This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/HeatConfident4673 on 2024-09-25 11:14:41+00:00.
My little sister Ella died a year ago. She was only 12.
The doctors said it was natural causes, but there was nothing natural about what happened to her. The truth is, our family killed her, slowly, over years of cruelty. It wasn’t sudden, but a slow, deliberate breakdown of her spirit—of her soul. They broke her.
Our father died when we were young, and my sister and I were taken in by his side of the family. It was supposed to be temporary, until our mother could get back on her feet. But it wasn’t. Ella suffered the most. My father’s family—my uncle, aunt, cousins—hated us. They hated her.
They were monsters, but they wore the faces of family.
The worst part? I couldn’t do anything to stop it.
I tried to protect Ella, but I was just a kid, too. She’d get locked in the basement for days, the door clicking shut behind her while my aunt turned the key with a smile. Sometimes, they’d forget to feed her. Other times, they’d do it on purpose. It wasn’t just the physical abuse—it was the torment. The things they said to her. They loved to make her feel small, powerless.
I remember seeing her eyes when they told her she wasn’t worth anything, that no one would miss her if she disappeared. Her eyes went empty. Dead.
I didn’t realize that, in a way, she had already died long before her heart stopped.
Ella's death was a relief to them, a way to erase their guilt, bury their sins. I think they believed, deep down, that once she was gone, all the things they had done would be buried with her. They never expected what would happen next.
At the funeral, something strange happened. Our mother—broken, hollow, not really there—stood apart from the rest of the family. She wasn’t crying. She hadn’t cried since the day Ella died. I watched her walk up to the casket, her hands trembling as she touched Ella’s cold face. For a moment, it looked like she was about to break down.
But she didn’t.
Instead, she leaned over Ella’s still body and whispered something into her ear.
I wasn’t close enough to hear it, but I saw the look in her eyes. I’ll never forget that look. It was...unsettling. Like she was speaking to someone she knew would hear her, someone who wasn’t really gone.
Later that night, I asked her what she whispered. At first, she didn’t answer. She just stared at me, her expression unreadable. But then, in a voice that was barely a whisper, she told me:
"I told her to avenge me."
I didn’t understand what she meant at the time. I thought it was just her grief talking. After all, the family had taken everything from us. I thought she was just angry, broken. But now, looking back, I realize it was something much darker.
The first sign that something was wrong happened the night after the funeral.
It started with the sounds. It was subtle at first—soft whispers that seemed to come from the walls, like distant voices carried on the wind. But the house was still. There was no wind. I remember standing in the hallway, holding my breath, listening. It wasn’t random noise. It was too clear, too deliberate.
"You know what you did."
At first, I thought it was my imagination. I told myself I was just hearing things. But the whispers grew louder each night. They weren’t coming from outside; they were inside the house, crawling through the cracks in the walls, echoing in the corners. Sometimes, I’d catch a word or two, but other times, it was just the soft, almost pleading sound of a voice I couldn’t place.
But the others heard it too.
My uncle, the cruelest of them all, was the first to crack. He began waking up in the middle of the night, drenched in sweat, screaming about seeing something in his room. He swore that Ella was standing at the foot of his bed, watching him.
“She’s not gone,” he’d mutter to himself during the day, pacing back and forth. His eyes were wild, sunken, like he hadn’t slept in weeks. “She’s still here.”
No one believed him. They thought he was losing his mind. But I believed him.
Because I saw her, too.
It started small. Out of the corner of my eye, I’d catch glimpses of her—just for a second—standing in doorways or reflected in windows. She was never close, never fully there, but it was her. I know it was.
Her face was pale, hollow, and her eyes...they weren’t the same. They were dark, like empty pits, staring back at me. Her expression never changed. It was like she was waiting for something, or someone.
I tried to ignore it, tried to convince myself that it was just my mind playing tricks on me. But deep down, I knew. Ella wasn’t resting. She was waiting.
Then, the scratches started.
It was late one night when I heard it—a slow, deliberate scraping sound, like nails dragging across the walls. It came from inside the house, from the basement, where they used to lock her away. I wanted to believe it was a rat, or maybe just the house settling, but when I went downstairs to check, I found something much worse.
The walls were covered in deep scratches, gouged into the plaster, as if something—or someone—had been clawing at it, trying to escape.
But that wasn’t the worst part.
Above the scratches, carved in the same jagged lines, were words. Words I knew weren’t there before:
"You will pay."
My uncle was the first to die.
They said he fell down the stairs in the middle of the night, that it was a tragic accident. But I know what really happened. I saw his face before they covered it up. His eyes were wide open, filled with terror, as if he had seen something...something that shouldn’t have been there.
After he died, things escalated. The whispers became louder, more insistent. The footsteps started—slow, deliberate, like someone walking through the house in the dead of night. Every time they happened, I would freeze, listening, praying it would stop. But it never did.
My aunt, who had locked Ella in the basement so many times, began hearing voices. At first, she thought it was just her imagination, but the whispers followed her everywhere. In the bathroom, in her bedroom, even in her car. Always the same voice. Always Ella.
She begged for it to stop, but it didn’t. She started sleeping with the lights on, but that didn’t help either. One morning, I found her sitting on the floor of her room, her eyes wide and vacant, mumbling to herself. She wouldn’t look at me, wouldn’t respond. All she did was repeat the same phrase, over and over:
"She’s coming for me. She’s coming for all of us."
The rest of the family didn’t fare much better. My cousins, once so full of life, started looking hollow and gaunt. They hardly spoke anymore, their eyes darting around the house as if they were waiting for something. I knew what they were waiting for.
Ella.
It was only a matter of time before she came for them too.
And then there’s me.
I thought I’d be spared, that Ella wouldn’t come for me because I had tried to protect her. I wasn’t like the others. I loved her. But lately...I’ve been hearing something, too.
At first, it was just a whisper in the dark, something I could ignore. But now, it’s louder. Clearer. I hear it in my dreams, and sometimes, I wake up in the middle of the night with the feeling that someone is standing over me, watching.
Last night, I woke up to find a message scratched into the wall beside my bed.
"I’m coming."
And I know she is.