t. Ella suffered the most. My father’s family—my uncle, aunt, cousins—hated us. They hated her.

They were monsters, but they wore the faces of family.

The worst part? I couldn’t do anything to stop it.

I tried to protect Ella, but I was just a kid, too. She’d get locked in the basement for days, the door clicking shut behind her while my aunt turned the key with a smile. Sometimes, they’d forget to feed her. Other times, they’d do it on purpose. It wasn’t just the physical abuse—it was the torment. The things they said to her. They loved to make her feel small, powerless.

I remember seeing her eyes when they told her she wasn’t worth anything, that no one would miss her if she disappeared. Her eyes went empty. Dead.

I didn’t realize that, in a way, she had already died long before her heart stopped.

Ella's death was a relief to them, a way to erase their guilt, bury their sins. I think they believed, deep down, that once she was gone, all the things they had done would be buried with her. They never expected what would happen next.

At the funeral, something strange happened. Our mother—broken, hollow, not really there—stood apart from the rest of the family. She wasn’t crying. She hadn’t cried since the day Ella died. I watched her walk up to the casket, her hands trembling as she touched Ella’s cold face. For a moment, it looked like she was about to break down.

But she didn’t.

Instead, she leaned over Ella’s still body and whispered something into her ear.

I wasn’t close enough to hear it, but I saw the look in her eyes. I’ll never forget that look. It was...unsettling. Like she was speaking to someone she knew would hear her, someone who wasn’t really gone.

Later that night, I asked her what she whispered. At first, she didn’t answer. She just stared at me, her expression unreadable. But then, in a voice that was barely a whisper, she told me:

"I told her to avenge me."

I didn’t understand what she meant at the time. I thought it was just her grief talking. After all, the family had taken everything from us. I thought she was just angry, broken. But now, looking back, I realize it was something much darker.

The first sign that something was wrong happened the night after the funeral.

It started with the sounds. It was subtle at first—soft whispers that seemed to come from the walls, like distant voices carried on the wind. But the house was still. There was no wind. I remember standing in the hallway, holding my breath, listening. It wasn’t random noise. It was too clear, too deliberate.

"You know what you did."

At first, I thought it was my imagination. I told myself I was just hearing things. But the whispers grew louder each night. They weren’t coming from outside; they were inside the house, crawling through the cracks in the walls, echoing in the corners. Sometimes, I’d catch a word or two, but other times, it was just the soft, almost pleading sound of a voice I couldn’t place.

But the others heard it too.

My uncle, the cruelest of them all, was the first to crack. He began waking up in the middle of the night, drenched in sweat, screaming about seeing something in his room. He swore that Ella was standing at the foot of his bed, watching him.

“She’s not gone,” he’d mutter to himself during the day, pacing back and forth. His eyes were wild, sunken, like he hadn’t slept in weeks. “She’s still here.”

No one believed him. They thought he was losing his mind. But I believed him.

Because I saw her, too.

It started small. Out of the corner of my eye, I’d catch glimpses of her—just for a second—standing in doorways or reflected in windows. She was never close, never fully there, but it was her. I know it was.

Her face was pale, hollow, and her eyes...they weren’t the same. They were dark, like empty pits, staring back at me. Her expression never changed. It was like she was waiting for something, or someone.

I tried to ignore it, tried to convince myself that it was just my mind playing tricks on me. But deep down, I knew. Ella wasn’t resting. She was waiting.

Then, the scratches started.

It was late one night when I heard it—a slow, deliberate scraping sound, like nails dragging across the walls. It came from inside the house, from the basement, where they used to lock her away. I wanted to believe it was a rat, or maybe just the house settling, but when I went downstairs to check, I found something much worse.

The walls were covered in deep scratches, gouged into the plaster, as if something—or someone—had been clawing at it, trying to escape.

But that wasn’t the worst part.

Above the scratches, carved in the same jagged lines, were words. Words I knew weren’t there before:

"You will pay."

My uncle was the first to die.

They said he fell down the stairs in the middle of the night, that it was a tragic accident. But I know what really happened. I saw his face before they covered it up. His eyes were wide open, filled with terror, as if he had seen something...something that shouldn’t have been there.

After he died, things escalated. The whispers became louder, more insistent. The footsteps started—slow, deliberate, like someone walking through the house in the dead of night. Every time they happened, I would freeze, listening, praying it would stop. But it never did.

My aunt, who had locked Ella in the basement so many times, began hearing voices. At first, she thought it was just her imagination, but the whispers followed her everywhere. In the bathroom, in her bedroom, even in her car. Always the same voice. Always Ella.

She begged for it to stop, but it didn’t. She started sleeping with the lights on, but that didn’t help either. One morning, I found her sitting on the floor of her room, her eyes wide and vacant, mumbling to herself. She wouldn’t look at me, wouldn’t respond. All she did was repeat the same phrase, over and over:

"She’s coming for me. She’s coming for all of us."

The rest of the family didn’t fare much better. My cousins, once so full of life, started looking hollow and gaunt. They hardly spoke anymore, their eyes darting around the house as if they were waiting for something. I knew what they were waiting for.

Ella.

It was only a matter of time before she came for them too.

And then there’s me.

I thought I’d be spared, that Ella wouldn’t come for me because I had tried to protect her. I wasn’t like the others. I loved her. But lately...I’ve been hearing something, too.

At first, it was just a whisper in the dark, something I could ignore. But now, it’s louder. Clearer. I hear it in my dreams, and sometimes, I wake up in the middle of the night with the feeling that someone is standing over me, watching.

Last night, I woke up to find a message scratched into the wall beside my bed.

"I’m coming."

And I know she is.

This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/TheBatBelfry on 2024-09-25 09:37:13+00:00.

---

I was 8 years old when I last saw my mother. We lived in a somewhat big house out in the countryside. A decent drive from the nearest towns and cities.

One night, I heard cries and screams coming from the walls. I yelled for my mom who burst in worried. The voices didn't stop but my mom didn't seem to notice.

She banged on the walls and ordered the voices to stop and to let me sleep. They did as she asked.

Three nights after, I got in the shower and turned on the water. Blood, boiling hot blood spit out of the showerhead. I screamed as it slowly burned my face and body.

My mother pulled me out quickly and dried me off with a towel. The white towel turned red as she wiped away the blood all over me.

A week later, I went back into the bathroom to brush my teeth. The lightbulb overhead began to flicker and in the quick instances that the room was dark, I saw a man staring back at me through the mirror.

He looked pale and skinny, as if he hadn't eaten in days. The light stopped flickering and I almost played it off as an illusion until a bloody handprint appeared on the mirror.

It was the last weekend before school starts. I laid in my bed and must have snoozed off for a good few minutes to half an hour when my closet door opened.

Inside stood a woman, pale and skinny like the man in the mirror. I didn't know what I was seeing at first from how dark it was but it became clear once the woman rushed to my bed and began to strangle me.

Her cold grip tightened as she accused me of killing her husband. That's when my mom burged in and with an axe in hand, swung it at the woman. The woman's head came completely off and landed on my lap.

I screamed in absolute fear as my mom told me to hush. “It's time I showed you something,” I remember her saying.

She took my hand and escorted me into my closet. She led me through a narrow tunnel that connected to every room in the house, behind the walls.

My memory on everything I saw is still fuzzy. Maybe I chose to forget from how horrifying the sights were. I do remember however, following my mother into the basement.

Not our primary basement but another one hidden and tucked underneath the first. Her exact words I rather not repeat. Just know that she was very disappointed in me and that I should just have kept quiet like a good boy.

I don't know why. If there is a why. She began to bite into my neck, then my shoulder. She trailed her teeth down my arm, ripping away as much flesh as she could hold in her mouth. I cried and pleaded with her but she wouldn't listen.

In a movie, in this exact moment. Someone would burst through the door at the last second to save me. Maybe a cop. Perhaps a relative. A friend.

The only reason I lived to tell my story is because for whatever reason, in that twisted psychotic mind my mother had. Whatever little motherly love and instinct she held onto, kicked in.

She let go, apologizing in a calm manner. She left me laying on the ground as I could no longer scream and instead gasped for air as I stared at the open wounds she gave me.

She snatched the phone from the wall and called 911. I know it was 911 because she told whoever answered the phone everything, and everybody she killed. And how I was now lying on the floor on the verge of death and that if they don't arrive in 20 minutes, she would put me out of my misery.

The cops showed up some 15 minutes later and raided the house. They took my mother into custody and rushed me to the hospital.

I didn't get to hear the report on her until I finally got to my 20's. Even with all the details, I still didn't get what was the purpose. Why did she do all that.

The voices in the wall belonged to people she buried inside, using their skin as wallpaper.

The blood in the shower came from the bleeding bodies that she used to 'fix the plumbing'. It was hot because my mother thought if she left the water boiling they would disintegrate.

The mirror was two way with the inside looking into the restroom. The flickering light was just a standard faulty lightbulb.

The woman that came out of my closet went nuts after potential weeks of little to no nutrition. She attacked me thinking I was aware and helping my mother.

To this day, I don't know what was going on in my mother's head. The cops can't find any logical explanation for such drastic crimes.

I just tell myself the house was haunted and she was possessed to move on with my life. It's the only thing I can really do...

This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/SubstantialBite788 on 2024-09-25 01:57:47+00:00.

---

She dropped her cigarette and crushed it out with her foot. Shocking, because she was barefooted, and yet, not shocking, because it was Julie Byers. She was a frail, gaunt woman. Her arms and legs were wire thin. Her shrunken face was dwarfed by her large forehead and fringed with matted, blond curly hair.

Julie was homeless but lived with everyone. She hopped from trailer to trailer, spending a week or so in one home, wearing out her welcome and then moving on to another. She had the tenacity of a cocaine-addled salesman, knocking on doors, camping out on front porches, begging and pleading for entrance. Resisting her was futile. Calling the police, useless. She was persistently introducing herself as if no one knew who she was or had even perceived that she had existed. An existence such as hers was too irritating and obnoxious not to notice. Her presence was abrupt and unwelcomed. Someone had dropped her off in the trailer park like an unwanted mutt and she was too dumb to find her way out.

I had been lucky. She had never thought to grace me with her presence. Maybe it was me. I’m not very sociable. When I see her, I do my damn best to avoid her. Maybe it was my trailer. Not the nicest on the lot, a bare bones trailer with a set of stairs and a driveway, not much more. I’m not one for landscaping, or deck building, or even home maintenance in general. The less I build or accentuate, the less I have to take care of.

Or maybe it was my neighbor Mr. Greer, a mean old bastard that smelled like rotten eggs and whiskey, never ventured further than his lawn chair. He’d sit there all day at the edge of his driveway with a scowl on his face. He hated life in general but had a special disgust for people, and especially Julie Byers.

“Pitiful, rotten bitch,” he would say every time he saw her, a favorite platitude of his. It was consistent and frequent, like a grumpy, old fat parrot.  

I confronted him on one occasion to no avail. I cared little for Julie, but the spite was a little overboard and frankly, it pissed me off. Yeah, she was down and out, struggling, but she was a person, worthy of human dignity. I had never really expressed those sorts of sentiments before. Probably something I heard on a sitcom. He was unaffected by my emotional appeal.

“She’s fucking worthless. Pitiful, rotten bitch!”

“Alright, enough. Give it a rest. You can keep your damn mouth shut. I’m tired of hearing it.”

He rolled his eyes towards me without moving his head. I saw an unnatural sway of his pupils as they dilated and contracted rapidly to an abrupt focus.

“I didn’t ask your opinion. She’s a pitiful, rotten bitch that doesn’t deserve to exist. She’s a waste of existence.”

That was the extent of our conversations. I thereafter resigned to never again speak to the cantankerous turd. Fate guaranteed that I wouldn’t have to work hard to achieve that goal either. Not long after, Mr. Greer was found dead in his lawn chair. The silly thing is I saw the dead bastard. I saw him out of the corner of my eye, but I didn’t want to turn my head and draw his attention. I just figured he had fallen asleep. Later that night, the flashing lights of an ambulance woke me up.

“What happened?” I asked my neighbor Angie.

“Old man died, right there in his chair.”

“No shit!”

And ever since, that trailer had sat there empty. Three or four months I gather. No relatives had come by and collected his belongings. No one had come to clean the property or to sell it or even to show it. Management didn't seem to care. If they didn’t care, then I sure as hell wouldn’t care. I thought it would be nice to have the corner lot to myself, with only one neighbor to my left and rid of that nasty old man.

And I guess that’s why Julie finally felt safe to approach me and introduce herself.

“Hey boy, you like movies?” she asked as she started pulling out a pack of cigarettes from her back pocket.

I had just pulled up into the driveway, coming home from work. I didn’t see her until I had shut the car door. If I had seen her in time I would have kept driving.

“What’s your name? My name is Julie Byers. Some folks call me July, being that I’m all sunny and what not and account of my name sounding similar. We ought to watch a movie tonight, me and you. What kind of movies do you like? I like horror movies but sometimes I’ll watch a comedy. What’s good is to watch a really scary movie and then watch a comedy after. It balances out your nerves. Although sometimes you can’t balance out a really scary movie. I don’t care how funny a comedy is. You try to laugh and think about that funny movie, but that scary stuff keeps poppin in your head whether you want it to or not.”

All the while she’s inching forward. I wanted to tell her that I got to go, make up something, but I couldn't get a word in edgewise. She’s masterful at this game. She knew I wanted to ditch her. She knew she wasn't welcomed, but she didn't care.

The screen door on Mr. Greer's trailer swung open and slammed shut. We both turned and looked. It swung open again, but not in a smooth mechanical motion as if blown by the wind, but in a deliberate way to signify anger. An angry swing- I know that sounds crazy, but that’s what I saw. Julie saw it too. She shook and trembled.

“He’s still there. He don’t like me.”

It happened several more times, swinging out slowly then slamming shut. By this time, she was up on my stairs and after one more vicious slam, she flung her arms around me and buried her head in my chest. I fumbled for my keys and opened the door. She unleashed me and hopped inside the trailer. I didn’t have the heart to throw her out.

“It’s just the wind. Maybe a good comedy will make it go away.”

We watched several movies, her on the couch and me in my recliner. She talked incessantly. She narrated the scenes as they happened and provided a full commentary at the end of each movie. I feel asleep during the middle of the last movie, drifting off to a cacophony of slap-stick shenanigans, with slide whistles and kazoos and her nonsensical babbling.

I was awakened by a chilly breeze and an unexpected moment of silence. The television had been turned off. The front door was open, and the screen door was tapping against the exterior wall. A moderate wind was blowing through the night air. Julie was gone.

I can’t even begin to express the joy and relief that welled up inside of my soul. I felt like I had been freed from prison, able to do as I pleased. I went to close the door, somewhat miffed that she would just leave it wide open. As I reached out to grab the screen door, I noticed Julie standing on Mr. Greer’s front porch. She was staring into the trailer, stiff and unmoving.

“Julie,” I yelled. No response, her gaze affixed. “Come back inside. What are you doing?” Aggravated, I jumped off the porch and stomped across the lawn.

I got to the bottom of the stairs. The inside was dark, but there was a patch of moonlight coming through the back bedroom window. Julie noticed nothing. As I grabbed the rail to climb the stairs, she started to lift off the porch and float. There was an audible hum vibrating throughout, shaking the trailer and causing the metal railing to ring so slightly. Before I could pull my hand away from the railing, I felt a piercing shock of electricity.  A shadow moved into the moonlight, an eclipse both obscuring and illuminating. A corona of a tall slender silhouette, skinnier than humanly possible, taller than the inside of a trailer would allow. A quick glimpse of an alien or a demon, of which I didn’t know, but I suspected it wasn’t human. Julie’s body was yanked into the trailer. The door slammed shut, the hum faded.  

I was hampered by an immense fear and yet burdened by an overwhelming sense of guilt. After about an hour debating with myself, in the relative safety of my own home, I decided against calling the police and acting on my own. They would think me a madman if I explained that my vagrant neighbor had just been lifted off the ground and abducted by an unseen force. The other consideration was how was I even to fight such a force. Maybe a stealthy get-away, avoid a confrontation altogether. That was my plan: sneak in, grab Julie, and get the hell out of there.

I grabbed an old rusty filet knife from my toolbox, a knife I had neglected for years but still sharp enough to cut hoses and other miscellaneous shit I needed cutting. Not too sanitary for cleaning fish, but not beyond usefulness.

With my filet knife and a small stepladder, I made my way to the solitary window at the back of Mr. Greer’s trailer. I surmised it was probably the window over the kitchen sink and the entrance where my presence would be least expected.

I folded out the stepladder and placed it right up against the trailer wall. The window was unlocked and easily pushed opened. I peered inside but the darkness was unusually opaque, not a sliver of light or even a tinge of grey. The light from outside seemed to be absorbed into the darkness, destroyed as soon as it reached the interior. At once I felt a need to go back and get a flashlight, but then I would make my presence known. Still, I wasn’t too keen on stumbling around in the dark chasing after a chatty cat who may have already been killed by some mystical evil force, a force not likely to be easily injured by a filet knife.

I was frightened by a sudden moan for help. I heard Julie to the left in a distant corner of t...

---

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This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/Public_Web_9105 on 2024-09-25 01:11:06+00:00.

---

Growing up in a smaller suburban town as a 17 year old the only things to do were drugs or late night drives. My best friends, Casey and Danielle were driving with me late at night from a Walmart the next town over. I was always the back seat friend but what can you do? Some people are more meant for each other than others but they were the only two people other than my family that I ever felt any connection to.

We were cruising down the one of the small two-lane highways that stitch towns together between the vast rural areas of Upstate New York, when I saw an erected telephone pole covered in blue flame tucked into the bordering woods.

Immediately I screamed “CASEY, DRIVE FASTER”. She was confused but abided nonetheless. Quickly, I explained to her and Danielle what I had seen. as a consequence of living sheltered lives, we were all fearful. To this day I believe that fear was valid. During the day seeing something out of place can be confusing, but on a dark unlit highway? Downright terrifying.

“Maybe it’s a klan meeting?” Danielle said. Honestly, it was a valid theory. One thing people don’t know about New York is that the further north you get from NYC, the more like the deep south it becomes. “Well you know that the finger lakes used to be a hotbed of klan activity in the 1920s. Even now, people will find pamphlets for secret meetings” She continued. “You’re such a fucking history buff” I said. But we all knew her theory was completely plausible.

That was what we decided it was and we all tried our best to rid our minds of it. It was something none of us have brought up or even thought of in the following 6 years.

We were all grown now. Danielle did a semester of college and hated it, I graduated from a cheap state school. Casey had never liked school so she went straight to working with her family. Casey had the most money out of all of us and was the first to own a house. It was a small house and not in a very interesting area, it was hers though and that’s all that mattered. On the plus side she had about 5 acres of land secluded in an old forest. I still don’t know how she got such a good deal on the house.

While heading to the housewarming party I saw a charred pole on the highway just like the one I’d scene years previously. As I swung the door open I said “Hey guys! I saw a burnt out telephone pole while driving here and it made me think of that one time”. “What are you talking about?” Danielle said. She clearly didn’t remember so I went to the kitchen to tell Casey. She was just confused as Danielle was. I think since neither of them personally saw it, it didn’t leave as big as an impression on them.

“Remember when we were driving around as kids and we saw the klan pole?” I said. They slowly remembered what I was yammering on about. “You mean when we were driving back from Walmart and you thought you saw something in the woods?” Casey said. “Ohhh right I remember that, we didn’t believe you but you’re so easily spooked that we just went along with it.” Danielle said. A little hurt I said “well since you guys didn’t, believe me let’s go see it!”. “Ty you just got here and I just finished the snacks for the party. Just wait awhile and then we’ll go see your ‘klan pole’” Casey said while making air quotes with her fingers. It all made us chuckle because me thinking I saw something unusual was a completely normal occurrence in our younger days. “Yeah don’t you remember that time in middle school that you thought you saw someone watching us at the mall?” said Danielle. “Yah and it was just a mannequin with a hat?” Casey said with laughter. Seeing that my face was pink with embarrassment they relented. “Fine” Casey said with an air of mock annoyance. “Show us the pole, we all know how much you love poles and people won’t be getting here for another hour”

Elated I ran to my car with them in tow. This time I was the one driving. It was only 5-10 minutes away from her house depending on how fast you feel like driving.

We pulled over on the side of the highway and hopped out of the car. The pole was clearly visible from the roadside. With a grandiose gesture I raised my arms and said “SEE!?” Both of them were taken aback by my enthusiasm and the fact that this might be true. “Okay let’s go back now” said Casey, clearly more worried about the party she needed to host than childhood memories. “As long as we are here let’s get closer view of it” Danielle said. Cautiously, we hopped over the underbrush and reached the clearing.

I regret ever going there.

We stepped into a circle of scorched grass and mugwort to see the pole. I was wrong. It wasn’t a telephone pole. Well it was a telephone pole, but it lacked any sort of utilities on it. Only the bottom 7 feet of the pole showed any signs of direct burning; mostly light charring and some ash. Soot licked up to the top of the pole in thick uneven layers — I think this is the only reason I was able to notice it from the road. There was also a goop at the bottom of the pole that looked like a mix of glue and ash. As I took a step to examine it with my finger I quickly realized it was fat from sort of animal. In shock I took a step back and heard a crunch. Beneath my heel was an ashen rib bone embrittled by fire. It was a pig’s rib bone — nonetheless it was startling.

I was already paler than a sheet when Casey pointed out deer cams. Whoever did this had our faces and possibly my license plate. It didn’t take much convincing for all of us to run back to the car and we drove back home in silence.

None of us are professional investigators, hell I think the only one with any investigative knowledge would be Danielle. You see, Danielle works part time at a library and a diner, Casey helps operate her family’s machine shop, and I teach science at our old high school. Internally, I rationalized to myself that it was just some fancy way of barbecuing I’d never heard of.

The housewarming party went well but there was a sense of unrest shared between all three of us. At the end of the party, I was getting ready to go, but as I picked up my boot I saw a glint of metal caught in one of the sipes. As I wriggled it out I realized that it was a tooth with a dental cap. I showed it to Casey while panicking and we immediately called the police. We showed them the tooth and the location of the pillar on a map. They took the tooth as evidence, recorded our statements and left. I don’t know what good the police will do, hell I don’t even trust them. It was right next to the fucking highway. Whoever owns the pillars and the deer cams seem to have felt that they felt no need to hide what they were up to.

The last thing Casey said to me was “you know that wasn’t the way we took that night right?” The meaning was clear in her expression. Either this was unrelated to what I saw or there are multiple pillars.

Tomorrow Danielle and I are going to the town library to find any records of ownership for that area and old newspapers to see if anything similar has been seen in the area. I will let you all know if we find anything that gives us more insight in what we saw. To ease your mind, no one has been tailing my car so far so I think we are safe. If this post never gets updated, assume that we couldn’t find an answer or it is not something we can publicly discuss quite yet.

This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/bohemiancouchpotato on 2024-09-25 01:55:30+00:00.

---

Anyone who has even spent time in a small town knows how rumors fly. Everywhere you go you will hear gossip about affairs, who was kicked out of town, how the manager of the local diner got fired, and so on. 

Sure, my town might have those things, but the rumors don't stop there. 

Anomalies, missing people, cryptids, you name it. Around almost every corner you'll find something you wish you hadn't. 

For a bit more context, I live in a small town of about 2000 people in eastern Colorado. For privacy reasons, that is all the information I will give you about my location. I was born and raised here. After graduating high school, I just never left and had no intention of leaving. 

For the most part, these rumors are just that. Rumors. Urban legends, folklore, whatever word you find fitting. At least that's what I believed until just a few years ago when I started to get curious about some of the rumors. When I was young I would just stumble upon them. As I got older I would seek them out. To uncover the oddities of this town I am so fond of.

I am here to tell you all about my small town and all its wonderful and terrifying anomalies one at a time. Starting with old man Marly’s abandoned car. 

It was the summer of 2017. My friends and I were bored and wandering around private property. 

“Hey wait. Isn't this old man Marly’s land?” Linda said to me with a burst of energy.

“Yeah, I think it is. Why does it matter?” I respond back to her in an uninterested tone. 

“Callie, you don't remember the old rumor about him? You're kidding right?” Linda remarked with a snicker. 

“You honestly expected me to remember every little rumor this damn town has?” Just as I finished my sentence Ally jumped in.

“Oh, come on, you have to remember! Kids have been talking about old-man-Marly since middle school.” I shook my head as she tried to jog my memory. “You know, the old car in the field that people never came out of or whatever.”

“Hmm, yeah, I think I remember something like that,” I responded back halfheartedly.

“Come on, let's go try and find it!” Ally said with excitement.

“I promise you it's not as fun as you think it is,” Linda said with a chuckle.

“Wait, you've been in it?” I said with my interest rising.  

“No, I've actually never seen anyone sit in it. I just looked at it from afar and felt creeped out and left.” We all stood still in our places. Our curiosity slowly grew inside of us. “I think I can remember where it was. It's been a few years but let's look.” 

We walked around the 100-acre property casualty for the next hour when we finally found it. 

It was nearly impossible to make out the make or model of the car. It looked like it was once a light blue but was covered in years of rust and decay. Weathered by the hot summer sun and harsh winters. I'm not really a car expert, but it looked like a car from the 1950s. It was slightly sunken into the earth. Like it had begun to accept its fate as part of the land. It was about a mile away from a road so it really didn't make a lot of sense for it to be out there. However, It wouldn't be the first time I saw a random old car just decaying in some dirt.  

As we got closer to the car we felt uneasy. The car had a few trees and bushes surrounding it that would just slightly scratch at the paint making a hideous screech as the wind blew. 

We were a couple feet away and started to shyly giggle. All of us were unsure as to why we were so nervous. 

Linda learned to open the door. It took some muscle, but she got it open.

The windows were either tinted or became black some other way because we couldn't see inside. Our jaws hit the floor when we looked inside. We were blown away by a beautiful 1950’s interior. What was surprising is that it looked brand new. At least I would imagine it would look brand new. The seats were cherry red and leather. I could smell the new car smell from feet away. Fuzzy dice hanging from the rearview mirror, and strangest of all, the radio was softly playing an old song that none of us recognized.   

I had goosebumps all over my body. We all heard some rumors about the car, but none of us remembered ever hearing about the inside being perfectly preserved. 

Linda leaned forward and found keys in the ignition. She took a deep breath and sat down. Ally and I both gasped as she hit the car seat. 

We all froze. Feeling like idiots trying not to move as the wind whistled by us. 

“See guys, I told you it was silly,” Linda said as she started to fidget with stuff inside the car. 

Ally and I made our way around the car looking at it at every angle. Something still felt so wrong about all of it.  

“Sorry to disappoint you ladies, but I am still here. As you can see, I am still in the car even though-” She shut the car door before she finished her sentence. 

Ally and I stood by the car waiting for an uncomfortable amount of time for her to open the door back up. We figured she was trying to be funny or trying to scare us and we didn't want to get in the way of her joke. 

After what must've been 90 seconds I walked up to the door. I flung the car door open expecting her to yell ‘gotcha’ at me or something dumb, but to my shock. She wasn't in the car. Not only that, but the interior of the car now looked old like the outside of the car. The radio was off, and the keys were gone. 

The two of us spent the next hour freaking out trying to find her. We tried to find her on our own because we didn't want to get in trouble for being on private property but after finding no signs of her we asked for help. 

That was the last time I ever saw Linda. 

The years passed by and it was as if nobody cared she went missing. I couldn't even find records of her disappearance online. 

A couple years later, I was wandering around old man Marly’s field. I saw the car and was brave enough to open the car door and I was amazed to see the beautiful new interior that was in the car before Linda went missing. The old-timey song that echoed on the radio sent shivers down my spine. It brought me back to the last time I saw Linda. 

I pulled myself out of my fuzzy memories and walked back into town. I was planning on just going home but stopped by the local diner. 

I got inside just as it started to rain. It felt like the weather was trying to match how I was feeling. I sat down at the high-top bar with the bar stool squeaking in the process. 

Mrs. Patty saw me from the kitchen and got a puzzled look on her face. I won't go into too much detail about Mrs. Patty, but she has been in this town longer than most people I know. She has definitely seen some things, but that's another story for another time. 

“Why so gloomy baby?” she said with a smile and a twang. 

“It's nothing. I just have a lot going through my head.” I could tell as soon as I looked up at her that she didn't believe my lie. She was a stubborn woman and I knew I wasn't going to win this game. “Okay, okay, you win. Have you ever heard anything about that old car in Mr. Marly’s field?” Before I could even get the sentence out her eyes widened. It was clear I jogged her memory. 

“Oh wow, it's been years since I thought about that car. Yes, when I was young we used to dare each other to go sit in it. It started out with people just saying it was haunted because of the music that would play on the radio. Then one day my friend Robecka shut the door. Me and a few other kids watched from a little ways away but got confused when the door didn't open. I walked up to open it up and she was gone. We searched for her for a while then gave up and went home. We told our parents and that was that. A week later, my friends and I all went back. My friend Sal did the same as Robecka. He sat down and shut the door. I think you can guess where the story goes from there. I never saw Robecka or Sal again. They just disappeared. Into thin air. Yet another one of the big misstories of this town.” she murmured as she whipped down the bar counter. 

“Wait, your friends are the ones that started the urban legend?”

“Yes, unfortunately. They didn't get justice. It seemed like everyone else just forgot about them.” She paused and then looked at me. I could tell she had the realization that I had been to the old car. “Oh no. Don't tell me you-” I interrupted her. 

“Yes, You remember my friend Linda? She got in the car and never came out.” 

“Oh, that poor sweet girl. I'm so sorry, Callie.” She said to me in a loving tone while I tried not to lose it. “You know, something that always stood out to me about that car was the keys in the ignition.” As she finished her sentence I perked up. 

“What…what about the keys?” I replied. 

“Well, I'm sure as you know when you open up the car, the inside looks as good as new. It looks as if it's been sent back from the 1950’s but as soon as someone gets in and shuts the door, the next time the door is opened the interior is old and matching what the rest of the car looks like. But do you know what's missing when you open that door back up?”

“The keys!”

“Exactly. I don't know if that means anything, but where do those keys go? I don't know. It's probably nothing, but I'm too old now to do anything about it.” 

“No, I think you are on to something!” I blurted out and I jumped off my chair and ran back into the rain. 

I ran back to the old car. As I sprinted through the trees and jumped into puddles, I started to think how stupid the idea was. 

I final...

---

Content cut off. Read original on https://old.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/1fotg0f/my_small_town_and_its_many_urban_legends_the_car/

This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/toripope on 2024-09-25 01:27:19+00:00.

---

I work an office job, we draw up plans to show exactly where plumbing needs to go in restaurants or shopping centers. Well we had a large project we had been working on for weeks, and it was finally almost complete. So that means all of us employees were coming in around 6 or 7 in the morning and not leaving until 6 or 7 at night to make sure we could get all of the final details in place. I was so excited when Friday rolled around, I actually got out of bed with a skip in my step. I was so ready to hit the bar tonight and drink my stressful week away. My day was super boring but productive and I was pretty proud of this project, our small town had finally decided to add a much needed movie theater. I was just thrilled that I could be a part of something that was going to make such an impact here, but when 6 oclock came, I was even more thrilled to hop in my car and get on to my next destination.

We only have one rinky dink bar in our town where you will see everybody you know, and to be honest I was not in the mood to make any small talk, I wanted to get straight to the point…drunk. So I pulled up my maps on my phone and searched for a bar in the next town over. The first suggestion for me was a place called “The Black Dog”. It looked like a quaint place, and in all the photos all the same people were in them, so I figured it was a place I could go with no, “The weather has been nice lately” comments, as these people looked pretty drunk in all the pictures, but for some odd reason I couldn’t make out any of their faces. But I told myself I didn’t need to know them, I just needed to have a few drinks and call a cab to take me home afterwards and curl up in bed with a movie.

I quickly put the address into my GPS, but nothing popped up. I thought maybe the place was new, so I put in the coordinates. My ETA was about 45 minutes, not too shabby, and definitely far enough away from anyone I might know. I turned on my radio and listened to some tunes the whole way there. When I pulled in there were three cars in the parking lot, but what was weird about it, all the cars looked super old, and when I say old I mean like late 1800s or early 1900s old. I put the car in park, grabbed my purse, jacket, and phone and headed in. No one greeted me, but that was okay with me, like I have said a million times, I just want a few drinks with no distractions. I walked up to the bar and orderd my poison of choice, a good ole Cosmopolitan. The bartender took my order and had my drink made and in my hand super quickly. I looked around just wanted to take a peek a the fellow bar goers, because after all I am a woman and I do have some sense of awareness. It was three men, all dressed in super old timey clothing, it was the same men from the pictures and oddly enough I still couldn’t make out their faces but it was pretty dark in there, this town is weird with all their choices in cars and clothing, but shortly none of that seemed to matter…the drink was working, all my worries of work were slowly fading.

I shortly ordered another drink, but this time the bartender said something that was kind of odd, “We don’t see many pretty women like you around.” I ignored him, I’m not here for any flirting or a casual Friday night hook up. I decided to pull out my phone and scroll through my socials, but of course my service was out. I asked one of the patrons who was sitting two seats down from me if he knew the wifi code. He looked at me as if I was absolutely nuts, “What is wifi? I have no idea what you are talking about.”. I didn’t even reply, did I end up in some Amish town or something, that would explain the cars and the outfits, but it wouldn’t explain that there was only one phone in the building, and it wasn’t even a phone…it was a telegraph machine.

I decided to only have one more drink because I was getting creeped out, I ordered my drink, guzzled it down and walked outside to call a cab. I gave my address and shortly after I was getting a call from the taxi service. The man on the phone was saying he couldn’t find me at that address, that I must have gave him the wrong one, but I double checked, I had definitely given him the right adress. I just ended up deciding to walk to the nearest gas station and have him pick me up there. When I hopped in his car I asked the man if he knew anything about The Black Dog. He looked puzzled, “Yes Ma’am, that was a bar that was open during the Civil War for the soldiers, but it was torn down shortly after the war, a fight broke out one night leaving three men and the bartender dead.”. I didn’t even respond, my mind was racing, where even was I for the past two hours. So much for my peaceful weekend.

This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/Wild-Tea-9242 on 2024-09-24 14:15:14+00:00.

---

This is where everything took a sharp turn for the worse.

We crept quietly through the house, making our way to the back door, in the utility room. The yard was overgrown and the night was still deathly silent. The moonlight barely illuminated us, and we kept our flashlights off while we were outside so Sarah the ghost girl wouldn't know we were out there. Yazmine turned to us, “So, when we get in there, where should we look?”

“The basement,” Vanessa whispered, looking at the world through the camera lens, “the eyes could be in there. There were some kids toys in there, I think the killer liked taking souvenirs from his victims, he must've had more than the four they found in the basement. The eyes could've been kept as a souvenir before he decided to kill himself.”

My heart raced as we snuck our way around the side of that house towards the back door of the Eye Ripper house. We were actually going into the basement for a third time after everything that happened, and I hated it more than anything, but I knew that I wasn't gonna stay in that room with Zack. Not just because I was afraid of looking like a coward, but also because the general atmosphere felt so ominous with him around, even more than usual in this ghostly realm.

We went through the back door, and our tensions were the highest there. We quietly padded down the hall towards the kitchen. I stopped the two, shakily asking, “What if that boy is in there again?”

“I think Bryce just pissed him off, maybe he won't hurt us,” Vanessa said hopefully, “so far no one has really gotten hurt.”

“We don't wanna test that theory, though,” John said doubtfully.

“We'll be in and out, quick and quiet,” Yazmine assured me. It didn't help ease my frayed nerves. John put a finger to his lips to shush us as we carried on.

The basement door loomed before us like a gateway to hell. We opened it and shined our flashlights down the stairs, the beam just barely touching the floor beyond the last step. We didn't hear or see anything from our vantage point, so John took the first step, followed by Yazmine, followed by me, followed by Vanessa. It felt like walking into a lion's den, and not only that but knowing full well that the lion hadn't eaten in a long time.

When we descended the flight of steps, the basement seemed devoid of life, and that somehow felt creepier than if another entity was down there.

“Hurry,” I whispered, immediately starting to search for anything that might look like it could possibly contain decomposing children's eyeballs. I didn't know what that would even look like, maybe a morbid keepsake chest? Everyone started looking as well, shining their flashlights around and spreading out, a frenzied urgency in their movements.

I couldn't stop looking over my shoulder to make sure that monster wasn't looming over me again, especially when I bent down to check inside the furnace, which definitely seemed like a place someone would get rid of remains. I didn't even think about the fact it would be ash, my brain was too focused on ensuring I wouldn't be ambushed by something that looked like the kid from the Grudge. Strangely enough, though, a teddy bear was inside, old, worn, and full of dust and soot. It looked familiar. I grabbed it and studied the plush, trying to think of where I'd seen it.

Wait…. The picture.

When I’d looked up the Eye Ripper case online a week ago, this exact bear was being held in the arms of Millie Jenkins, the girl in the purple dress. On Wikipedia, I read an article about her, and one of the photographs included there was of her cuddled up next to her mom on a couch during Christmastime, and she was clutching that bear to her chest. It was unmistakable, with orange button eyes, a cute tiny smiling mouth, and a red plaid bowtie under its chin. The belly looked like it had been stitched poorly, the sewing work abysmal.

I could feel my heartbeat in my ears as I took my fingers and yanked up the seams. As the sounds of my friends’ shoes scuffing the ground while they explored the dank basement became white noise, I forcibly ripped open the hole inside the teddy.

There was a little sack inside, tied at the top by a string, something of a sachet with a texture like a potato sack.

It absolutely reeked.

My nose scrunched up and I held it away from me. “What the fuck,’ I said, garnering everyone's attention.

“What is that?” Vanessa inquired, coming over quickly to film my finding. John and Yazmine approached, too.

“I don't know.” I noticed the bottom of the sachet was darkened with the stain of a long-dried substance. Something viscous enough to not disappear when the fabric wasn't wet anymore, like water. With quivering fingers, I pulled the string and opened the bag for everyone to see. John shined his flashlight down in it.

“What the hell is that?” Yazmine sounded befuddled.

Inside were two black, shrunken little round…things. They were very clearly the origin of the smell, and they looked like grapes, olives, or blueberries that had aged a thousand years in the sun.

“Wait a second-” I dropped the sachet and backed away, becoming aware of the horrible truth. “Are those eyes? Are those her goddamn eyes?”

“H-holy fuck.” Vanessa breathed, her bottom lip trembling. “That's actually what eyes look like when they're decomposed. I saw it once, on an animal that died on my grandma's farm. They become these little black things.”

“Fuck sake!” John lifted his shirt over his nose with his free hand. “That's sick!”

“You guys!” Yazmine’s face was a mixture of horror and excitement at the revelation, if that was even possible. “It's terrible, but we actually did it! We found the eyes!”

“We found a pair of eyes,” I corrected her, “he hid them in Millie's teddy bear. I saw a picture online with her holding this exact one, it's definitely not a coincidence.”

“If we want to appease all four of the victims, we need three more pairs of eyes,” Vanessa realized with great dismay.

“Oh, gross,” John gagged, backing away so he couldn't smell the rot. I tied the sachet back up. “I guess you can hold onto that, Grace.”

“Gee, thanks.” I rolled my eyes.

“Everyone, keep looking!” Yazmine urged. “We gotta-”

Our walkies crackled, and we all stopped to listen. There was silence for a few moments, as if someone was holding the button to speak but choosing not to say anything. After a bit too long of waiting for them to speak, John raised the walkie to his lips.

“Zack, Bryce, are y'all okay?” He whispered. It felt like the world was still for a few tense moments, as if it had stopped spinning and we were frozen in time.

“John,” Bryce’s quaking voice whispered through the speakers, “you guys need to come back right now.”

“What's wrong?” Yazmine pressed, panic flashing over her face.

Bryce whimpered, his breathing ragged as if he were truly scared for his life, “... There's something wrong with Zack, I think-” An unexplainable sound interrupted him and the walkie stopped making the static sound.

“The hell?” I said, feeling fear gnaw at my chest. The walkie crackled back to life again before anybody could say anything else.

“John.” Zack's voice, quiet and emotionless, sounding nothing like the emotional and energetic Zack we know. It didn't sound like he was calling him as much as he was just stating his name, as if someone had asked what his friend's name was and he was answering robotically.

“Zack, the fuck are you doing to Bryce?!” John roared. Yazmine, Vanessa, and I leaned in, listening closely. I glanced over my shoulder to make sure there was no ghostly spectator.

“Where are my eYeS?” Zack asked, his voice warping towards the end of the sentence, like an old doll with a voice box broken from age and wear and tear. It deepened in pitch towards the end, like he was an old machine slowly powering off. “GIve tHeM bAcK.”

“What the fuck?” John screamed. We all looked at the walkie in horror.

Yazmine picked up her walkie. “Bryce?! Bryce, where are you?!”

There was no answer.

“I-Is that really Zack?” Vanessa whimpered, her eyes bulging nearly out her skull.

“Shit!” John ran for the stairs, and Vanessa and Yazmine followed right after him. I immediately ran after them, all of us sprinting towards the basement door, which we'd left open for an easy escape. Desperate to save our friend.

The door slammed in John's face and he immediately shook the doorknob, trying futilely to open it.

“It’s locked!” He yelled, the panic in his voice contagious.

“Oh my God!” Vanessa despaired, no longer holding the camera up to her eye. “We're going to die!”

“Break it down!” Yazmine demanded, her face soaked with sweat. “Use that jock strength!”

“Back up.” John said, and we obeyed, right before he started kicking and kicking at the door. It rattled on its hinges with each thrust of his sneakers. Then, he braced it with his shoulder, and started ramming his arm into it over and over.

I watched him and prayed inside my mind for the God my mom always preached about to save us from this nightmare. Then I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, and an unwanted presence dangerously close to me.

I turned around in a flash, a gasp ripping out my throat as I shined my flashlight on the pale, eyeless, and dead face of Millie Jenkins. Every horrifying detail inches away from me on the step under the one I was standing on, the way her eyes were like the deepest holes, like she had...

---

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This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/googlyeyes93 on 2024-09-24 22:56:12+00:00.

---

Previous

DAY?

I’ve been in and out of conscious control of my body for a while still, unsure of what’s happened for the last few hours or days. I’m in a constant dream state, somewhere between awake and asleep on the permanent edge of night. Everything around me is so vivid, and the horrible things that have been lurking around the subjects have started acknowledging me when I observe. I worry that they may turn their wrath to me, and it’s time to enact my plan before it’s too late. I believe at this point we’re thirty days in.

I… I had a memory while I was paralyzed at one point, body shutting me out of control while my mind told me anything to keep me busy. I could see my mother, gaunt face staring at me with wide, unknowing eyes that were in the throes of insomnia, just like I was now. I remembered our last moments.

Her symptoms came on slow at first, just the occasional sleeplessness here and there, nothing too bad. Over the next few weeks it began to fill more nights, staying up even after taking the strongest sleeping pill her doctor could prescribe. It wasn’t getting her anywhere though, and soon enough she was getting maybe… maybe five hours of sleep a week.

Soon, not long after her sleep dropped off under twenty hours a week, she started having the hallucinations. She kept telling me that she could see my father, that he was screaming at her, berating her again for something beyond her control. That was just another Tuesday night at home growing up, seeing the old fuck get drunk in front of the television until he was ready to take out his frustrations. When he finally died, I was thirteen, and I don’t think I had ever seen mom more content with life. After a few weeks, her bruises were finally healed, and she was practically glowing with energy to make things better for both of us.

She only had four more good years after that before all of this happened. The hallucinations got worse, with paranoia becoming a major part of it. She swore that there were shadows watching her from every corner, waiting for her to go to sleep so they could take her body for their own. Soon, she refused to turn lights off in the house, having me install the brightest bulbs I could to try and keep them at bay. I did it, of course, because what else am I supposed to do for my mother while she’s staying awake up until her final hour? I could at least humor her and put her mind at ease a little. Not that she knew I was her son at this point, constantly asking me who let me in or confusing me for her older brother at some points.

Finally she had this like… moment of lucidness. She actually spoke to me like I was her son again, not some stranger in her home.

“Mikey, I want you. to end this.” She said to me one night as we sat watching Jeopardy. She always loved Trebek, and there wasn’t a single night we missed out on watching. We had made it a game for the longest time between ourselves, seeing who could outscore the other. She didn’t know what was going on anymore, but I was hoping it was something that could give her peace in the middle of it all. I was surprised, not expecting her to even talk other than babbling gibberish at this point. “You don’t deserve to go through this. Nobody does.”

”Mama, what are you talking about? I’m taking care of you until it’s done.” I said, looking over at her and expecting sanity to break again at any moment. The solemn stare she gave me let me know that she was one hundred percent in control right now, completely sane and sober to a fault.

”We both know this is as bad for you as it is for me. I want you to let me go on my own terms, Mikey.” She said, tears in her eyes as she kept contact with me. “I don’t care how you do it just… just make it quick for me. Please. I can still see things and I can’t take it much longer.

”Okay. Okay, mama.” I was sobbing now, nodding that I would help her. I don’t know what else I was supposed to say, but her speaking to me like that again, after the weeks of nothing but screaming and terror we had been through, let me know that she was right. She knew when it was time, and she knew that prolonging this only made it worse.

It wasn’t something I could just… do. Days passed while I grappled with it, the morality aspect and if I could even do it. This was my mother, the woman who raised me and protected me all those years, taking the brunt of my father’s anger and rage. How could I repay her by killing her? Every time I think of her, all I could remember was what she told me, even until the end. Every time something new ran us down, every time our situation went straight to shit for the umpteenth time, through all the beatings from dad, through being homeless for weeks just to escape him, all the tears I cried not knowing what was going on, afraid he would come back any moment to beat us again. Those same words, “I’ve got you. I’ve always got you, even when you don’t.”

I waited until she had taken one of her doses to attempt a little sleep, watching her doze off into a restless nap. That was when I did it. Taking one of our couch pillows, a heavy, fabric woven throw with feather stuffing she refused to throw out, I put it over her face, pressing down with all my weight as I looked away, tears stinging in my eyes. She struggled for a minute, body fighting back instinctually to claw at life. I pushed down harder, beginning to match her muffled screams from under the pillow with my own long, dreadful wails.

Finally… she was still. It was gradual, movements beginning to slow, becoming smaller, weaker as she lost oxygen. Finally, she was sleeping, eternally, safe from the hell her brain was putting her through here.

I told the doctors I found her like this, putting the pillow under her head so she looked like she had just drifted off. Considering her condition, they didn’t bother with an autopsy so I was in the clear. A secret I would keep until death, when I would be able to apologize to my mother personally.

This was much earlier than I had planned to do it though. Over the past few days of slipping sanity, I could hear her muffled screams coming in clearer, the same sounds as her last breaths. Before long, she was visible, standing right there near me, staring me down.

I’ve tried to keep ignoring her, making my way around the facility to check on the others. By all accounts, the only ones who should still be alive are myself, Taryn, and Murray. The others are all far beyond the point of death, still somehow living and functioning. One had taken to wandering the facility, making finger guns at various specters and causing viscera to fly from their bodies. He got the same treatment in turn though, with the wounds he was suffering now something akin to shotgun blasts. Much of his body was shredded, and there was a bone splintering out of his hip, causing him to limp and walk with a stagger through the hallways.

Somehow I haven’t gone noseblind from the intense smells scattered through the facility, though they’ve begun to mesh together as things get worse. The subject quarters smelled of excrement and death, while our quarters were filled with the stench of burning flesh, cooking over an intense fire with the smell of burning tires to accent it. I was constantly paranoid there was a gas leak somewhere, thinking we would all go up in flames at any moment.

Taryn has been having more moments of clarity lately, and though we’ve both been going through dissociative episodes, we have been able to talk and try to theorize what the hell is going on. In our deductions, we’ve come up with a few ideas that, in hindsight, should have been massive red flags.

First, I had no part in the subject selection, and she says she didn’t either. Doubt Philip had any kind of say, either. Now, considering the lack of sleep beforehand for subject One, and the relative similarity of all five subjects, which we didn’t see until arriving and at a point of no going back, there were far too many inconsistencies to pull off the experiment in the first place. That’s what leads us to our second belief.

We’re all subjects. This one was obvious at this point, but they were the preliminary trial, while we were the main event. We got to see everything happening to them, observe it, then see it all happen to us in real time. Where we’re split is on what the purpose is. Nothing adds up to a typical experiment, and whoever is pulling the strings seemingly is just throwing shit at the fan to see how it splatters on the wall behind. Then Murray entered the conversation, giving us a whole new view.

He was a former intelligence officer, worked in a lot of espionage stuff before going into the private security sector. From everything he had seen here, he suggested we were guinea pigs for the gas. Some new kind of weapon, meant to possibly take out enemy strongholds from the inside, making them turn against their own allies as the paranoia takes hold. As much as I hate to say it, it makes the most sense. We go in trying to do some good, trying to find cures for sleeplessness and diseases like mine, only to become a weapon test for someone. Doubt we’ll be the last.

We turned our attention to the next issue at hand- the phantoms. We could all see them at this point. The students, the sewn together girls, the drowned family, rabies patients… and the limbs. Nothing but mountains of limbs filling the space around Five. Mur...

---

Content cut off. Read original on https://old.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/1fopu4l/the_american_sleep_experiment_is_fucking_doomed/

This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/Weird-Suggestion-152 on 2024-09-24 16:43:26+00:00.

---

It started on one of those Friday nights when I found myself tumbling down a digital rabbit hole. The Wayback Machine had always been my go-to when I wanted to dig into internet history, and mystery. I've always found exploring the ghosts of old websites, lingering on the fringes of existence, to be interesting. I was reading old blogs, forums, and digital diaries, searching for something to entertain me and feed my imagination.

It wasn’t a website I recognized. The URL was strange, like an old subdomain of a now-defunct hosting site. "The Reflective Mind", or something equally obscure. I'm not even sure how I ended up on the page. It looked like it had been abandoned for years—one of those late 90s or early 2000s blogs that someone created and then abandoned. The post was buried deep in the archives, the kind of page that didn’t get many visitors even when it was live.

“He’s Watching. The Vanity Man is watching,” the title read.

Curiosity got the better of me, so I read on. The post was surprisingly long, much more in-depth than typical internet drivel. The writer talked about a figure, not unlike the Hat Man or the Midnight Man, but they called it, "The Vanity Man."

"It starts with a simple ritual," the post began, which immediately piqued my interest. The writer described a process that felt more clinical than supernatural, as if they were detailing any other common creepypasta, or conducting a mundane experiment. There was no mention of witchcraft, no pentagrams or chanting. Just an odd set of instructions.

The Ritual:

1. Start at midnight.
2. In your home, turn off every light, every screen, every source of artificial light. The only thing you should see is the natural darkness around you.
3. Find the largest mirror in your home, the one you catch glimpses of yourself in without meaning to. If you don’t have one, a reflective surface will do, but a mirror is best.
4. Stand in front of the mirror and light a single candle. Hold it in your left hand.
5. Stare at your reflection without blinking. Not for 10 seconds. Not for a minute. But for 6 full minutes. You have to stare. You can’t look away, even if your eyes start to water.
6. At the end of the 6th minute, the candle will go out on its own. Do not attempt to relight it. You’ll know it’s time when the mirror reflects something back at you that isn’t you.

The post went on, recounting the writer’s own experience.

"I didn’t believe it at first," they wrote. "I thought it was just another urban legend. But when the candle snuffed itself out, and I saw him… no, it… I knew it was real. It’s always watching now, just outside my vision. I can never truly see it unless I look directly into the mirror, and that’s a mistake you only make once."

The rest of the post was filled with frantic recounts, warnings, and regrets. The writer claimed that The Vanity Man was something ancient, something that only comes when summoned. It didn’t physically attack. It didn’t chase you. But it lived inside the reflection, just out of view, watching you always, a shadow behind your own. The final words on the post sent a shiver down my spine:

"I can feel it even now, as I write this. If you find this, turn back. Don’t look. Don’t summon it. Don’t invite it into your home."

Naturally, I ignored the warning.

I couldn’t stop thinking about the post. Over the next few days, I found myself constantly searching for more information about The Vanity Man, but nothing concrete came up. A few scattered mentions on obscure paranormal forums, some dead links, and a couple of blurry images posted by anonymous users, but that was it.

I was hoping to find more posts from the same author or blog. I recovered a few more obscure pages, others who had apparently encountered The Vanity Man. They all followed the same format. The writer would find the ritual, perform it, and then their life would fall apart. They would see him in reflections, at night, in windows, in puddles on the street.

Some of the writers vanished from their online circles soon after their final posts. Others were later reported missing, or worse. My skepticism should have been enough to stop me. But there was a part of me, some reckless, insatiable part, that wanted to know if it was real. What if there was something to it? What if I could figure it out? So, I decided to do the ritual and see for myself.

The night was quiet. I had prepped everything exactly as described. I turned off every light, every source of electronic glow. My phone sat useless on the other side of the room, the screen completely dark. There was nothing but the stillness of my apartment and the vague reflections in the massive mirror that hung on my bedroom wall.

It was 11:57 PM when I stood before the mirror with the single candle. My hands were trembling. The darkness was so thick I could barely see my own reflection. I lit the candle and held it in my left hand, the flickering light casting long shadows on the walls behind me.

As soon as the clock struck midnight, I began to stare. I kept my eyes focused on my own gaze, just like the instructions had said. The seconds dragged by. My eyes started to burn from the strain, but I refused to blink. After the second minute, the burning was excruciating. But I forced my eyes open, eager to prove the story wrong. I told myself it was all in my head, that nothing would happen. The minutes passed. Five minutes… six minutes…

That’s when the candle flame began to flicker, even though there was no draft. And then it went out.

I was plunged into total darkness. My breath caught in my throat. I couldn’t see a thing, but I felt something change. The air in the room grew colder. I could hear my own heartbeat, loud and thudding in my ears. I didn’t want to look back into the mirror, but I couldn’t stop myself. My eyes adjusted slowly, and that’s when I saw it.

There, standing just behind me in the reflection, was a figure. It wasn’t human, not really. It was tall, almost impossibly tall, and its face… its face was mine. Not exactly, though. The face in the mirror was a twisted, distorted version of me. Its eyes were sunken, its skin pale and gaunt. But the worst part was the expression. Its lips were pulled into a wide, unnatural grin. It was looking at me. My hair stood on end, shivers traveled down my spine. I was completely frozen in fear. I wanted to scream, but I couldn't. I felt as if I had been plunged into ice cold water.

I spun around, trying to catch a glimpse of it in real life. Nothing. Just darkness. I was alone. But when I looked back at the mirror, it was still there, standing behind me, grinning. I backed away, my heart racing, but the figure didn’t move. It just stood there, staring at me through the glass, waiting.

I couldn’t take the sight of it anymore. I grabbed the mirror, ripping it off the wall, and threw it face down onto the floor. The crash was deafening, the glass shattering into a million pieces. For a minute, I thought it was over. I thought I was safe.

But then I saw the shards. In each tiny fragment of glass, The Vanity Man still stared at me, grinning, hundreds of reflections watching from every angle. I finally mustered the strength to scream, and ran out of my apartment. I frantically ran to my car, eager to get as far away as possible. I saw it again in my rear review mirror. I saw him in the reflections of the windows outside of my apartment. In every reflective surface, there he was.

That’s when I realized what the blog post meant. The Vanity Man doesn’t live in just one mirror. It lives in every reflection. Since that night, I’ve covered every reflective surface in my apartment. I avoid windows, puddles, anything that can reflect. But it doesn’t matter. I see it everywhere now, lurking, always smiling, always waiting. I've become a complete hermit, scared to leave my apartment, scared of my own face. The eviction notices are piling up outside my door, and I know it will be any day now that they come for me.

Even when I close my eyes, I swear I can still see it standing there. Just waiting for me to look.

You should stop reading now. Don’t search for it. Don’t try the ritual. It’s not worth it. Because once you’ve seen The Vanity Man, it’ll never stop watching.

This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/ShotMobile3075 on 2024-09-24 01:51:20+00:00.

---

My name is James, and for 11 years, I’ve been haunted by something that happened when I was 14. I live in Saint Stur, a tiny mountain town with less than 600 people. What happened to me that October changed my life, and to this day, I still don’t understand it.

On October 4th, 2013, my father, grandfather, and I went elk hunting early in the morning. It was quiet—eerily quiet. You could barely hear the animals moving. We hiked about four miles from the trucks when everything went dead silent. My grandpa, trying to ease the tension, joked, “When the woods go quiet, there’s a predator around. Guess they know how mean we are.”

I laughed, but it didn’t help. Something about that morning felt off, like we weren’t the only ones out there. I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was watching us.

We didn’t see anything all day, so we decided to head back. As we got closer to the trucks, the feeling of being watched grew stronger. About 250 feet from the trail, we heard a scream. It was so close—closer than anything should’ve been without us seeing it. My grandpa told us to move fast. We all piled into the truck, and as we backed up, I caught a glimpse of it.

A tall, dark figure, like a twisted mix of a man and a deer, its claws sharp and teeth razor-like. It was smiling. My grandpa saw it too, because he didn’t say a word the whole way back. He just focused on getting us out of there. We didn’t make it home until 6 PM.

Later that night, I overheard my grandpa and dad talking. My grandpa asked, “Did you see it too?”

My dad didn’t believe him, said it was all stories he used to tell. But I knew it was real. I told them I saw it, and I could tell by the look in my grandpa’s eyes that he believed me. My dad, though, said it was just paranoia after hearing that scream.

But it wasn’t a mountain lion. My grandpa said it was something else. Something older.

That night, I went to bed, but I woke up around 5:30 AM to the sound of my grandpa trying to stop my dad from going back into the mountains. He was convinced it wasn’t over. And deep down, so was I.

My dad never came back. They searched the mountains, but they never found a trace of him.

Weeks went by. Then the knocking started.

Every night, a knock at my window. And every night, I heard my dad’s voice. “Let me in,” he’d say. “I forgot my keys.” But the voice was always just…wrong. Like someone trying to imitate him but not quite getting it right.

For years, I lived with that knocking. My grandpa told me never to answer. And I didn’t.

When my grandpa passed away, the knocking didn’t stop. It just changed.

Now, it’s his voice I hear too. Both of them, calling to me from the woods. Every night, they get louder. Every night, it gets harder to ignore.

I know it’s only a matter of time before whatever took them takes me too. I don’t know how much longer I can resist.

This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/damemaussade on 2024-09-23 21:40:55+00:00.

---

I moved into the house last month. It was one of those charming, old colonial homes, with creaking wooden floors and ivy creeping up the walls. A dream for someone like me who always loved the idea of history clinging to every corner. The realtor mentioned it was over a hundred years old, and though it needed some repairs, it felt like the perfect place to call my own.

The first night in the house was quiet, almost too quiet. It’s funny how you never notice the absence of sound until it’s gone. I didn’t hear the hum of cars in the distance, no people walking down the street, just pure silence. It should have been peaceful, but instead, it left me with a nagging feeling of unease.

It started on the third night. I was lying in bed, drifting between sleep and wakefulness, when I heard a faint scratching sound. I sat up, groggy, trying to figure out where it was coming from. I thought maybe it was just a mouse or some other rodent. Old houses are prone to pests, after all. But as I listened more closely, it sounded like something bigger. Something deliberate.

It was coming from the walls.

I tried to ignore it, telling myself that it was probably just an animal. Maybe a raccoon or a possum had gotten into the crawl space. But every night, the noise got worse. What started as a faint scratching soon turned into what sounded like whispering. It was so faint I couldn’t make out the words, but there was something disturbingly human about it.

I called an exterminator, thinking that whatever was in there needed to be dealt with. They came, searched the house, and found nothing. No signs of rodents, no nests, no entry points. They assured me there was nothing in the walls. But the sounds continued.

One night, the whispering grew louder. I sat up in bed, heart racing, straining to hear. I couldn’t deny it anymore—the voices were there, just behind the wall of my bedroom, and they were speaking. Words slurred together in low, guttural tones, too quiet to understand but unmistakably there.

Then, something tapped against the wall. It was slow, methodical, like someone knocking from the other side. I jumped out of bed and pressed my ear to the wall, trying to hear. The whispering stopped, and for a moment, there was silence again.

But then the wall shifted.

I don’t know how else to describe it. It felt like something inside the wall moved—something alive. I could feel the vibrations under my hand, like a deep, hidden pulse. My stomach churned, and I backed away slowly, afraid to look away but terrified of staying too close.

I hardly slept that night.

The next day, I called a contractor to check the walls, hoping it was just faulty wiring or some structural issue. He tore open part of the wall where I’d heard the noise, but all he found was the usual—wood, insulation, nothing out of the ordinary. He patched it up, and I pretended for a while that it was enough to make me feel safe.

That night, I decided to record the sounds. I left my phone on with a voice recording app running, propped up against the wall where the sounds had been the loudest. I lay in bed, the sheets pulled tight around me, and waited.

The whispering returned, but this time, it was clearer. The words still made no sense, like they were spoken in a language I couldn’t understand. But as I listened through the thin walls, I realized something horrifying: the voices weren’t just random—they were responding to me. They would grow louder when I moved, and quiet when I stayed still.

At one point, I couldn’t take it anymore. I shouted, “What do you want?”

The whispering stopped. For a moment, there was nothing but the pounding of my heart.

Then, a single word came through the wall. Clear as day.

“You.”

I froze. The air in the room felt thick and oppressive, like it was pressing in on me from all sides. I grabbed my phone, too scared to play back the recording, and ran out of the house.

I’ve been staying in a hotel ever since, but I can still hear the whispering in my dreams. I know I have to go back eventually—it's my home, after all. But I don’t know if I can. Because whatever is in the walls wants me, and I don’t know how to stop it.

This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/Aggravating_Road2692 on 2024-09-24 17:39:31+00:00.

---

I moved in with my Uncle who had a strange set of rules.

When I was twelve I was forced to spend a summer with my Great Uncle Jeremy. You see I was a bit of a troublemaker back in those days, and my parents thought if I spent some time with my strict grouch of an Uncle, I would somehow be rehabilitated. You can imagine how hard my eyes rolled when my mom and dad told me about their plan, but I was oblivious to the horrors I would endure that summer.

Uncle Jeremy was somewhat of a mountain man. He lived in the remote wilderness of Montana's high pine forest. A homesteader through and through, he'd made a life where most people would go insane, granted Uncle Jerremy did seem a bit coocky to me at the time.

My dad almost tossed me out of the car as we rolled into my uncle's mountain cabin. He didn't even wait for Uncle Jeremy to greet me at the door. I watched as Dad's little Prius made its way back down the long driveway and onto the unkempt dirt road. While I was a bit offended by how I'd just been abandoned, I was not envious of the long journey ahead of him. It took us almost two hours to traverse that nasty road. I was sure we'd be left stranded at one point or another, a Prius is no off-roading vehicle.

The hybrid's tail lights disappeared amongst the dense forest. My attention turned to the rickety wooden cabin. This house was not what you would imagine it to be, it wasn't the picturesque idea people have when they think of a log cabin. I could see the structure had been through a lot. The logs were weathered, faded by the hot Montana summer and the icy winter winds. I could tell that everything used in its construction was sourced from the surrounding forest. Likewise, no modern amenities were visible, no power lines, fire hydrants, not even a satellite dish. I knew then it was going to be a duller summer than I'd imagined.

I lifted a hand to knock on the old door and stopped when I noticed a few deep scratch marks on its facade.

'Bears?.' I thought to myself. An uneasy feeling that I was being watched from the pines came over me. I cocked my head in the direction of the tree line. It felt like something was calling me over to the woods. The door squealed open and I returned my gaze to the cabin.

In the passageway stood a grey-bearded man, the fibers in his beard long, greasy, and matted. His skin was old and weathered, I suspected the same reasoning as the cabin's. He looked at me through the grey film in his eye. I'd never actually met Uncle Jerremy up until that point, but I'd heard stories about him from my father. My father had suffered the same fate as me the summer between seventh and eighth grade. He told me Uncle Jerremy was not a man to be trifled with.

"You listen to everything your Uncle Jerremy tells you, he is not a man you want to make angry." My father would lecture, but when I looked into the face of the withering man, I didn't sense an ounce of animosity. He almost seemed kind, nothing resembled the ferocity my father had mentioned.

"Hi, I'm Marcus." I outstretched my hand in the introduction but he slapped it away, before placing a hand over my mouth.

"Shhh-- we don't say names here!" He moved my head over to the side to make sure no one, or, nothing was listening. More of my father's description of my great-uncle came to mind.

"Uncle Jeremy is a bit-- strange, but he has your best interest in mind, try your best to ignore his lack of civility." The words were all starting to make sense now.

Uncle Jerremy ushered me into the cabin and I thought I heard him whisper my name, as he pushed me inside. That is until I turned to see the look of fear in his eyes. I knew then that the sound had drifted in on the early summer breeze, somewhere beyond the tree line, and the hairs on the back of my neck stood.

"Is everything Okay Uncle Jerremy?" His open palm slapped my cheek as I spoke his name.

"Damn it, kid! I told you no names!" He said through gritted teeth before returning his gaze to the tree line. Almost like a dream, a faint voice slithered into the cabin.

"Jerrrreeemmmy." The voice called.

"What the hell is that?" I asked but received no reply. Uncle Jerremy quickly slammed the door shut.

"Rule number one, NO NAMES!" I dropped my gaze at his reprimand.

"Rule number two, if you hear something strange, leave-- it -- be. Ignore it! You hear me?" I ponder his instructions before moving to question his logic.

"W-Why?"

"Not another word on the matter those are the rules. My only rules, you follow them or I'll send you back to your little life in Boise you hear me!?"

Just then my escape from homestead living became clear, break a few rules here and there and I'd be back in the Gem state. I tried not to smile at the plot that was formulating in my mind.

"Your room is down yonder." The old man pointed down a small hallway before leading me to it himself. We stepped into a small ten-by-ten room, I threw my backpack onto the bed and plopped down right beside it, giving a grunt of relief.

"What do you think you're doing kid? This isn't some luxurious mountain retreat." I eyed the crumbling wooden walls, 'The understatement of the century' I thought to myself.

"We have work to do", he moved to the window and pushed open the shutters taking in a lung full of pristine mountain air in the process. Beyond his gave stood a two-acre clearing in the forest. A mix of fields, more comparable to glorified gardens, and livestock, chickens, goats, and one cow. He turned to me and noted my disappointed face.

"What you think this was a free ride? No, we work for our food here." He said with the first ounce of enjoyment I'd seen inch across his face. He pulled open a drawer on the nightstand.

"I placed these here for you before you got here." I peered into the drawer to find some old torn overalls.

"You put those on and meet me outside, there's a lot to get done around here. The faster we get it over with the faster we can have ourselves a nice supper.

Later that night I lay in bed unable to sleep. All of my muscles were aching. Uncle Jerremy was not lying, homestead living is not for the weak. We'd worked until the sun met the horizon, and this time of year in Montana, that was around 9:30 p.m.

We'd weeded the fields, fed the chickens, and milked the dairy cow whose name I found out to be Bessy, and done dozens upon dozens of other tasks that were not very enjoyable. The best thing about it was that Uncle Jerremy said we would do it all again the next day. I placed the pillow over my face hoping that it would suffocate me. I was a beat dog that needed to be put out of its misery. The warmth of the plush fabric seemed to comfort me a bit, so I left it there as the night slowly started to wash over me. Just as I was about to fall into an uneasy night of sleep, I heard scratching from the other side of the wall. It was coming from outside.

The sound was very faint, it almost reminded me of the time we had mice inside the walls back home, only these walls were not hollow, they were solid lumber. I moved the pillow off to the side making sure that nothing muted the scraping by my head.

'Scrape, scrape, scrape." The noise sounded rhythmic. Almost as if someone was sending a message.

'Scratch, scratch, scratch." Whatever it was it was clawing deeper into the side of the cabin. Whatever was making the noise was too strong to be a mouse, a raccoon maybe. Then the sound intensified, to a loud ear-piercing screech, like someone clawing at an old chalkboard.

"Screech, Screech, Screech." I shot to a seated position. It must've been a bear. Montana Grizzlies scared the shit out of me, part of the reason why I'd never come to meet Uncle Jerremy in the first place. I heard the same faint whisper that had come from the tree line earlier that day, only this time instead of Uncle Jeremy's name, my name hissed in through the cracks of the cabin.

"Maaaarccussss." I looked at the shutters on the window, and my heart dropped when I saw something slowly pulling them open.

"Uncle Jerremy!" I shouted. From down the hall, I heard a bedroom door smash open, followed by my room's door. Uncle Jerremy stood there holding his 22 in hand, his eyes meeting mine, before noticing the slowly creeping shutters. He leaned the gun on the wooden wall before running over to the shutters and forcing them closed. He quickly locked the latch before turning to me.

"Kid! I had two rules and you broke both of them the first night!" He shouted at me while I still trying to make sense of what just happened. I was hoping that the more my uncle talked the more the situation would clear up, but everything he said just made me more confused and frankly terrified.

"Now you've done it, kid. It now knows our names, it's imprinted on us. You have no idea how hard it was to get rid of the last one."

'It? The last one?' I thought.

"Wha-- what are you talking about." I quivered.

"Never mind that, from now on you keep these shutters locked here?" He didn't have to tell me twice.

"The whole house is going to be locked down. And just so we're clear if you hear me calling your name, it ain't me!"

'What the hell, what else could it be?' I opened my mouth to ask a clarifying question.

"What is-- it?" I said.

"What's my second rule!?" My uncle commanded. I pondered for a bit, before responding.

"If I see something, leave it be."

"That's right! Leave-- it -- be. No more of t...

---

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This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/EmmaWatsonButDumber on 2024-09-24 17:21:16+00:00.

---

So much has happened since my last update.

While I tell you what happened, please keep one thing in mind: stay away from the forest. Forget everything that I told you the last time, about recreation and nature and all that. It's not worth it.

It really isn't.

I didn't want to say it, but deep down I knew. It was my fault that my dad was missing. No matter what cryptic creatures roamed the park, he'd been safe until I showed up. Through me, he'd showed them he had a weakness. and they fed on his fear. Now, it was possible I would never see him again, and it was all my fault.

I knew it. I just chose to bury it deep down in my chest and let it sink deeper in my stomach, a knot that would never disappear. 

As I was sitting there, at the checkpoint, covered in a blanket and shivering from the stress, Martin approached me. As much as I wanted to ask him about the park, the rules, my dad, something inside me didn't know whether to trust him or not. Was he the real Martin? 

He sat down next to me. "I'm sorry." The night was still cold and unwelcoming. The trees stood tall and sober in front of us, crowned by the dark, never-ending sky. No stars. Just a black, soulless night. Maybe clouds had rolled in. I kept thinking of how 4 hours ago I'd been searching for constellations with my dad. 

"What do you mean?"

"I'm sorry for your dad."

"Don't say that. You say it like he's dead."

Martin didn't answer, and didn't look at me either. I turned my body towards him. "He's not dead. He isn't."

Martin remained silent. Then, without thinking, I punched his arm. He pulled away and frowned. "It's not my fault! He shouldn't have brought you here."

"Tell me everything you know! About this stupid park! I deserve it. You owe it to me, and it's the only way I can actually find him."

He stared at me for a while, and so long had passed until his response, that I'd thought he had decided not to answer. When he finally spoke, his voice was toned down to a whisper. "We thought they were lying. Both me and Paul, and the others. When we got hired here, we heard the stories, the legends and everything, but assumed those were horror stories passed around. We didn't stop to listen, and didn't believe anything until we saw it with our own eyes. See, this park is huge. Huge, and no one ever bothered to explore it. I'd thought they lacked the resources, but now I see they were just afraid."

He stopped to look around. It would be ridiculous of him to hide from anyone right now. Why would he feel ashamed of telling me these? I thought, but then realized he was probably looking around himself to stay aware not of someone, but of something. That's the thing. Even when you've been face to face with the supernatural, your mind still searches for a logical explanation. 

"We started writing down the occurrences, trying to find... a pattern, or a way to avoid them. We thought that, if we wrote down those rules, we might be able to not get inconvenienced much."

He wiped his face with his hand. "We never knew this could happen. None of us had ever disappeared, we just thought the worst they could do was annoy us, creep us out, hurt us..." He was sweating, even if it was freezing outside. He kept shaking his head. "P-Paul always refused to believe... he'd never actually seen anything..."

I sighed. I felt too alert to let my guard down and cry, but I craved it. 

"Why do you let tourists here? Campers?"

"They only care about those who wander off. They search for it in your soul. The desire to get lost. And then they help you."

A shiver ran down my spine, for no reason. I hugged myself, then sneezed. "I need your help to find him."

"Tomorrow morning."

"No, Martin. He could get hurt." I turned towards the dark mass of trees. "He's out there, alone, now."

"Who's out there?" said a woman, coming out of the cabin. 

"My dad. He's missing." She frowned, then looked at Martin.

"Which post?"

"62" he replied."

"Shit. That's my next shift. I could look for him with you, if you want? I'll take my car and go to the post. Tell you if anything shows up."

Martin looked back at the cozy cabin, warmly lit, then to the dark woods. With a sigh, he stood up and started walking to his car. I followed.    

He locked the car doors, and then I called my dad. My heart was beating so fast, I thought it would break free from my chest. No answer. I took a deep breath. "Right. We should, uh, look for his ATV first."

We drove back to his post, then we started checking the other paths around the main road. His ATV couldn't have gotten too far. We found it parked in front of a big oak tree, but no trace of my dad.

The trees surrounding it made it impossible for the car to pass through, so we came to the grim conclusion that we had to get out and search for him by foot. We ran over the rules one more time, to be sure.

No weird markings.

Dead Blue.

Whistling, loved ones, one-armed man. Got it.

I held onto Martin's arm as we sunk deeper into the dark trees, our flashlights drawing out more shadows than usual. Calling out for him. Begging him to come out. I yelled his name over and over, until my throat started to hurt. I could feel branches hanging on to my clothes in unnatural, twisted angles.

At one point, we stopped dead in our tracks.  Ahead of us, behind a tree, something was moving. 

"Who's that?"

"Oh, wouldn't you like to know."

We both froze. "What?" 

The old lady voice continued. "Who could it be-e-e?"

It was as if she was hiding behind the tree. One of her bony hands appeared from one side, and the other from the other side. She moved them around, tracing the outline of the tree with her fingers. It looked as if she was playing with us, to make the tree seem like it had hands.

I knew I had to try. "Have you seen my dad?"

"Have you seen my face?" she replied, instantly. 

"N-no."

"Would you like to?"

I turned to Martin, right when the old lady (or whatever it was) jumped from behind the tree. Even though I hadn't seen her face, I could make out how grotesque it looked judging Martin's expression. He fired a few shots, and I heard a wail like nothing else I'd hear before. It felt as if my ears were ripped off. 

Then, silence. "I don't think this is safe, Kev."

"No shit."

"I'm sorry about your dad, but I'm sure he's fine, if we just search for him in daylight..."

"No, he could die by then. Every moment is precious."

I thought Martin was looking at me angry, but I realized two things. One, he wasn't looking at me, but behind me, and two, he wasn't angry, but confused. 

"Kev, don't move..."

Right in that moment, I heard a whistle far in the distance.

If the whistling is near you, it means they're far. If it's far away, it means they're near.

I opened my mouth to scream, but right in that instant, as Martin reached for me, I blacked out.

When I woke up, I had a terrible headache. I was still in the woods, but Martin was gone, and so was his car. I felt incredibly drained, and my hands were shaking so bad, I could barely lift them up. I started walking back to my dad's ATV, hoping I could take it and move on with my search. I checked the time, but something else stood out on my phone. The date.  It was one day later.

I'd been in the woods for a whole day. 

My head foggy, my body stiff, I got on the ATV and figured out how to start it, then drove back to the main road and to my father's post. I could see the light on and make out a silhouette. I stopped, studying its outline. It looked like it had only one arm. If you see a man without an arm, don't help him. 

It was too late. He'd seen me, and was climbing down the ladder. I got back on the ATV and drove away. Right when I was halfway through, I ran out of gas. Behind me, footsteps. 

"Kid, hold on. I see you met my wife earlier. What a fine woman she is."

My head was pulsating. "Don't fucking come near me."

"Come on. You wanna find your dad or not?"

"You wouldn't know where he is."

"Bullshit. I spoke to him this morning.”

Rage filled me and replaced the fear. I got down and turned to the old man, who had been limping behind me, and hit him. "Don't speak about him! Don't you dare!"

The old man laughed, and I saw his only tooth staring back at me. I pushed him away and started running back to the post. I ran, and ran, and ran, without looking back, until my limbs ached of a pain I'd never known before. I got to the post and climbed up the ladder, then locked the trap door and called my mother, who was worried sick about me. I barely managed to get a word out before I collapsed from exhaustion. When I woke up, morning was creeping in. I called my dad, one more time. The phone rang a few times. 

"Yeah? Kev?"

Tears gathered in my eyes. My throat hurt to speak, but I did. "Dad? Dad, is that you? Where are you?"

"Kev, get out of the forest. They'll let me go. They want you."

This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/iifinch on 2024-09-24 15:57:32+00:00.

---

It was 2 AM in the morning, and I was either about to ruin my friend group or start something new and strange.

Exhausted but unwilling to go to sleep, I pushed off my blanket to only cover my legs and sat up on the couch I laid in. Less than two feet apart from me was the owner of the apartment I was in, a girl I was starting to have feelings for.

I was either getting love or sex. Sex would be a natural consequence of lowered inhibitions, the chill of her apartment that these thin blankets couldn't dampen, and the fact we found ourselves closer and closer on her couch. The frills of our blankets touched like fingers.

Love would be a natural consequence of our common interests, our budding friendship—for the last three weeks, I had texted her nearly every hour of every day, smiling the whole time—and most importantly, our little game we'd been playing since I got here. Who's the bigger freak? Who can say the most crude and wild thing imaginable? It started off as jokes. She told me A. I told her B. And we kept it going, seeing who could weird out the other.

Then we moved to truths and then to secrets, and is there really any greater love than that, to share secrets? To expose your greatest mistakes to someone else, and ask for them to accept you anyway.

I didn't quite know how I felt about her yet in a romantic sense. She was a friend of a friend. I was told by my friend to not try to date her because she wasn’t my type and it would just end in heartbreak and might destroy the friend group. The funny thing is I know she was told the same. 

Mabel- the girl who laid beside me- texted me casually earlier that day. She mentioned she didn't know what movie to watch. I knew what movie I wanted to watch. I'd pick and pay for the movie, she'd host and cook. Now, here we were about to start love or sex. It's never both this early.

"That was probably my worst relationship," she said, pulling the covers close to her. "Honestly, I think he was a bit of a porn addict too." Her face glowed. "What's the nastiest thing you've watched?"

I bit my lip, gritted my teeth, and strained in the light of the TV. Our game was unspoken, but the rules were obvious—you can't just back down from a question like that.

I said my sin to her and then asked, "What's yours?"

She groaned at mine and then made two genuinely funny jokes at my expense.

"Nah, nah, nah," I said between laughs. "What's yours?"

"No judgments?" she asked.

"No judgments," I said.

"And you won't tell the others?"

"I promise."

"Pinky promise," she said and leaned in close. I liked her smile. It was a little big, a little malicious. I liked that. I leaned forward and our pinkies interlocked. My heart raced. Love or sex fast approaching.

She said what it was. Sorry to leave you in the dark, reader, but the story's best details are yet to come.

She was so amazed at her confession. She said, "Jesus Christ" after it.

"Yeah, you need him," I joked back. Her face went dark.

"What's that supposed to mean?" she asked.

"What? Just a joke."

"No, it's not. I can see it in your eyes you're judging me." She pulled away from me. The chill of her room felt stronger than before. And my chances at sex or love moved away with her.

"Dude, no," I said. "You made jokes about me and I made one about you."

She eyed me softer then, but her eyes still held a skeptical squint.

"Sorry," she said, "I just know you're religious so I thought you were going to try to get me to go to church or something."

"Uh, no, not really." Good ol' guilt settled in because her 'salvation' was not my priority. I am Christian, just not good at it. I'm not too shabby at the love-everyone part though, so that's half the battle. Well, at least I was good at loving your neighbor, but we'll get there.

"Oh," she slid beside me again. Face soft, her constant grin back on. "I just had some friends really try to force church on me and I didn't like that. I won't step foot in a church."

"Oh, sorry to hear that."

"There's one in particular I hate. Calgary."

"Oh, uh, why?" I froze. I hope I didn't show it in my face, but I was scared as hell she knew my secret. I just took a job at Calgary.

"They just suck," she said, noncommittal.

Did she know?

"What makes them suck?"

She took a deep breath and told me her story—

At ten years old, I wanted to kill myself. I had made a makeshift noose in my closet. I poured out my crate of DVDs on the floor and brought the crate into the closet so I could stand on it. I flipped the crate upside down so it rested just below the noose. I stepped up and grabbed the rope. I was numb until that moment. My mom left, my family hated me, and I feared my dad was going insane. The holes in the wall, welts in his own skin, and a plethora of reptiles he let roam around our house were proof.

And it was so hot. He kept it as hot as hell in that house. My face was drenched as I stepped up the crate to hang myself. I hoped heaven would be cold.

Heaven. That's what made me stop. I would be in heaven and my Dad would be here. I didn’t want to go anywhere without my Dad, even heaven.

 Tears gushed from my face and mixed with my salty skin to make this weird taste. I don't know why I just remember that.

Anyway, I lept off the crate and ran to my dad.

I ran from the closet and into the muggy house. A little girl who needed a hug from her dad more than anything in the world. It was just him and me after all.

Reptile terrariums littered the house; my dad kept buying them. We didn't even have enough places to put them anymore. I leaped over a habitat of geckos and ran around the home of bearded dragons. It was stupid. I hated the feeling that I was always surrounded by something inhuman crawling around. It hurt that I felt like my dad cared about them more than me. But I didn't care about any of that; I needed my dad.

I pushed through the door of his room, but his bed was vacated, so that meant he was probably in his tub, but I knew getting clean was the last thing on his mind.

I carried the rope with me, still in the shape of a noose. I wanted him to see, to see what almost happened.

I crashed inside.

"Mabel, stop!" he said when I took half a step in. "I don't want you to step on Leviathan." Leviathan was his python. My eyes trailed from the yellow tail in front of me to the body that coiled around my dad. Leviathan clothed my dad. It wrapped itself around his groin, waist, arms, and neck.

And it was a tight hold. I had seen my father walk and even run with Leviathan on him. Today, he just sat in the tub, watching it or watching himself. I'm unsure; his mental illness confused me as a child, so I never really knew what he was doing.

I was the one who almost made the great permanent decision that night, but my dad looked worse than me. His veins showed and he appeared strained as if in a state of permanent uncomfortably, he sweat as much as I did, and I think he was having trouble breathing. The steam that formed in the room made it seem like a sauna.

He was torturing himself, all for Leviathan's sake.

"Dad, I—"

"Close the door!" My dad barked, between taking a large, uncomfortable breath. "You'll make it cold for Leviathan."

"Yes, sir." I did as he commanded and shut the door. Then I ran to him.

"Stop," he raised his hand to me, motioning for me to be still. He looked at Leviathan, not me. It was like they communed with one another.

I was homeschooled so there wasn't anyone to talk to about it, but it's such a hard thing to be afraid of your parents and be afraid for your parents and to need them more than anything.

"Come in, honey," he said after his mental deliberation with the snake.

And I did, feeling an odd shame and relief. I raised the noose up and I couldn't find the right words to express how I felt.

I settled on, "I think I need help."

"Oh, no," my dad said and rose from the tub. So quick, so intense. For a heartbeat, I was so scared I almost ran away. Then I saw the tears in his eyes and saw he was more like my dad than he had been in a long time.

He hugged me and everything was okay. It was okay. I was sad all the time, but it was going to be okay. The house was infested, a sauna, and a mess, but life is okay with love, y'know?

He cried and I cried, but snakes can't cry so Leviathan rested on his shoulder.

After an extended hug, he took Leviathan off and said he needed to make a call. When he came back, he told me to get in the car with him. I obeyed as I was taught to.

We rode in his rickety pickup truck in the dead of night in complete silence until he broke it.

"I was bad, Mabel Baby," he said.

"What?"

"As a kid, I wasn't right," he said. My father randomly twitched. Like someone overdosing on drugs if you've seen that.

He flew out of his lane. I grabbed the handle for stability. The oncoming semi approached, honked at us. I braced for impact. He whipped the car back over. His cold coffee cup fell and spilled in my seat. My head banged against the window.

It hurt and I was confused. What was happening? The world looked funny. My eyes teared up again, making the night a foggy mess.

"I wasn't good as a child, Mabel Baby. I was different from the others. I saw things, I felt things differently. Probably like you."

He turned to me and extended his hand. I flinched under it, but he merely rubbed my forehead.

"I'm sorry about that," he said, hands on the wheel again, still twitching, still flinching. "You know you're the most precious thing in the world...

---

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This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/Exciting_Ball9852 on 2024-09-24 03:44:22+00:00.

---

I slapped my alarm as quickly and quietly as I could. While holding my hand over the alarm I  slowly turned to see if I had woken my wife. Jane always managed to look pretty, even when she was sleeping, well not really but, she looked pretty to me. I walked to the bedroom door on my way to the kitchen making sure to avoid the creaky aged planks that made up my bedroom floor. I could practically step around them with my eyes closed. Jane has always loved the taste of fresh game, I could never understand what she liked about it but, I loved hunting so it was a nice balance. I tried preparing the pots and plates as quietly as I could but, you know… they’re pots and plates. I told myself she couldn’t hear anything I was doing and the surprise wouldn’t be ruined but, I’m certain I heard her trying to race back up the stairs quietly to spare my feelings.

After leaving the kitchen ready for the meal I would prepare later I grabbed my beautiful bolt action CZ rifle and left out the front door. The outside world greeted me with a single tone that mirrored itself as far east as west. The blinding white frost of the cold winter morning created the illusion of distance at infinity while simultaneously appearing completely flat and right in your face. A gentle breeze made sure my eyes never opened further than a squint. I whistled at my lazy mutt and he poked his head out of his luxurious dog house. I lowered my fist to Bartleby and he used my knuckles to give himself a nice shiatsu head massage. I tucked my hand back into my pockets after the cold strips what little heat I had left. Bartleby bites at my hand annoyed that I put it away. I led him to the passenger side of my truck, opened the door for him and he hopped in closing the door behind him with his jaws on the rag I wrapped around the handle on the inside. I walked over to the driver's side and just before I ducked into the seat I looked up to see her smiling at me from the 2nd-floor window. When I saw her she flinched away but quickly came back when she realized I had already seen her. She gives me a bashful smile and wave and I shake my head chuckling while waving back at her. I start the truck and regret not getting the heater fixed, even on high it’s only barely enough to allow me one hand on the wheel while I warm up the other. At Least she’s a reliable rig.

We cut through the fresh snow with ease on the main road heading towards a nice hunting spot that I frequently visit. Bartleby had already buried himself in his smelly blanket and refused to come out. I pat him over the blanket, “Come on boy, haven’t you slept enough?” He stubbornly gives me a soft “woof”. I reach into the glove box and pull out a package of dried venison. I lay a piece next to his snout and he briefly pokes his nose out to sniff and lick up the treat. I rub his head and continue down the road until I reach my right turn. After arriving, Bartleby and I left the truck and headed towards the treeline. Bartleby immediately finds a tree to mark his territory at, and as I wait for him I begin to load up my rifle one round at a time. The forest is oddly quiet until I hear faint footsteps in the distance, I squint my eyes to try and see what’s causing the noise and I see something coming towards us from in the woods. I used my scope to get a better look at the animal and saw that it was a wolf sprinting in my direction, “huh”. I looked further up and saw an enormous pack of snarling wolves following closely behind the first. My eyes widened as an electric wave of shock sprang from my heart to all of my fingers, despite the biting cold I broke out into a sweat. I hadn’t even realized I dropped my bullets. After they lightly landed on the ground, I had already turned around to run for the truck, stopping when I didn’t see Bartleby following. I must have stopped too quickly because my feet easily lost the ground and I found it with my hands and nearly my face.

 I got up as quickly as possible ignoring my stinging hands, I ran back to Bartleby with the stampede of menacing black fur and white hungry teeth in the background growing in size with each passing moment. You don’t realize how large a wolf really is until you see one with your own eyes. As soon as I could reach him, I grabbed his collar and yanked. He got the message and began following. We weren’t far from the truck but the wolves also weren’t far from us. Their paws were dreadfully audible now and as I ran I couldn’t tell if the panting directly behind me was my own dog or a wild wolf. I must have been panicking too much because after I reached the truck I ended up on my ass again. “DAMN IT!” I exclaimed as I missed the handle by mere inches. I looked up and it was too late, there was no time to make it back in the truck, Bartleby stood over me like a lion. He braced for the gnashing jaws of fierce wolves but the impact never hit. The wolves ran over Bartleby and I as if we weren’t even there. They completely ignored us and continued running as a pack as if they were caught up in a blazing forest fire and had made a temporary alliance with all life in the forest to just escape. I watched them cross the main road I had turned on, their large frames shrunk to nothing in the vast empty canvas that blurred the lines between heaven and earth. The only discernible point of reference was the sun, faded behind clouds with no depth or shadow. I sat there in silence for a moment trying to calm my breath.

Maybe the trees absorbed the wind, maybe the snow muted the ambiance but, after the storm of wolves passed by, the silence of the forest was unnerving. Still sitting on the ground, I laughed to myself in terror as Bartleby licked my face trying to comfort me. I gave him my knuckles and he scratched his head with them. Returning to where I dropped the bullets, I noticed that the divide between the forest and the rest of the world suddenly seemed greater. I stood before the border of two worlds and I willingly stepped into one where I didn't belong.

Walking through the forest I looked up directly at the sun and felt no pain due to the clouds evenly distributing its light everywhere. Still morning, nearing noon. Bartleby found a scent and I followed him, eventually the scent became a small trail of blood. That wasn’t too unusual but, what I saw in the distance was. I jogged ahead of Bartleby because he was still just focused on the trail in front of him. I saw something in the trees. My gaze grew more intense with every step, as a clearer picture revealed itself to be another wolf hanging upright on a tree branch with its innards on display like some sick mad scientist dissection experiment. Its skin was stretched out and pinned to the tree branches as if someone were leaving an animal's skin out to dry in the sun. The corpse was still purging its scarlet fluids onto the massive blotch of fowl black-dyed snow below. My brow furrowed, and my face turned to a scowl of confusion and disgust, the pure white snow around the gorey scene only made the colors seem more vibrant and clear. What the hell could have done this? Bartleby backed up with his tail between his legs, I looked around some more and noticed the surrounding trees all had unrecognizable symbols roughly carved into them. I didn’t know what to make of what I was seeing, it was simply strange and disturbing to say the least.

Finally, we arrived at my little tree fort, hunting shack, shelter, whatever you want to call it. I built her right onto a tall strong tree. Bartleby jumped into the box I made for him attached to a rope leading all the way up. I climbed up first using the ladder steps nailed right into the tree then I pulled the rope to bring Bartleby up with me. The shelter was a small one, standing upright in it was impossible and if I layed down on any side with my hands and feet stretched out I could easily touch each side of the walls. Only one side of the wall had an entire section of wood missing to show the view of the deeper part of the forest, the other walls could only be opened with small hinged hatches acting as windows barely large enough to fit my head. There was a large camo tarp covering the biggest segment of the open wall to keep out the cold. We sat patiently and comfortably inside, protected from the unrelenting cold, but despite the gentle howling of the wind, the forest really was oddly quiet. I hadn’t realized how clearly I could hear my blood pulsing to the beat of my heart in my head until the silence was broken by a gentle knocking just behind my head on the wooden wall where I was sitting. Immediately my veins froze over, my heart sank as my eyes grew.

 I tried to ease my growing heartbeat by thinking “Well it’s probably just a loose branch” I got up hunched over and looked at the hatch on the wall, I hesitated as I began to raise my hand towards the lock when another 3 knocks halted my movement. A weak voice from either a young boy or a lady said “Hello..?” from the other side of the wall. The adrenaline came back and I worried someone out there was freezing, in need of my help but no, that couldn’t be. How did they get up here, have they been here for some time, before I even arrived? Are they just hanging on the tree? No, if someone was out there in need of help, they wouldn’t be waiting outside a shelter, I would have found them in here when I came up. I looked at Bartleby and was surprised he hadn’t started barking, he st...

---

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This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/Smash5shulkisbroken on 2024-09-24 02:21:10+00:00.

---

I don’t know where to start, until now it's only felt like a bad trip. It started as any normal night for college a loner, a game console with four controllers, a party game guaranteed to send us to the ER for carpal tunnel, and enough beer to drown a mid-sized dog. It was destined to be a night of stupidity, glee, and light-hearted antics. Since I’m the pregaming master, I already had a few drinks down to celebrate the end of finals week and before we go back home for the holidays. It was amazing to let my brain have a break after all the stress it suffered; potential dependence be damned.

JT was the first to show up, if I had to describe him in a few words, it would be if Abe Lincoln was built like a Mac truck with fingers like sausages. Despite his imposing stature, he’s relatively mild mannered, but just a beer in and he becomes the Tom Brady of our drunken game nights. Cam was next. He was by far the most social and the only one who’s out and about every week getting some action The last of our pitiful party was Phil, my roommate. Phil isn’t his actual name, it’s Stephen, but when money was tight, we lived off the cheese steaks from the sandwich shop he works at for a week straight. After that the name just stuck.

Anyway, the game night was a double feature, the first event was one grand prix of Beeriokart followed by rounds upon rounds classic Mario Party where the current first place player(s) and minigame winner(s) take sips of a drink of their choice. We had made it past the Beeriokart section with barely a buzz except for Cam who was the lightweight of the group. Which was the reason for Beeriokart, otherwise Mario Party wouldn’t be fair. At the end of the Mario Party game, Phil had thoroughly crushed us all due to bonus stars and so the rest of us chugged the remainder of our drinks as we set up the movie marathon to end off an amazing night.

As JT fumbled through the Roku menus to open HBO Max, we heard a knock on the door. Phil, being the only one of us capable of at least holding a coherent conversation, answered the guest. It was the landlord’s annoying younger brother. This kid is always wrecking things in the common area, apparently, he’s on probation for breaking a kid's femur after the jerk had bullied his friend. I can respect the sentiment, but I guess the other kid’s parents filed a restraining order, so the little brat came to live in the building with his older brother. He wasn’t loud like he normally is so he must be on rent collection. I somehow managed to get out where I put the rent money between all the slurred speech. We went back to picking a movie when we heard another knock, the brat is back, and he wants to watch the movie with us. Since none of us were in the right state of mind, we let him stay. We finally decided on a movie. I fell asleep a quarter of the way in and started what may be the worst night of my life.

It was a pleasant dream, I woke up next to my buddies and the brat in the same room. We’re all just stretching, Phil already picking up some of our stuff in the process. As per my typical routine, I go to the windows to hopefully catch a whiff of the coffee shop across the street from the apartment complex. What I came across was a solid brick wall on the other side of the window. Next thing I know we all hear a loud bang and turn to find the brat’s upper arm scraped by the bullet. Blood slowly trickled down to his forearm as the poor kid hyperventilated through the pain. Me, half dazed but sobered by the gunshot, instructed the others to get away from the front of the door. I reached my hand across the door to the knob and quickly opened the door, firing one more shot at the other wall. After sweeping the doorway, we found a gun hooked up to a mechanism that fired a bullet when the door opened. I had seen enough body horror and torture movies to spot all the cliché traps.

After disabling a few more obvious traps we reached the end of the hall where it bended to the left. After trying to peek around the corner for a few minutes, I determined that there was no immediate danger. However, Cam took that as a sign to make a break for the elevator and set off another trap. I luckily managed to grab him and pull him to safety when I felt this sharp pain in my leg. A bit of shrapnel left a cut in my calf. After dressing my wound, me and the other guys inspected the scene and found that what cut me was shrapnel from a pipe bomb trap which was set up in the first room to the left. Whoever crafted these traps surely wanted us dead. JT, who was more toward the back, told us he heard footsteps. We all jumped up and rushed to see if there was anyone else in peril, but what we found still haunts me every night. It was a man in an off-white suit that seemed to glow in the darkness, and he was wearing an old bowler hat or fedora. We all ran towards him shouting, but he didn’t respond. He just stood there. He stood there until we were about five feet away, and then he started moving. He started to slowly turn his head and that’s when we saw what he looked like. His face was comprised of nothing but darkness, and in place of his eyes seemed to be glowing orbs.

We all violently shook awake from the worst group trip imaginable. The first thing on our minds were why was the apartment complex booby trapped and who was the mysterious “Hat Man?” Yet, that wasn’t even the worst part, because I looked down to see my calf, and saw about an inch deep cut and the blood stain left on my pajamas. Whatever just happened, was painfully real.

This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/QueenOfTheDead2023 on 2024-09-23 17:23:28+00:00.

---

Part 1

Part 2

So, things have been rather hectic through this investigation. We've had a few interesting conversations and gotten a few answers we've had so far in this investigation, but it hasn't lessened the fear and terror of our situation whatsoever. In fact, I'd say these answers have revealed that the situation is worse than we initially thought. But, I'm getting ahead of myself.

As I've mentioned before, since the incident with the shark cage the entire Amity crew has been seeing Bruce, occasionally showing his fin above water as if to let us know that he's still following us. What I didn't think to mention while I was typing that however was that, since the incident, Lawrence had surprisingly been rather quiet the past three days. Usually, even in serious situations and cases that he's stuck his nose in, the representative would always find a way to directly question my skills in the trade or spout some words about how my marriage is blasphemy or something along those lines. This time however, he had barely said a word to anyone on board and had been keeping to himself, almost always standing near the port and staring out at the water with a pale look on his face. It eventually got to the point where Dylan pulled out a bag of dice and passed out a pair of 6 sided dice to each of the twelve of us.

"Alright, I don't know about you folks but I'm getting worried about Larry," the older gentleman declared as he passed them out, "Instead of fighting among ourselves on who's gonna check on him, I reckon that we roll dice to decide who does. Highest roll will be the one to do it."

We each took turns rolling out our dice to see who would go talk to Lawrence. I was the only one who got an 11, causing me to mutter "Well fuck."

"Jamie, you're up," my Boss said with a pat on my shoulder, to which I stood up and began walking towards the port.

Lawrence acknowledged me as I reached him but remained silent for a while. Even now he was still staring out at the water, watching as Bruce's fin surfaced again. I stood there with him, unsure of what to say to him, and found myself watching Bruce along with him. It's then that I noticed something odd about the beast in question. Before I could only see it in bad weather and in deep water so I wasn't able to get a close look, but with the sky clear and the sun out I could make out what appeared to be burn scars on its fin and what I could see of its scales. They looked pretty bad, and rather old, as if Bruce had had them for years.

"You see them too, right?" Lawrence suddenly said, nearly startling me, and when I turned my attention to him he continued, "Those burn scars on its hide, I mean."

"Yeah, I do. Any guesses as to what might've caused them?" I asked rhetorically, not expecting an answer but was surprised to receive one.

"Oil, most likely," the representative replied solemnly, glancing over at me, "Seems like our 'friend' here found themselves caught up in an oil spill that likely involved plenty of fire. Unfortunately, I think I know which one."

"Oh?"

He was silent for a moment before he said, "Do you know why I've been acting the way I have? Force of habit unfortunately, one that I've actually been trying to break for years. You already know that I'm Catholic, but the truth is a lot more complicated than that. I didn't grow up here in Canada like you guys did, rather I was raised in a suburban area just on the outskirts of New Orleans in a very...extreme Evangelical sect. In fact I guess it should rather be referred to as a cult. I was pretty deep and brainwashed in it too, and trust me when I say I've said and done worse shit then everything I've said to you two combined, and I fucking hate it."

"Well, not something I expected to hear but alright," I said, comprehending what I've just been told and trying to figure out how to approach such information, "So...what changed?"

"I got a job outside of the neighbourhood back in March 2010," Lawrence replied, his eyes glazing over as if he was lost in memories, "I was a safety inspector for an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. My job on paper was to ensure that everything was secure and functional, but the cult had some influence on the rig, so I was occasionally paid extra to look the other way. I didn't care at the time since I was still under their thumb, but...well, I'm sure you can figure out exactly what happened one month later."

At first I wasn't sure what he was referring to, but it wasn't long before the details he gave clicked together and I said, "The oil rig you were on, it was the Deepwater Horizon wasn't it?"

"...Yeah, it was," he said as he pulled up his right sleeve, revealing a pattern of burn scars along his arm, "One minute, I was patrolling around to look for leaks. The next thing I knew, I was in the water, surrounded by burning oil. These scars will constantly remind me of why I can never go back to slacking off on my duties. What happened next was a blur, but I vaguely remember being rescued by someone or something and that they were seriously burned by the flames."

He turned towards me again and coldly said, "I've been trying to deny the existence of the supernatural for 14 years because I didn't want to accept the harm my negligence caused to the entity that saved me that day. But your very existence and the incident three days ago, not to mention Bruce being right in front of us has thrown that truth right back in my face. You wanna know why I've been silent? Because I've seen Bruce before, and I recognize those scars. Bruce is the thing that saved me, and all they got was horrible injuries and not even a thank you in turn. I..I don't know about you Jamie, but if I got injured saving someone and they didn't even come looking for me to thank me...I'd probably hate humanity too. It's likely my fault that this happened."

"Larry, you shouldn't blame yourself for a disaster like that," I cut in, alarmed that not only would he do such a thing, but that our Man Eater could be tied to a tragedy like the Deepwater Horizon, "You grew up under the influence of a cult, no one should be blaming someone for being influenced to not do their job by a group that's had them under their thumb for their whole life. Speaking of, what happened with the cult after the disaster?"

"Oh, those rats?" the representative scoffed in annoyance, "My parents only visited me once in the hospital with our leader once during my whole stay. They made it seemed like they cared for my well-being and that they were just giving me enough cash to pay for my bills and then some, but I'd been with them long enough to understand that they were really trying to buy my silence on the negligence onboard the rig. This opened my eyes and made me realise that the leader really didn't care about anyone within his church, to him we were nothing more than puppets. So, I took the money and later left an anonymous tip that helped expose the safety conditions on the rig. As for the cult themselves, their leader vanished into the night after the rest of the cult was arrested for something unrelated."

It took some more talking and coaxing, but eventually I was able to convince Lawrence to come back to where everyone else was. Soon we were planning what to do next, and eventually Matt would make a suggestion that, while simple, would not only change how I had thought of the bespectacled man, but would end up revealing just how serious this investigation actually was.

"I should see if my fiancee can come help out with identifying what we're dealing with," the news reporter declared, "I have my suspicions, but Tia works in the mythology section of our city's history museum, she'll certainly have a better perspective than me."

"You suspect this is some mythological beast that's stalking us?" Lawrence gruffly inquired, his eyebrows furrowed with interest.

Dylan turned to look at the representative as he replied, "Well, it sure as hell ain't a shark, let alone any marine life I've seen in my time sailing the seas. Hell, Blue Whales can't even reach the size of that thing."

"We can rule out any prehistoric animal, too," Ellen interjected without even looking up from her notes, "There's no known Plesiosaurs that look in any way similar to that, and there's no records of a Megalodon looking like that either, let alone reaching anywhere that size."

"Guess we have no choice," I noted calmly, and then turned to Matt and said, "If it helps our investigation, see how fast she can get here."

"Oh don't worry, she'll be here in no time," Matt chuckled as he walked away and pulled out his phone, "Let's just say you're not the only one who's a great swimmer."

His comment was quite confusing at the time, but it was only when Tia inevitably arrived that I understood what he meant. Ten minutes after Matt finished the call, the Amity rocked slightly as if to indicate we were being boarded. Soon after Matt approached us with a beautiful Chinese woman that...

---

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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/googlyeyes93 on 2024-09-23 21:54:22+00:00.

---

Previous

DAY 16

I honestly don’t even know if that’s the right day. At this point, everything is blurring together. I’m on… eight days, I believe, of no sort of sleep whatsoever. The feeling of electricity in my spine is the only thing keeping me going at this point, making it impossible to stay still or fall into any kind of rest. The auditory hallucinations have gotten much worse, and now I can clearly hear the numerous horrors inside the subject room. Even worse, the smells are beginning to come through as well, only adding to the stench of excrement and old viscera exuding from the observation room.

Nothing I’ve done has worked. I’ve tried… a few methods of killing myself at this point. Hanging was ineffective, leaving me with nothing but a bruised neck and trouble breathing since. Taryn made it obvious that blood loss wouldn’t do anything, so that was useless. An attempted drowning in the bathtub was cut short when I realized asphyxiation wouldn’t do anything, just like when I hung myself. Probably for the best, because that was an awful, awful feeling.

My last attempt was at a tried and true classic- the Reaper’s bath bomb. I plugged in the air fryer from the kitchen, figuring a toaster just might not have the oomph I need. Fill the bath, turn the fryer on four hundred, and let me cook.

I can still smell something burning, probably my internal organs, considering everything still feels like it’s on fire. The aches aren’t going away, and I’m not sure that I’ll be able to stay alive once I’m finally out of this, assuming I ever am.

I’m going to search for other ways. If push comes to shove, we have some drugs in the medical bay, but I’m honestly not holding out hope at this point.

—-

DAY 17(?)

I’m starting to see things. Whatever the noises are coming from, whatever the others have been seeing, they’re finally starting to appear for me.

They’re not in focus though. It’s like… it’s like looking through a patterned glass window. Their basic shape is there, but everything is blurry or mismatched, colors end where they shouldn’t and others warp so nothing is clearly distinguishable. I’m terrified of what I’m going to see when they become more clear, as what’s already showing is horrifying.

Some of the figures gathered around One are terrifying, with many just having large, red prisms of color where heads should be. Meanwhile most of the ones around Two are wearing a bright pink, and the singing… the singing is something I can hear no matter where I am. It never stops.

I’ve seen water dripping on the floor here and there from seemingly nowhere, but I now see it’s due to those gathered around Three. Their screams are some of the worst, like someone shrieking at the top of their lungs underwater, only bubbles escaping as liquid fills their airways. I can only imagine this is the sound they were making when they died.

Five hasn’t stopped banging at the door, and I still don’t know what it is that’s surrounding him. There are just… mounds? Not people figures, like the others- okay, some are more humanoid, I guess, but others are just massive piles. The worst thing is it looks like they’re burning, molten embers pulsing among dark gray and black fractals of light.

Philip is catatonic at this point, but I think it’s more because he’s shutting down from stress. I believe he’s at the point of audible hallucinations, so I would imagine he’s hearing the same things I am. Whatever is around him, the sounds are of screams and flames, a smell of charred flesh lingering in the air.

Four… Four seems to have gone feral, and we locked him in his room due to the signs he was exhibiting. Whether it’s just a psychosis exhibiting rabies like symptoms or not, that’s a whole other hell we aren’t willing to bring in here. He was almost howling in his delirium, hair matted and skin glistening in sweat as he tore at it, trying to get something out of himself.

I know there’s someone behind me, too. I know who they are. I know why they’re here. I just can’t bear to face that.

Murray has checked in on me from time to time. I believe he’s in the same state of audio hallucinations, but has yet to get a grasp of everything. The only other guard still alive has expended every bullet he could find from the security room, putting each one into his own head, one at a time from every possible direction to try and end his suffering. He’s still sitting in there, clicking an empty gun against what remains of his jaw. The top and back of his head are mostly gone, one eye lolling out of the skull to stare at the gun as it clicks again, empty. His lower jaw is mostly gone, but he’s still trying to speak. Or just crying, sobbing in loud, dreadful screams that gurgle through a mangled throat.

I have noticed one constant, no matter where I go, and it’s not the one that’s attached to me. This figure is clearer, made up millions of refracting and morphing beams of light, every color I could think of and beyond. It was… I think it was human, and the face was kind, even welcoming, but no matter how close I tried to get to it, it was like I was being pulled away. It was staying in the same place but I just couldn’t reach it, like infinity was standing between us at any given moment. No matter how long or fast I walked towards it, an eternity passed while getting no closer.

I don’t know what this is, but I believe it may be the key to stopping all of this.

—-

DAY 18

The figures are growing clearer now. Jesus… these images are worse than any nightmare I could conjure up, even after my worst bouts of sleeplessness. They’re still not totally there, but now they’re less… broken, I guess is the best way to put it. It looks like I’m watching old footage off a flip phone camera, like someone tried to make a horror movie on one.

The girls still dancing in circles around Two, occasionally taking a leave from their spot to kick or hit him, were the frankensteined, mangled corpses of girls cobbled together. There were stitches along their necks, and eyes were missing from some. There was this horrible makeup like a harlequin doll that was on their face. The pink dresses they wore were stained with scarlet blood, right in their abdomens. Two was approaching the same state of lucidity as One has been in since a few days ago. He’s not taking things as well though, with mostly unintelligible screams before one of the little girls uses their high heel shoes to stomp into his face. I can see, from the observation window, one of his eyeballs skewered through one little girl’s stiletto heel. If we’re being honest, I was rooting for them. At least someone was getting some good out of this situation.

Four and his… things. They’ve begun to rip each other apart. First he made a lunge at one of them, then they all started going at it, beginning to rip him limb from limb while biting his flesh. Hospital gowns flapped as they ran, showing bare asses that would have been comical if not for the savage gore staining the gowns.

One was still in high spirits, somehow, despite now being riddled with bullet holes. At some point, I heard a much louder bang than usual, and checked the room to see that the caved in part of his skull was now wide open, brains splattering the wall behind them. Despite that, he was still jovial, congratulating one of his many phantoms on their great aim. All that he got back was a gurgling scream from one that was missing it’s entire upper skull, face consisting of nothing but lower jaw and flapping tongue. It must have been in control of the shots, because something else hit him, splattering gore through the front of his shirt just like what happened on. the exam table all those days ago.

Taryn is just hanging by a thread, though she’s gone mostly catatonic now as well. There’s an older man who keeps hovering around her, though he simply glares from afar instead of doing anything. I’ve lost track of the times I’ve woken up, so to speak, unsure of where I am or how I got there. It’s just moments of blacking out here and there, without any telling what could be happening in between points A and B.

Philip… I don’t know what’s happening to Philip. He’s lately taken to sitting in his cot, covering his ears, and just screaming at the top of his lungs. His pleas alternate between apologies and begging for his life, but he’s screaming as if he’s trying to be heard over a cacaphony of terrible sounds. To his credit, that is the case, as the two figures near him are screaming in constant, shrieking pain. They’re just pillars of fire, standing beside him at all times. He’s been complaining of the heat in between fits, saying that he’s burning up, and I can see why, finally.

The issue is confronting my own demon, so to speak. I can see her clearly now, the exact same way she looked when she died. Peaceful, for once, instead of screaming in delirium about the thing that was after her. It was as if she had gone in her sleep, though that wasn’t the case at all. She was there, awake, screaming in delusions and convulsing as the prion ate away at her brain, taking any semblance of peace from her for the six months before she died.

All I can hear most of the time are muffled screams, the last things I heard from her. God… I’m so sorry, mom. I’m so sorry that I’ve brought myself to this. I just wanted to help myself, help anyone like us. I’m so sorry…

—-

DAY ???

I’ve been… gone? I guess that’s the bes...

---

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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/Aggravating_Road2692 on 2024-09-23 18:15:50+00:00.

---

There's something strange about the little boy from down the street.

Our new house was in a nice little neighborhood on the outskirts of a large metropolitan city that wasn't known for its hospitable reputation. So you can imagine my relief when I found my little family a cute little abode in a mostly retirement-age community. While there was no age requirement, almost all of the residents of Springcrest Village were sixty years old or older. They'd abandoned the busy city life to live out the rest of their days in a new upscale community where they found fellowship with people with shared life experiences.

Springcrest had everything they could ever need. It was situated right next to this fancy golf course, ideal for keeping those old joints moving. A well-maintained pool, excellent for keeping their aging skin nice and leathery for all to admire. Most importantly, there were no schools nearby, which meant no pesky children to ruin the old folk's peace and quiet.

We drove into our new picturesque life and were met with a multitude of smiles and waves. Ricky and I are a middle-aged couple, something rather strange to see driving down the roads of Springcrest Village.

'Maybe they thought someone's adult children had come by to visit Mamma and Poppa?' I imagined them thinking as we drifted past the identical housing. Everyone seemed really kind. That is until they noticed the Penske truck tailing behind our little Corolla. Their faces changed from looks of welcome to emotions of disgust. Some gesturing over to their spouses to come and look at the impending tragedy. The Yellow moving truck sped past them and I saw a few grumpy old men throw their hands up in frustration.

'So much for a warm welcome." I thought to myself. I looked over at Ricky as he journeyed onward unfazed by the many twisting looks.

Our car slowed over to the side of the street, coming to a halt in front of our new forever home, leaving the driveway spot available to the moving truck. The movers got straight to work.

As the rolling door on the Penske truck clinked against the metal stopper, the sound of metal on metal echoed through the quiet neighborhood.

"Let's get to work boys!" The driver yelled at his mostly college-aged laborers. The commotion brought many silver-haired women and grey beards to the windows, some coming out onto their lawns to show their disapproval with their hands placed firmly on their hips. To say that I was extremely uncomfortable was an understatement.

I itched my arm in an attempt to quell my nerves. Ricky noticed my uneasiness and wrapped a hand around my shoulder. His embrace worked for the most part, and the old folks looking on slowly vanished from my mind as I looked up at Ricky's face of admiration taking in the sight of our little three-bedroom home.

"Mom?" I felt a tug on my pant leg and looked down to see Daniel, our seven-year-old son, trying to get my attention.

"What is it honey?" I said as I patted a hand on the back of his head in a comforting gesture.

"Look." He pointed to the neighbor's rose bushes. It took a minute to realize Daniel hadn't suddenly become an avid rose connoisseur

Beyond the many reds and whites of the flower petals, through the thorned bushes, and hidden behind a little angel statue, were a pair of little eyes peering out at us. It was a little boy.

I breathed a slight sigh of relief when I realized that Daniel would not be the only child in our neighborhood.

"It's Okay honey, go say hi." I gave Daniel an encouraging shove as he hesitantly took a few steps forward.

"H-Hi." Daniel quivered but the boy behind the statue seemed to shy way behind the angel's comforting stone body. Daniel looked back over at me, searching for some kind of instruction. I waved him forward, he took a few more tentative steps.

"I- I'm Daniel." Daniel outstretched a hand in a manner we'd taught him to do, a cordial introduction. The boy seemed to completely disappear behind the angel as his hands now gripped its hard exterior. Daniel took a few more steps until his arms brushed up against a few roses. Just then the frightful boy darted through to foliage, snagging his shirt on one of the thorn branches. His little orange tee shirt ripped as cotton fabric clung to the sharp twigs. With surprising agility, he leaped over some of the rose bushes and disappeared from view. Daniel stood there confused, granted I was too.

"Strange boy," Ricky said.

"Yeah, strange indeed," I said under my breath while still trying to make sense of the situation.

"Come on Daniel. Let's go pick out your room." Ricky shouted. Daniel snapped out of his surprise and ran his little feet into the house. Just then I too came out of my stooper.

"Wait, take your shoes off, it's new carpeting!" I yelled. As we all walked through the door, I couldn't help but return my gaze to the little angel statue, once again, the boy's little eyes peered out from behind as the door slowly creaked closed.

***

Daniel was Homeschooled. We'd never trusted the public education system. Often, kids don't get the attention they require, most times they are just names on some roster. Ricky and I knew this. Soon after we got married we concluded that I would stay home and school our children ourselves. Hence our disregard for adequate schooling near Springcrest Village.

Unlike many other home educators, we as a couple felt we were more than qualified for the task of molding our young son's mind. Ricky was a professor at a community college about a half hour's drive from our new dwelling, and I had my masters in social work, though I no longer practiced. Ricky made plenty and I had my hands full with our rambunctious seven-year-old.

On this particular day, Daniel and I were working on long division. Yes, our second grader is slightly more advanced than the normal school curriculum, something Ricky and I loved to take credit for. This aptitude however did not grant him the same level of patience.

"Aww, mom. I don't get why I have to learn this stuff." He wined while laying his head on our kitchen table, his eyes firmly planted on the vivid imagery coming from the other side of the window.

"Now Daniel, I know this is hard but you have to try and focus, just a few more practice problems and we can stop for the day," I informed him. To my annoyance, he returned a disrespectful grunt. I couldn't help but scowl at his rudeness.

I reached for the ruler on the table and planted a mild slap on the tip of his nail bed.

"Ouch!" Daniel retorted, bringing his hand to his mouth while huffing a few hot breaths of air as if the mist could ease the pain. He eyed me with a mild sense of anger. Yes, I hit my son.

His eyes slowly started to melt from a look of anger to one of understanding.

"Sorry, Mom." He said as he lowered his eyes. It's not often that a kid relinquishes his emotions when they know they did something wrong, which made me proud of my boy. I caressed his face, squeezing his cheeks and forcing him into a pucker. I brought my nose in and glided it back and forth on his like I used to do when he was a baby.

"I'm sowwy my little cupcake." My baby voice made him shy away.

"Mom." He said with an inflection, I gave a mild chuckle. Just then I saw his eyes turn to the window, a look of surprise plastering its mark on his face. I turned to whatever caught his eye and gave a slight jolt as my eye met the glass.

On the other side, stood the boy from the first day we'd moved in. He was dirty, wearing the same orange shirt as the day he spied us from the rose bushes. His arms were scratched, visible streaks of red running down his skin, it must've been the rose bushes that'd done it. His face had an aura of judgment to it.

"It's that boy," Daniel whispered. The boy on the other side would not lose his connection with my son. Seconds turned to minutes, and it started to get a bit awkward, more than it already was.

"Mom?" Daniel said with a questioning change in pitch.

"Can I go say hi? I looked into my son's eyes and realized that it had been some time since he'd socialized with someone his own age. Guilt washed over me. Sometimes I forget that Daniel needs to interact with people his age.

I gave him a somber smile, I could tell Daniel knew I was mauling his question over in my mind, a grin inched his way across his face, one that said 'Come on please'. I slammed the book sitting on the table shut.

"Okay go, but we have to do a few extra problems tomorrow."

"You're the best mom!" He said as he shot out of his chair and made his way to the front door. I remained sitting at the table, as I lost Daniel from view, but just then I remembered the kid at the window.

A shiver ran down my spine as his eyes were glued on me, I don't think I'd ever seen the boy blink. That is until I saw eyelids closing horizontally. My skin crawled. His gaze trained on me, the sound of the front door unlatching in the background. From the right corner of the window ran Daniel, an excited pep in his step.

"Come on let's go play." The strange boy lost his connection with me and ran off onto our front lawn. Falling on the grass and rolling around in its green pigment that now added to his already filthy shirt. Daniel tagged him and the boy gave chase. The two ran out of sight.

I stood there contemplating what I'd just seen, Ricky's words on move-in day replaying in my head.

'Strange boy.'

"Strange. Strange indeed." I whispered.

...

---

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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/Theeaglestrikes on 2024-09-23 18:08:41+00:00.

---

“I think that might be the wrong way round,” I said, smirking.

The message had not been inked, but engraved into the plastic laminate partition. It’s the staple of any public bathroom stall. A number that, let’s be honest, is either false or owned by an unwilling participant of a bad practical joke. But this message was different. Unlike the other musings and doodles on the cubicle wall, it caught my eye. That was no meagre feat, considering it was three in the morning, and ten bottles of cider were sloshing around in my belly.

It wasn’t the unbalanced handwriting that entrapped my gaze. Not even the brown trail of rust left in the grooves of the etching. So what if an inebriated moron had written his phone number with his house key? That didn’t interest me at all. My curiosity was piqued by the length of the number.

Four digits. I didn’t ring it, of course, because I didn’t expect that the call would actually connect. That, along with the backwards wording of the message, started to poison my intrigue. There was an omen lurking in the message. I didn’t like any of it.

But I shook my head, realising that my drunken mind was playing cruel tricks on me. If a drunken stranger had written the message, it would make sense that he’d only remember four digits of his number. It would make sense that he’d mix up a common saying too.

Get a grip, scaredy-pants, I told myself, chuckling as I struggled to aim my stream away from the seat of the toilet.

“The fuck are you yapping about?” Mason slurred, slipping on the damp floor as he pulled my cubicle door open.

I zipped up my jeans and drunkenly grinned. “Trying to sneak a peak?”

“Keep your fantasies to yourself, Alec,” Mason said, swaying listlessly in the doorway. “Now, what were you saying, tosspot?”

“I don’t remember,” I admitted, laughing and shrugging.

“Something about the wrong…” my friend hazily began, pausing to belch. “Something was round? I don’t know.”

I slapped my head in realisation, then jabbed a pointing finger at the cubicle wall. “The message! I was saying it’s the wrong way round.”

Mason crouched, squinting to read it. “It’s missing, like… three numbers…”

I snorted so hard I choked. “Mason, it’s missing a few more than that. You’re drunk.”

“So are you!” he protested, standing up with hands on his hips, then stumbling into the opposite cubicle wall.

“True, but at least I have more than one brain cell left,” I pointed out.

“That isn’t saying much, considering you only started with two,” Mason retorted.

I laughed. “Damn.”

“Yeah,” he replied, tapping his temple with a grin. “See? Even tipsy, I’m witsy.”

“Witsy?” I asked, giggling.

“Witty,” he corrected.

I was searching for a smart reply when I noticed that my friend had produced his phone from the front pocket of his jeans. My inebriated friend’s bobblehead hindered his ability to focus on the screen, but I already knew from the tone of the phone’s digital clicks that he was dialling a number. A short number.

“You’re not serious?” I asked as the phone started to ring. “It’s not going to work.”

“We’ll see, won’t we, Mr Smart Alec?” Mason asked, mashing the phone against sweaty hair in a completely failed attempt to meet his ear. “That name hits the spot every time.”

“Yeah?” I scoffed, rocking from side to side. “So does your mum.”

My friend laughed, shoving me into the green, rickety wall of the cubicle. “My mum’s too wonderful for you.”

“You’re too wonderful for you.”

The phone had barely stopped ringing when the response sounded through the speaker. I heard the voice with such clarity that I twisted my head to ensure the responder hadn’t appeared in the cubicle.

As my friend and I locked eyes, I knew that we felt the same chilling sensation. The same chilling realisation.

Mason should not have called that number.

“Who is this?” my friend calmly asked, struggling to sober himself up.

“Who is this?” the voice parroted, speaking in a misshapen way.

Mason started to pant, his chest bloating and compressing rapidly as he trembled on the spot. I tried to control my breathing, but I knew why were both so afraid. There was background noise behind the voice on the other end. And that sharp, spiky audio didn’t signify bad reception. Something was hidden in the static of the call.

“Hang up,” I said.

I reached towards the phone in Mason’s hand, but he retracted it and shook his head at me in absolute terror, as if to say that ending the call would be a dreadful idea. As if he were hearing more than me. And I wonder, sometimes, whether he’d simply been trying to stop me from hearing it too.

I trusted my friend, as I’d never seen him that way. Possessed by terror that surpassed even my own, and I’d certainly never been so frightened in my life. His transformation became fully apparent when a drunken pub-goer stumbled into the bathroom. The barfly that locals call Barmy Barry, but only because he does, in fact, act a little barmy if we don’t.

“Fuck off, Barmy!” Mason yelled.

The old, dishevelled gentleman wore a matching waistcoat and corduroy trousers, as if he were either attending a funeral or preparing to perform amateur magic. And knowing Barmy Barry, it may well have been both. I was actually relieved to see him. Relieved to be drawn back into the real world and forget, for a second, the unsettling nature of the phone call.

“What are you boys doing in here?” the grumbling man mumbled as he walked towards our cubicle.

“Blow,” I joked.

“You’re blowing each other?” Barmy Barry gasped.

I sighed. “No, Barry, it’s… Never mind.”

“Barmy Barry,” he corrected.

“Just get out of here,” my friend icily ordered.

Barmy Barry narrowed his eyes. “I’m going to tell Michele that you two are up to no good. I’ll be back to check on you if you haven’t left in a few minutes. And then I’m taking a piss, okay? Once you’ve calmed down.”

“Bye, Bazza,” I said as the man exited the room.

My friend summoned a deep breath.

“It was only Barry,” I said, before gulping. “Just… hang up the phone, Mason. We don’t need to keep talking to him.”

“Who is this?” the phone voice repeated with that horridly unnatural timbre.

Mason ignored me and started to reply. “This is—”

“This is Mason,” the voice interrupted, answering its own question.

The two of us quaked in the bathroom stall. Nobody had mentioned my friend’s name. Not me. Not Barmy Barry. Yet, this mysterious voice knew.

I pleaded with silent eyes for Mason to hang up the phone. To my surprise, in spite of the unwilling look on his face, my friend nodded. But as he started to lower the phone from his ear, the voice on the other end spoke again.

“Why are you listening to Alec? Don’t you want to enjoy a long time?” it whispered.

Before my friend responded to the voice, the door to the bathroom stall swung closed, sweeping my friend out of the cubicle with unholy force.

“Mason!” I shouted, instantly grabbing the handle.

Something was wrong. I sensed it before I’d even opened the door. Sensed, somehow, that I would be facing a new land when I stepped outside.

I was both right and wrong.

The grimy, stained, neglected bathroom still stood before me, but its pieces had been scrambled. Before me was the familiar row of sinks, but it stretched much farther, much like the row of cubicles beside me. And when I twisted to face what should have been the room’s far end, I found only a long tunnel. The two walls, lined with sinks and stalls, were no longer straight and finite. They curved sharply to the right, and whatever lay around the corner was just out of sight.

“Alec?” a familiar voice cried.

My chest tightened.

“Mason?” I replied, voice cracking as it barrelled down the tiled chamber ahead.

There did not come a second response from my friend. However, a few seconds later, the sound of a shutting door echoed down the tunnel towards me, seemingly carried by a far-off breeze. It became clear to me that I wouldn’t find the bathroom’s end once I rounded the corner. A thought confirmed when I finally took ginger steps out of the cubicle, skidding slightly in the same mystery puddle that had nearly claimed my friend.

And after following the curving tunnel for only a few steps, I saw that I was correct. The bathroom continued ceaselessly. The two walls did not meet some end-wall. I did not see an exit beside the last cubicle on the right, for there seemed to be no last cubicle. All that awaited was a never-ending passageway of sinks and stalls.

I didn’t want to follow the bend. I had a feeling that I should wait in the first cubicle for the nightmare to pass. But I knew, if I were to do that, I would be turning my back on Mason.

As I walked farther and farther from the faux safety I’d felt in the initial cubicle, I tried to focus on my trainers clapping against damp tiles. But the persistent echoes of distant noises drowned each step, no matter how heavily I walked.

Far-flung faucets gushed. Poorly-oiled stall hinges groaned. Doors locked or unlocked. Every sound typical of a public bathroom, which would have been banal in any other circumstance, seemed to excavate a fresh layer of fear from the pit of my stomach. I held my sanity together with duct-tape and faith.

It was when a not-so-distant sound emerged that I finally unravelled.

Only three or four cubicles ahead from me, a stall door closed. But not before I had a chance to scream at the sight of translucent fingers gripping the plasti...

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This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/BuddhaTheGreat on 2024-09-23 16:13:41+00:00.

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If you have no idea what I’m talking about or where I am, you should read my last post.

Perhaps I judged this place too harshly. It turns out that they have finally gotten around to getting a cell tower up here, so I do have reception. Typically, it’s extremely spotty, but hey, at least it’s there. I am going to write and put up these posts as and when I have the time, so don’t try and measure the gaps between them to create a timeline. It won’t work.

Anyway, I should probably start from where I left off last time. By the time the bus was pulling into Chhayagarh, I was the only passenger left. No, some horrible monstrosity did not attack us and kill them off. They just got down at their own stops like usual.

You must understand that people from the outside can and do visit our village. It’s just incredibly difficult. It does not appear on any official map. No travel guides about it exist anywhere. The only symbol of the Indian government in the entire area is the police station, and it’s completely staffed by local officers; I’m pretty sure the district superintendent doesn’t even know it exists. If you try to catch transport from any of the major cities, no one is going to know where it is. Pretty much the only way to get here is to ask for directions in some of the neighbouring villages. Some of the people there, especially the old ones, may be able to guide you to the right buses and roads. Curiously, people who have visited once never have any trouble finding their way back again, but most never do. It’s a pretty boring place.

If you do manage to find your way here, you’ll be greeted by the same rusty iron board that I saw, scrawled over with barely legible writing in English, Hindi, and Bengali, right before the bus dumps you in front of the two naked concrete pillars that qualify as the village stop.

“Dear visitors, Chhayagarh is more dangerous than it appears. Do not speak to strange people. Do not go to the forest. Do not leave your dwelling at night. If you see anything strange, inform the police station immediately. We are glad to have you as our guests.

—Chhayagarh Gram Panchayat”

Wonderful, given that I was as much of a stranger here as the occasional German vlogger who stumbled in. Instead of driving off after fetching my suitcases from the luggage carrier overhead, the bus driver parked his vehicle off to the side and casually ambled over to the small tin-and-wood tea shop helpfully placed immediately across the road from the stop.

Standing on the outskirts, I realized my predicament too late: in my rush to get here, I had forgotten to call ahead on the landline. The family had no idea I was here. Therefore, I had no transport to the manor. On top of that, it was the zenith of noon, and the sweltering road threatened to melt my shoes. Having little other choice, I slowly followed the driver to the welcoming shade of the shop. The front had been extended into a corrugated tin awning, with several wooden benches underneath forming a makeshift seating area. Here, the both of us almost unconsciously settled in next to each other. The driver raised a finger to the old man manning the shop, who quickly brought over an earthen cup brimming with milk tea and two cheap biscuits.

“And for you, babu?”

It was too hot for tea, so I asked him if he had water. He did, and I ate two extremely dry biscuits of my own between gulps.

“People don’t come here often, to this village. Especially not from the city.”

The driver’s voice was level and rich, unnaturally posh for someone with his rough, everyman appearance. I paused before deciding to ignore it. There had been enough strangeness already.

“No. No, I suppose they don’t.” I took another sip of the water.

He looked at me for a good few seconds, over the rim of his cup, and I could have sworn I saw stars dimly twinkling in them again.

“Tourist? Or are you some sort of salesman?”

“Neither. Just some… family business.” No way he needed to know more than that.

In the first place, it was odd to have to strike up a conversation with your bus driver. They were supposed to be liminal beings, taking you where you needed to go and then disappearing. This just felt wrong, like seeing your middle school teacher at the mall.

“I see. Family is good. One must take care of their family.” The driver nodded solemnly, finishing his tea and smashing the cup on the ground. “Do you smoke?”

“Uh… No, thanks.”

“I don’t either.” He glared straight into my eyes again, pupils expanding until I was looking into dark abysses. “I like quick deaths. Slow ones are boring.”

The air turned heavy and brittle, like something was about to happen. His eyes seemed to swirl like whirlpools as I looked into them. The effect was almost hypnotizing. A strange, dull cold began to deaden the tips of my fingers, slowly radiating upward into my palms, and then my arms. My eyelids grew heavy and drowsy. All I wanted was to go to sleep, but I was startled out of my stupor by a loud clang. The shopkeeper had placed the kettle a little too roughly on the stove.

When I glanced back, the driver’s eyes were back to normal. He sighed and got to his feet, walking around under the shade to stretch his legs.

It took a while to find my voice again. “Don’t you need to, you know… go back?”

“No. Not yet. The route timings are very spaced out. I spend a few hours here every time.” He nodded at the back of the shop, where a small ramshackle shed was leaning against the wall. “He lets me sleep in there sometimes.”

“Are you a local?”

“No, but I visit often.” He looked over to where his bus was parked. “Obviously.”

Right. I had very little interest in continuing this conversation, especially given what had just happened. Instead, I gulped down the last of the water and began looking around for a bin to throw the bottle in. The shopkeeper waved me over.

“Give me the bottle, babu.”

He tossed it into a green plastic bag behind him. “I send them for recycling with the bus every night. It’s good money, though he keeps some of it.”

“I see.”

“Would you like some tea now? I put on a fresh kettle.”

“Oh, no, not for me. Thanks.”

Then he leaned in conspiratorially and asked me the fateful question that every outsider must face in any village in India.

“Kiske yaha se hai aap?”

Whose house are you from?

Well, what he was really asking is how I knew people here. In other words, my family. Also, he spoke in Hindi. So, he was not a Bengali. That did not surprise me. There are plenty of people from other states here, mostly migrants in search of jobs. Ram Lal, our manservant, was from Bihar, though his ancestors had moved to Chhayagarh a long time ago.

“Birendra Thakur,” I answered, using my grandfather’s formal name.

As soon as he heard this, the shopkeeper, who must have been at least twenty years older than me, jumped out from behind the shop and bent to touch my feet. I recoiled instinctively, practically jumping backwards to stop him.

He looked up at me, still squatting on the ground. “Thakur! The little Thakur! How you have grown! It has been so long since you last came to the village!”

I grabbed his shoulders and practically hoisted him to his feet. “Please get up, and don’t touch my feet. I’m practically your son.”

Oh, yeah, I should probably mention this. Like all good feudal lords, the men in our family are given two names: a personal name at birth, and a ‘formal’ name at puberty. Yes, I also have one. No, I won’t be revealing it. Not yet, anyway. Also, Thakur is just an honorific we use, like ‘lord’. It’s more common than you think. Rabindranath Tagore? The poet guy? ‘Tagore’ is just a bastardized spelling of ‘Thakur’.

After hesitating, he opted to merely fold his hands together. “Thakur, I have seen you when you were a boy. You used to buy sweets from my shop whenever you visited.”

Maybe that was true. I barely remember my trips here.

“You don’t need to call me that.”

“After your grandfather passed…” He touched his head in a reverent gesture. “Birendra Thakur treated us like his own children. We heard about your father too. The gods have given you much grief. But the village is yours now, Thakur. Now that you are here, everything will be all right.” He paused. “But why are you here? You need to go to the manor! One vakil babu came to the village a few days ago, and I heard he was waiting for you.”

I nodded. “Yeah, I’m just looking for a way there. Is there an autorickshaw or something I can take?”

“A few farmers pass by here. But you cannot travel by bullock cart, Thakur! It’s unthinkable!”

I raised my hands to placate him. The change in demeanour was threatening to give me a whiplash injury. “I’ll manage.”

“Nonsense!” He turned to the back of the shop and shouted, “Ramu! Ramu! Come here!”

A young, well-built man came jogging around the back of the building. After a brief introduction, during which he also promptly tried to fall at my feet, Ramu pulled his trusty bike out of the shed, and we set off for the house.

Ramu was the shopkeeper’s son, and about a year younger than me. He worked with his father in the shop, and during harvest season, he helped in the fields. Like his father, he also had a deep, totally unearned reverence for me, refusing to call m...

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