Babchia's Story

Originally posted by: End of Worlds

I'm relaying a story from my grandmother, who told it to me exactly once, years ago, and refuses to speak of it ever again.

My great grandmother was a Polish immigrant who came to this country around 1915. She married shortly after, and my grandmother was born in 1922. This story takes place when my grandmother was nine years old and my great uncle was an infant.. They lived in Brooklyn. The rest of this story is transcribed from what she told me.

"It was a cooler summer day, and Babchia (Polish for "grandmother," pronounced Bop-chee; it's what we all called her) and I were taking your great uncle to the park a few blocks away. It was a weekday and folks were at work, so there weren't many people out on the street. We were about a block away from the park on one street with no one else out when we saw a little girl walking towards us. She looked about my age, maybe a little older, with black hair. We couldn't see her face because she was looking down at the sidewalk as she walked towards us. The first thing I noticed was that Bapchia straightened up a bit and frowned, like there was something wrong. I started to ask her what was wrong, but a moment or so later I picked up on it too.

There was something weird about the girl. I didn't like looking at her; I got this watery feeling in my eyes and I felt afraid. She kept walking directly towards us. When she was around thirty feet away Bapchia pushed the stroller at me and told me quietly to cross the street and hurry to the end of the block, and most of all don't look back.

I was very afraid by now, so I did what she said. I waited at the end of the block, nervous as a wreck, waiting for her to come back. Finally she did, and she was pale as a ghost, and scared looking. She was holding onto the crucifix at her neck. I thought she'd been running. She wouldn't tell me what had happened, only that we had to leave.

It took me years to get her to tell me what she'd seen that day after I left. She never wanted to talk about it, and would yell at me if I brought it up. Finally one day she did, and she still looked scared to tell it.

She told me that after I had crossed the street, the little girl kept walking until she was just a few feet away, and then she stopped. Bapchia stopped too, looking at her. The girl slowly looked up from the ground to stare at Bapchia, who said her face and eyes were "like the dead," though she would never explain what that meant.

Then the little girl opened her mouth. Wide. Much, much wider than a human mouth could go. And she kept opening it. It stretched down to her chest, while her eyes stayed locked on Bapchia's. That was when Bapchia broke and ran, crossing the street to my side and hurrying towards me without looking back."

After she finished I wrote it down in its entirety as best I could. My great grandmother was extremely religious and, according to my grandmother, swore until her dying day that this story was true. My grandmother, though she did not witness the whole thing, was visibly unsettled by the memory. I haven't embellished or altered a thing here, everything I posted is exactly what she told me.