nosleep

This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/Sea-Concept-7772 on 2024-11-13 21:55:18+00:00.

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My name is Nick Bannon. I’m about six feet tall. Skinny build. My curly hair and eyebrows are a dark brown, and my eyes are bright blue. A strange start to my story, I know, but it’s only because I know the inevitable. It’s going to happen again. I don’t know where, and I don’t know who to, but I have a feeling it’s been happening for a while. I’m just another small link in a long, long chain.

If there’s a photo in your home that matches the description above, you’re in danger. All I can advise is that you get out. Get out as fast as you can and share my story with somebody, anybody who will believe you. I’ve written it out below, as quickly as I could under the circumstances. I don’t think I have much longer. It’s going to find me soon.

————————————————————

My Mother died two months ago. Lung cancer. We weren’t very close, especially at the end, but I’d been the only family she didn’t despise. Because of this, the majority of her possessions were left to me. This included an old blue truck, a storage unit full of tattered furniture and old clothes, and a split level house at the end of a long country road.

The house itself was in okay shape. There were some exterior walls that looked a bit rough, but it was old. Good bones, as they say. I decided I’d move into it, at least for the time being. I was between jobs, and it felt like as good a place as any to crash for a little bit. I packed what few belongings I had from my shitty studio apartment and left the city in my rearview mirror.

Things were normal for the first few days. It felt good to be away from the chaos that I’d grown accustomed to. My closest neighbor was two miles away, and I barely saw any cars drive by. I’d forgotten the value of silence from time to time. 

However, pretty quickly it got to the point where it was too silent. Soon, every creak made me jump, every gust of wind sounded like an intruder, and it was driving me crazy. I decided that I needed a project. Something to fill the silence. Pass the time. I had a lot of it these days. I looked around at all of Mom’s tacky inspirational wall hangings and her dated velvet furniture and decided that it felt too much like her in there. If I was going to live there, I was going to make it mine.

I had a yard sale that had a pretty great turnout, despite my isolated location. Pretty much everything went, and what didn’t get sold got donated to a local thrift store. I shampooed the carpet, painted the walls, tended to the garden, all things that Mom probably hadn’t done in years. By the time I was finished, the entire house almost looked brand new. I bought some new furniture with the yard sale money, threw up a few horror movie posters, and soon enough this place was starting to feel like mine. 

————————————————————

It had been easy to get rid of Mom’s stuff because, quite frankly, most of it had been ugly. The only things that stuck around were her framed portraits, the ones that climbed the stairs. They were family photos. A dozen semi-familiar faces dotted them sporadically, and I found myself staring at them from time to time, wondering what they were up to now. It felt odd. I’d been alone for so long that the thought of a family this big being my family didn’t make sense in my head. 

I started getting in the habit of greeting them each morning. I know, it sounds weird, but grief is a strange thing. I felt comfort in it. As I’d been clearing out everything, I’d found a family photo album. Using that, I’d been able to match a lot of the names to faces. Aunt Grace popped up a lot throughout the frames, as did my Uncle Rob. I even saw myself as a baby a few times. It took a while, but soon I had each of them memorized. That’s why I’d noticed the new photo almost instantly.

Every single one of the frames had a thick, black frame, no matter the photo size. It gave the wall a nice, uniform look. Mother had liked them that way. The new one stood out from the rest. It was made up of plastic roses, each one a different shade of red.

The image inside of the roses was of a woman. She was ice skating alone on some pond, surrounded by brush and thick snow. The photo was taken from a few yards away, through the branches of a dead tree. It was like photographer had been crouching a few yards away. Hiding. 

When I went to take the frame off the wall, I was met with…wetness. The entire frame was covered in some sort of thick, clear goo that had started to pool on the stairs. My stomach churned at the sight of it. I took my shirt off and used it as a sort of glove to carry it to my kitchen table.

I stared at it for a long time. Half of my brain was searching my early memories for the skating woman. Maybe she was a long lost relative, or maybe a friend of Mother’s? But that wouldn’t explain the photo showing up out of nowhere. I’d passed that photo wall dozens of times, and I was almost certain that it hadn’t been there before. It also wouldn’t explain that disgusting goo.

At that point, I was weirded out and confused, but I wasn’t scared. I’d heard about strange things happening in the woods, how it can play tricks on your mind. That had to be it. I tossed the frame into the garbage. I didn’t want it anywhere near me. I thought that’d be the end of it. Just a strange occurrence, nothing more.

That morning, I skipped saying hello to the photos. There was an imposter. It didn’t feel right.

————————————————————

Later that day I decided to take the truck into town and run a few errands I was putting off. I needed to get out of the house. It felt like I had that disgusting goo all over me, even after a shower. Being in town helped a little bit, but not much. At the convenience store, the cashier picked up on my off mood.

“You doin’ okay, sweetie? You look pale.” She said, bagging my groceries. I lied and told her I was fine, and forced our conversation to turn towards the weather.

“I’m just getting sick of those storms,” I said. “I know some people say they help them sleep, but not me”

The woman gave me a weird look. “Storms? What storms? It’s been bone dry for weeks! You sure you’re okay?”

“Oh, uh…yeah. Yeah, I’m fine.” I stammered, grabbing my groceries. I hurried out of there and got in the truck. What had she meant by no storms? I’d been seeing lightning every night pretty much since I’d moved in. Maybe she lived in a different county. Yes. That had to be it. 

I drove around for an hour or two before heading back. The skating woman wouldn’t leave my head. When I finally returned to the house, it had started to get dark. Night time out in the middle of nowhere was no joke. I brought the groceries in and put them away. I cooked a small chicken dinner, cleaned the dishes, and shut the house down for the night. I needed to sleep. It wasn’t until I went to shut off the front porch lights that I noticed it.

The photo of that skater. It was back in its place on the wall, right along with the others. A fresh layer of goo was dripping off of it like slimy teardrops.

Alright, I thought. Now I’m scared.

————————————————————

I didn’t end up getting much sleep that night. I laid in bed and stared at the ceiling in a daze. The sounds of the old house sounded even louder in the dark. There wasn’t a storm, at least not one that I noticed. In the morning, I checked every single nook and cranny in this house, looking for any sort of explanation on who’d moved the photo while I’d been gone. It had to be an intruder, but there were no signs of forced entry. The windows had been rusted shut years ago, so there was no chance of someone shimmying in that way. All of the doors had been locked as well. Deadbolted.

Outside, I saw no footprints or tire marks that weren’t the truck’s. Nobody else was here but me, at least according to the physical evidence. After a paranoid few hours of searching, I got fed up. I started a fire in the backyard and threw the photo into it. It almost sounded like it was screaming as it went up in smoke. I stood there until I was sure it was charred beyond repair before I doused the flame.

The next day I had someone from SPC Security come out and installed a home alarm system, complete with a tablet that controlled its every move. It was very fancy. The man showed me how to arm and disarm the system, and helped me create an access code. After he left I felt a bit better. At least now I’d know if something in the house was moving while I wasn’t.

The photo hadn’t returned, thank god, but I still felt weird about the photo wall. What had once given me comfort now felt wrong. I took the photos down and put them in a box that I shoved into a closet. The stairwell looked bare afterwards, like I’d ripped all of its teeth out, but I felt good. It felt like I had things under control.

That night, I got into bed with the security tablet laying on my bedside table. I armed the house with my access code, and I drifted off to sleep as the lightning began once more.

————————————————————

The alarm clock read 3:45 a.m when I was startled awake. There was a sound.

ACK! ACK!

I squinted through the pitch black, still half asleep. I couldn’t see anything.

ACK! BLECH! ACK!

Whatever it was was loud. Really loud. The sound was like a blend of a sick puking cat and a human cough. I rubbed my eyes with some force and peered into the darkness again.

ACK! ACK! ACK!

As my eyes began to adjust, I saw it. In the corner. Something was there. Crouching. Vibrating. Tw...

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This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/niceynice876 on 2024-11-13 14:28:31+00:00.

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I'm writing this here because I don't know what else to do.

Let me start from the start. I lived with my two roommates, Carmen and James, in a typical apartment off-campus. The three of us shared a fridge, and space was pretty tight, but we'd worked out as good system to avoid disagreements—ensuring that each of us had our own shelf, and anything in other areas of the fridge was labelled.

Carmen and James had been living in the apartment for a semester prior to me moving in, and while I was worried initially that the two of them might be cliquey, they were very welcoming. Both of them were straight-talking and adult without being rude or blunt, which was so refreshing after my experiences with some terrible roommates in places I'd lived before.

Everything was going smoothly—no moldy food, leftovers kept on our personal shelves, and boundaries respected. That was until the morning I opened the fridge, bleary-eyed and looking for coffee creamer, and found a weird jar on my shelf.

What looked like gnarled roots were suspended in cloudy liquid that swirled as I examined the jar in my hand. The jar was old-fashioned, sealed with a two-part canning lid that seemed stuck tight. I'd never seen Carmen or James have anything like in the fridge this before, and in my mind I groped around for rationale as to how this could have showed up. As I struggled to open the lid, it finally loosened, not with the fresh pop of a sterile jar, but with the gritty sensation of corroded metal loosening its grip on rust. This jar looked like it had been here for years. I quickly screwed it shut again, not wanting to experience the smell of what was inside.

My fingers ran over something that felt like paper on the bottom of the jar. I checked that the lid was on tight before turning over the jar. There, on the base, was a dog-eared label with words written in old-fashioned cursive: "To bind".

“Did either of you buy this?” I asked Carmen and James, but they both said no, barely paying attention. “If someone’s messing with me, just stop. It’s not funny,” I told them both, but neither of them took responsibility. It was too early to argue, so I shrugged and threw the whole jar in the trash.

The next week or so, nothing else weird happened, and I started to forget about the jar that had shown up in the fridge. That was until the morning that James yelled my name from across the house.

"EMMA!" he shouted, and I immediately jumped up and headed downstairs to see what the matter was. It wasn't like him to randomly yell for me, and I could tell by his tone that something was wrong.

James was stood by the fridge, his face twisted into an expression of disgust. "Emma, what the fuck is this?", he shouted, as he opened the door.

I jumped back as he revealed the fridge was crawling with maggots. Their pale, segmented bodies were pulsing in sick rhythm as they wriggled up the inside walls of the fridge, each one swollen with a glistening sheen. In the center of the fridge was a mass of maggots in writhing clusters, and I realized with horror that they were concentrated around my box of leftover pizza—the pizza I'd ordered just the night before.

"Emma, answer me! What the fuck is this?"

I was frozen with disgust, and my voice sounded stuttery and weak. "I don't know, James... this has nothing to do with me, I swear!"

"Then why the fuck are they coming from your pizza box?"

I recoiled as James grabbed my box of pizza, seemingly so full of anger and adrenaline that he didn't care about the maggots crawling all over it, which scattered to the floor around our feet. The air puffed with spores that made me cough as he opened the lid, the once-cheesy slices nearly unrecognizable—swollen with mold, shades of green, black, and white spreading across the surface in fuzzy patches. Some spots seemed slick and slimy, others looked almost bubbly. Amid the rotting mess, maggots swarmed over each slice, their pale bodies weaving in and out of the gooey, decomposing crust. The air was filled with the dense, sour stench of decay and whispery, wet squelching of their bodies sliding against each other.

The sight of the decay inside the box was so shocking that I almost didn't notice the message on the inside of the lid, scrawled in harsh, capital letters: "ENJOY WHILE IT LASTS".

James tilted the box to look at the message. "What does this mean, Emma?"

"I don't know! The pizza was fresh, that message wasn't there last night..."

"So you're saying that me or Carmen must have done this? Why the fuck would we want to nuke our own fridge with maggots?"

"No, that's not what I'm saying! This is so fucked up..."

James' eyes were full of a hard rage that I hadn't seen before, and I was almost as scared of him as I was of the maggots. "I don't even want to hear how this happened. It's your mess, clean it up, and you need to replace all of our food that's been ruined by this. This is unbelievable Emma, I really thought we could trust you." He threw the pizza box on the counter and stormed from the room.

I cleaned it all up, filling up trash bags while crying with frustration and fear. I was so confused—there had been no hint of any decay when I'd eaten the pizza last night, and I'd simply thrown the leftovers in the fridge thinking I'd eat them later today. I didn't have the money to buy an entire fridge's worth of food for three people, and I was sick with worry that my living situation was descending into the same mess of hostility that I'd experienced before.

I spent about an hour on my knees in my rubber gloves, scooping up handfuls of maggots and dumping them in boiling water to kill them, then scrubbing the fridge with bleach. Neither James nor Carmen mentioned the incident to me again, although both of them had noticeably cooled towards me, and I spent as much time in my room as I could to avoid any awkward confrontations. Each time I opened the fridge, I braced myself, terrified that something else would appear.

And I was right to be afraid, because a few nights later, it happened again.

I opened the fridge to grab a snack, only to find a plate on my shelf, front and center. On it was a slice of cake sat upright with a candle on the top, as if ready to present to a birthday girl. But the cake was old-looking, sagging and sunken. It looked kind of familiar—frosting a sickly shade of green, surrounded by hardened crumbs, and speckled with confetti-like sprinkles. My stomach dropped as I noticed the letters scrawled across the top in smeared icing. The first few letters of my name. EMM…

It was unmistakably the same cake from my tenth birthday. I remembered that the frosting was a hideous shade of green because my mom had added too much food coloring. How could a slice of it be here, now, almost a decade later?

“Emma?” Carmen’s voice cut sharply through my thoughts, and I jumped. She was standing in the doorway, arms crossed. I felt like I'd been caught red-handed, guilty of some crime I had no part in, and I tried to use my body to block the cake. But the look in my eyes must have told her that there was something wrong.

“What now?” she asked, walking over to the fridge and peering over my shoulder. Her eyes widened as she spotted the plate, and her mouth curled in disdain. “You can’t seriously expect us to believe this isn’t yours.”

“What? No, I—” I stammered, trying to find the right words, but she cut me off.

“James told me about the maggots, and now this? A slice of rotten cake with your name on it?” Her eyes were cold and sharp with accusation. “I don’t know what kind of game you’re playing, Emma, but it’s sick.”

“I swear, Carmen, I didn’t put this here!” I said, my voice filled with desperation. “I have no idea how any of this is happening!”

She snorted, folding her arms tighter. “You’re telling me that a weird cake with your name on it just magically appeared in our fridge? Do you even hear how insane that sounds?”

“I know how it sounds,” I whispered. My voice was brittle with shame. “But I’m not doing this. I haven’t done any of it.”

Carmen shook her head. Her face with was filled with disappointment, her eyes wrinkled with disgust, like she was contemplating a stranger doing something unsanitary. I'd hoped that some fragile trust was still there, but each syllable she spoke tore it down. “We were actually happy when you moved in. We thought you’d be different. But you’ve brought nothing but weirdness into our home. First the maggots, and now this? James and shouldn't have to live with constant gross surprises in the fridge.”

“Carmen, please. You have to believe me.”

“I don’t have to do anything,” she snapped. “We’re going to have to reconsider this whole living arrangement.”

Later that night I lay in bed, unable to sleep, replaying the argument with Carmen over and over in my head. I felt like I was going crazy, but I knew I wasn't responsible for this. Every other area of my life was healthy and happy. All I could think, unlikely as it seemed, was that James or Carmen were playing a trick on me. I didn't feel safe, I couldn't face a confrontation with them, and even if I could, our relationship would be forever tainted by what had happened.

I needed to talk to someone who might have an outside perspective on all this. I picked up my phone and called my mom.

“Hi, sweetheart!” She sounded cheerful at first, but her tone shifted when she heard the strain in my voice. “Emma? Is everything okay?”

I he...

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This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/lightingnations on 2024-11-13 14:53:46+00:00.

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At the front door Mom hesitated, drew a deep breath, and said, “Okay, has everybody still got their blindfolds?”

“Noooooo,” my brother Logan replied sarcastically. “I lost mine since you asked three seconds ago.”

Logan hated the safety lectures we got whenever we visited Grandma. He was thirteen and I was ten, both tall and stocky with a shock of blond hair.

Mom’s eyes narrowed at him. “Logan, how about you drop the attitude? Like I haven’t got enough on my plate already.”

“My blindfold’s right here,” I said, tapping my forehead before another argument broke out.

“Good boy Blake. We’ll be in and out in twenty minutes, I promise.”

“Then we’re getting Burger King right?”

“Absolutely,” she said with a bright smile. I punched the air while Logan muttered something too low to hear. A special treat like Burger King was a huge deal to me back then.

Our grandparents’ house lay in the centre of a dirt lot surrounded by a chain-link fence. All the curtains were taped shut. Mom rapped the door, then we waited there for a few minutes while rain hammered the gutters like a steel drum. I remember worrying we’d stand there until Grandma’s ‘golden hour’ started.

Mom grabbed a ring of keys from her bag and undid the series of locks, then we stepped into the musty air of the house, shaking water from our coats and jackets. All the tacky upholstered furniture was already outdated, even back then, and the walls were covered with shelves displaying Grandpa’s prized model car collection.

Usually, Logan and I stood on the welcome mat while Mom battened down the hatches, but past the stairs and to the left, smoke was pouring out from beneath the kitchen door. Mom rushed along the corridor into the kitchen, followed closely by Blake and I. The downstairs landing wrapped around the stairs, with the kitchen at the back of the house.

On the stove, a fry pan was spurting with giant flames as Grandma, completely unaware of the danger, tried to scramble some eggs. Mom yanked the pan off the grill just as an alarm started shrieking. She shouted for us to get Grandma out of there, waving away most of the smoke with a set of oven mitts.

Dressed in her pink nightgown, Grandma fought us every step of the way, swiping at the air with her long, yellow nails. I was afraid of using too much force because her frail body always made me picture a skeleton. In the lounge, she refused to settle on a plastic-covered sofa—everything was shrink-wrapped, really—until Logan promised he’d make her a corned beef sandwich if she behaved, speaking in the soft tones you’d use around a fussy toddler.

Shortly after the alarm quieted, Mom came in and said to Grandma, “Where’s Dad? He didn’t answer the door.”

“Eugh, don’t speak to me about that man. I was washing the dog but he kept climbing away.”

“Grandma and Grandpa got a dog?” I whispered to Logan.

“No dickhead. Grandma’s nuts, remember?”

“Logan,” Mom snapped. She insisted we refer to Grandma’s problems as her ‘funny spells’.

Once it became obvious nobody could coax any sense out of the old lady, Mom went to find Grandpa herself. We’d barely had time to sit when she screamed from a room upstairs. Logan and I exchanged a look of concern then rushed after her.

Grandpa was sprawled across the bathroom floor, groaning. A shower curtain which had been ripped off its hooks covered his midsection, and blood oozed from a deep gash along his forehead staining the tiled floor red. He’d slipped while climbing out of the tub. Him and Mom had endless arguments about that house being a death trap but he refused to move. He was afraid what might’ve happened if they moved someplace filled with nosey neighbours.

Mom shouted for me to call an ambulance. I rushed downstairs but the rotary phone in the landing spat a dead tone. I figured the storm knocked out the lines.

“It’s not working,” I said as I rushed back.

Mom pinched the bridge of her nose and sobbed while Logan and I stood there. Kids aren’t great at processing those sorts of situations. She told Logan to help her get Grandpa into a bathrobe hanging from a nearby rack.

“Ew, gross,” Logan sneered.

“NOW!” Mom’s sudden outburst upset me more than all the blood. She rarely raised her voice.

She told me to help with the doors. Grandpa must’ve noticed me shaking, because he forced a smile and said, “I tell you Blake, this getting old business ain’t for the faint-hearted.”

He spoke as if he’d just had five glasses of whiskey, all sluggish and lazy.

Logan and Mom helped him outside into the family Volvo, all four of us getting drenched.

“Alright, everybody in the car,” she said, panting heavily.

“I’m not leaving Helena,” Grandpa protested from the passenger seat. “She needs somebody to keep an eye on her.”

Mom’s hand shot up out of frustration. She took a moment to compose herself, checked her watch, and then said, “Okay, you boys stay here while I take Grandpa to hospital. Grandma’s gonna be fine for another three hours. I’ll be back before then, but keep your blindfolds close just in case. Logan, you’re in charge. Set your electric watch thingy for a quarter to nine so you don’t forget.”

“That’s okay, I’ll rememb—"

“JUST FUCKING DO IT,” she screamed as she climbed into the car, slamming the door shut behind her.

As we watched her drive off, I told myself there was no reason to freak out. We’d stayed with Grandma during her golden hour many times.

Yeah, before her ‘funny spells’ a voice at the back of my mind added…

“Are we still getting Burger King?” I asked Logan after Mom’s Volvo disappeared. He rolled his eyes and spun toward the house. That stung. I was sick of him treating me like a stupid kid.

The locks were more complicated than a Rubik’s cube, so Logan needed to reseal them. As he did, Grandma hobbled out of the lounge. I met her at the doorway, but she said, “Get your hands off me pervert.”

“Gramma it’s me. Blake.”

“I’m not an invalid. Piss off before I scream.”

It hurt when she treated me like a stranger. Growing up, I’d always looked forward to seeing her. The way she’d hug me close and cover the top of my head with fierce little kisses and insist on giving me money for sweets.

Logan and I both had a go at explaining what happened, but she only tutted and said, “That man always was a drama queen.”

She went to climb the stairs, but between her stooped spine and rickety knees, the trek took five minutes. Even with our help. Anytime we steadied her she unloaded another round of insults. She disappeared into the bedroom, and then her rough, chainsaw snore rang out.

And that was that. My brother and I were stranded there without so much as a Gameboy.

In the lounge, a CRT TV received a fuzzy picture of BBC One, so we watched twenty minutes of a cooking show where celebrities crowded around a sizzling pan. With every roll of thunder, the signal temporarily turned to black-and-white fuzz.

I kept pestering Logan to play ‘the blind game’, but he insisted he was too old until a program about renovating houses started.

The blind game was simple: somebody put their blindfold on and looked for the other while the ‘hider’ tried sneaking up on them. Usually, I hid in a storage cupboard at the back of the kitchen just large enough to hold me, a vacuum cleaner, and a mop, but now I was old enough and smart enough to realize it was the first place Logan checked. So, I left the door slightly open and perched myself on the closest counter instead. When he made a b-line for the nook, I leapt onto his back.

He shrugged me off, wrestled me onto the floor, and then pinched the pressure point in my shoulder, both of us laughing. After a few rounds we’d exhausted every hiding place and returned to the TV. Our stomachs wouldn’t quit grumbling. A bacon double-cheeseburger should’ve been halfway through my digestive system by then…

As time marched on, we spoke less and less. Even though the windows were blocked, I knew it was getting dark. 7.30 became 7.45. Then 8. My teeth started chattering together.

"Quit being such a pussy," Logan said, although I could tell he was nervous because he kept tapping his watch non-stop.

I must’ve still looked scared because he reached over and patted me on the shoulder. “Just chill. Mom’ll get back soon. Then we’ll go for Burger King.”

As if on cue, his watch beeped. Fifteen minutes to go. Swallowing a gulp, he said, “Okay, get your blindfold on.”

He helped adjust mine so everything was perfectly black, then we sat in silence while a tennis ball got batted around on TV. I’m not sure how much time passed because I didn’t want to risk peeking at the clock above the mantlepiece.

Soon the TV cut to an emergency weather report. A lady announced several major roads were closed due to flooding. My hands balled into fists. Did that mean Mom couldn’t reach us?

From above our heads, there came a heavy thud. My neck craned towards the sound. On television a crowd applauded. Logan fumbled for the remote to switch it off, then we breathed in sharply.

“What should we do?” I whispered.

“Nothing.”

“But what if Grandma’s hurt like Grandpa was?”

“Nobody’s fucking hur—”

There was another thud, loud enough to rattle fixtures around the room.

“Wait here,” Logan sighed.

When he got up, I did too—partly because I was sick of him brushing me aside, mostly because I was terrified of being left alone. I grabbed onto his t-shirt despite his protests, and then we shuffled into the chilly, draughty h...

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This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/DivineAnime1 on 2024-11-13 14:18:42+00:00.

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The first time I set foot in the old house, I felt an inexplicable shiver, like an unseen gaze was fixed on me. My parents said it was just the chill of an empty house, but something else felt… off. It was a grand, old Victorian manor, with narrow staircases, tall windows, and a silence that settled thickly in every corner, as if the house itself was holding its breath. My parents couldn’t believe their luck finding a place like this for such a low price. “It has character,” they said. “It’s charming.”

But I could feel that weight, an unspoken presence that seemed to linger just beyond sight.

It wasn’t long before we’d unpacked the ground floor and our bedrooms, but the attic was left for last. From the moment we moved in, I was drawn to it, though I couldn’t say why. Maybe it was the idea of the unknown, of the forgotten things stashed up there by the previous owners. My parents warned me to be careful on the stairs; they were narrow and steep, twisting up to the attic like they were designed to keep people away.

One chilly afternoon, while my parents were out running errands, I finally decided to explore the attic on my own. I climbed the narrow stairs, the wood creaking under my weight, and slowly opened the attic door.

The air was stale, thick with the smell of dust and decay, and the shadows seemed deeper, more oppressive than the rest of the house. Faint shafts of light filtered through a tiny window, casting long shadows over old trunks and covered furniture. The silence felt alive, thick and heavy, like it was listening. And then, nestled in the far corner, I saw it.

The box was small but ornate, covered in carvings that seemed to writhe under the dust, as if they were alive. Strange symbols, almost like twisted vines, wove across its surface, and though I’d never seen markings like these before, they looked disturbingly familiar, like something I’d glimpsed in a half-remembered dream. The wood was dark, stained, almost black, with a faint reddish sheen that reminded me of dried blood.

I stepped closer, feeling an odd compulsion to touch it, to know what secrets it held. As I approached, the air around me grew colder, as if the box itself was pulling the warmth from the room. My skin prickled, a tingling that grew sharper with each step. Every instinct told me to leave, to shut the door and go back downstairs, but I couldn’t look away. My hand moved almost on its own, reaching out, fingertips brushing the carved lid.

A wave of dread washed over me as I lifted it open, a feeling so intense it took my breath away. Inside, lying on a bed of faded, ancient fabric, was a mirror. It was small, maybe the size of my hand, and framed in tarnished brass with the same twisting patterns carved along the edges. But it was the glass itself that held my attention. Even through the dust, I could see that it wasn’t just a reflection. It seemed deeper, like I was looking into an endless void, a space that could swallow me whole.

I stared at my reflection, feeling an odd, uncomfortable pull, like something in that mirror wanted to reach out, to wrap itself around me and pull me inside. My fingers tingled where they touched the edges of the mirror, and the air grew thick, pressing in on me until I felt I couldn’t breathe. I set the mirror back down, closed the box, and stepped back, a shiver crawling down my spine.

The attic was colder now, silent except for a faint creak, like something shifting in the darkness. I backed away, my heart racing, and stumbled down the stairs, forcing myself to put as much distance as I could between me and that box. I told myself it was just an old relic, something left behind by the previous owners, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d woken something up, something that had been waiting.

That night, as I lay in bed, I heard it—the faintest scratching sound, almost too quiet to be real. I held my breath, straining to hear, and after a moment, it stopped. I convinced myself it was nothing, but when I drifted off to sleep, I was haunted by dreams of shadows crawling along the walls, of cold hands reaching out to touch me, to drag me back to the attic.

I woke up with a start, feeling eyes on me, but the room was empty, the shadows still. Just as I was drifting back to sleep, I caught a glimpse of something in the corner of my room. There, half-buried in the shadows, was the box from the attic. My blood went cold. I knew I hadn’t brought it down. Heart pounding, I reached out, fingers trembling, and pulled it toward me.

The mirror was there again, its surface dark and bottomless. As I picked it up, I saw my face reflected in the glass—my own features twisted, stretched, as if something was looking back at me from beneath my own skin. And then, behind me in the mirror, I saw a figure—a tall, dark shape, its face obscured but its eyes bright, piercing. I spun around, but my room was empty. When I looked back at the mirror, the figure was gone, but I could still feel it, watching me.

The following days were a blur of shadows and whispers. Every night, the scratching grew louder, and the figure became clearer in the mirror. It no longer hid in the shadows; it stood right behind me, close enough that I could feel the cold radiating from its body. I couldn’t escape it. It was there when I closed my eyes, when I looked into any reflective surface, waiting for me to turn my back.

One night, when the scratching was so loud I could barely think, I went back up to the attic, carrying the mirror with me, determined to put it back where I found it. But as soon as I set it down, I heard a whisper, soft and mocking, right in my ear.

“You can’t hide from me,” it said, the voice low and gravelly, like two stones grinding together.

I stumbled back, heart racing, but the voice followed me. Shadows shifted around the box, twisting into shapes—faces, bodies, hands reaching out. I scrambled down the stairs, locking myself in my room, but the voice was still there, a soft humming that grew louder and louder until it was all I could hear.

From that moment on, the entity was with me, an unshakable presence haunting my every step. I’d see it in reflections, lurking at the edge of my vision, always watching. I began to lose sleep, the whispers and scratching invading my dreams until I was afraid to close my eyes. My parents still didn’t believe me, and I was too scared to press the issue. They didn’t hear it. They didn’t see it.

But I did. And I knew, deep down, that it wasn’t going to stop.

One night, in a moment of desperation, I went back to the attic, hoping to destroy the mirror, to break whatever curse I’d awakened. I smashed the mirror to the floor, shards scattering across the room. For a moment, the scratching stopped, the whispers fell silent, and I felt a sense of relief.

Then, slowly, the shards began to shift, pulling together, forming into a shape. The shadows coalesced, rising from the fragments, tall and impossibly thin, its eyes like burning coals. It smiled at me, a grotesque, mocking grin, and I felt a cold hand press against my shoulder.

“You can’t get rid of me,” it whispered, voice filling my head. “I’m part of you now.”

I screamed, stumbling back, but it followed me, its face twisted into that terrible smile. And that’s when I knew—I would never be alone again. It had claimed me, and there was no escaping it.

After that night, I tried to go back to normal. I went through the motions—school, conversations with my parents, pretending. But I could feel it there, a dark presence lurking just behind my thoughts, watching, waiting.

At first, it was subtle. Shadows moved differently around me, my reflection seemed to hold something deeper, something… gleeful. I’d find myself staring into mirrors too long, studying my own face like it was a stranger’s. The scratching sounds never left, now echoing from within, scraping at my mind until I was awake, alone in the dark.

Over time, the whispers started, twisting my thoughts, making people look like shadows in masks, urging me toward things I would never have done. Sometimes I’d feel myself let go, letting it take over just to ease the pressure, feeling that dark satisfaction flood me until I was sickened by what I’d become.

Each day, I feel it grow stronger, its desires becoming mine. I don’t know where I end and it begins. I know now that there’s no escape; it’s part of me, a silent, laughing passenger, twisting my thoughts, consuming me piece by piece.

I am no longer alone... No.. WE are no longer alone.

This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/dlschindler on 2024-11-13 02:39:27+00:00.

---

In Obedient Grove, silence isn’t just the lack of sound—it’s a way of life, a kind of ritual, almost. It lingers in the air, in the way our neighbors nod rather than greet, in the steady tolling of the clock tower. Evelyn and I, we’ve grown accustomed to it. After all, in a place like this, silence can be comforting. Or, at least, that’s what I’ve always thought.

These days, our quiet is occasionally softened by the sound of Timmy’s laughter, and, if I close my eyes, I can almost pretend everything is as it was. He doesn’t understand, not fully. To him, this is just a visit to Grandma and Grandpa’s, a long one, perhaps, but temporary. He talks about his mother and father as if they’re right down the road, as if any day now they’ll walk through the door. Evelyn and I haven’t found the strength to correct him, to tell him that he’s here with us for good. Instead, we let him keep his illusions, because a part of me wishes I could still believe it myself.

In the morning, I watched Evelyn braid his hair into cornrows, her hands moving carefully. I think about it now, of Evelyn smiling as she sends him off to school with a sandwich and a small treat, watching him skip down the driveway. I know she worries, lingering at the door until he’s out of sight, fearing that, like his parents, he might simply disappear if we don’t watch him close enough. Each night, I read him the same stories we used to read to our daughter, and he falls asleep with his little hand tucked into mine. He’s the last bit of her we have, and I don’t think either of us would survive losing him, too.

The whole town seems to sense it, our need for this fragile new normal. The neighbors nod from their porches but rarely speak, lawns are pristine, and at night, the streetlamps all flicker on in perfect unison, a soft, reliable glow against the dark. Obedient Grove cocoons us, as if trying to keep us safe in its quiet embrace.

There’s a peculiar stillness to this place, something deeper than grief, something unspoken. It presses in, as though the town is watching us, biding its time.

That first night was the first time in a long while that I felt uneasy in my own home. It’s difficult to explain; it sounds almost foolish as I write it down, but the silence here, the stillness—it was different. There was a weight to it, a quiet that pressed down like a presence, as if something else had settled into the house with us.

It started small, just faint noises—a creak on the stairs, the thud of something dropping in the attic, footsteps. Old houses have a way of making their own sounds, so Evelyn and I brushed it off as our imaginations running wild. Still, when I checked on Timmy, I found myself hesitating by his door, lingering just long enough to hear the soft, steady sound of his breathing. He was fast asleep, oblivious to the unease seeping through the walls.

But the noises didn’t stop. At one point, I could’ve sworn I heard someone—or something—whispering from the corner of the room, but when I looked, it was only shadows flickering, shifting along the wallpaper. Just a trick of the light, I told myself. But I knew that wasn’t quite true. Evelyn felt it too. I saw it in the way her hands trembled slightly as she closed the curtains, how her eyes darted to the shadows that gathered just beyond the lamplight.

We tried to sleep, to put it out of our minds, but the house refused to let us rest. There were noises—an almost rhythmic tapping along the walls, faint but insistent, and a skittering sound, as though something was crawling through the walls themselves. I remember holding my breath, straining to make sense of the sounds, my heart thudding in my chest. I don’t remember feeling this way since the accident—this feeling of something terrible hovering just out of sight, waiting.

Then came the shadows. They seemed to pool in the corners, darkening the spaces between furniture, thickening under the bed. At first, I thought it was just the play of headlights from the street, but the shapes lingered, stretching along the walls and ceiling in ways I can’t explain. And just before dawn, I thought I saw a figure standing in the doorway of Timmy’s room.

When I gathered the courage to look again: there was nothing there.

It was only then, as I lay back down beside Evelyn, that I realized I’d been gripping her hand all along, and that I’d been praying, over and over, that it was only the house settling, that the quiet would return to its familiar, peaceful hum.

But this morning, when Timmy asked why someone was whispering his name during the night, I could feel the truth beginning to creep in: we aren’t alone. Something has shifted, and whatever it is, it’s come to Obedient Grove to make itself known.

The silence in Obedient Grove has always been a comfort to me, a stillness that held the world steady and predictable. But lately, I wonder if it’s something else entirely, something alive, that stirs within the quiet. A force that thrives in the spaces where words go unspoken and thoughts remain nascent. As strange as it sounds, it’s as though the very hush of this town draws out what’s hidden, giving shape to things that should never take form.

It began with Timmy’s sketches. He’s always been fond of drawing—a happy distraction, I’d thought, a way to keep his mind on brighter things. But his drawings have changed. Where once there were smiling stick figures and animals, there are now twisted shapes, creatures that don’t belong in any storybook. Long limbs, eyes that bulge in impossible places, mouths that curl into jagged grin. Evelyn and I exchanged uneasy glances when we saw them, dismissing it as a phase, perhaps, or an outlet for the confusion he must be feeling. But it didn’t stop there.

The first real sign came a few nights ago. Timmy was fast asleep when I heard the patter of footsteps in the hall. Thinking he’d woken up, I went to check, but found only his toys scattered across the floor. They hadn’t been there when we tucked him in. As I reached down to pick them up, one of them—a wooden horse on wheels—let out a faint creak, as if it had moved by itself. I told myself it was my imagination, but the dread lingered, a chill that seemed to seep into the walls

Evelyn and I were sitting in the living room, exhausted and the house was finally still, or so we thought. A faint shuffle behind us broke the silence, something soft and scratchy—just the sound you’d make if you dragged a piece of chalk across the wall in slow, jagged strokes.

I turned, and in that sliver of dim light from the hallway, I saw it. The thing was barely there, a shape that wavered and shifted, like a child’s frantic drawing, come to life and slipping between worlds. It looked like something Timmy had scrawled in crayon on paper, then smudged over in wild streaks—a chimera, but incomplete, sketched in blurry lines that couldn’t hold still. A strange smear of limbs and eyes that almost formed a face but melted away when I tried to focus. It didn’t walk, didn’t crawl, just seemed to blur in and out, as if it were trying to find itself and failing.

It was there, and then it wasn’t. When I blinked, the shape shifted, slipped backward, and vanished. But there was a sickly residue left in my mind, like staring too long at something bright and having the shape burned into your vision.

Neither of us said a word. Evelyn’s hand was cold in mine, her grip unsteady, and I knew she’d seen it too. We couldn’t find words to fill the silence, so we sat there, each of us holding our breath, watching the shadows for any sign that it might reappear. I felt my heart pounding in my ears, the quiet pressing in again, as if the house had sealed itself over that strange, fragile thing.

Hours later, we climbed into bed, but sleep refused to come. I lay awake, staring at the ceiling, wondering if it would slip back into our room while we slept, if it had always been lurking just beyond our sight, waiting.

Morning arrived, but it felt like the earth had tilted slightly, leaving everything off-kilter. The sunlight poured through the windows, but it didn’t warm the room; it only made the shadows sharper, more oppressive, as if they were stretching longer just to remind us of their presence. I watched Timmy sitting at the breakfast table, still as stone, staring blankly at his untouched plate. His hands were curled into fists at his sides, and his eyes—his eyes were distant, hollow, as if he wasn’t really here with us at all.

Evelyn and I didn’t speak. We couldn’t. The silence between us had grown thick, a presence in itself. The kind of silence that makes your skin crawl, the kind that makes you feel like you’re suffocating on your own breath. The house was so still, I could hear my pulse in my ears.

I watched Timmy, my heart hammering in my chest, but I couldn’t bring myself to ask him what was wrong. His stare was empty, unfocused, as if he were seeing something we couldn’t. The air in the room was so dense, so heavy with something unseen, that I couldn’t move. I couldn’t look away.

Evelyn’s hands were trembling in her lap, wringing together like she was trying to hold onto something, trying to stop herself from breaking apart. I could see the same panic rising in her eyes—the kind of panic that comes from knowing something terrible is happening, but not knowing what or when it will strike. Her gaze kept flicking to the shadows in the corners of the room, as if expecting them to move, to ...

---

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This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/No_Bathroom1296 on 2024-11-12 00:38:22+00:00.

---

My therapist told me that writing about things could help. She kind of looked away when she said it, so I’m not sure she believes that. If I’m honest, I think she just doesn’t want to talk about it anymore. It doesn’t matter though. I’m gonna write about it anyway. I’m gonna write about it because it DID happen, and it doesn’t matter what she thinks. At least if I post it here, someone might actually read it. If I post it here, maybe it can help.

I should probably start with the move.

My dad had taken a job outside of Cleveland. It was a spur of the moment thing. He didn’t really have a choice, given the circumstances. He accepted his first job offer, looked at one house, and drove a U-HAUL straight to Peninsula.

My dad is a suburban nature-lover. He’s the kind of guy who hikes trails on the weekend in clean boots and cargo shorts. To be fair, his cargo shorts are kind of legendary though. Some of his pockets literally have smaller pockets inside. At the time I thought he just needed a place to put all the crap he bought. I figured that he collected gear, which collected dust, and that was just the capitalist lifecycle.

Anyway, what I’m trying to say is, it wasn’t entirely a coincidence we ended up living in Cuyahoga Valley National Park. The hiring manager at Whalen and Erie Railroad had given us a generous relocation stipend. So when someone tipped off my dad to a “gem of a property in the park,” he jumped on it.

The gem, as it turned out, was overhyped. Aside from the incredible great room, which kind of looked like a glass cathedral standing over the valley, the house was a dump. The septic tank was a rust-caked hole, and the well water looked like it was pumped from a muddy tire-track.

Ironically, the dilapidated state of the house probably sealed the deal. The owner was an old widow with no family. When she showed us the house, she turned the knob on the kitchen faucet, and it sputtered brown bubbles. She let out this pathetic, nervous laugh and said something like “Robert always did all that stuff,” then stifled a sob and apologized. I think my dad was about ready to cry too, and he made a cash offer the same day.

We quickly settled into our new home. Living in the heart of the park, it felt silly to drive to the trailhead when I could just step out of my house directly into the woods. So I started blazing my own trails. It was that time of year when you can lose yourself in the rhythmic shuffling of leaves underfoot. It’s an amazing time to visit Northeastern Ohio, if you stick to the trails. 

I would spend hours everyday wandering the woods. I didn’t want to go to school, and my dad didn’t have the heart to make me. So we reached an agreement: I could pursue a GED from home as long as I remained open and honest about how I was feeling. I would never hurt myself, but given our family history, I didn’t blame him for worrying.

So while he was at work, I walked. The main valley is majestic, but I’m fond of the untouched places. There are lots of little feeder valleys, these soil-rich places where the roots haven’t stopped the erosion. I bought a guidebook on the park, and I used it to pick out different kinds of trees while I walked through the valleys: American Beech, Sugar Maple, Norway Maple, Red Maple, Red Oak, Pin Oak, White Oak. I got pretty good at identifying them. My favorite was Musclewood, which kind of looks like a wizard turned a jacked horse into a tree.

If you take the time to look at the trees in a forest, one thing you’ll notice is that they carve out little fiefdoms. If you see an oak, it’s probably surrounded by oaks. Sometimes, like with Quaking Aspen, it’s because a single tree sprouts so many trunks that the whole freaking forest is just one tree, but usually it’s just good old competition. Black Walnut, for example, likes to poison the soil around it with juglone.

I was walking along the valley floor when I noticed them. At the head of this small valley were six beech trees. Each of them was nearly identical in height and circumference. As I got closer, it was clear that they were spread out to form a perfect hexagon. I stopped dead in my tracks. Surrounded by perfect wilderness, these six gray trees stood in their nice configuration like concrete monuments.

Someone had planted them. For a second, I wondered if maybe, just over the ridge, there was a park bench with a little plaque commemorating a loved one. Far from comforting me, the thought triggered a fear that I was not alone. Was someone else standing out of sight? Lurking? Watching me? I turned a slow circle, looking in every direction.

There was no one. Of course there was no one. The nearest trail was at least a half-mile away. Uneasiness slowly overtook me with that realization. If no one comes out here, then who planted the trees? I turned back to face them. Inspecting them a second time, I could see there was something carved into the trunks. 

It wasn’t any language I could read, at least not at that distance. The symbols ran in thin interweaving bands that wrapped each trunk at the same height. I wanted a better look, and my curiosity compelled me. I started to walk toward the closest tree, but the sound of my first step startled me. 

The forest was perfectly silent.

I don’t mean quiet. It didn’t get quiet. It was silent. No squirrels. No birds. No wind. It was silent. 

Tinnitus rang like an alarm in my ear. The word “PREDATOR” pressed at the back of my mind like a hot iron, and I froze. Every muscle tensed with the effort of not moving. Not an inch. Not a millimeter. Motion was sound, and sound was death.

With shallow breaths, I slowly craned my head five degrees to the left, then five degrees to the right. I strained my eyes to the edge of their sockets trying to see as much as I could. No signs of movement. I looked a second time, turning my head a little more. Nothing. On my third scan, I saw it. There, in the middle of the hexagon, was a seventh tree.

I was confused at first. It seemed to blip into my peripheral vision as I turned my head away. I turned back, and it was gone. I pushed my glasses up the bridge of my nose. Surely it was a trick of the light. But again, when I turned my head slowly, the tree appeared at the very edge of my vision.

The seventh tree stood perfectly centered between the others. I held it there, at the corner of my eye. I willed my vision to clarify, to show me something of the tree. It did not. I couldn’t make out any details, but I could tell from the dark colors that, unlike the other trees, this one was scarred top to bottom with illegible symbols.

As I stood there frozen, half-seeing a tree that doesn’t exist, the symbols started to glow. In an instant, I felt an intense heat on the side of my face. My breaths were no longer shallow by choice; they were squeezed from me by an electric tension in my chest. Just before full panic set in, a twig snapped.

The forest erupted with the sound of my flight. My shoes kicked leaves, gouged soil, and sent rocks tumbling into the creek as I screamed each breath. This was life or death—a frantic, mindless sprint. As I tore around a bend in the valley floor, I dared to look over my shoulder. I needed to know.

I should have been looking ahead.

The back of my skull slammed into the ground. As I lay there, head swimming, a shadowy figure stepped into my blurred vision: “Womp womp womp?” 

It was talking, but I couldn’t understand anything over the “shhhhhh” of blood shooting through my veins. I felt the figure brush against my left leg as it moved to stand over me, and I sprang into action. Operating entirely on instinct, I shifted my weight, hooked my right leg behind its knee, and kicked its legs out from under it.

I didn’t bother to gauge my success. I scrambled to my feet, my head starting to clear, and ran home screaming through the woods, battered but alive.

My dad was standing on a ladder installing new gutters on the front of the house. As my dogged running slowed to a stop, I heard him shout: “Jesus Christ, Nathan. Are you okay?”

I was no longer screaming by this point. I had long since lost the energy. Instead of answering him, I steadied myself on the porch railing. I sank to a crouch, and vomited. 

“Holy shit. Nathan!?” 

My dad jumped from one of the lower rungs on the ladder and rushed to my side. He touched the back of my head, and I could see from his hand that I was bleeding. I swallowed, and said, “I hit my head.” I gasped a few breaths. “I fell.”

The knock came a few hours later. My dad was grabbing a new ice pack from the kitchen. On his way to answer the door, he stopped at the couch where I was laying. 

“How are you feeling buddy?”

“Like shit.”

“Attaboy.” 

My dad smiled and continued to the entryway. He opened the front door, and I could hear the conversation as it leaked into the living room:

“Good evening!”

“Hello.”

There was an awkward silence.

“My name’s Nevin.”

“Hello, Nevin.”

There was another silence, and Nevin cleared his throat.

“Uh. Well, I’m not sure I’m in the right place, but a young man ran into me this morning, and it looked like he might’ve gotten hurt. I asked around, and it sounds like he might be your son?”

“So that’s what happened.” I could hear my dad shuffle his feet, and I imagined he was looking over his shoulder in my general direction. “Well, I appreciate you checking in on him. He got a solid knock on the head, probably a little concussion, but I think he’ll be a...

---

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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/GrimmestGhost_ on 2024-11-13 02:56:48+00:00.

---

It was my second year with the force, and me and my partner, Mendell, had drawn the short straw: we were both working Christmas Eve. As patrol officers we'd be driving around doing our usual routine, only on the night that most people would rather be doing anything but working. The scene is still vividly burned into my mind: we were in our cruiser slowly driving down a quiet road a little past midnight whilst keeping an eye out - and an ear to the radio - for any car wrecks, drunks, or some other kind of incident that required our attention. To nobody's surprise though, in a smaller, semi-rural town on Christmas Eve, there wasn't a soul outside except for us. I was sitting in the passenger seat watching the snow flurries fall out the side window and musing about the few hours of sleep I'd be lucky to get once home before my kids inevitably woke up early and excited to go tearing through the presents "Santa" had left under the tree for them when the call came in.

"This is dispatch, we have a potential home invasion in progress, requesting officers to the scene immediately."

"Copy that," Mendell spoke into the radio. "Address?"

As dispatch delivered our location, I felt a small lump form in my stomach and my heart skip a beat as I looked over in Mendell's direction. He obviously was thinking the same thing as I, as he mirrored my actions before turning back to the road, flicking on the car beacons, and increasing our speed.

The address of the home was one we were both familiar with. Three days prior we had been called to the same house. The owner, a single mother, around early 30s I guessed, with two young kids had called 911 saying she thought there was someone outside her house. When we arrived at the scene she had timidly opened the door for us and we took a look around the property. According to her she was preparing to take the trash out when she saw something moving outside the kitchen window, after which she promptly ran upstairs and locked her and the kids in the bathroom before calling the police. She couldn't provide us with much of a description, only that she briefly saw a "shadowy" figure before she had bolted. We checked the area around the window but found nothing. It had snowed earlier that day, so a fresh blanket covered the lawn and would've revealed clear footprints had someone been there, but the snow around the window was undisturbed. We checked the rest of the area around the house, but came up with nothing there either.

The woman, Beth as she told us, was very clearly terrified by the ordeal, but there wasn't much we could do. She was very adamant about having seen what she saw, and repeatedly emphasized that she "wasn't crazy". While I'm not sure Mendell or I were convinced anything had actually been there, after all there was no physical evidence and the human brain isn't immune to tricking itself, I did sympathize with her. Having kids myself, I know how powerful the drive to protect them is, and the thought of not being able to do so is any parent's worst nightmare. As we stood there in the house's entrance hall, Beth still trembling and her two kids - the older looked no more than six - looking down from the staircase banister, I had asked her if she had anywhere else she and the kids could go for the night just as a safety precaution. She responded in the negative, saying a hotel would've been too expensive, and the only family they had lived in another state. After that we told her to call if anything else happened and left. I could sense both Mendell and I were a bit weirded out by the situation, but neither of us spoke about it in the days since.

That was until now, as we found ourselves called back to the same location days later. Pulling up in front of the innocuous two story home, we both exited the car quickly. Something was immediately different about the place. It looked the same as it had days ago: the same plastic Santa in the yard, the multicolored Christmas lights strung along the porch, but something was off. I could feel it, even if I couldn't quite place what it was. I placed a few heavy knocks on the door and announced our presence. No response. I knocked again. No response.

Mendell took a few steps over and peered through the window into the dark house before quickly turning around in surprise. I had initially though he had seen something inside, but followed his gaze to the porch railing, where the lights that had been providing what little illumination they could, had now gone dark.

"They went out as soon I looked inside." He said, sounding a bit confused. I wasn't sure if he was talking to himself or to me, but I began answering anyways.

"They could just be on a timer or-" I was cut off mid sentence by a loud thud from inside the house. We both gave each other a quick glance to make sure we were on the same wavelength before drawing our weapons.

"Police. We're coming in!" I yelled before grabbing the doorknob. I had expected it to be locked, had expected us to have to force our way inside, but to my surprise, and unease, the door provided no resistance in opening itself. The entrance hall was deadly still. I grabbed my flashlight and shined it around looking for whatever had caused the noise we heard, but nothing was out of place. Mendell nodded his head towards the stairs, and I nodded back, understanding. He'd check upstairs while I took the ground floor. Ducking into the dining room on the left as I heard Mendell's footsteps ascending up, I began a methodical room-by-room sweep of the first floor. To say I was on edge was an understatement. I still couldn't pinpoint what it was, but something was very off in that house. Every corner I turned, every crevice I turned my light towards I had expected to find something, only to be met with nothing every time. Everything looked to be where it should be, no signs of robbery or a struggle, no signs of any life at all.

I slowly made my way into the living room, the final unchecked room, and began taking in my surroundings. A Christmas tree, a fake one by the looks of it, stood in the corner of the room by a magnificent fireplace. Through my flashlight revealed strings of lights decorated around it, they remained dark like the rest of the house. A few colorful wrapped presents sat underneath in a pile, practically begging to be torn open, while on the living room table I spotted a glass of milk and an undisturbed plate of cookies next to a note reading "For Santa". Despite how cheerful the sight should've been, in the context of the dark, quiet house, illuminated only by flashlight, the scene filled me with an inexplicable sadness. Something clearly wasn't right here, and the thought of whatever it was happening on Christmas of all days, was upsetting to me.

I was tensely scanning my flashlight along bookshelves, looking at family photos and an old radio when the sound of my walkie talkie going off nearly made me pull the trigger of the gun that was tightly gripped in my other hand. I set the flashlight down on the shelf and grabbed the walkie.

"Yeah?" I spoke, my voice unexpectedly shaky.

"I found the kids, they're safe." Mendell replied. A bit of relief washed over me before he continued "No sign of the mom though. They say she went downstairs and never came back."

"She's not down here. I've checked every room."

"Maybe she left? The door was unlocked when we got here."

I wasn't sure how to respond. With how shaken Beth had been a few days ago, it didn't make sense to me that she would run and leave her kids behind. There had also been that thud...

As my thoughts trailed off, all hell broke loose. All the lights in the living room, both the overhead and those on the tree, turned on and began flickering at a rapid pace. I frantically looked over at the switch only to see it in the off position. My eyes turned to the adjacent rooms only to see that they were all experiencing the same phenomenon. Suddenly the bookshelf radio roared to life, blasting Christmas carols at a volume that made my ears hurt.

"What the hell is going on?" Mendell yelled through the radio, though I ignored him. With the rapid light flickering I spotted something I hadn't before, something that made the knot in my stomach contract tighter. In the fireplace a few unburnt logs lay resting, and on those logs I could see a few bright red spots. Amidst the sensory overload happening all around, I grabbed my flashlight and began making my way to the fireplace on shaking legs. Crouching down, I shone my light directly into the fireplace. My initial thought had been right. Pooled around the logs, and spotting them with little dots, was the unmistakable sight of fresh ruby-red blood. A fresh drop splashed down, sliding down the log and joining the forming puddle. Then another. I couldn't hear my heartbeat over the music, but I could certainly feel it. I didn't want to do it, but I had to. Reluctantly I crawled forward, shined my light up the chimney, and angled my head to look.

I wish I hadn't.

Stuffed halfway up the chimney, body crushed and mangled to fit in the entirely-too-small space, was a human. I stared directly into the dead eyes of Beth, her face contorted into an eternal, silent scream as she stared down back at me, blood dripping down her face. I lurched backwards in terror as a new nightmare began. Even louder than the still-playing Christmas music from the radio, a rapid heavy stomping sound began permeating t...

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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/Decent_Hovercraft556 on 2024-11-13 01:29:08+00:00.

---

I’m a witch.

While that may sound far fetched it is true. I’ve always at least somewhat believed in the supernatural. Call it instinct, call it superstition, or call it naivety. No matter what, I can work with magic and spirits well enough.

I live in Colorado, near the mountains. While we all know that the Appalachian mountains are scary most people don’t realize the horror of their younger cousins. They are young, and they lack any of the ancient life of their elders but their horrors are far less known. But I’m getting sidetracked, let’s get into the meat of the story.

I woke up at about 6 in the morning on the saturday when this began. I was going to head into the mountain forest at that time so I was preparing accordingly. I put on my favored old hunting boots, a warded flannel jacket, and I wore a belt with an abundance of pouches. I put my ritual knife, a crescent shaped blade with a bone handle and several spells on it, in its sheath and slung my rifle over my shoulder before heading out. After all I know better than to assume the woods are safe.

The twenty minute drive to my little dead end of a dirt road was calm, if only the whole trip was like that.

In the early morning chill I trudged uphill to a brilliant, purple and blue, clearing of wildflowers where I crouched down and started cutting some columbines by the stem, the morning dew fresh upon my skin. Calmly I started to cut through my next set of flowers, some larkspurs which were flourishing, their harvesting accompanied by the song of birds. Thus I stepped to my final harvest. I cut some bluebells by the stem and started placing them in a pouch. As I was crouched by them I heard a twig break. I snapped my head up and held my knife in front of me, but there was nothing there. I assumed it was just some animal, but that was my first mistake. I walked onward towards my next destination, a small stream a mile or so away. I walked through and my eyes watched for familiar landmarks, a oddly bent tree here, a dilapidated wooden structure there, but as often as there were familiar landmarks there were unfamiliar things. A tree had some fresh damage which might have been claw marks, a little fox den a few meters away from my path collapsed, and a mutilated corpse.

That was something else I should have noted, I approached the corpse only to see what appeared to be some sort of deer. I’ve never really been disturbed by death or gore so I felt it would be worth it to take this animal corpse which had clearly fallen upon a trap or got a stray buckshot striking it or something. After all, it would be a waste to just leave it behind. So I got to work, blood pouring into a preset jar, meat squelching as I skinned the creature. As I methodically skinned the creature I met its glassy eyes, there was no life in them but there was something there. In the reflection of the eyes I saw something rush between two trees. On instinct I grabbed my .22 rifle, it wouldn’t do much but it could scare off a threat, and I started poking around, my bloody knife resting in its sheath. But nothing was there, not just no animal but nothing, it was dead silent. There was only my breath and the sound of my fingernail tapping against the gun’s barrel.

I mumbled a quiet prayer, “Lady Artemis, mistress of the hunt and the wilds, please grant me safety in this wood.” and another, “I call upon the green, grant me safe passage and forage.” And several other prayers. I wasn’t actually scared then, but I wish I had been maybe things would be different then.

As my search yielded no results I returned to the carcass and continued harvesting, the empty eyesockets peering into me. As I finished harvesting the corpse it was midday and I had used a small tarp I kept in one of my larger bags to carry it over my shoulder as a rucksack I carried on to the stream. As I walked the forest returned to life and the hairs on the back of my neck that I didn’t even know were raised settled down. I quickly checked my phone as I arrived at the creek, it was 12:20 and there was no hint of any need to return home. I filled some jars with water from the stream and started walking upstream to see if anything else I wanted was around. I saw a few golden chanterelles I harvested and also some fly amanitas I avoided. But for the next hour or so there was nothing else of note, no silence or stalking creatures or odd landmark.

But that was before I saw the circle. It was on top of a mostly flat boulder, faded chalk marks made a circle around a core carving which looked like a spiral with some sort of runes around it. The carving was caked in a red-brown substance. As I stood by the circle the air felt off, the gentle breeze stilled and the animals grew silent. This place caught my interest, I scribbled the symbols down in a notebook, a set of five lines pointing away from another line, a branching line which resembled a tree, something that seemed to be a lightning bolt, and a set of curved lines sticking together. I resolved to try and figure out this weird spot, another foolish mistake.

It took several hours to copy it all down, and the sky was dark with clouds. I could smell the rain coming, I had to get home soon. After all, I was just barely sixteen and got my license barely a month ago. So I rushed down the mountainside with far less caution. I ran past the dilapidated building and the weird tree and the dilapidated building. When I noticed the building for the second time I realized something was off. How did I get turned around in a place I have roamed for since I was twelve and got my first knife. And as I paused I noticed something in the trees, there was a flash of something in between the trees. So again I grabbed my rifle and moved to inspect the area with some muttered prayers. There was again no life but there were some odd symbols on the trees, Forgetting my circumstances I copied them down. But I then remembered my circumstances and slashed through the symbols with my enchanted ritual knife. Then I turned and continued hurrying downhill. Now I got through the flowers and reached my car, a beat up little pickup truck. I quickly placed the deer harvest in the back and tied it down and slipped into the driver’s seat.

As I closed the door I noticed something. It was hidden between a tree but I saw its arm, it clearly bent with at least two joints before it slipped into the dark and it’s six bloody clawed hand held two glassy dark eyes.

I never was one to run. I punched my bully when he was twice my weight as a little girl. I drew a knife on the creep who was following me when I was twelve. I pointed my .22 rifle at the mountain lion that nearly pounced on me during my first hunting trip. And I stood my ground against the spirit which entered my home and terrorized me and my siblings. But this thing was different, I felt my instinct to fight overwhelmed. It was something greater than me, it was powerful, and I was just some squirrel or mouse. I tore out of the little dead end fast enough that I nearly shot off of the road when I came on a turn.

By the time I got on a road where I may have interacted with another driver my fear had settled, instead of rushing away I focused on every little detail around me, I scanned for any marking or movement. I analyzed every landmark possible. But now as I saw me phone tell me it was 19:00 I was in town. As I pulled into my driveway and started unloading my loot I saw something on the side of the trunk.It was a set of six scrapes.

I rushed to store my loot and then grabbed some chalk from my magical workspace. I scribbled down a pentacle and some protective sigils at the doors and windows. I started to make some witch bottles when my mother caught notice of my erratic behavior.

“Dear, what happened,” She asked. She was well aware that I didn’t react like this normally. When I didn’t respond she continued, “It’s okay dear, what’s going on?”

“Mom I have to set up some protections for the house, something might’ve followed me.” I answered as I placed some iron nails and my blood in a jar and murmured some protective charms before moving onto the next. I spoke up, “Tell the others that this is a ghost thing and to stay put.”

My mother, unsurprisingly, did not take my orders and instead asked a question, “What do you mean by ghost thing?”

As I made my last witch bottle I answered, “I know you don’t believe but there is some sort of spirit which was causing me issues.”

I quickly ran past her into our yard and buried one bottle in each corner of the property and ran back inside. I then heard my siblings scamper out of their rooms.

My older sister, Erin, looked at my disheveled state. She quickly grabbed her own hunting knife and rifle before returning and speaking, “So Amy, what’s happening?”

My younger brother, Jacob, spoke up this time, “Sis what’s happening, I’m scared.”

Following this my little sister, Elizabeth, spoke up, “Yeah, is it another ghost. This time I’ll fight it!”

I was pretty confident before this but now it was a bit more serious. I breathed before speaking, “You all should be fine, remember the charms I made you?” I began, getting a series of nods, “You should be fine if you have them with you. And Liz, you’re too young to fight this one.” This seemed to satisfy my younger siblings and they went back to their room. But Erin stood firm.

“I don’t know anything about magic but this is serious isn’t it....

---

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This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/BoxGoblin on 2024-11-13 01:03:45+00:00.

---

I ran a successful true-crime podcast called Eidolon. It covered missing-person cases, from legendary stories on Amelia Earhart to relatively unknown cases from the recent news. Recently, I told my 100K plus followers that I was stepping away to focus on other projects, namely my day job as an audio engineer. I told my friends that I was taking a mental health break. All the interviews with grieving parents, friends, and lovers with no closure had chipped away at my soul. I needed to reset, rediscover the beauty in this world, to forget the darkness that lurks beneath its surface.  

But the main reason I shuttered Eidolon, the reason I deleted all my audio files and contact sheets, the reason I promised myself I would never touch the true-crime genre again was due to one person: CharnelSam. According to his scant Patreon profile, Sam was located somewhere in the U.S. and had plenty of discretionary income, donating to various true-crime podcasts via the site. But he gave the most money to mine, having donated over $5,000 to Eidolon for the past two years, usually through regular $200 payments. CharnelSam was my biggest fan. 

My online conversations with Sam were brief and professional. I sent him a nice, personalized “Thank You” message each time he donated and would announce his username at the top of my credits after each episode. Most of the time, my messages went unanswered. But on occasion, he would respond with a single cryptic sentence. It was always the same: 

“Light floods the grateful frame, catching moments gifted by time.”

I had no idea what that meant or what it had to do with my podcast. It might have been part of his online signature, perhaps some famous quote missing an attribution. But if that were the case, why only send the attribution and not an actual message? I never thought much about it. I was just happy to receive such large and consistent donations. If Charnel Sam wanted to send me a cryptic quote now and then, he was more than welcome to do it. But everything changed a few weeks ago when I received this:

Hey Brian. I have some information that I think could help solve the Bertrand Hikers Mystery. 

I’d recently re-aired an episode on the Bertrand Hikers, two teenage girls who mysteriously vanished while hiking in the Bertrand Nature Preserve in northwestern Georgia, an area not far from my home in the Atlanta suburbs. The case was one of my most popular stories and the main one that launched my podcast. The disappearance of Heather Simmons and Alisha Gundersen is one of those local legends that everyone I grew up with knew about but never received much national attention. As such, it was a relatively unknown missing-person case when I recorded my first podcast episode on it. Though the girls were teenagers, they were not the attractive, white, blonde teens that received most of the media’s attention. Heather was slightly overweight for her age, with lots of bushy curly hair. The popular girls at her school picked on her, calling her Shamu. Alisha was pretty but still an outsider in the small town of Bertrand. She was biracial with a white Norwegian father and a Nigerian mother. Her family had recently moved to America from Bergen, Norway, and she spoke broken English. There were kids at school who jokingly referred to her as a dark elf. 

Both girls were 16 at the time of their disappearance. They became friends at Bertrand High, where they shared a homeroom. They played soccer and loved bands like Nirvana and The Smashing Pumpkins. They stayed up late watching John Carpenter movies and binging on popcorn and Kit Kats. They got straight A’s in all their classes. They dressed up as Beetlejuice and Catwoman for Halloween one year. They were inseparable. Alisha was planning to go to Harvard Med and become a dentist when she grew up, and Heather wanted to be a wildlife photographer for National Geographic. More on that later. They weren’t popular at school, but they had loving families, and they always had each other. 

On October 17th, 1998, Heather and Alisha biked from their homes to the Bertrand Nature Preserve, a massive park covering 80 square miles of dense forest that blanketed the low-lying mountains of the Appalachian Foothills. Witnesses at the visitor center saw them arrive around noon that Saturday. They’d told their parents they were just going for a short hike up to Bald Head Rock, a scenic lookout about three miles from the parking lot where they’d chained up their bikes. Tons of people hiked the trail on the weekends, and the girls were planning to be home well before nightfall. In fact, Heather and Alisha were planning to see the movie Practical Magic with Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman later that night at 8:00 pm. 

But 8:00 pm came and went, and the girls’ bikes remained untouched in the parking lot. No one had seen them. No one had heard from them. By then, Heather and Alisha’s parents were frantic. They’d already called 911, and a couple of officers had gone out to the Bertrand Nature Preserve to search for the missing teens. All they found were the bikes, still chained up outside the nature center.  

Over the following weeks, a huge search party combed the mountains. Hundreds of volunteers and SAR personnel checked behind every tree, looked within every bush, and turned over every rock, searching for clues. They found nothing!

Eventually, the news reports stopped. The missing posters on telephone polls and outside shops started to fade, fall off, or were even pasted over with fliers advertising local bands or politicians running for upcoming elections. As sad as it was, the case would’ve disappeared into total obscurity were it not for a strange discovery almost two years later.

In 2000, a local Boy Scout troop was camping in the Bertrand Preserve when one of the kids stumbled upon a rusted single-lens reflex (SLR) camera half-buried in the dirt near their campsite. He didn’t know it then, but the boy had just discovered Heather’s most prized possession. She’d taken the camera with her on that fateful day in October two years prior.

When the authorities developed the camera’s film roll, they uncovered a breakdown of that day’s events. The first half of the pictures are known colloquially as The Day Shots. These pictures were all timestamped on October 17th, 1998, likely taken over two to three hours while the girls were on their hike. The photos showed squirrels scurrying among the canopy, alien-like mushrooms growing on the moist ground, and various angles of Alisha hiking up to Bald Head Rock. There were shots of Alisha silhouetted against the afternoon sun and others showing her disappearing into an endless forest. Heather had a good eye for composition, and she knew how to make the most of natural lighting. It’s sad looking at the Day Shots now because you can see the raw talent of a burgeoning artist finding her voice. She would’ve made a great photographer had she come home that day. 

Another thing people noticed was the way Heather captured Alisha’s beauty in the photos, the way she brought out her best friend’s hazel-green eyes, and accentuated her sharp facial bone structure using a juxtaposition of light and shadow. There was already speculation among their classmates that Heather had a crush on Alisha. Some even believed they were a couple, though Alisha had many boyfriends in high school, and there was no evidence the two girls had ever hooked up. Some speculated that Heather may have killed Alisha after she’d rejected Heather’s advances, and then Heather killed herself. But there was no evidence of this from eyewitnesses or the photos themselves.  

What was clear from The Day Shots was that both girls had a zest for life. They were having fun and goofing off. There were even some forced-perspective photos of Heather and Alisha pretending to eat a downed tree. These pictures contradicted one of the authorities’ early theories regarding the girls’ disappearance: that they might have taken their own lives due to depression. It was a reasonable theory, given that both girls were bullied at school and had no real friends outside of each other. But they never left a note, and neither their parents nor their classmates felt they were depressed. 

What really got the authority's attention was a second set of photos on the roll. They called them--

The Night Shots. 

These photos were timestamped on October 31st, 1998, a full two weeks after the girls were reported missing. They were taken in the middle of the night with a camera flash for 30 minutes. Creepiest of all was the subject matter. The Night Shots were almost entirely random images of the forest: tree limbs, bushes, rocks. There were no signs of civilization in them, just endless darkness beyond the foliage caught in the camera flash. Many of the pictures were out of focus, showing random green and black blurs. The most famous photo was a close-up of what appeared to be the back of Heather’s head. Her curly hair filled the frame. Amongst those bushy strands was a dark red streak: BLOOD. 

The photos on Heather’s camera were never officially released to the public. They remained sealed in evidence until sometime in the late 2000s, possibly ’08 or ’09. That’s when someone leaked them to a now-defunct true crime forum called Missing Inc, and they eventually found their way to Reddit. Once people saw the photos online, the Bertrand Hikers c...

---

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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/Ok-Poetry6064 on 2024-11-13 00:11:03+00:00.

---

When I was younger, my parents always told me bedtime stories. They were twisted tales – terrifying, cautionary fables of monsters who lurked in closets or shadows waiting to snatch up “bad kids” like me. They’d whisper these warnings in darkened rooms, voices low and dripping with menace. Sometimes, they’d even turn the lights off, leaving me alone to cry in the pitch black, my imagination creating horrors beyond what they had even described.

By the time I was eight, I’d started sleeping with a flashlight under my pillow. My parents never knew, and the thought of it being my secret made me feel safe, like I had a small piece of defiance they couldn’t strip away.

Things got worse when I turned twelve. They’d take away my flashlight, and they locked the windows shut at night. I wasn’t allowed out after 8 PM, and they put bars on my door from the outside. They said it was “for my protection,” but I knew better. It felt like they were punishing me for something I didn’t understand. They’d say things like, “The monsters only come for those who deserve it” or “They’re not done with you yet.” I didn’t know what they meant, but the implication was terrifying.

One night, I woke up to scratching sounds just outside my window. I could barely breathe as I crept toward the glass, pressing my ear against it. The sound stopped immediately, but just as I was about to crawl back into bed, I heard it again, now coming from inside the walls. I stayed awake all night, curled in a ball under my blanket, my heart thudding against my chest. The next morning, I told my parents, hoping they’d check the walls or take me seriously. But my dad just smirked, his eyes gleaming. “Told you they weren’t done.”

As time passed, the scratches turned to whispers. Low voices murmuring my name from behind the walls, under the bed, or just outside my door. I’d lie awake, shaking, too afraid to move. My parents seemed almost pleased with my terror, often reminding me, “It’s what you deserve.”

One evening, I overheard them talking in hushed tones. They mentioned something about “the ceremony” and “keeping her quiet.” My blood ran cold. What did they mean, and what was this ceremony? I wanted to confront them, but I couldn’t bring myself to, not with those hollow gazes they wore whenever they looked at me.

A few days later, my mom handed me an old, dusty mirror. “Place this by your bed tonight,” she instructed, her tone icy. “You’ll see what’s been watching you all these years.”

The fear was paralyzing, but curiosity overpowered it. That night, I set up the mirror. I didn’t want to, but I had to know.

Around midnight, I heard it—the scratching, louder this time, relentless. Then the voices started. This time, they didn’t whisper; they hissed, louder and angrier. My name, over and over. Trembling, I opened my eyes, staring into the mirror.

In the reflection, I saw a shadow figure behind me. It was featureless, a dark shape hovering, but what made my blood turn to ice was its face. It had no eyes, just hollow sockets, staring right at me. And then it smiled. It whispered in a voice eerily similar to my mother’s, “You deserve this.”

I bolted from my room, pounding on my parents’ door, screaming for help. They opened it slowly, looking calm, almost…expectant. They didn’t seem surprised or even worried. “See anything interesting?” my dad asked with that twisted smirk.

I couldn’t understand. How could they let this happen to me? “What are you doing to me?!” I shouted.

My mom sighed, looking almost pitying. “Honey, it’s not us. We’re not the ones who hurt you.”

Before I could respond, she took my hand and led me back to my room. “Look in the mirror again, sweetheart,” she whispered, her voice chilling.

Against every instinct, I glanced back at the mirror. This time, I noticed details I hadn’t before. The shadow wasn’t someone behind me – it was me. And as I stared into those hollow sockets, memories I had long buried began resurfacing.

I remembered nights as a child, hearing crying that I thought was my own. I remembered my mother waking up with bruises, which she blamed on me in my sleep, but I thought she was lying. And the reason they locked my windows, the reason they feared me.

In the reflection, my face split into a cruel grin. I whispered, “You deserve this.” It was my voice. The mirror cracked, and with it, I remembered every monstrous thing I had ever done.

This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/orangeplr on 2024-11-12 23:02:53+00:00.

---

Emma was an extrovert.

But she hadn't always been one. 

I suppose it’s my fault we drifted apart, in the end. The truth was, I fell for all that bullshit: I listened to that voice, the sneering one that nipped at the back of my ears with its sharp incisors, the one that asked, why is your only friend a girl? I fell for the indoctrination every twelve year old boy does. And it wasn’t like she was a tomboy, either — she was a real, proper girl, complete with the star-and-heart shaped hair clips, sweeping blonde bangs and posters of horses and boybands all over her purple painted walls. She liked fairies, she liked unicorns. I liked her anyways. She was funny, and she always asked me questions, and she always shared. She was quiet around others, her long face always pointed down at her shoes, but she wasn’t like that with me. 

It was my fault we drifted apart. But I couldn’t stand how they looked at us, all of them, when we were playing together next to the basketball courts — I didn’t like how the girls scoffed, how the boys shouted things I couldn’t quite make out and then shoved each other, laughing uproariously… but the worst were the adults. I saw the looks they gave each other when Emma and I showed up to class side by side, secret looks, but I knew what they meant. Hope we get invited to the wedding, right?

So I stopped hanging out with Emma. I made new friends, boys who liked soccer and spitting contests, and the looks and whispers stopped. And Emma stayed alone. 

That was until high school. When we got to high school, I started to notice that Emma had changed. 

At lunch, when I went out to the front lawn with my friends to toss a frisbee back and forth like wannabe college kids, I started to see her with other people. When I passed through the halls, I saw her with boys leaning against lockers, laughing and placing her hand on their shoulders. Every day it seemed like there were more people, more friends, surrounding her like a school of fish around a shipwreck. This wouldn’t be unusual, except that Emma was always such a small, timid girl. She had been a loner since she was tiny. This was when I truly realized I didn’t know who she was anymore. I didn’t necessarily miss her anymore, it had been years since we had so much as spoken to each other, but it still gave me a strange pang in my chest to think it. 

Emma was an extrovert now, I realized. She was nice to everyone, a huge smile was always pulling at her glossy lips. Her hair was always perfect, falling in little swoops at her shoulders, she wore bright pinks and oranges and blues in the form of tight skirts and frilly blouses. She was attractive to the boys in an approachable way, but so nice to the girls that she was never considered a threat. Just a friend. 

Even from a distance, I could observe that everyone liked Emma. How could you not like Emma? 

At graduation, I looked for her. While I was accepting my fake diploma up on the stage, my friends and family cheering for me from the sea of faces, I searched the crowd for Emma. I spotted her quickly, near the back — someone was talking to her animatedly, a girl with a tight brown ponytail and braces, and she was smiling a strange smile, but she wasn’t responding. Instead, she stared straight forward. I felt my face get a little hot: was she looking at me? Should I wave or something? But when I squinted my eyes, I could tell that it wasn’t me she was looking at. 

She was looking somewhere behind me. 

After the ceremony, I looked for her again. I tried to part the mass of bodies, muttering excuse me's and sorry's as I went. She was surrounded by a throng of her peers, all speaking so loudly and cheerfully that I couldn’t make out anything she was saying. I got a glimpse of her face for a split second — she was smiling in that same strange way, almost sad. I finally heard her say something, her pink lips parting like they were crumpled up, as if she was crying. 

“I’m going to miss you all so, so much.” 

Then came college. Emma and I ended up at the same school, one that was far enough away from home to feel like a grown up, but not far enough to actually be one. In college, I saw her less, so I thought of her less. College was much bigger than high school, and I had much more to think about than my old childhood friend. But when I did see Emma, things seemed the same. Always surrounded by people, always smiling. 

I made new friends. I tried out for the soccer team, and I made it. My grades were okay, B to C average, and my roommate was weird, but he always left me alone. I felt content with the little life I had been building. 

That was until the party. 

It was by no means the first college party of the year, nor the craziest. I was told it would be just a couple of kids at one of the houses on campus, being rented out by seniors, but in typical college party fashion, it got out of hand pretty quickly. 

I went with a couple of my own friends, and we mostly stayed in the kitchen, crammed into the corner with mystery drinks clutched in our hands. The whole place reeked of smoke, and all the lightbulbs had been changed to colored ones, giving the house almost an eerie nightclub vibe. It wasn’t anything special, but feeling the warm buzz brought on by a mixed drink in a red plastic cup, crouched in a stranger’s kitchen with new friends, I was feeling pretty good. 

I knew when Emma got there. I could claim I sensed it, like it was some sort of psychic superpower, but I just knew by the chatter. The air suddenly felt livelier, and people funneled from the kitchen to the living room, calling out greetings. 

My friends and I used the temporary quiet in the kitchen to get ourselves fresh drinks, and then we filed out to the porch to smoke. My warm feeling only grew, and soon I was laughing so hard I felt I might piss myself, elbowing my friends in the way that’s only okay when you’re drunk. The music thumped from inside the house, muted by the sliding glass door, and I didn’t even feel the cold. 

When we finally decided to go back inside, I was surprised to find the kitchen entirely empty. I frowned, and checked my phone. It was only around midnight — why would everyone be gone? 

That was when I heard someone shout from the other room, and my friends and I eyed each other. I felt a guilty twinge at how excited the prospect of a fight breaking out made me, but I wanted stories, I wanted the college experience. 

We all rushed into the living room. And that was when I saw her. 

Emma was on the table, and everyone in the room was facing her, as if she were a caged animal in the zoo. She was on her hands and knees, but in a way that told me she’d been standing up before, clutching a clear bottle in one hand and the edge of the table with the other. I watched, horrified, as she wretched over the side, wobbling back and forth like a swaying ship. Everyone shouted in dismay and crashed backwards towards the wall, wanting to avoid the splash zone, and I was very nearly forced out of the room. 

“N-No,” she moaned, wiping at her mouth with the back of her hand, the bottle clanking against her shirt buttons. “I’m sor-sorry… I’m sssso sorry…” 

Clearly she had had too much to drink, and I wondered what I had missed before we’d come in. My friends were laughing, nudging each other and me, but I didn’t join them. Emma keeled over, flopping pathetically on the table, as someone shouted “get down!”, their voice brash and cruel. Someone else laughed. Someone else started taking pictures of her.

I had never seen her like this. And I had never seen anyone be mean to Emma, not since middle school, at least. 

I like to think I saw her wet skirt before anyone else did — at least, I hope that’s true. I would hate for everyone there to remember their last time seeing her alive as her slumped over on someone’s table, pee trickling down her legs and pooling at her hip, hugging an empty bottle like a teddy bear. 

I shoved through the crowd on an instinct, ignoring my friends questioning shouts trailing after me. I reached Emma in a few seconds, gently trying to pry the bottle from her hands and pull her from the table. 

She finally acknowledged me when I scooped her up into my arms, wincing at the wetness soaking through my shirt sleeves. Her eyes fluttered open and she stared up at me, her eyes glazed over. 

“An… Andrew?” She slurred. I nodded, my face made of stone. The people all around us let out a collective oooh, and I was back in middle school, letting go of Emma’s hand, refusing to look her in the eye. 

I looked her in the eye then, though, and she smiled in that sad way that only I seemed to ever notice. Then she threw up on my shirt. 

I got her to the bathroom and I locked it behind us as thralls of people pounded against it with their fists, chanting our names. EM-MA! AN-DREW! EM-MA! AN-DREW! We’ve become the most interesting thing at the party, I thought. We've become the spectacle. Emma sobbed as I helped her into the bathtub, figuring it would be the easiest to clean off later.

Emma’s head fell back against the tile and she groaned. I silently slipped off my shirt and scrubbed at it in the bathroom sink, choking back my own bile as I did. I wasn’t drunk anymore, or at least, I didn’t feel it. 

“Andrew,” she whispered after a long time. I looked over at her. She had pushed her blonde hair away from her eyes, stringy with spit and vomit. She stared up at me, watery and tremblin...

---

Content cut off. Read original on https://old.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/1gpy7vu/emma_is_an_extrovert/

This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/Grandaddyspookybones on 2024-11-12 22:44:08+00:00.

---

Yeah, that’s right. I heard my name in the woods. If you’re Appalachian, you shuttered at the title of this alone. If you’re not, I’ll explain.

My grandfather went to be with the Lord a few years ago now. He grew up in a small wooden shack a mile off the road. There’s a small Hellfire Brimstone Pentecostal church off the main road. We attended there a few times with him for revivals but often times we would park there and walk to his small house. Along the road he would tell us all kind of spooky stories, which I’ll perhaps share one day. He also told us about all kinds of stories through his life, about his parents, and what it was like growing up in such harsh conditions.

The conditions I’m talking about is probably what you expect to hear coming from poor southerners in Appalachia. No power, cooking only over an open fire, etc. He also told us about how he would stuff hay through the cracks of the wood to try to provide some insulation against the harsh winters. The cabin wasn’t much, probably 150-200 sq ft. There were two bedrooms, and by that I mean one very large room where the family would gather/eat/bathe/ and the kids would sleep. The second room was where his parents slept. Along the creek bed near his house, there was a fresh spring you could get water, and there was a house attached to a school bus, where his uncle lived.

It’s been years since I had visited the house. Occasionally we would have family meals out there for a picnic, bringing friends to come see the place. Some land disputes got in the way as the land had been split and divided and drug addicts had got in the mix. Grandpa went up there often during the last few years of his life to tear down fences people put up trying to keep us out.

During those walks my brother and I used to take with Grandpa, he told us all kinds of superstitions, many of which I hold today. Examples would be to not show my teeth to a writing spider or to close an open pocketknife. He also would tell me about things like…hearing your name in the woods. In the words of Grandma, “there are haints and boogers in the woods”.

I was visiting Grandma lately and we were talking about Grandpa and the old cabin, and I got the itch to just go sit there for a bit and think. See Grandpa really was the greatest man I knew. I figure maybe if I could go sit on the steps to the old cabin, I could have some form of communion with him.

Now I didn’t make it clear at the beginning of this post, the road into the cabin was somewhat accessible in a vehicle, provided you have a 4WD, which I did, but it make more sense to me now why we always walked it. Grandpa wanted us to have that quality time. So when I got off the main road, I parked my SUV at the church, thinking back on the times I’d see Grandpa lifting his arms and praising Jesus, about how the first girl I had ever loved used to go there, and how the preacher man would be running around the congregation feeling that Pentecostal fire.

Getting out the car, I took a slow walk to the cabin. I enjoyed hearing the acorns under my boots pop and the leaves crunching, a few birds tweeting their familiar songs, and the water from the creek a short ways yonder.

When I made it to the cabin, I had a bag of mixed emotions, I suppose. I missed Grandpa a whole lot, I was angry that the methheads who lived nearby had littered the cabin with drink bottles, and I was bothered by the men who thought they should “restore” the property when all they did was take away the character of the place my Grandpa loved.

I went by the creek and there it was familiar. The school bus was still there, there was a bicycle wheel stuck in the ground that Grandpa would put a stick in when he was a young boy and roll around the property, and I filled my water bottle with some of that spring water. As far as I was concerned, that was holy water.

After kneeling down for a quick prayer and let a small cry out, I decided it was time to make it back to my car. That’s when I heard it….”Phillip”.

It was almost a whisper. Surely I hearing things, nightfall wasn’t too far away and I brushed it off as a small fear. But then again man’s voice, “Phillip”. I now noticed I couldn’t hear squirrels rustling in the leaf piles or the birds chirping.

I tried to think, that wasn’t any of my family’s voices. Grandma was the only one who knew I came here and she isn’t the kind of woman to use a phone to tell family I had came by the old house. It couldn’t have been any of the tweakers that lived on the edge of the property, none of them would know my name.

“Phillip”, came a tone that was giggling and somewhat sinister.

This was it, this is what my grandparents had told me about. These were haints and boogers trying to get me. I never knew what they meant by “get me” but I sure didn’t want to find out.

I paced quickly towards the car, mind you it’s only about a 15 minute walk. 10 if I jog.

“Phillip…….Phillip…..PHILLIP”, the haint screamed.

My now I started jogging, this would save some time, and the sun was setting.

“Phiiiiiiiiiilip” came up the noise, like how a man will jokingly make the vibrato that a female opera singer has.

Lord only knows why I turned, I broke the rule and acknowledged it. “Who is there”, I asked.

“Phillip. Phillip, Phillip. Phillip. PHIIIIILIP”.

I closed my eyes and slapped myself a couple times, I was going crazy. None of this could be real.

Then I saw…something standing about 50 yards from me. It was the size of a short man, and he had on a devil mask and cape. Very cartoonish, like something someone would buy for Halloween. Holding one of those plastic red pitchforks.

A distorted mangled voice came from it, howling and laughing. “Oh ho ho Phillip”.

I know what you’re thinking, run. And that’s what I did. I ran. I only had maybe a quarter mile left to the car, I ran like never before and his thing was hot on my trail.

“Phillip” it sang out, “Phillllllip, Phillip. Phillip”, it cheered as it tackled me from behind. It quickly flipped me on my back and started digging into me. They were not hands…..they were claws. Skinnier than a nun’s finger and sharper than nail it drove both into my chest, scratching me all up and down and singing my name, continuously.

The primal noises that came from it and gleeful cheers mixed with the fast breathing of my name had to have echoed the woods. It eventually wrapped the claws around my throat.

“Shhh Phillip huehuehue”. I could see the strain in its eyes and the pure hate this booger had. I chokingly reached for anything I could get and I managed to get a rock. With any strength I had in me, I swung the rock into its head. Plastic didn’t crumple from a Halloween mask though, the rock caused a bludgeoned dent, like when you know you hear bone get hit through paper skin.

As it rolled off me to howl , I managed to catch my breathe and get up. There I ran as hard as I could, there wasn’t much, I could see the car and the church. It took one last tackle at me and scraped my ankle on its way down, but I did it. I made it to the church parking lot.

The creature stopped where it was and wouldn’t enter the lot. It just kept stomping. Stomping and saying, “Come back Phillip, come back. Come back Phillip, come back. We need you Phillip”.

I climbed in my car and took off down the road, watching it dance by the moonlight in a circle with 3 others just like it.

This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/newbieyeye63 on 2024-11-12 22:33:40+00:00.

---

I've been working in this textile factory for forty years now. I've seen them come and go - both the living and the dead. When Sarah walked in that morning, bright-eyed and full of hope, my heart sank. They always look like that at first. They never listen. They never believe. Something about her reminded me of myself, decades ago, before I learned the true nature of this place.

The memories flood back whenever a new face appears. Emily in '92 - she had that same determined walk, head held high despite the whispers from the old-timers. She lasted three weeks before the cutting machine claimed her. Maria in '98 - her laugh could light up the whole floor, until the day she answered a call for help that came from no living throat. And then there was Kate in '03, Lisa in '07, Amanda in '12... The list grows longer every year, and I force myself to remember each name, each face, each story. Someone has to carry their memories.

I watched Sarah fill out her paperwork, her hand steady and sure. If only she knew what those forms really meant - not just employment agreements, but potential obituaries waiting to be written.

The factory hasn't changed much since I started here in 1990. The same industrial lights flicker overhead, casting long shadows between the rows of machinery. The air still carries that distinct mix of cotton fibers and machine oil. But now it carries something else too - whispers, echoes, and the lingering presence of those who never left.

I remember my first day like it was yesterday. Margaret, the floor supervisor then, had given me the same tour I now give to others. She'd seemed distracted that day, her eyes constantly darting to empty corners of the room. I understand now what she was seeing. She didn't make it to retirement - lost to the cutting machine in '93. Sometimes I still hear her counting inventory in the storage room.

I try to warn them all, in my own way. During Sarah's lunch break, I pulled her aside. My hands were shaking - they always do now, after what I've seen. "There are things you need to know about this place," I told her, watching her young face for any sign of understanding.

"When you hear someone asking for help with their machine, don't go. Never go alone. Always verify with at least two other people that someone needs help. The voices... they're not always who they claim to be."

I remember giving the same warning to Jennifer in '05. She laughed it off. Three days later, we found her by the spinning wheel. The ghost that called her had worn my voice.

Sarah nodded politely, but I could see the skepticism in her eyes. They all have that look at first - that mixture of concern and pity for the old woman who's spent too many years among the machines. Some think I've inhaled too much cotton dust. Others assume the isolation has gotten to me. If only it were that simple.

Back in '97, I tried to document everything. I kept detailed records of every incident, every pattern I noticed. The way the machines would run at slightly different speeds just before someone died. The cold spots that would appear in new places. The voices that sounded just a little too perfect, too familiar. Management found my notebooks during a routine locker inspection. They sent me to three different psychiatrists. I learned to keep my observations to myself after that.

I watched Sarah during her first week, noting how quickly she picked up the work. She had good instincts around the machines, respected their power. But she was also kind - too kind. When Lucy from packaging called out sick, Sarah volunteered to cover part of her shift. She didn't know that Lucy had died in '01, and sometimes her ghost still punches in for the night shift.

I was in the break room when it happened. My sandwich sat untouched as I heard the commotion - running footsteps, a machine's terrible grinding, then silence. I knew before I even got up. They'd used my voice again.

I ran to the spinning room, my arthritis forgotten in the moment. But I was too late. I'm always too late. The spinning wheel was still humming, threads tangled in impossible ways. Sarah's body lay motionless beside it, her hand still reaching out to where she thought I had been standing, asking for help with a jammed mechanism.

The worst part is always the aftermath. The police investigations, the safety inspections, the grief counselors. They never find anything wrong with the machines. They never question why it's always the same machines, the same circumstances. The reports always read "operator error" or "failure to follow safety protocols." But how do you report that a ghost asked for help? How do you explain that the voice calling out in distress wasn't human at all?

Sometimes I wonder if I'm part of the curse too. Doomed to watch, to warn, but never to save. Forty years of the same story, different faces. The ghosts never take me - perhaps that's my real punishment.

The next morning, I stood in my usual spot, watching them cover Sarah's body. The machines hummed their eternal song, and I could already see her ghost forming in the corners of my vision - another shadow among shadows, another voice that would call out for help.

In Forty years, I've learned to recognize the different types of ghost-shine. The fresh ones glow brighter, still clinging to their last moments. Sarah's had that same desperate gleam I've seen too many times before. They all start the same way - confused, angry, desperate to understand what happened. Some fade with time, becoming mere whispers in the darkness. Others grow stronger, learning to mimic voices, to manipulate the machines.

I returned to my station, as I always do. The only living soul among the machines and their ghostly operators. Sometimes, in the quiet moments between shifts, I catch glimpses of all of them - Emily, Maria, Jennifer, and now Sarah. They watch me with hollow eyes, perhaps wondering why I survived while they didn't.

There was a time, years ago, when I tried to quit. I made it as far as the parking lot before the weight of responsibility pulled me back. Who would warn the new ones if I left? Who would remember their names, their stories? Who would know to look for the signs, to question the familiar voices calling out in the night shift? So I stayed, becoming as much a fixture of this place as the ghosts themselves.

Tomorrow, someone new will walk through those doors. And I'll try again, knowing it probably won't make a difference. Because that's my curse - to keep trying, to keep warning, to keep remembering. It's the least I can do for all the souls trapped in this place of endless shifts and eternal overtime.

The factory stands as it always has, a monument to progress and productivity, its windows gleaming in the morning sun. But I know its true nature now. It's not just a factory - it's a gathering place for the lost, a repository of voices that never quite fade away. And I remain its sole living witness, keeper of its dark secrets, guardian of its growing collection of shadows.

As the afternoon shift begins, I hear Sarah's voice for the first time since her death, calling out from near the spinning wheel. It's perfect, too perfect, just like all the others. I close my eyes and whisper a quiet prayer for whoever walks through those doors tomorrow. They never listen. They never believe. But I'll keep trying, because that's all I can do. That's all I've ever been able to do.

This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/Thomas-O on 2024-11-12 14:12:39+00:00.

---

Alondra was a faith healer, and like every single one of her kind, she was a complete and total fraud. She came from a long line of faith healers, those who would go town to town, set up a revival tent, preach a sermon, and then heal those who came forth, all in the name of God and money.

I worked for Alondra as part of her travelling revival show. My job was to vet audience members before the show began, helping decide which of them would be invited on stage to have hands laid upon them and supposedly be healed. I’d start my day in the parking lot, which was often just a field on the outskirts of whatever town we were visiting. I’d watch intently as people got out of their cars and headed toward the revival tent.

Typically, I’d keep an eye out for people who used a wheelchair to get around, but still had the ability to walk short distances. I’d spot them right away – the passenger door of their car would pop open, they’d slowly get out, and then shuffle over to the trunk of the car, where their companion would pull out their wheelchair and guide them into a seated position. These were the people who’d get invited onstage to be healed. I’d follow behind them and covertly listen in to their conversations so that I could pick up some useful tidbits of information, like their names. I’d take note of where they sat, and then pass all that information on to our production crew.

Sometimes I’d see people in wheelchairs who couldn’t walk even a little bit. There was no chance in hell they’d be invited up to the stage – after all, God will only heal those who can meet him halfway.

Now, just so you have an understanding of how everything worked, let me run you through a typical revival. Start by imagining this:

It’s revival day, and the show is beginning. Alondra starts her sermon by spouting off whatever Biblical nonsense she’s decided to talk about that day. It usually centers around Jesus healing the faithful, but sometimes it’s completely random, just Bible quotes that Alondra selected from some deep recess of her memory.

While she’s busy telling lies to the believers, the crew coordinates which audience members are going to be invited onstage. I key my radio and speak to Kyle, our production supervisor. “The guy in the left section wearing a blue shirt and red Angels ballcap,” I say. “He’s in a wheelchair, but I saw him take some steps. He should go first. His name’s Lawrence. The wife is Shelly.” Kyle listens intently as I tell him about Lawrence and the others I vetted.

Alondra then brings the sermon back into focus by telling the crowd that she herself has been selected by Jesus Christ to carry out his work in the heartland of America. She takes a big dramatic pause and looks out to the expectant crowd, some of whom want to be healed, and some who just want to see God’s hand in action. She clears her throat and points her hands at the audience. “God is speaking to me right now,” she says. “He’s telling me there’s someone here who’s been in a lot of pain lately, someone who prays every day that he’ll be able to get up out of his wheelchair and dance with his wife once again.” She turns and looks directly at our mark. “Lawrence. Yes, you in the blue shirt. Christ is calling you. Come on up here with your beautiful wife Shelly.”

Lawrence and Shelly, faces full of happy tears, make their way to the front. Alondra tells them how special they are, how she knows that Lawrence has been dreaming about the day when he can stand and hold his wife close once again.

She lays a hand on Lawrence’s forehead and commands him to be healed. Immediately two of our stagehands run forward and lift him from his chair. Lawrence, adrenalin pulsing through his veins, puts his legs down and stands up. Whatever pain he may be feeling in his legs is eclipsed by the applause from the crowd, and a desire to not piss off Jesus. He takes a step. Then another. His wife reaches into her purse and puts all her money in a nearby donation bin. Others in the crowd do the same as Lawrence spins in a circle and smiles. The next person is called to the stage and the healing continues.

And that’s how it went. Town to town, dollar to dollar. We mostly “healed” people in wheelchairs, but we would also “heal” those who suffered from any sort of chronic pain, and even cancer patients. It was by far the best paying job I ever had, and I grew close to everyone in the crew. We were a den of thieves and liars, but we were honest and noble amongst each other.

Alondra was middle-aged and very charismatic, both onstage and off. She could preach a sermon about watching paint dry, and it would somehow still be the best sermon you ever heard. Her father, grandfather, and great-grandfather had all been faith healers. It was how she was raised, and she intrinsically knew what everyone around her needed to hear. She dominated any conversation she was part of, but she was always so interesting that nobody minded. When she wasn’t preaching, she spoke about hockey, purses, horses, TV shows, and pretty much anything except God and Jesus.

Kyle, our production supervisor, had once been a firm believer in Christ. Initially he’d joined up with Alondra under the belief that her powers were truly God-given, and not the result of trickery and deception. He was quickly disappointed, but soon found solace within the fat wads of cash he was making. During his first few years, he rationalized his actions by claiming that he’d donate his money to charity, but after a while he stopped saying that. There were ten of us in total who ran the show. I joined the crew knowing from the beginning that it was all a scam, but separating the foolish from their money didn’t bother me one bit.

The beginning of the end came one morning when Alondra walked out of her trailer and addressed the rest of us. “I’m going to heal an amputee,” she said matter-of-factly. We laughed. “No. I’m serious,” she said. “Jesus came to me in a dream last night. He told me how to do it.”

The rest of that day, all she could talk about was how Jesus had spoken to her, and that she’d never experienced anything like it before. “He glowed,” she recalled. “I’ve never felt so at peace than when he was with me. I was sitting at a large table with him. And then, suddenly, there were eight of him, and they all spoke in unison, telling me exactly what I need to know.”

It was weird. I mean, here was a woman who never discussed God or Jesus unless she was trying to con people out of their money, and all the sudden, in the most earnest way, she was telling us how great Jesus was, and that she had dreamed about EIGHT copies of him. We kept trying to laugh it off, but that only made her more insistent that she had a newly divine purpose.

At that point, we had a couple more days before our next revival. We were camped outside some Podunk town, still setting up our tent and equipment. Alondra pulled me aside and spoke to me. “I need you to go to the ocean and get some seaweed. Burn it on the sand and then bring the ash back to me.”

“What?!” I said.

“I need ash from seaweed.  The seaweed needs to be burned on the sand. It can’t be done any place else, and it must be done today. That’s what Jesus told me.”

I protested. “Are you insane? Even if I wanted to, we’re two-hundred miles from the ocean!”

“We have time,” she said, holding out the key to her Mercedes. “Take my car.”

“Can’t you go?” I asked.

She shook her head. “No. I have to stay here and meditate.”

“Since when do you meditate?” I asked.

She ignored my question and forced the car key into my hand and smiled. “Make sure you do it right. If you don’t follow the directions exactly, I’ll know.” She turned around and walked back to her trailer.

I quickly found Kyle, who was helping set up the tent. “Alondra is acting really weird,” I said.

“Gee, ya think?” Kyle replied.

“She’s making me drive to the ocean and bring back some seaweed.”

“What?” Kyle said as he took off his hat and scratched his head in confusion, “There’s too much work here!”

“Why don’t you go speak to her?” I asked. “Maybe you can talk some sense into her.”

“I’ll be right back.” Kyle stormed off to her trailer, but not more than five minutes later, he returned. He was clearly distressed. “Maybe you should just go do it,” he said with shaky hands. “I don’t think I can reason with her right now.”

I looked down at the car key in my hand. “Really?”

“Think of it as a day at the beach. At least it gets you out of helping with the set up,” he said.

I clamped my hand around the key while pondering my options. “There’s no way I’m going to drive two-hundred miles to the ocean! Maybe I’ll just go into town and catch a couple of movies. Alondra won’t know the difference, and I’ll just pick up some ashes from that campsite over the hill.”

Kyle glanced over at Alondra’s trailer and shook his head, almost like he was in fear of her. “No, she’ll know if you don’t do it right.”

“Man, what did she say to you?” I asked.

“It’s not really what she said, it’s how she said it,” he replied. “She told me to tell you to do as she asked. But the way she spoke her words…” he trailed off for a moment. “It just made me scared. I can’t really explain it.”

I rolled my eyes, but I knew there was no more discussion to be had. Anyway, Alondra had always paid me well and treated me like family. I supposed it wouldn’t kill me to do what she asked. I got into her car and drove off, giving Kyle a wave of my hand as I passed him. ...

---

Content cut off. Read original on https://old.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/1gplm3u/god_healed_an_amputee/

This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/02321 on 2024-11-12 18:51:17+00:00.

---

First:

Previous

My arms had been taking a beating recently. The tainted magic had finally fully gone through my systems but now my left arm wasn’t healing as fast as I could have liked. It hurt like a bitch but I was glad I still had it. It could have been ripped off on the last job.. I wondered if Ito had gotten his arm replaced yet.

August sent me a screenshot of a job demanding we did it together. I debated the offer. Having backup was good however I didn’t know if I had the energy to deal with him that day. The longer I took to answer him the more texts came in. I caved and said yes. Within the next few hours, I found myself at the start of a hiking trail waiting for him to arrive.  

In recent years supernatural creatures have started to migrate to cities. It was easier access to food sources if they were the type able to blend in with humans. The monsters that stayed in the forests were either more animalistic or focused more on traditions. I wasn’t looking forward to whatever waited in the woods. It could be anything from a werewolf to an ancient creature beyond human understanding.   

August arrived late. He said he was having trouble finding a babysitter he trusted. Lucas was in a kindergarten program. Most of the time August didn’t work when Lucas was awake and at home. Lately, he has been having issues finding jobs that fit within school hours. He didn’t mind working at night and would often go two days without sleeping. Most of the time Evie didn’t mind staying overnight at his place to make sure Lucas was fine. But she was often busy during the day. He’s started to have limited options for babysitters now that I was working more.  

When he walked over, he raised a cooler bag to show off.  

“Lucas helped make us lunch.” He said proudly.   

I’ll admit that was pretty cute and worth waiting for.   

We walked down the trail to find the reported site. August happily talked about Lucas. The pain in my arm kept me from adding much to the conversation. Soon we found ourselves at a recently used cult summoning site. Or something along those lines. A circle with Latin words had been drawn around the campfire in red paint. The area was covered with burnt-out candles and feathers. Countless messy footprints were left behind in the dirt leading off into the woods. Instead of getting down to investigating, August sat on a fallen tree lunch bag on his lap. He patted the wood next to him causing me to raise an eyebrow.  

“Now?” I asked.  

He kept patting me until I sat down. I suppose there was no rush getting this job done. We had hours of sunlight left. He opened the bag and handed me a messily made sandwich. He ate some carrot sticks as we silently took our break. I’ve seen him eat raw meat and vegetables. And a person’s brain. He couldn’t eat processed food or spices. I heard he was sick for a full day trying a single chicken nugget.   

He pulled out an orange and offered it to me when I finished the sandwich. My hand had gotten crumbs on it, so I reached out to my other one to take what he offered. A burst of pain shot up my arm and I dropped the orange after picking it up. He caught it but didn’t hand it back. Instead, he started to peel it.  

“I can peel my own orange.” I told him reaching out again but using my good hand.   

“Is another person doing this for you emasculating?” He replied, not even looking up.  

“A little.” I said in a serious tone even though I was joking.  

“I’ve always found the idea of men not accepting help a bit silly. Your species is weak. You have only gotten this far because you rely on others. The pyramids weren’t made by a single person, so take help when you can get it.”  

He held out the peeled orange, with a dimpled smile on his face. I took it from him. Even though he was a man-eating monster I thought it was a good thing he adopted Lucas. I had a feeling the kid would turn out alright. I glanced over to see August split his face for half a second to make his mouth wide enough to fit two large oranges into his mouth. Lucas would be an odd kid, but a good one with this monster as his father.   

After our lunch break, we got up to look around. I hunched over to look over the circle to see it wasn’t all Latin. Some words humans may assume to be random scribbles had been mixed in. I didn’t know Latin aside from a word or two, so I didn’t know what the person had been trying to do.   

“What do we have here?” August asked after he let me look things over for a few minutes.  

“This was most likely done by humans.” I pointed out.  

“How can you tell?” He pressed getting down to my level.  

August had done way more jobs than me. He should know the answer. I considered this was a test.  

“It wasn’t written in the common language supernatural creatures use. But it’s close enough. They were able to write a word or two by chance. There have been thousands of years of misinformation about how spells and magic work from it being suppressed from humans. Because of that, most people think spells need to be found in human skin-bound books written in blood. If you have clear wording and enough magic to power the spell, you can use any language.”  

I stood up and shoved my hands into my pocket to keep away the chill. August ran a finger over the red paint as if testing it.   

“Why do creatures always tend to use the common language then? I know a few of them have been brought up in the human side of things and maybe English would be easier for them to use.”  

I narrowed my eyes at him. He knew the answer. So why bother to check if I did?   

“The common language doesn’t have double meanings for words. It has a crap ton of words but they all mean one thing. English isn’t always like that. Read is a good example. Like Hey, read this or I’ve read that. If a word has two meanings, the magic doesn’t decide on the more logical one. It picks one and you end up with a result you don’t want, or the spell backfires because the magic didn't have a clear path to act on.”   

August nodded along and played dumb. Or maybe he really didn’t know all of this. Not all creatures used spells. I’ve only seen him use his claws and teeth. You didn’t even need to use a spell to make magic do what you wanted. It took longer to write it out, but spells focused the power more efficiently into the task. Magic is a creature’s life force. Using less in a fight to get the job done was key to staying alive.  

“You seem to know a lot about this kind of stuff, but you’re not overly strong.” August commented.  

I should be offended by that. I did enough up beaten and bruised by the end of every job. The pain in my left arm proved his point.  

“My mother hunted down monsters. I’ve always been around supernatural creatures. We moved a lot, and I didn’t go to school as much as I should. Because of that, my only choice was to be a contract worker after my mother died.” I said with a shrug.   

“What about your father?” He asked looking me over.  

“He was human. A biker, I think. My mother said it was a one-night stand. She always wanted kids but only got me. She always said how lucky she was to have me considering her health problems. My life with her was rough but not bad enough that I need therapy.”  

“You totally need therapy.” He said without missing a beat.  

I shoved his shoulder. Even though he looked thin, I couldn’t make him move a millimeter.   

“What about you? Here you are asking for my tragic backstory without giving yours.” I said offended but not expecting him to actually tell me.  

“My clan lived in some mountains. Suddenly cabins started to be built near us for a new tourist ski town. A few of the older generation saw it as free food. Contract workers got wind of it and took out my entire village. I accepted this leash to stay alive. I bounced around for a while before finally landing in Evie’s care.”   

He moved his head show off the black ring around his neck. His voice sounded steady, but I was still kicking myself for asking him such an insensitive question. Not only did he most likely have to watch his loved ones be killed, but he was also caught and forced to work with the people who murdered his family. I looked away with a bad taste in my mouth.  

“Humans and supernatural creatures are not meant to interact. The moment those humans stepped foot on our mountain meant death for both of us. If we keep working together, the day may come when one of us needs to turn on the other. You seem to know a decent amount about creatures, so it won’t be a one-sided fight.” He said in a rather calm tone.  

I looked back over to him letting the words run through my head. We did try to kill each other when we first met. And then I stabbed him again in the cave mostly trying to save my own life. If he went feral, could I kill him? I brought my attention to the empty lunch bag by the fallen tree.  

“What about Lucas?” I asked.  

He looked down at the ground as he gripped his hands together. This thought had come across his mind more than once. He was a monster raising a human. That fact never left his mind since he adopted the poor kid.  

“I would never do anything to hurt him on purpose. I would rather die. But because of what I am... I’ll cause him pain. He may end up hating me. Until then, I’ll tr...

---

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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/NoooNotTheLettuce on 2024-11-12 08:56:46+00:00.

---

Jake’s grandparents owned a lake house his family shared, and after we graduated high school, Jake decided it’d be fun to spend a weekend there with a few friends. It was our way of celebrating graduation before we all went our separate ways for college. Jake’s parents agreed, so it was just the six of us, ready for a relaxed weekend by the water.

I arrived a bit late on Saturday, just in time to catch the end of a swim before we set up a fire pit as the sun went down. Jake had raided his grandparents’ fridge and got us a few drinks, and before long, we were joking, sharing stories, and enjoying the night.

As it got later, the atmosphere shifted when my friend Sam suddenly glanced toward the lake. Just off the shore, we noticed a man in a small, weathered fishing boat. He was sitting completely still, watching us. There was no sound of a motor, no fishing gear, nothing to explain why he was there. It was as if he’d drifted in from the darkness. We stared, uncertain, until finally, without a word, he turned on a motor and disappeared back into the night.

Once he was gone, we joked to relieve the tension, calling him the “lake peeping Tom” and laughing about how strange it was for him to be out alone in the dark like that. Soon, we forgot about him and went back to our conversation.

But a while later, we heard water splashing and the hum of a small motor. We all looked over, and sure enough, the man was back. He was closer this time, his blank face half-hidden by shadows, but his eyes were locked on us.

Finally, Sam called out, “Hey! Do you need something?”

The man stopped, silent, and slowly lifted a hand in a wave. Then he smiled—a thin, unsettling smile that didn’t reach his eyes.

Jake stood up and shouted, “You need to get out of here! This is private property.”

The man didn’t respond. He just stood there, staring, before slowly shaking his head as if in warning. The gesture sent a chill through us, and we decided enough was enough. Grabbing our stuff, we quickly put out the fire and hurried inside, locking the doors behind us. Most of us went upstairs to get a better look, hoping he’d finally leave.

From the window, we scanned the lake, thinking he was gone—until one of our friends pointed toward the shore. He was still there, gliding along the edge of the property, his gaze never leaving the house. It was like watching an animal circle its prey.

We went downstairs, debating whether to call the police, and rushed back up to check on him. He’d slowed down now, drifting closer. Then he bent down, picking something up, and we all froze. It was an old, silver harpoon. He lifted it, letting us see it clearly. There was no doubt anymore; he was threatening us.

Jake immediately dialed 911. I stayed at the window, watching him. The man started twirling the harpoon between his fingers like a baton, his face blank. When Sam whispered, “Oh, my God,” I looked back and saw the man had tied his boat to the dock. He was stepping out, walking toward the house.

Tap-tap-tap.

A gentle knock on the door, almost polite. Then, in a low, almost friendly voice, he called, “Hello? Can I come in? It’s cold out here…”

We didn’t move, didn’t answer.

The knock came again, soft, insistent. “Please let me in. I just want to talk…”

Slowly, he moved around the house, dragging the harpoon along the path, tapping each window, each door, his voice circling us. “Won’t you let me in? I promise I won’t hurt you…”

Through a crack in the curtain, I watched as he finally started walking away. He was halfway down the path to the dock when he stopped and turned around. He stared at the house, his eyes cold, a too-wide smile stretching across his face.

Then, without warning, he raised the harpoon and threw it. It struck the side of the house with a sickening thud, embedding itself into the wood so hard that the end of it was still vibrating.

We stumbled back from the window, our hearts pounding. Outside, he chuckled—a soft, eerie laugh that faded into the night as he climbed back into his boat and drifted away.

He circled the house a few more times, slower now, as if savoring each moment. Finally, he turned and vanished into the darkness, the hum of his motor growing fainter until there was only silence.

The police found nothing. No boat, no footprints, no sign of anyone on the lake. But the harpoon was still there, buried in the wall. They took it as evidence, but even after it was gone, none of us could shake the feeling he was still out there.

That was the last time I went to that lake house. As far as I know, he’s never come back, but I’ll never forget the way he circled the house, the hum of his motor, the scrape of that harpoon, or his soft voice asking to be let in.

This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/spnsuperfan1 on 2024-11-12 06:35:13+00:00.

---

First | Previous

After extensive testing and a thorough examination, Detective Davidson has been officially cleared of possession.

That’s right, Demon Dan has successfully vacated his system, leaving Dustin with only slight psychological damage.

(If you're new, you can find what my therapy sessions have covered: here

He doesn’t remember much about the few hours he was shoved into shotgun or how he ended up getting possessed in the first place. All he’s told me is that he remembers feeling really cold and angry. Overall, it was an unpleasant experience, one he wouldn’t wish upon his own worst enemy.

On a totally unrelated note, the division will be holding a mandatory training seminar on the proper precautions to take to protect against possession in the very near future. Yes, I know it’s a mouthful. It was rather enjoyable to see Lieutenant Dawn struggle to read the memo out as he went around announcing it to everyone.

Salt, iron, holy water, a cross, and The Bible are great basic items to have in your possession at all times. If you’re a little more paranoid, or extreme, there are more permanent precautions. Like a protective tattoo for example. There was a certain tv show that circulated it around a couple years ago, now that I think about it.

Dustin is seriously debating getting one of these tattoo’s. He has a couple on his forearms that I’ve seen on occasion when his sleeves are pushed up. A purple butterfly and a rose I think. They’re small, but I’m sure meaningful. It might also just be an excuse to get another tattoo though, the symbol is pretty cool looking not gonna lie. That, or he’s more irked by that experience than he’s letting on.

As you can see, we take possession and more importantly precaution, very seriously at the Winchester Police Department Supernatural’s Division. Here, it will literally save your life if you come prepared for anything that might jump out and attack you.

I’m back at work, by the way, if that weren’t obvious already. How’s it going?

Well, if you were to ask me which supernatural cases I hate dealing with the most, I’d say anything involving vampires. They’re gruesome creatures, ruthless and cut throat. They’re even rarer than sirens, so when one pops up it’s a whole annoying mess to deal with. Like an actual mess. When a particularly out of control vampire feeds, it turns into a bloodbath.

And lucky me, I just can’t catch a fucking break. As soon as I set foot back in the precinct, Davidson and I were handed the case of a suspected supernatural serial killer.

In layman’s terms, three murders that share common characteristics and have a cool down period between each kill can be classified as serial murders. The first two victim’s, an older woman and a young man, were all drained of blood and their throats ripped out- classic vampire M.O. The most recent murder of a little girl made three. Like I said, I hate vampires.

Dustin and I got to the scene a little after three pm, taking over for the first responding officer. The girl’s body had been found in an alleyway, resting by an overflowing dumpster. The crime scene was cordoned off with that classic yellow tape, a small gathering of curious bystanders on the other side, balancing on the tips of their toes in hopes of seeing something.

The girl’s skin was pale and her little shirt was drenched in blood, throat torn to shreds. Her eyes had glazed over, the life completely drained from them. A permanent expression of terror frozen on her face as her mouth hung open from screaming out her last breath. To throw salt in the wound, a pesky fly crawled in and out of her mouth and on the skin of her face.

She’d been exsanguinated of blood, so lividity wouldn’t be an indicating factor of time of death here. But, based on the fact her jaw still hung open, Rigor Mortis hadn’t set in yet. The stench of sickly sweet iron was too strong for this to have occurred a day or two ago. That meant the body had been fresh, killed only a couple hours ago.

A vamp killing in broad daylight. Bold, but not entirely unheard of.

Lana was the girl’s name. It was written on her purple backpack. There was one of those emergency contact cards in there with the parent’s information as well.

I stood there staring down at the little girl as a pair of blue latex gloves snapped on the skin on my hands. The background noise of the crime scene investigators, other officers, bystanders, cars, even the nature around the city seemed to fade into nothing the longer I concentrated on Lana. It was just me and her in the world, nobody else.

She reminded me a bit of myself at that age, probably because of the long black hair she had tied up into a ponytail. I also had a purple backpack in elementary school.

A tear slid down my cheek as I mourned for the girl. Lana was so young, had her whole life ahead of her, only for it to be ripped away in an instant. Her promising life in exchange to keep a greedy monster’s appetite at bay. Despicable. She was just a kid walking home from school.

A hot flash of rage swept through my body.

Then a facial muscle in her cheek twitched. Startled, I jumped back, screaming, “No!”

After my outburst, the activity around the busy crime scene ceased, everyone’s eyes pointed at me. My partner dropped what he was doing and made his way over to me.

I took multiple steps back, my eyes trained on the unmoving corpse. Uncontrollable tears gushed down my face. Panic gripped my heart, like a vice. Quick shallow breaths left my lungs. My head was spinning. It felt like I was going to die.

Thanks to all my therapy sessions, I recognized it as a panic attack.

Needing to remove myself from the situation, I ducked under the crime scene tape and booked it back to the liftback- Dustin en tow.

I slammed the passenger door shut and locked the car, rolling down my window to let the fresh air in. A slight breeze whooshed in, settling my nerves a little.

Dustin leaned against the vehicle with one arm resting on top of the roof and the other on his hip. He looked down at me with concern. “You good?”

“I will be,” I said with a shuddering breath. My wrists flailed around erratically as I attempted to shake the shock out of my system. I wiped drying tears off my face with my sweaty palms after taking the gloves off.

Dustin pat the top of the liftback twice. “Okay,” he said nonchalantly, walking back over to the crime scene.

Detective Davison was a dear and conducted interviews while I calmed down in his car. Then, together we went around to the surrounding local businesses and requested they hand over any CCTV footage they might have.

While most of the owners were happy to oblige, a couple of them told us to fuck off and come back with a warrant. God, I love small town Michigan. The grit on some of these folks reminded me of the Windy City.

With witness statements, interview notes, and a good bit of security tapes to sift through, Dustin and I headed back to the comfort of the precinct.

The first couple minutes of the car ride were silent. “What was that back there?” Davidson asked, breaking it.

I clicked my tongue against the roof of my mouth. “Would you believe it if I said it was first day back jitters?”

He shot me a quick, stern, glance. “Lucky…”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” my whole body shifted away from him and his gaze as my neck turned to face out the window. I crossed my arms and huffed.

Dustin sighed before he sincerely said, “If you ever do want to talk about it, I’m here.”

“Are you ever going to tell me what you really went through while you were possessed?” I mumbled into my chest. After peeking over my shoulder, I found him looking stone faced with his lips pressed together in a hard line.

An awkward silence filled the air between us. The tension grew so thick, you could cut it with a knife.

Then Clair de Lune, Dustin’s ringtone, started playing. He fumbled for a second, reaching around for his phone while keeping his eyes on the road. I rolled my eyes before leaning over and grabbing it out of the center console for him.

“Hey,” Dustin said as he answered the phone, putting it on speaker, “are you thinking what we’re thinking?”

“A vampire? Possibly, yes,” Jane’s semi-muffled voice rang out. Just like his car, Dustin’s phone was old. His model was a good two, three, maybe ten updates behind modern technological standards. “But there’s also the possibility it could be-“

“No,” Dustin cut her off. I shook my head in agreement. Nobody wanted the alternative to be the case. Especially me.

A slightly offended pause came from the phone. “I was just saying it’s a possibility. But, yeah, the supernatural we’re most likely dealing with here is a vampire.”

“Great,” I said unenthusiastically, earning yet another glare from my partner.

“Well we’re on our way back to the precinct now,” he informed. “The three of us can sit down and create a profile when we get there.”

“Alrighty then,” Jane said chipperly, “see you soon.” She then promptly hung up the phone.

The rest of the car ride was drowned out with the stale sound of FM radio.

Back at the precinct Jane, Dustin, and I met up and sat down in one of the conference rooms to...

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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/LatchKeyLore on 2024-11-12 03:16:57+00:00.

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2:00 Pm

“Hey guys welcome back to Buck Busters I’ve got a special one for you today I am currently on the way to hunt what I hope to be one of the biggest bucks this channel has ever seen. So, stay tuned buck nation, you don’t want to miss this one” I dropped the smile from my face, put down the camera and stepped out of my truck.

Why now I thought? I hadn’t spoken to my brother in six years and now out of the blue he’s calling me, inviting me to come hunt on the family land. I walked toward the family home; this would be my first time back since dad had passed. My brother was waiting for me on the porch rocking back and forth in dad’s old chair. “Mikey!” he shouted, “Mister big time finally comes home”, “Good to see you too, Rick” I retorted already regretting coming back here.

“You sure that’ll be enough to bring that beast down” Rick scoffed “Remind me which one of us is a famous hunter again?” I said tossing 3 shells up and down in my hand. He just glared back at me. His eyes were just like dad’s. I couldn’t stand it. Without a word I grabbed my pack, my rifle and set off down the path.

5:15Pm

“I’m about halfway to the stand and let me just say Buck Nation I’ve never felt better about a hunt, just you wait guys this one is going to make the history books, and as tradition my three shells one to miss, one to wound, and one to finish em off, but as you all should know by now I’ll only need that last one. And don’t forget next Tuesday the new three shell rule and deer o’clock merch drops so be sure to get em while you can”. Reaching the end of the trail I looked up to see the deer stand. I knew Rick wasn’t much of a hunter these days, but I at least thought he would bother to maintain dad’s old stands.

 Originally the stand was a simple ladder leading up to what was basically a bench seat, just big enough to squeeze two people with a thin bar to pull down for safety. The ladder, now short a few rungs, had become home to a variety of spider webs, tree branches, and even a bird nest. As for the seat itself, it looked intact save for the luxurious cushioning of leaves.

Walking around the back of the tree, checking the straps supporting the ladder, I noticed a deep groove in the ground. “Check this out Buck Nation, looks like someone’s been digging out here, maybe I’m not alone”. I pointed the camera at the groove, I had to walk alongside it to even capture the full length of it. “I know I said I would be hunting a monster this time, but this looks a like a real monster has been here”

I made it up into the stand at around 5:30 pm, it was already almost dark. My plan was to sleep in the stand that night to give myself all the time I needed to get my deer. “Alright Buck Nation, day one is in the books and come tomorrow morning I’ll have a new rack to hang on my wall.”

2:27 Am. the numbers on my phone burned into my eyes as I read them. Leaves were raining down on me, but I felt no wind. Listening, I heard what sounded like a small army right beneath my stand. “squirrels” I muttered. Cursing the existence of my sleep disrupting visitors, I readied my rifle. “This’ll shut em up” I said pointing the rifle to the ground and firing off a shot.

The forest erupted with thousands of footsteps all darting in different directions from my tree. The silence that followed was overwhelming, what was once a bustling cityscape of commuters going about their day, was a now ghost town. In the silence a new sound found my ears “ktckktcktc”. The sound stopped me as I began to lay my head back down. “What the fuck” I whispered. The sound had begun to grow louder, it had started from behind me and began to grow closer to my left side. The sound was like someone rummaging through a bag of bones.

“Oh, shit game time” the words left my mouth almost as quickly as I could pull my camera up. “What’s going on Buck nation, it is currently 2:40 Am and I believe I may have found my buck”. The sound had now reached my left side. I craned the camera out into the darkness to capture the source of the noise. “No luck looks like I’m going to have to wait till sunup for this one Buck Nation” I said reluctantly placing the camera back into my pack after thirty minutes of the sounds growing increasingly further away.

5:30 Am. “Todays the day guys a new Buck Busters record is going to be set”. The day brought with it a thick sea of fog coating the sprawling forest. My phone went off, a text from Rick. “Was that you last night?” the text read. “Yeah, had some wildlife screwing with me thought I’d scare em away” I responded. “Hope you got enough shells now” I began to read his response, but my attention was ripped away as something breaking the fog caught my eyes.

Antlers. Huge Antlers. They were like tree branches and impossibly large. Then I noticed a second pair then a third. The three rows of antlers were all I could see cutting through the fog’s endless sea, like mighty oars propelling an unknowably large vessel atop it.

I pulled down the safety bar using it to steady my camera as I focused on the antlers. “Chink” that was the only sound I heard as the rusted bolts supporting the safety bar and most of my body weight gave way. The generous coating of leaves broke my fall. I scrambled onto my feet noticing that I had landed inside a new trench.  Alarm bells sounded in my head but down here with that thing, was not the time to investigate. I flew back up the deer stand skipping at least a few rungs.

 “For fucks sake” I muttered seeing the absence of antlers. Just as I began to put my camera away a doe began to cross into my small pocket of visible ground. “The hell” the words left my lips before I could even grasp what I was looking at. What I was looking at was a doe, but it was missing its entire back half. The poor creature was pulling itself across the dirt with its two front legs, leaving a trail of blood and intestines.

I watched in sheer bewilderment for what felt like hours but must have only been a few seconds when I was quickly pulled back to reality. The antlers were back. Six separate shafts of antlers extended through the fog, moving almost consciously towards the dome. In an instant they wrapped around the body of the doe and pulled it back into the fog.

I continued filming through the entire encounter. At this point it was about my channel anymore; I had begun to believe I was either going to film one of the greatest discoveries of this century or my own demise.

 Buzz. Rick had left me another message “Hey man I’m sorry if we got off on the wrong foot, it’s really good to have you back, let me know when you get that thing and I’ll help you drag it out, then we can catch up it’ll be just like old times, with dad”. I smiled. “Right” I said, I was going to kill whatever this was, then I would get out of these woods and back to Rick. I ejected my spent shell from last night and tucked it into my pocket. I readied another round and prepared to truly begin my hunt.

4:00pm. The hunt had gone on for longer than it should have, I was beginning to worry it wouldn’t show and I didn’t know if I could take another night in the stand and there was no chance in hell I was walking out of here at night with that thing out here.

 “It’s go time Buck Nation, 6:00pm you know what that means deer o’clock, let’s hope that applies to whatever it is that’s out here”. I began to pan the camera in an attempt to capture the sheer scale of the forest now free of its foggy coverings.

A lone bird flew overhead, then three, then hundreds. Something was coming. I stood up in the stand, turned around pointing the camera behind me into the woods. “The hell is that” were all I could get before with a meaty thunk as bird smashed into my camera sending it plummeting into the ground.

Hastily I flew down the ladder after it, I knew how big of a risk this was, but I knew without it no one would believe the things I had seen. “Please be okay” I said examining the camera for damages. “Click” I started the playback on the camera to ensure it was still in working order. I wasn’t prepared for what I saw on that recording. In the camera’s brief fall, it had captured something in the woods. A tree taller than any other in the woods stretching high enough to scrape the clouds. I looked up from the camera, there was no such tree. My heart sank, I couldn’t kill this, whatever this wasn’t like anything I could imagine, and I had to get out of this forest.

7:30 Pm. Darkness brought a new feeling to the forest. The life that had once surrounded me had all seemingly died off. I always felt the deer’s eyes on me, I had begun to fear that at any moment an antler would break through the trees. The thoughts bogged my steps down, but I had to keep going, I was going to get out of the woods and see Rick again. “Stupid, stupid, stupid” I cursed myself. I was the one that left when Dad died. I was the one that had cut Rick off. I started making these videos to distract myself from what hunting really meant to me. What it really meant to my family.

9:00pm. As I climbed the final hill I could see the lights from the house shining, like a lighthouse breaking through the fog calling me to port. With each step I felt the deer’s presence draw closer, it was as if just as quickly I left its line of sight it would grow just tall enough to shadow me again. I had begun to run but I stifled my breathing, I feared the thing would hear me and attack at any moment.

9:15...

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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/InformationRemote865 on 2024-11-12 05:19:00+00:00.

---

I’ve been a park ranger in Mount Hood National Forest for over a decade, and nothing has ever truly shaken me. Sure, there are the occasional lost hikers, a few wild animal sightings, but nothing out of the ordinary. That changed a few weeks ago.

It started with a missing person’s report. A hiker had gone out alone on the Timberline Trail, and his wife called in a panic. He was supposed to be back by 5 pm, but it was now 7, and he wasn’t answering his phone. Something about the way she sounded—frantic, desperate—told me this wasn’t just a case of someone losing track of time.

I took the night shift patrol to search for them. The air was cold, thick with fog, and the trees stood like silent sentinels, blocking out most of the moonlight. As I ventured deeper into the woods, a deep unease settled in my chest. It was too quiet. The usual sounds of rustling leaves or animal calls were absent.

I followed the trail, each step crunching on the frost-covered ground, the silence pressing in around me. The usual sounds of the forest—distant calls of owls, the rustle of small creatures in the underbrush—were absent, replaced by an unnerving stillness.

Then I found it. Frantic footprints. They led off the trail, deeper into the forest. The prints were erratic, almost as if the person had been running or stumbling in a blind panic. I crouched to examine them, my flashlight cutting through the darkness. The shape of the prints was unmistakable—a hiker’s boot, a solid, worn tread. But something wasn’t right. The ground around the prints was disturbed, torn up as though something had been dragged along with them.

I followed the trail further, the hairs on the back of my neck standing up. But then I found something worse. Another set of prints. Larger. Much larger. And not human. They were too deep—and they spread unnaturally wide, the toes splayed out like claws. The earth around them was torn as though whatever left them had been moving with immense weight and power.

I felt the cold sweat on my brow, but I couldn’t stop now. Something wasn’t right, and I needed answers. The prints led further off the path, into the darker parts of the woods. The air grew heavier, the fog thicker, and for the first time in years, I regretted being out here alone.

I hesitated at the edge of the steep hillside, my boots slipping on the loose rocks as I followed the prints downward. The earth seemed to be alive, shifting beneath my feet with every step I took. And then, I saw it—a scrap of clothing, caught on a branch. It was torn, frayed at the edges, and stained with something dark. The fabric looked familiar, but it didn’t matter. What mattered was what I saw next.

The footprints of the hiker and the creature now seemed to line up perfectly, as though the thing had been stalking the person, step by agonizing step. Whatever it was, it wasn’t just following. It was hunting.

I took a deep breath, trying to steady myself as the weight of the situation bore down on me. I couldn't turn back now. I had to know what was out here, and if I could help whoever was still out there.

I moved further down the trail, careful not to lose the prints, when suddenly, a scream pierced the silence. Distant, but unmistakable. A cry of pure terror. It sent a shockwave through my chest, freezing me in place.

But then, I heard something else. A low, guttural roar, far deeper than any animal I’d ever heard. It wasn’t just a roar, though. It was mixed with the scream, as if whatever was chasing the hiker was so close, it had begun to drown out their cries. The sounds twisted together, sending a wave of ice through my veins.

I didn’t wait. I ran.

I pressed my hand against my side, feeling the cold metal of my firearm beneath my jacket. It didn’t give me much comfort, but it was the only thing I had. I kept telling myself that if the hiker was still alive, the gun might be the one thing that could make a difference—if I could find them in time. If I could stop whatever this thing was.

The sounds of the forest seemed to grow quieter as I ran, the rush of my own breath drowning out everything else. My pulse thundered in my ears, each step making my heart beat faster. I had to focus. I had to find them.

I slowed, my chest tightening as I tried to steady my breath. My heart was pounding too loudly now, and I was beginning to lose track of the sounds that had been guiding me. I listened intently, straining to hear anything, but the woods were eerily silent. No more screams, no more growls—just the sound of my own feet crunching the underbrush.

The gulley opened up, and the fog seemed to thicken. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up, a primal instinct warning me that something was very wrong. I stepped into the small clearing, shining my flashlight across the ground, scanning for any signs. My stomach twisted when I saw it—the signs of a struggle. Broken branches. Trampled ground. Torn-up dirt.

And then, I saw the fabric. Bloodstained, torn to shreds, lying in the grass like it had been discarded. I couldn’t breathe for a second as I crouched down beside it. The fabric was too familiar—it was the same as the scrap I had found earlier. This was real. The hiker was here. And they were hurt.

I fought to stay calm, but my mind was racing. This person wasn’t just lost. They were being hunted. I could feel it deep in my gut, that sickening certainty. I had to keep going, had to find them before it was too late.

But as I scanned the clearing, the silence grew heavier, more oppressive. Like something was watching me.

I kept searching, my eyes darting around the clearing, every muscle in my body tense, but all I could hear was the wind rustling through the trees. The silence was deafening, heavy, as though the forest itself was holding its breath. But then, I heard it—a gnarled, sickening crunch. A sound that made my blood run cold.

I whipped around, flashlight in hand, the beam cutting through the darkness. My breath caught in my throat as my eyes locked onto the unimaginable scene just beyond the treeline. There, lying in the shadows, was the hiker. Or what was left of him. His body was mangled, torn open like a ragdoll, his entrails spilled across the ground in a sickening display of brutality.

But worse than the body, worse than the blood, was the thing crouching behind him.

The creature was massive, its hulking form towering over the shredded remains of the hiker. Its body was covered in matted, dark hair, thick and wild. Its head bobbed with each sickening crunch it made, the sound of bones breaking echoing through the night air. I could barely comprehend what I was seeing.

Then it turned its head, its eyes locking with mine. Those eyes—they weren’t like anything I had ever seen. Dark, empty, and full of hunger.

Its mouth was a grotesque thing, stretched wide with sharp, jagged teeth, glistening with blood. The stench of it hit me like a wave, rancid and foul. In its clawed hands, it held the hiker’s legs, tearing through them with a grotesque ease. The creature chewed through bone like it was nothing more than celery, its mouth moving with mechanical hunger.

I stood frozen, too terrified to even breathe. The light from my flashlight wavered in my shaking hands as I tried to process what I was seeing. There was no mistaking it. This thing wasn’t some animal or wild creature. It was something far worse, something far older.

And it had seen me.

The creature let out a shriek, a high-pitched, piercing scream that rattled through my skull, making my ears feel like they were going to burst. It was a sound so unnatural, so horrible, that I thought I might lose my hearing entirely. Before I could even react, the thing launched itself toward me with terrifying speed.

I fumbled for my gun, heart hammering in my chest as I drew it. My hands were shaking, but I forced them steady. As it closed the distance, I fired. The first shot hit its shoulder, but the beast didn’t falter. I squeezed off another shot, and this time, the bullet slammed into its massive chest.

The creature stopped, its body jerking back from the impact, a guttural cry of pain escaping its monstrous mouth. For a moment, I thought it might charge again, but instead, it turned and fled into the woods. The sound of its massive frame crashing through the trees, snapping branches and uprooting saplings, echoed long after it had disappeared.

I stood there, frozen, my breath ragged in my chest, the adrenaline surging through me. My heart pounded in my ears as I listened for any sign of it returning. Silence. Nothing but the faint rustle of the wind.

I slowly lowered my gun, still on edge. I glanced back at the hiker’s remains—his torn, mutilated body—a horrible reminder of the nightmare this forest had become. The peaceful trails I had once loved were now tainted with blood, with terror.

The weight of what had just happened crashed down on me. I forced myself to take note of my location, marking the spot where the creature had attacked. I wasn’t about to leave the area unguarded, but I had to get back to the station, to report what had happened.

With slow, deliberate steps, I began making my way back, keeping my gun drawn, my senses heightened. Every shadow in the forest seemed to move, every sound felt like a threat. The night had become a living nightmare. I couldn’t shake the feeling that something else was watching me, waiting for its chance.

I a...

---

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This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/MikeJesus on 2024-11-12 01:02:29+00:00.

---

Alyssa was a wonderful person to have around the flat. She was bright, she was funny and she had all sorts of attractive friends she would introduce me to. When Henry started dating her, I was psyched.

For the most part at least.

Alyssa was a wonderful person, but she was a terrible cook. What made the situation considerably worse was that she was a passionate cook. Henry and I would survive on delivery pizza for the most part, yet every couple of weeks Henry’s girlfriend would drop by and treat the two of us to dinner.

Most of the stuff in our fridge was well past its expiry date and Alyssa’s approach to recipes was the wrong kind of improvisational, yet we’d still let her cook and then pretended to enjoy her food. She was, after all, a wonderful person aside from the whole cooking thing.

Alyssa was a wonderful person, yet, years later, I think it was her liberal interpretation of quiche that began Henry Willow’s journey towards madness.

The meal was far from good, yet it wasn’t until the morning that Alyssa’s culinary skills truly revealed their horror. For three days I existed on a diet of Gatorade and white rice. When I finally ventured past our front door for a grocery run, I felt like a changed man. When I met Henry in the kitchen, it was clear he had changed as well.

Once before, Henry had complained about his dreams. He was going through a bout of insomnia and swallowed an unhealthy amount of sleeping pills to put it to rest. The morning after his sleeping pill experiment, he told me about a dream where he was a spider, or something along those lines.

The morning that we had both recovered from our food poisoning, Henry spoke of his dreams once more. This time, however, he was brimming with passion and fear.

I can’t remember exactly what Henry told me that morning. It’s been decades since the two of us roomed together and the man’s speech was frantic. Apparently, in his sleep, my roommate had been visited by a heavenly being that imparted news of his future. Henry spoke of “Hybrid creatures ruling the world” and “The final century of Man” and a bunch of other things which made me think that the food poisoning had dislodged some screws in his brain.

When Henry mentioned that this heavenly being had given him the winning numbers for the draw of the lottery at the end of the school year — I latched onto that.

It seemed funny.

In comparison to the other things my roommate was saying, it seemed sane.

I laughed and asked him to give me the numbers. I did, after all, suffer from the same poisoning and would be no richer for it.

Henry did not find my joke funny. He was uncomfortable. His fever dream communion had been unlike anything he had ever experienced before. He struggled to understand most of what was imparted to him in the dream, yet he was scared that its apocalyptic predictions were correct.

I, once again, laughed. I assured him that what he had experienced was simply a particularly nasty fever and that he would forget about it in no time. I assured him he would be fine and that no hybrid beasts would rule the world.

Henry seemed to calm at my assurances, and for a moment I felt like I was sitting in the kitchen with my good old easy-going roommate, yet after that morning Henry changed.

We both studied in the sciences, but neither of us were especially studious. Henry in particular had a habit of skipping lectures and borrowing the essays of his more academically gifted classmates. It honestly was a miracle that Henry had managed to pass his first year of university. Henry had always been a slacker, yet his communion with the dream-being radically changed his ways.

I seldom saw the guy around the flat anymore. Henry wholeheartedly committed his whole life to school. He attended every lecture, ceased all of his social activities and even broke up with Alyssa. Apparently, he needed to focus on his schoolwork. Apparently, that’s what the dream-being demanded of him.

My roommate had stopped drinking or smoking or having any kind of fun. He didn’t seem interested in hanging out with me and, after a couple bounced invitations, I let him have his solitude. I just let my life carry on without him.

After the first post-quiche morning, I had forgotten all about the lottery numbers.

Henry had not.

I was coming back from class at the end of the semester when I heard the television was on. The lottery draw, specifically.

Henry was sitting on the couch with a bottle of scotch. Expensive stuff. Lagavulin. There was a dent in the bottle, but he was sitting rigid like a man in an electric chair. He didn’t even notice me coming in.

I grabbed myself a glass and asked Henry for permission. He barely noticed me. All his attention was focused on the television. A bunch of yellow and blue balls were bouncing around a studio aquarium.

Our friendship had long faded by then. It even took me a solid minute to remember the lottery aspect of Henry’s prophetic dream. When the thought did finally connect, I exclaimed and tried making conversation but Henry would have no part of it.

His attention was focused solely on the numbers being drawn.

One by one his body tensed. When the count was halfway through, he downed the rest of his glass and took a deep breath. Henry didn’t budge an inch until the final number was read. As the presenter turned her speech to a crawl for suspense, his eyes remained glued to the screen, unblinking.

When the final number was read Henry gasped for air. He collapsed into himself, like a man mortally wounded.

I refilled my drink and patted him on the shoulder. Judging by his reaction, I presumed the dream numbers had been wrong. I said something to that effect and started to refill his glass as well.

From his nigh catatonic state, Henry grabbed my arm and stopped me from pouring. His words were cold as ice and scarcely resembled my old friend. He told me to never underestimate him again. Visibly frustrated, Henry brought out his winning ticket and waved it in my face.

The numbers matched.

On screen, the announcer was screaming about a winner in a haze of confetti but there was no joy in Henry’s eyes. He wasn’t celebrating his winnings. He was angry at me for doubting his bizarre visions.

Seeing my old friend suddenly rich, I tried calming down the situation. I asked Henry how he was going to spend his winnings. I tried to remind him of all the cool destinations both of us dreamed about traveling to back when we first became buds.

This calmed him down, somewhat. Henry took another deep breath and apologized. The lottery results were a constant source of worry. The months he had spent dedicating himself to science would have been in vain had the numbers not matched. He was simply emotional.

With another deep breath Henry rose and started for his bedroom. Yet, perhaps sensing my confusion, he stopped.

It’s been decades, but what Henry said will forever stick in my skull.

Henry told me, in the calmest of tones, his plans for the future. All of his winnings were to be invested into specific stocks so that his fortune may grow. Henry didn’t tell me where his dreams suggested he invest, but he did wave around his winning ticket as he spoke. He seemed quite pleased with himself.

Henry said that for his long term plans he required a lot of capital. In the meantime, he had learned as much as he could from university and would take his leave in the morning after exams. Before I could even ask the question, Henry said his rent would be covered in full. Then, with a handshake, he bid me goodbye.

The next morning, Henry’s room was bare and the man was gone. He stayed true to his promise, and wired me his share of the rent for the next couple of months and I even briefly got to sublet his room to one of Alyssa’s friends.

She’s my wife now, so I too, in a way, in a less optimal way, won the lottery.

I still think about Henry a lot — the horrible quiche, that morning tea, his ramblings about hybrid creatures and the final century. Those thoughts linger and, I must admit, frighten me. Yet they’re not the reason why I have spent years trying to track the man down.

I want to speak to Henry again. I want us to hang out, like old college buddies, like we used to back in the day. I want to see Henry and when I see Henry, I would ask him for a single thing:

Just a bit of stock advice.

This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/Theeaglestrikes on 2024-11-12 00:42:31+00:00.

---

I (37f) have a son (12m), who I’ll call Nathan, and a daughter (14f), who I’ll call Anna. A couple of months ago, I took Anna to a private hospital for a procedure to have four of her wisdom teeth extracted. Teeth that were, unfortunately, well-embedded in her gums, necessitating the use of a general anaesthetic. The doctor explained that it would be a lengthy procedure. Local anaesthesia just wouldn’t cut it. Anna wasn’t best pleased about that, and neither was I.

Now, anybody who’s seen the aftermath of such sedation, whether in reality or from sadistic, film-making YouTube parents, knows that it often leads to wonky, witty remarks. Though I didn’t personally have a recording phone at the ready, I’ll admit that I was hoping for some bizarre wordplay after the procedure. Instead, my daughter uttered something vile.

Before I repeat her confession, I need to give you some context.

My husband, Ed, used to go white water rafting with our two children and his brother, Darren. Some years, I’d go with them, but work commitments often clashed. Anyway, Ed wasn’t a particularly strong swimmer, so I always felt a little uneasy about the idea of him out on such unforgiving water without me. And, in late 2022, my worst fear came true. A strong current pulled my husband under, and by the time Darren had recovered his body, it was too late. Ed drowned.

The following months were awful, but Anna changed the most severely. To eke even a handful of words out of her became a rarity. But that didn’t stop Uncle Darren from trying. From helping the family to heal, in the wake of Ed’s passing. It was no surprise to me when he offered to come to the hospital with us — keep Nathan company whilst Anna endured her long procedure.

So, around eleven in the evening, when my daughter woke from the anaesthesia, all of those factors were filling my mind.

“Hello, darling,” I said softly, using a pinky to hoist Anna’s sweaty bangs out of her rolling eyes. “How are you feeling?”

Anna’s doped up face observed me absently. But within the teary pools of her wandering eyes, there swam thoughts. Loose, disconnected thoughts, but thoughts that still meant something. And when she opened her mouth to speak, two wads of tissue spilled from her puffy cheeks.

“The house looks empty…” Anna said in a half-muffle, wafting both of her hands at the right-hand side of the hospital room, which was an unlit space lined with empty beds.

“We’re not at our house, sweetpea. We’re in the recovery room,” I explained, poking a slight gap between the overflowing tissues so I could hear her more clearly. “This is a hospital, remember? And you’re got this massive space all to yourself, so I suppose it does seem quite empty.”

Anna mumbled something incoherent.

“You’ve had your teeth removed,” I continued. “And you’re going to feel a little out of it whilst the drug wears off, honey.”

“Where’s the man?” my daughter asked in that low, disoriented moan.

I smiled. “Dr Addis? He’s doing the rounds. But the nurse is here. Joyce. Remember her from earlier?”

The young nurse, fiddling with various instruments on a trolley, looked up and beamed. “Hello again, Anna! Everything went well, and you’re being really brave. I’m going to run a few tests now, then we’ll give you an oxygen mask to get you back into fighting shape. Make sure you tell me if you feel any pain or sickness, okay? It’ll—”

“No…” Anna groaned. “The man.”

“She must miss Dr Addis,” Joyce giggled.

I looked at the nurse apologetically. “Sorry.”

The woman grinned widely and shook her head. “Don’t be silly, Mrs Kary. I’m only teasing! Anna, I’m sure Dr Addis will be back soon, but we—”

“The man!” Anna insisted loudly. “Nathan didn’t see…”

“Sweetie…” I began.

Then my daughter’s wide eyes shot to me, and she slurred her wretched confession.

“Dad didn’t drown. Don’t tell Mum. He… He says he’ll kill us… if I tell Mum.”

There followed silence. A special silence which pressed heavily on the skin, weighing both Joyce and me to the floor. The nurse clearly felt something in Anna’s words. Something more than drug-induced nonsense.

“Where is the man?” my daughter whispered, and I finally understood that she was not talking about Dr Addis.

Uncle Darren and Nathan were sitting in the corridor. That horrifying thought circled my mind as I processed what Anna said. A string of supposedly drug-induced words. That was what any rational person would believe — or, at the very least, want to believe. But a memory came to the forefront of my mind.

Christmas Day, 2023. Darren made a pass at me.

“Gin and hormones, Cynthia,” he sheepishly promised after I spurned him. “That was all.”

I chose to accept that explanation, given that our entire family had already been through so much, but it never sat well with me. Even before Ed’s death, something about Darren had never sat well with me. He forced himself upon our family after the death of my husband — his own brother. Injected himself into the main artery of our lives.

And relatives should be there for a grieving family, obviously, but he tried, time and time again, to go above the call of duty. He continuously turned up at our house to take us for luxurious meals at restaurants. Incessantly coaxed the children into letting him ‘sleep over’ at our home. Would manipulate me into agreeing — feeding Nathan, primarily, with ideas that it would cruel for them to send me home at such a late hour.

Sometimes, at night, I’d hear footsteps from the hallway. Wake in a sweat, quaking in fear as I wondered whether I’d left my bedroom door ajar. And once, I was certain I opened half-sleeping eyes to see a figure sitting on the chair in the corner of the room. But I told myself it had been a dream. One fever dream of many.

“Anna…” I feebly whimpered. “Do you know what you just said? Was it true?”

My daughter loudly shushed me, trying to lift a finger to her lips, but her dozy limb only half-cooperated. “We don’t speak about it. He says he’ll hear if we speak about it. Says he’s always listening…”

“Mrs Kary,” the nurse croaked. “Should I proceed?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know. I don’t know what we should be doing right now. Anna, was this a dream that you had? Please tell me that you—”

“This!” my daughter interrupted, showing a scar on her forearm. “This wasn’t from the oar… It was from him.”

My face turned pale as I eyed the faded scar on my daughter’s arm. A scar that Darren claimed Anna had acquired from her oar after it hit a rock, causing a large, jagged splinter of wood to cut into her flesh.

Before the ‘accident’, Anna talked. Talked, and talked, and talked. She hadn’t been that way for two years, but an influx of anaesthesia had reopened those old gates. I saw that in my daughter’s tearful eyes. She wasn’t aware of herself. Wasn’t aware that she’d confessed a dark secret to her own mother. But the words were true. I didn’t doubt that.

“Mrs Kary…” Joyce continued, still seeming uncertain as to what she should say or do.

“I’m going to find my son,” I said calmly, standing from the bedside chair. “Please watch Anna.”

My daughter’s eyes grew as she finally seemed to identify my face. “Mum…?”

I seized her hand and squeezed. “Everything’s okay, sweetie. Just let Joyce look after you, okay?”

“Right. Everything’s okay,” the nurse agreed weakly, as if I’d said the words for her benefit. “I… I’ll do those tests now…”

I rushed into the corridor and barrelled forwards. But I was so lost in my thoughts — so lost in the laces of my Converse — that I didn’t see. Didn’t lift my head until I’d almost stumbled into the row of blue, plastic chairs at the end of the hallway.

“Mum?” Nathan gasped, swivelling in his seat to look at me. “What’s wrong?”

I’d been too frightened to look ahead. Too frightened to wear a false smile and act as if all were well. But there was something far more frightening about seeing my son sitting alone, in the middle of the row. It was, of course, a blessing to know that I could snatch his hand and scoot him away without facing his questioning uncle. But it terrified me, nonetheless.

After all, Darren had gone somewhere.

“Mum, slow down!” Nathan pleaded, attempting to wriggle out of my handhold as I rushed towards Anna’s room.

I was ready to tear my daughter out of her bed, regardless of the nurse’s advice.

“Sorry, Nathan,” I panted as I shoved the door open. “But I need…”

I didn’t finish that thought.

The recovery room was alarmingly quiet. Anna’s segment, semi-partitioned from the rest of the space by a thick curtain of green fabric, was the only lit section of the large area. One solitary fluorescent light hummed loudly above my daughter’s bed — the only sound in the room. And my daughter had been left unattended.

I rushed over to her bed and asked, “Where’s Nurse Joyce?”

Anna looked at me with teary eyes. “She’s here.”

Rather than unpacking that, I pulled the duvet off her robed body. “We’re going home now, Anna. Come on. Nathan and I will help you stand.”

My son lifted his half-conscious sister with his shoulder under her arm, and I ran around to the other side of the bed. But before I managed to grab Anna from the left-hand side, I slipped — train sole squeaking unbearably on the tiles blow. Fortunately, my hand reflexively reached outwards and gripped onto the green curtain for security.

I didn’t want to look down. And when I did, I wished I hadn’t. There, starting to stain the lower half of m...

---

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This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/Scarlett_Nocturne on 2024-11-11 23:35:21+00:00.

---

But first I need to give you some context. It was nearly five in the evening, and I was half-listening to the news as I folded the last of the laundry. The newscaster’s voice crackled in the silence of the empty house.

“…with yet another victim, police are considering the possibility that the so-called ‘Dearborn Devil’ is not just a burglar, but something far more dangerous. We urge all residents to lock their doors and avoid going out alone at night…”

I chuckled nervously, glancing around the quiet room. But when the front door creaked open, I froze, heart racing. Philip wasn’t due home for hours.

There he was, in the doorway, staring at me with wide eyes. His face looked different, dark and rigid.

“Philip,” I murmured, offering a smile. “You’re home early.”

“Anna,” he said, crossing the room in long, fast strides. He took my hands, gripping them too tightly. “Pack. Quickly. We have to leave now.”

A chill ran through me, cold as the news anchor’s warning still echoing in the room. “What’s going on?”

He didn’t answer, just squeezed my hands harder, almost painfully. “Anna, we don’t have time. Just trust me. There are people after us. Very dangerous people.”

I forced a laugh, “Philip, that doesn’t make any sense. Who would be after us?”

He swallowed, glancing back at the door like he expected someone to burst through it at any second. “Just pack. Lightly. Just a few things.”

I nodded, searching his face for answers he wouldn’t give, then hurried upstairs. I packed a few essentials, slipping Sterling into my bag. He was my old teddy bear, a constant source of comfort since childhood. As I passed the window, I saw the driveway empty except for our truck, bathed in the fading evening light.

When I came back downstairs, Philip was pacing by the door, his own bag on his shoulder, his face tense. Without a word, he led me out to the truck. A new duffel bag lay in the truck bed, bulging with whatever he’d packed inside.

“What’s in there?” I asked as he slid behind the wheel.

“Supplies,” he muttered, not meeting my eyes. His gaze was fixed on the rearview mirror.

He started the engine and pulled onto the road, just as two police cars rounded the corner. The flashing lights flickered to life, casting ominous shadows around us.

“Hold on,” Philip hissed, slamming the gas pedal down hard.

I gripped the seat as the truck careened down the street, skidding around corners as the police tailed us. Philip surprised me with his driving skills. My heart pounded with every sharp turn, the world spinning as we hurtled through side streets, alleys, anything to shake the flashing lights behind us.

Finally, after a blur of speed and sirens, we shot down a narrow path into the woods, where the police cars couldn’t follow. Philip slowed, and the sirens faded into silence, replaced by the creak of trees and our own ragged breaths.

I swallowed, clutching the seat. “Where are we going?”

“To the cabin,” he said, jaw clenched. “My friend’s place. The police might look there eventually, but it’ll buy us some time.”

The sun was gone by the time we pulled up to the cabin, its broken windows gaping like hollow eyes. The air around it felt thick and heavy, pressing down on me as we stepped inside.

“Philip,” I whispered as the door creaked shut behind us, “please explain what’s going on.”

“Not yet,” he said, rubbing his face with trembling hands. “We need to sleep. I’ll keep watch.”

I nodded and laid down on the narrow cot in the corner. I wanted to argue more but I wasn’t sure who I would be arguing with. This wasn’t like Philip at all. He slumped into a chair by the door, his eyes scanning the shadows. I shut my eyes, listening to his breathing, my mind racing.

Time passed in a strange, hollow silence. Then I heard him stand up, his footsteps soft on the floor as he crossed the room. My skin prickled as I felt something cold and metallic against my ankle—a handcuff, slipping into place.

“Philip?” I whispered, my voice shaking.

Before I could pull my leg away, he clasped the second cuff around my other ankle, locking them tight.

I thrashed, kicking out as he fumbled with the chains. My heel caught him in the face, and blood streamed from his nose. With a snarl, he slapped me hard, and the world went dark.

When I came to, I was sitting on a wooden chair with my wrists bound to its arms. Eric sat across from me, wiping the blood from his face. His expression was calm, almost serene, with a strange gleam in his eyes.

“What are you doing?” I gasped.

Philip smiled, a thin, hollow smile. “Anna, what do you remember about the night our son disappeared?”

The question cut through me like a knife. “I got a call from you. You said he was gone. I dropped everything and rushed home as fast as I could.”

“Where did you rush home from?”

I hesitated a moment before answering, “Sarah’s house. I was with her all afternoon. You know that.”

“Liar!” he roared, his face twisted in rage. “You were with someone else. Sarah told me everything.”

My voice trembled. “What?”

Philip took a slow, shuddering breath. “I got summoned by the police today. I went first thing in the morning because they found some mislabeled evidence. Some CCTV footage. They showed it to me, Anna. They wanted to know if anything looked familiar.”

“What was it? What did you see?” I asked genuinely interested in what clues it might hold despite also wanting to ask what it had to do with my cheating or how the police were after him now.“I saw something familiar. My old car parked on a bridge. Right around when I discovered our son having disappeared from his crib. My car was there when it should have been in Sarah’s driveway. And it’s not you with the car. There’s just this very tall and dark figure, just standing there like he’s staring into the water.

“I’ve never seen him before. I had no idea how he could have had access to my car. The video was warped and it was hard to make out details. Still, I told the police I’d bring you to the station to try and figure out who could have stolen the car without you noticing. 

“But on my way home, I had a hunch. I stopped by Sarah’s and she finally told me the truth. How she’s been covering for your affairs for years. Then it all fell in place for me. Of course you’d be able to hang out with your lovers more if you didn’t have a child getting in the way.”

It was my turn to get angry, “Philip! That is not what happened at all!”

He sighed and reached into the duffel bag to pull out a new meat tenderizer, the cold metal glinting in the dim light.

“The police aren’t after me for what I’ve done,” he whispered, eyes gleaming, “but for what I will do.”

I tried to ask, “Why are you taking this out on me?” but he interrupted with a shout, “WHO IS HE?”

I tried to say I didn’t know who he was talking about but I knew the jig was up. He shut his eyes to steel himself for what he was about to do. I took the opportunity to move behind him. His whole body shook with surprise when he opened his eyes to see the chair empty, the handcuffs on the ground and empty rope tied on the chair arms.

Philip took a step back and stumbled into me. He whipped around with his eyes widening as he finally saw me for the first time. Very tall and dark, I towered over him now.

“Sit down,” I said, my voice low and cold. I pointed a claw at the seat I had just vacated.

Philip’s knees buckled, and he sank into the chair, eyes wide with terror. “What did you do to our son?” he whispered, his voice shaking.

I leaned closer, letting my shadow loom over him. “Why, darling, I told you. As soon as I got your message, I dropped everything… and came straight to you.”

His mind was obviously overwhelmed so I helped him out by commanding him to sleep. He slumped back, his eyes going glassy as my words washed over him. I giggled at how he looked exactly the same as when he was taking his nap 10 years ago. I picked up the meat tenderizer from the floor, feeling its weight in my hand, and a dark smile spread across my face.

“Time to go to work,” I murmured.

When Philip next opened his eyes, he was covered in blood, a thick, coppery scent filling the air. His head throbbed, and he stumbled forward, his hands shaking. I was slumped in the chair, bloodied and bruised, bound in chains.

The police burst into the room, guns raised, and I screamed, my voice cracking. “He’s the Dearborn Devil! He said he’d kill me next!”

Philip stared at his hands, horror flooding his face as he saw the bloody meat tenderizer in his grip.

“No, I didn’t—it wasn’t—” he stammered, but the officers grabbed him, hauling him to the floor. In the chaos, I made one of the officer's guns discharge and that started a chain reaction. They all backed off and fired their guns until it was clear that Philip was no more.

They covered me with a blanket and led me outside, to a waiting ambulance. I looked up at the officer and whispered, “Check his teddy bear. He said he was going to get something in there for me.”

The officer nodded, returning a moment later with a bloody knife in his hand, his expression grim. The knife would match the wounds of all the Dearborn Devil’s victims they had found so far. Including the ones not revealed to the media.

“It’s over now, ma’am,” he said softly. “You’re safe.”

I smiled, a shiver of satisfaction running through me. “Yes,” I murmured. “This game is finally over.”

Weeks later, I was released from the hospital and driven home in ...

---

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This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/GRIM_READER_YOUTUBE on 2024-11-11 20:44:48+00:00.

---

This will be the first time I have ever told anyone this. Even now, speaking about it, it was one of the most terrifying situations I have ever been in. To this day, I tend not to look out my window in the dark. It was October time last year and I needed to catch a break, so I did what any normal person would do and looked up social media for a getaway break. I've been single for 2 years now, and I usually do these things by myself. I find it a good way to get away from everything.

I came across a blog about a ''wilderness experience''. You would stay in a cabin out in the woods with one gigantic window that looks out at the wilderness. The cabin isn't much of a cabin at all. It is quite small, basically just one room, one gigantic window, a bed facing the window, and a small bathroom. So, I booked it that very weekend. The drive was uneventful; it took 2 hours to get there. When I was booking, I was told I was going to meet a man named Tom. Tom owned the cabin and, I presume, the land that it was on. I drove into a laneway. The lane went on for about 5 minutes of windy roads, gritted gravel, and shrubs on each side. The further I went in, the denser the shrubbery and trees became.

I pulled up in front of a big, square, white house. As I got out of the car, the gravel underneath sank me just a little bit by my own weight. I walked up to the door and rang the doorbell, then took two steps back. The door opened immediately. An old man greeted me at the door. He was around 5'6", bald, in his 60s or 70s, wearing blue jeans.

"Hello there." "Hi, um, I have a booking in the getaway cabin." "Yes, yes, come in. We were expecting you."

I walked up the two steps and into the house. The house was pretty regular, except for the gigantic ceilings above. There was a small desk to the right-hand side, where the old man went behind.

"Okay, so what time would you like breakfast at?" said Tom

"Um, anytime really. I'm not in any rush."

"Okay, we'll say 9:30."

"Yeah, that's great."

"And what experience are you looking for?" asked Tom.

"Um, how do you mean?" I replied puzzled by the question.

"Well, we have seasonal experiences around here, and because it's coming up to October, we have horror, or you can jump ahead and go straight to Christmas. The experiences are up to you. Here, here is the list."

The list was an A4 sheet of paper. It had an option for four items: number one, Christmas, and then just beside it, in brackets, it said Santa Claus; number two was horror, and beside it, in brackets, it said Halloween; number three was New Year's; number four was Thanksgiving.

"Um, which one is the best?" I asked the man, still confused by the offer.

"Well, while you're here, you will still get the whole experience of the wilderness, but what happens tonight will be completely up to you. Personally, I do think you should avoid the Christmas one, as we are still in October. But, are you brave enough to pick horror?"

I did want to get away from everything for a while. I didn't think I was going to be getting such a confusing offer. So, I looked at the man, took a brave breath in, and said, "Sure, nothing scares me. Go on, I'll do the horror."

"Excellent choice. So here are your keys. Your cabin is just out the door here, down the path through the woods, and you will see it in the middle of the field. Go there, and there are a number of items in the room. Beside these items will be a little note on how to use them. I recommend you keep the lights off; otherwise, when it gets dark out, you won't be able to see anything out your window. But if you keep the lights off, your eyes will adjust. So please, just remember that."

I thanked the old man. I took the keys and went back to my car to collect my things. I followed the man's instructions towards the cabin. It was around 4:00 p.m. at the time. It was slowly getting to dusk as I arrived at the small cabin. The cabin was no larger than 8 ft tall. It was a brown square wooden box with one gigantic window overlooking the tree lines. I walked up to the cabin, unlocked the door, and let myself in. When I came in, there was one chair facing the window, a small fridge to my left-hand side, my bed to my right (not facing the window), and a small bathroom barely big enough for one person. There were a number of random items in the room.

The first one I noticed was a pair of binoculars. The binoculars had a note beside them that said, "Use me at nighttime. I am night vision." The next items I noticed were earplugs. The note beside the earplugs said, "Use me if the wind gets too loud." Finally, there was a notebook. The note beside it said, "Write down your experiences here."

After settling myself in, I decided to take a seat on the chair, pulled over the binoculars, and put them on to see what was in the wilderness. It was around 5:00 p.m. at this point. Off in the distance was an apple tree. Four small baby deer came out and slowly moved their way over to the apple tree, picking at it. The two main deer walked behind the baby deer. It was quite an unbelievable sight, one that, if I wasn’t in this cabin and I was standing outside, would surely never happen because the deer would have been too afraid once they saw me. But behind this window, I could see everything in the wilderness.

At 7:00 p.m., it was pitch black. At this point, I had all the lights off, staring out into the shadows. The night vision binoculars were working. You could see everything in a dark green palette. As I was there gazing out into the wild, I heard a knock on my door. I got up out of my chair and opened it, and not to my surprise, there was no one there. I figured this was one of the horror experiences. It did give me butterflies in my stomach—excited ones—so I sat back down with a small grin on my face.

Suddenly, as I looked out the window, something just ran by. I could barely make it out, but it was definitely in the figure of a human. I picked up my night vision goggles to have a look. Searching far and wide, I found nothing. It must have been just my eyes adjusting, or again, just another one of these horror experiences.

For the next 2 hours, nothing really happened. I drank two beers as I sat in the chair, opened a bag of chips, and just listened to the wind. I wrote down some of my experiences. I wrote down noticing the deer, someone knocking on the door, and something running by the window. I read back on a few of the entries. Nothing out of the ordinary except one from four weeks ago. It was from a woman named Mary. She said that she also had knocks on her door and saw something or someone running by. She said that she regretted picking the horror option.

I told myself I should get ready for bed, but not before I had another look outside using the night vision binoculars. Again, I searched wide and far. Then I noticed something way off in the tree line. Two small dots lit up. The more I stared at the two dots, the more an outline of a figure emerged. It looked like a really skinny man. The man had really long hair coming down his face. Out from the two dots, which I presumed were his eyes, he was hunched over with his shoulders out in front, but his arms were long and skinny. I stared at him for nearly a minute, wondering why there was a man out in the woods at this time. This was surely another horror experience happening.

I stood up from my chair, still in complete darkness. I lowered my binoculars, trying to see if my naked eyes could see the man, and to no surprise, I couldn’t, as it was way too dark outside. So, I put the binoculars back up to my eyes. That’s when I noticed the man was now standing outside of the tree line, closer to me. The tree line was about 100 meters away from the cabin. All in front of me was overgrown grass blowing in the wind. The hunched man never moved, his shoulders still pointing towards me, with his arms nearly down as far as his knees. His hair was still slicked down his face. My heart began to speed up. What was actually happening here? Is this part of the horror experience that the old man welcomed?

Again, lowering my binoculars, I decided to take a sip of water and then put the binoculars back up to my eyes. Now...The figure was about 50 meters away. He was a lot taller than I first expected. I don't know how he got this close so quickly. I took a sip of water for only 3 seconds. How could he move that fast? Since he was closer, I noticed he was breathing heavily. I noticed his arms and body were full of scabs. His facial features became clearer the closer he got, and yet he still didn't move. As I stared, I could see his eyes were staring directly at me.

I decided to grab my phone and call Tom. I was worried that this wasn't all part of the experience. I searched for Tom's name on my phone, found it, put the phone to my ear, and looked up. The man, or figure, was now only 10 feet away from the window. At this point, I did not need binoculars at all. The figure was taller than the cabin itself. Its eyes were fixated on me. Its hair was no longer covering its face. Its wide mouth was left hanging open. Its long arms moved up and down as its body was breathing.

I kept my eyes on the figure as Tom wasn't answering his phone. The figure's head shifted upwards, looking into the sky. Its neck was long and skinny. Its hair was falling down the back of its head, revealing its skinny, stretched abdomen. It roared in a high-pitched voice. I put my hands ...

---

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This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/Euphoric_Welcome_668 on 2024-11-11 18:11:01+00:00.

---

When my husband burst into our bedroom waving the transfer papers, his eyes sparkled with a joy I hadn't seen since our wedding day. “Germany, Sarah! They picked me to lead the Munich project!"

Staring at him in disbelief, our three-month-old daughter sleeping soundly in her bassinet beside us. I should have been elated. This was his dream – leading an architectural team on an international project.

But as I held our daughter Emma during those sleepless nights, anxiety gnawed at me, him being at the office or on business trips, Moving across the world with postpartum depression and a newborn felt like jumping off a cliff blindfolded. Still, I painted on a smile.

John deserved this chance, even if lately it seemed his blueprints got more attention than his family. "Think of it as an adventure," he whispered as our plane lifted off the tarmac. "Just one year. We'll explore Europe together, make memories with Emma." I squeezed his hand, leaving behind our family and friends. Not to mention everything we’ve ever known and loved

The rental agent, Frau Weber, toured us through our new home in suburban Munich. The main floor was bright and airy, with tall windows that flooded the rooms with light. "Perfect for a young family," she beamed. "Excellent schools nearby, parks within walking distance." John practically bounced through each room, rattling off renovation ideas and pointing out architectural details. The basement, however, stopped his enthusiasm cold. While most of it had been converted into a modern living space, complete with plush carpet and delicate floral wallpaper, an odd door stood at the far end like a tomb marker. Its wood was scarred and weathered, children's stickers peeling off its panels, hinges orange with rust. "What's behind there?" I asked, noting how the door seemed to absorb the light around it. Frau Weber's smile faltered. "I... I'm not certain. The previous owner left rather suddenly, as he was a bit of a loner.I can inquire if you'd like?" "No need," I said quickly, though something about that door tugged at the edges of my mind. "We won't be here long enough to worry about it." The first few months passed in a blur of adjustment. John threw himself into his project while I navigated life as an attentive mother. Gradually, I made friends with other families in the neighborhood, as well as the moms who stayed at home. Though my German improved, I was still slightly nervous.Emma started sleeping through the night. Even John began coming home earlier, spending weekends taking us to beer gardens and on family outings instead of the office.

But that door. It haunted my thoughts, especially at night. I searched the shed, combed through boxes left by the lonely man, looking for a key. Nothing. Until our final week, as we packed to return home. I found it in Emma's room, of all places, tucked inside an old stuffed bear that had been left on a shelf. The key was black iron, its head ornately carved with what looked to be some sort of moth

"John!" I called, racing to the basement. He followed in suit, curiosity overtaking his usual caution. The key slid in smoothly, as if it had been waiting for us. God knows how long it’s been waiting for us.

The stench hit first – sweet rot and old copper as if a million rats were left to die, the smell dissipating but lingering.John fumbled for the dangling light bulb. In the sickly yellow glow which mixed with the fluorescents that filled the basement, horror befell our very eyes.

Mason jars lined old shelves, their contents floating in murky fluid – eyes, tongues, fingers. Leather items that couldn't possibly be leather hung from hooks. Photographs covered one wall, showing people in various stages of terror. And there, mixed among the older pictures, were new ones.

Us.

Walking Emma in the park. Shopping at the market. Sleeping in our bed.

On a workbench lay fresh tools and an appointment book. The last entry was tomorrow's date, with three names:

John. Sarah. Emma.

Frau stood in the doorway, her eyes blazing with rage and pure evil. "I see you found our key," she spat, clutching a tarnished silver cross. "I told my father that the teddy bear was a bad idea, but he never listened, just like he never did. He wanted me to carry out his twisted legacy long after he's gone, but I refused. That was until I realized he was right. A father who's inattentive, a mother whose mind is plagued with such great despair that it's more important than her child. And then there's little Emma, born out of wedlock. You're our perfect specimens, the whole reason he did this. He used his faith as a weapon, a justification for his monstrous acts. And now, so will I."

Letting out an agonizing scream, Frau lunged at my husband, the tarnished cross clutched in her hand. Tackling him to the ground, she raised her arms, screaming Proverbs and Psalms in his face. I grabbed the first thing I could find and smashed her in the back of the head. Blood began pooling from her long black hair as she fell to the floor, her twisted prayers broken. Mallet in hand, tears poured from my eyes. I had just killed someone, yet relief washed over me that this was finally over.

The police came and conducted a thorough investigation. They determined that Frau and her father were responsible for dozens of deaths, if not more. Not only previous residents but prostitutes and various homeless community members had fallen victim to them. Multiple cold cases were closed and the families were finally able to find some closure, even if they'd never be able to find the bodies.

We moved back to the States the next day. John took a pay cut to transfer home early. Sometimes I see him checking the locks twice, three times at night.And Emma's new room? We sealed off the closet door completely.

But late at night, I swear I can hear hinges creaking somewhere in our house. And sometimes, when I check on Emma, I spot a strange sticker on her wall that wasn't there before.

This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/RichardSaxon on 2024-11-11 17:39:31+00:00.

---

“Captain, do you have a moment?” Henderson asked quietly, concern clearly present in his eyes. “It’s Levi. He’s not doing too hot.”

I sighed, still not sure what to make of the situation. He’d been out of it for the past twenty-four hours, and mission control hadn’t yet been informed regarding his status.

“Let’s talk to him again,” I suggested.

I glanced out through the window, staring down at Earth’s brilliant, blue shine below. We were more than five hundred kilometers up in the atmosphere, and should a medical emergency arise, we weren’t equipped to handle it, but notifying our superiors would mean a premature end to our journey. It wasn’t a choice I would make lightly. With no one back on Earth even aware of our covert mission, we couldn’t afford a do-over.

We pushed our way through the station, floating around corners towards our bedchambers at the station’s rear end. Levi had been confined to his room since he started displaying symptoms, but in spite of his poor mental state, he had not yet made an attempt to leave his room.

He sat against the wall, sobbing quietly, not taking the time to acknowledge our presence.

“Levi, how are you holding up?” I asked as comfortingly as I could.

“We have to find her. She has to be out there. She’s not gone,” he mumbled to himself.

“Find whom?” I asked.

“Why are you pretending like you don’t know,” he went on. “Carey is out there. She needs us.”

I glanced over at Henderson. We shared a confused expression before redirecting our attention back to Levi. His eyes were bloodshot, heavy bags lining their underside. Even under heavy sedation, he hadn’t slept a single minute.

“Levi—” I began, “there is no Carey. There’s just the four of us here, and we haven’t had an EVA in over a week. There’s no one outside. There can’t be.”

“How can you say that? How can you look me in the eyes and pretend like you don’t know?”

It was a discussion we’d had on more than one occasion in the past day, repeating it would only serve to exhaust all of us. And getting increasingly worried by the minute, we excused ourselves and locked him back inside his room. Though stuck in his bizarre delusion, Levi made no attempt to resist his confinement.

We returned to the bridge, where Adriana Lowe was waiting for orders on what to do next.

“What do you think?” I asked.

“Mental break?” Henderson suggested. “I just don’t know what set it off.”

“What about a tumor? Neurological disorder?” Lowe asked.

“The company put us through a barrage of medical tests, including an MRI. Unless he grew a brain tumor in the past two weeks, that ain’t it,” Henderson replied. “It’s only been a day, and—”

Henderson was interrupted mid-sentence by a bang reverberating throughout the station, appearing to originate from the outer hull.  

“What the hell was that? Did we just get his by something?” Lowe asked.

“Not a chance, anything up here would have torn through the exterior,” I replied. “Check the computer. Confirm that nothing’s malfunctioning.”

Lowe pulled herself over to the control panel and started performing a system’s check. Though no alarms had been triggered, there were a handful of non-emergency errors, enough to prompt a worried expression on Lowe’s face.

“Captain, we’ve got a problem.”

Already by her side, I started reading over the alerts.

“We’ve lost contact with the T-driss?” I half asked, half stated.

“I can’t realign the antennas, only four of six are even operational. We can’t contact mission control,” she said.

“I don’t understand,” Henderson began. “Didn’t Levi check this yesterday?”

“It’s just a minor power failure, isolated to the communications’ array. Probably a blown circuit,” Lowe explained.

“That’s the bang we heard?” I asked.

“Wouldn’t have been that loud. None of the alarms went off either, so no fire,” Lowe went on.

“What do you suggest?”  

“Not sure yet, we just have to find the damage.”

“I’m sure Levi was working on the solar array electrical supply yesterday. In his state of mind, he could have easily crossed some wires, since they run through the same sections as the Antennae,” Henderson suggested.

“I’ll get the repair logs,” I said. “Lowe, have a look at the wires in the meantime.”

Grabbing the repair logs, I started flipping through the handwritten pages, looking for the last entry. All of us had taken our turn maintaining the systems during our two-week tenure aboard the station, mostly one or two sentences to confirm that everything was in order. I didn’t even need to check the signature, seeing as I had become well acquainted with our team’s handwriting during our several years of training. Henderson’s, Lowe’s, Levi’s, my own—but an entry by a fifth, unknown person caught my eye, with loopy handwriting and an unintelligible signature. It was an entry by a person not stationed aboard the CSS.

But before I could examine the entry any further, a loud knock was heard, as if something had slammed against the station’s exterior.

The sound was loud enough to garner the attention of our entire team, but none could come up with a plausible explanation of what had caused it. Until the sound repeated, and Henderson had an idea.

“Lowe, you said two of the antennae were non-operational?”

She nodded.

“The way they were installed, it’s mostly clinging to the station by the cables running them. It’s possible the base detached, causing them to dangle around and periodically slam against the hull.”

We waited as the sound repeated, coming from approximately the same spot. Henderson could be right, and it meant fixing the problem would require a session of extravehicular activity.

“Don’t worry, I’ll go outside and fix it,” Henderson said, as if he could read our minds.  

“An unauthorized EVA session? Mission control won’t be happy,” Lowe chimed in.

“How are you planning to contact them to ask permission? Captain Foley is in charge. He can make the call,” Henderson replied as he gestured towards me.

I could only nod in agreement. “We don’t exactly have another choice.”

“Right… let’s get to it then,” Henderson said as he started heading for the airlock.

We accompanied him to the inner hatch with its preparation chamber equipped with spacesuits and tools. He quickly got dressed and entered the airlock, hesitating for but a moment to glance back at the three remaining suits.

“There’s only four suits in total,” he pointed out.

“There’s only four of us here,” Lowe said.

“Still, five bedchambers, even if the station isn’t manned to max capacity, there should be one suit per bed.”

“I can’t remember there being more than four,” I said. “Does it matter?”

“I’m not sure,” Henderson said, but he ultimately decided it wasn’t worth the time it took to discuss it. He closed the inner hatch to the airlock behind him and attached himself to the EVA safety-line. If he was right about the antenna, it wouldn’t be a hard task to reattach it to its base. He quickly climbed to the topside of the station and called in via radio to relay his findings.

“I see two broken antennae,” he said. “But they’re just broken and bent, not detached from the base.”

“Can you clarify?”

“I mean, the noises we heard, it couldn’t have come from the damaged antennae. It looks more like something tried to rip it out. There’s no impact damage.”

“Can you repair it?”

“Yeah, absolutely. Give me thirty minutes. Have Lowe look at the wiring in the meantime, there’s bound to be some damage to that as well.”

“I’m on it,” Lowe said, allowing me to stay on the line with Henderson.

“It’s weird, though. There’s nothing out here that could explain the damage nor the banging sound. It must be coming from inside,” Henderson said.

“Inside? How do you figure that?”

“Could be a fault with the pipes,” he said. “Or maybe someone moved into the walls.” He chuckled at the last quip, but I could tell he was nervous about the situation.

We tried to stick to small talk to ease the tension, but Henderson had to keep his mind focused, and I didn’t want to distract him from the task at hand with conspiracy theories. Still, my mind kept reverting back to the handwritten entry in the repair log, written by someone not present on the ship, though clearly dated more than a week after we arrived in space.

“Captain, I know you’re thinking about the repair log. I could tell you noticed the aberrant entry. I saw it too. I wanted to say something earlier, but I wasn’t sure what to make of it.”

“Did you recognize the signature?” I asked.

“No, but it made me think—” Henderson began, only to stop dead in his tracks.

“Henderson?”

He remained silent until I repeated his name over the radio.

“I think I see something,” he explained. “Yeah, there’s definitely something outside. It’s moving.”

“What do you see?” I asked, not yet understanding the gravity of the situation.

“It’s just like a weird silhouette. It’s hard to say, it’s too far away. It’s definitely moving though—Shit, it’s getting closer. Jesus Christ—it’s alive! Get me out—”

“Henderson?” I near yelled into the radio. “Henderson, respond!”

Another few seconds of radio silence, but Henderson wouldn’t respond. I kept calling for him, loud enough to catch the attention of the remaining crew. Lowe came rushing back to my position, startled by the ruckus.

“What’s going on?” she asked as she saw me gripping the radio with all my might.

“Henderson, he saw something outside. I think he—” I tried to explain before Lowe cut me off.

“Henderson? Who the he...

---

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