Posted by: TacoCriminal
The sealed, séance room at the old farm house.
My grandmothers house is a restored and remodeled farmhouse. The foundation,
and most of the downstairs, is unchanged from when the original house was built
around 150 years ago. All of the materials, the lumber, iron nails, thick door frames,
are all the same. For a better mental picture of the house, the downstairs is very
similar to the house in the 1990 return of the living dead. The difference is the
hidden basement, and the previously sealed room.
Without going into boring detail, a hidden basement was discovered at my
grandparents house about 40 years ago, and there was a strangely shaped room
down there. No one knew what the room was for, until a local psychic looked at the
room and immediately told my grandparents to stay away from it, and to move the
antique furniture out of the room.
The psychic, or as the town called her "witch," left the house in a panic repeatedly
mumbling "bad people," and "cursed." My grandparents didn't do as she said, and
only moved out the furniture when my father and mother bought a house.
Family and friends always thought the old witch was just a crazy woman, until the
problems started. Now, no relative on either side of the family will accept the
furniture, and some can't even bring themselves to look at it when they're at my
parents house.
No one goes in the basement. No one can figure out why the basement has smelled
like rotting meat ever since the furniture was moved. There has never been an
explanation why the door to the basement will unlock itself, and open. The fresh
flowers grandma used to arrange downstairs will always wilt in a day, and everyone
who has stayed and been in the bathroom has heard at least once someone knock on
the basement door and quietly ask "hello?"
Like my parents house. . .except not as worse.
This is the background story before the serious stuff.
The death bed/ The silent mirror.
The worst part of the furniture that was moved was an old wooden bed that was
painted in a faded, pea soup green, and the matching mirror cabinet. Everyone
hated these pieces of furniture after the move.
The bed frame had a huge, plain headboard, and there were pillars in the four
corners of the bed that ended in a dull, arrowhead shape. Because of the design of
the bed, the mattress would rest just below a thick frame that connected all the
pillars. When you laid down in the sunken bed surrounded by its high, wooden
walls, you always felt like the bed was swallowing you. About 150 years ago, an
unknown relative of the family built this bed, and no parts had been changed since.
Every time you rolled on the bed it would creak loudly, moaning under the stress it
has had to endure over the decades.
The matching mirror was a huge and flawless despite its age, and the ornate frame
for the piece showed no signs of wear. The mirror was attached above cabinets, so
an average size man could only see his reflection above his waist. In the room that
had both pieces, the mirror faced the bed. The headboard of the bed faced the door,
and the mirror was on the same side as the door. If you wanted to see your reflection
in the mirror, you had to walk into the room and stand in front of the bed.
The reason the bed is called the death bed is because family members would always
sleep on the bed when they were extremely sick, or going to die. Almost all of my
dads family had died on that bed, and by coincidence, a few of my mothers family
passed always as well there. My first experience with the death bed was when I was
a child, and I had a bad case of strep throat. I had to sleep on the bed.
I had fallen asleep as soon as my head touched the pillow, but my fever was too
strong, and I woke up in pain around midnight. As I lay in the bed, struggling
against the pain and facing the wall on the left side of the bed, I heard the bed creak.
Not only did I hear the bed creak, but I could feel it move.
I lay motionless until the creak happened again, and I felt someone roll over closer
to me. Thinking it may be my mother who might have come in to keep an eye on me
since I was sick, I rolled over to see if she was asleep. Someone else was there.
A woman, probably in her thirties, was facing me. She was staring right at me with
her eyes and mouth wide open. She looked like she was going to start crying and
wail out in pain, but she just stared. Surrounding her eyes and mouth were dark
blue circles, and her straight black hair was thrown covered part of her face. Her
cheeks were sunk in, and her mouth kept dropping more and more open like the
sorrow was becoming too much. I turned away to try and grab a hold of the side bed
and pull myself out, and when I looked back she was no longer there. I crawled back
into the bed, put the sheets over my head, and didn't move for the rest of the night.
I told my mother what I saw in the morning, and she didn't seem too concerned
until I mentioned how sad and hurt the woman looked. My mother, who was sitting
at the kitchen table with me, stood up, went to the bedroom where my father was
getting ready for work, and starting talking to him. I couldn't make out what she
was saying, but he came out soon after and said "don't go in that room again, and
you're not to sleep in there again, I don't care how sick you are." I asked if it was
because of the woman and he said yes, and then I asked if I'm going to be in trouble
and he said "your great aunt is dead, she won't bother you and she was nice
woman."
She is the only young woman to die on the bed. She died of some type of
asphyxiation that the farmland doctors couldn't figure out. Apparently she stopped
getting enough oxygen being pumped in her blood, and she died being virtually
paralyzed and unable to call out for hours.
The good poltergeist stuff is coming up; this is the calm stuff.
More death bed/mirror
Although this particular mirror (there are three total) never conjured the big
problems like the other mirrors, it did something strange always. The room with the
bed and mirror had blinds that keep all the light out of the room when closed, and
at night, there was no light at all. The room was always pitch black except the
mirror, which would glow. It wouldn't project light or illuminate anything, but it
would glow brightly despite no light being directed to it at all. If you went to look in
the mirror, you could see a clear reflection of yourself, but NOTHING else in the
room. It was like you existed in a void.
Death bed silent man
My first encounter with the silent man was about two years after the dead woman
on the bed. It was during the day, and I was looking through the mirror cabinet
draws for an old stapler. I found the stapler, and I as I was looking at it to see if it
needed staples (or if it would work), I heard a man clearly say:
"Hi"
He didn't say it in a friendly tone, but more of "I see you" sort of tone. What's
worse is I looked up into the mirror and I was alone in the room. I moved as quickly
out of the room as I could, and as I did I heard the same voice, but in a growling,
angry voice say:
"Get back here"
I didn't, but whatever it was now angry, and people started to take notice.
Since the room with the bed was at the end of the end of the hall, you could look
right in to the living room from the doorway. Also, you could always see me leave
my room since. I remember the first time I left my room and froze in fear as I
looked into the doorway of the death bed room. There was something like a man,
translucent, crouched down like a panther ready to pounce. I stared into the top of
the head of the "man" (because the figure was looking down), until I gathered
enough courage to run for the living room where my parents were. As I took off, so
did it, and it jabbed me in the small of my back, knocking me down. Over the period
of a year, this happened a few more times, and I have scars on my lower back the
size of fingertips. There are no fingerprints, but there are unusual and consistent
oval scars.
Also, since my parents room were right next door to the death bed room, the door to
my parents room would slam shut. It would only slam shut when someone was
trying to enter or leave the room, sometimes hitting one of my parents in the face
with the door. My mother was pissed one day that the doors would do that and I
said it was the ghost in the death bed room. She said she knew, and her and my
father could hear something laughing through the walls sometimes.
She closed and bolted the door shut until we moved. Occasionally you would hear
something knock lightly on the door and ask "hello" very quietly. When we moved,
my parents had the bed and mirror destroyed to take care of the problem.
Unfortunately we then decided to keep the old music boxes and the buried mirrors.
On a kinda side note: No one had ever experienced anything bad with the bed, or
anything with the angry male ghost until it was moved into the séance room in the
farm house basement. People don't go down there anymore because something else
also knocks lightly on the closed basement door and asks "hello."
The big stories about the old music boxes and the two mirrors are next.
First the old music boxes.
I hated this fuckin' things since the first time I saw them. They were about 100 years
old, ceramic (mostly), highly decorated with sky and clouds type themes, and the
music that came out of them were perfect. All three of them, the two clouds and
soaring ballerina (the top had a ballerina that would twirl when the box was
wound), were in perfect condition. They just didn't seem right. The people had left
these boxes and everything else their daughter had behind. They were angry with
her because she committed suicide, and didn't want a reminder of such a bad child.
Wow, what a happy family.
We stored everything she used to have in the attic except the boxes (my mom loved
them), and we didn't take down this mirror thing she had in her room. Instead of a
full-length mirror, she took mirror squares and glued them almost next to each
other on a part of the wall. It was like a broken, full-length mirror that faced the
bed. Luckily, I got the room with the horrible mirror.
One day, the dog was chasing one of our cats around, bumps into the dresser that
had the music boxes on them, and all the boxes fall to the floor and break. There
were only two people that were upset that happened: my mother and the daughter.
We were there only one month after that, and it was a nightmare. Our dog suddenly
developed over 50 ulcers in her stomach and died. . .in three days. Even though
there was no smoke, you and everyone around you would start choking and
coughing. Air would rush so strongly by your ears sometimes that you couldn't hear
the world around you. People would start sleep walking (the only time ever in this
house during this period) and leave the house. You would always wake up outside
like it was an eviction of a supernatural kind. Then there was her mirror.
She looked very similar to the girl in the ring (no drowning symptoms, evil whitish
eyes, or any of that stuff, but she wore a white night dress and has long, dark hair). I
remember being in bed and looking at the mirrors, when I saw her for the first time.
It was like the mirrors were really one big, broken window, and she was looking
through. Just her upper body because she was like peering around through the
mirrors at me, and she was angry. Sometimes she would look scared or worried, but
most of the time is was pure anger. I hid every time I saw something like that, except
when I was leaving the room. Sometimes I would be walking out and I would look at
the mirror at an angle, and I could see her kinda like hiding behind the wall so you
couldn't see her if you looked directly at the mirror.
She apparently appeared in some other mirrors in the house, but I didn't see them.
New tenets moved in after us, and then quickly moved away. The house had been
abandoned for a few years and was recently torn down.
Next are the antique mirrors that used to be buried. (Why my mother and father
wanted them, I have no idea.)
More about the death bed I forgot
Just about everyone that knows the death bed room remembers the mumbling
voices. If you left my room at about 1 a.m., or at noon, you could hear about 10
people "talking," but it was more like a whole bunch of mumbling voices. If you got
to about two steps from the doorway to the room, they would stop but not all at
once. It was like someone said "everybody quiet," and not everybody did right
away.
I had a sleep over, and one of my friends got up to use the bathroom at night. He
said when he was coming back that he heard the mumbling in the room that I told
him about a while ago. However, he didn't go up to the door, but stood there and
tried to listen to what's going on (the angry male ghost hadn't appeared yet, so there
was no reason to be scared). Eventually, the voices quickly died down and he left
about 5 seconds after it was quiet. As he started to walk to my room, the door to the
death bed room closed very slowly, and he says he heard something like a giggle.
When he made it to my room he was so scared he was crying.
would rather have the death bed than this mirror. Sure, I don't live at home
anymore, but the fact that it exists bothers me. It's called the blood mirror because
the seal used to keep the back of the mirror to the frame is blood. Blood isn't like
glue so we were able to crack the frame off easily (we were going to save the frame
and replace the mirror around the first week we had it, but we put everything back
together). One of my mothers relatives (the first woman to kill herself) used to do
this with cabinet seals and stuff, so we weren't shocked when it happened, but we
were spooked.
She tried to put her blood in everything because she was some type of witch, and she
was trying to live forever or something. I know that's going to raise questions but we
don't really know because there aren't any records of her anymore or any solid
information or basis really in witchcraft. She was probably just plain nuts.
Here's a diagram of the upstairs where the mirror is. It will be important later.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Brothers Room | Bathroom | Parents Room
| |
| |
|--------------------D------------------------------|
D D
-----------------| Hallway |
Blood Mirror D |
Room |--------------------------------D------| |
| Metal frame mirror room | Stairs |
| | |
| | |
----------------------------------------------------------
It's crude, but there you go. It's all upstairs.
Ghost stairs
There are three types of ghosts on the stairs. The first is the casual walker, who will
walk at a calm pace. Even if you stare at the stairs, whatever it is will keep walking.
This doesn't happen to often anymore, but it was really cool when it did.
The second is the clumsy runner. Someone just takes off and kinda trips and
stumbles on the stairs on the way up. It's like a kid running. Very rare to happen.
Both all reach the landing on the second floor and walk towards the blood mirror
room, past the metal mirror room. That's how I connect the stairs walkers, but I
could be wrong.
The third is horrible.
I was asleep one night and I woke up to a loud thud downstairs. I listened as
whatever it was ran full speed to the stairs, up the stairs, down the hall, and
slammed into the door with the blood mirror in it and kept slamming. . .where I was
sleeping. I started shaking because I just woke up and it sounded like some madman
was in the house coming for me and I wasn't ready. My dad comes out of his room
and yells "what the fuck are you doing at. . " and trails off. No one was there in the
hallway.
The knocker
The knocker comes in two varieties. The knocking with the death bed room is more
of someone making a fist, sticking out his or her index finger, and gently rapping on
the door. The first knocker with the mirror is nothing like that. It's more of a full
fist, all four knuckles rapping on the door. This one comes once in a while and just
knocks on the blood mirror door for about two minutes, sometimes during the day.
"knock knock knock" (quickly but gently)
Me: "yeah, what?"
"knock knock knock"
Me: "yeah?"
"Knock knock knock"
Me: "what?!" (I go to answer the door)
I open the door and there's only dead silence.
The second knocker is a full-fist pounding that shakes the door. This has happened
twice.
The first time was 10 seconds of beating on the door at 2 in the morning. I go to the
door because I think it's an emergency, and no one is there.
The second time I heard the pounding and didn't get up (this was about six months
later). Every ten seconds something would pound on the door and pause for about
one minute. Then I heard the doorknob wiggle. Scratching on the door. The
doorknob shaking slightly.
Then BAM!! One big hit smacks the door and I hear something run downstairs and
into the kitchen, where there is no more noise.
Scratching.
Scratching has been heard on many separate occasions, from either inside the closet
or from behind the mirror. I would have to say from behind the closet is scarier to
me because I saw the movie House when I was young, and if you've seen that movie
you know that a certain part can leave an impression on a kid.
The scratching is very light, and not in one spot. The scratching will go from low in
the closet to high like something trying to figure a way out. If you see the original
haunting, there is a scene when something is trying to get into a door and it sounds
just like this. The pounding on the door wasn't similar, but the scratching is dead
on.
Behind the mirror you hear scratching sometimes, only around 1 or five in the
morning. Sometimes there is a tapping sound, but mostly scratching.
I got more, but I got to take a break for a sec if that's ok.
Why I hate the blood mirror.
Sure it attracts things that knock on the door and run up the stairs. Yeah there's
scratching and tapping from the closet and mirror. When you look at it though, it's
just noise. The blood mirror, however, is more than just noise.
It could be any day, at any time, with any one in the room, and then it attacks. Since
the mirror has no way to directly hurt you, it makes you hurt yourself. I have been
quietly watching TV or talking to friends that are in the same room with me and the
blood mirror, and you can feel it come alive.
The room temperature will drop 40, 50, 60 degrees within minutes so you can see
your breath. You can't concentrate or focus on what you were doing. Your eyes
can't focus on one point, and you're unaware of what you're body is doing. All you
can really hear is your heart pounding at a rhythmic pace. Suddenly you, and
anyone else around, is in a haze. . .a trance.
When you regain focus, you realize you're bleeding.
The most common thing people will do is scratch themselves with their fingers on
their left hand on their right arm or upper chest. Without thinking, people will dig
huge gashes into their bodies with just their fingers and not know it. Every time
they will look at the mirror when they realize what they just did.
It doesn't happen often, but when it does it's truly frightening. The best example I
have is when I brought my now ex-girlfriend to show her the room because I had
told her about all the ghosts in my house. When we walked in I said:
"Here's my old room, and there's the mirror."
And as soon as I said that and pointed to the mirror, the temperate began to drop
drastically. I went over to some shelves to see how much of my stuff my little
brother had taken since I had left, and I took my eyes off her. When I looked back
at her she was staring at a wall, with a desperately sorrowful face, and digging into
her right arm. I grabbed her, and as I did I must have woke her up out of her
trance. She looked scared until she saw the cuts in her arm and screamed. She was
out of the house before I could leave the room. As soon as she left, the room
instantly got warmer. It wanted her. . .something about her she liked.
The blood mirror still stands today behind an old dresser. My mother always gets
crippling arthritic pain whenever she goes to take down the mirror and get rid of it.
The pain is so bad she can't even grip silverware. . .until she decides to do something
else. I moved the dresser drawer to hide the mirror, to bury it, so it won't bother
anyone else. Some day the dresser drawer will be moved and the mirror will reflect
the light of day again, and I know it will be even angrier than it was before I hid it. I
pity the person that inherits it then.
Thank God for eBay.
Sorry for the crappy joke. Anyways, I need to clarify some earlier stuff I wrote
about so I'll do that in another post if you want me too. Also, I've got some other
stories, some of which are my friends if you want them. Thanks for all the support
so far.
In regards to the séance room in the basement:
Furniture from upstairs was moved downstairs, and into the séance room
accidentally. The furniture was later moved out when my parents bought a house,
and put the death bed and mirror into the third bedroom for guests. I have no idea
why they would want to use the family death bed for a guest bed, but I guess it was
free.
If you want a mental picture of the basement, here it is. The basement is a simple
rectangle, maybe 20 feet long, and 15 feet wide. Then there is a séance room, I forget
the specs but it's built for "satanic" type rituals, attached to the basement walls. The
séance room is right by the steps up to the basement door.
The basement door was hidden on a wall in the huge downstairs bathroom. The
mirror faces the basement door, so you could be looking in the mirror and hear the
knocking behind you.
Whatever it is in the basement "talked" to me three times in one day. The first time
it knocked and asked hello, the second time it knocked and asked hello but a bit
more worried than before, the third time it just angrily "breathed" out at me. If you
exhale lightly at first and then exhale strongly and quickly at the end, you can kinda
get the idea of what I heard.
As for why my parents keep these things, I have no idea. My parents are addicted to
anything that has been passed down through the family, and their house is now
loaded with stuff from both sides. My mother hates the mirrors, but she only wants
to take them down and not throw them away because they've been in the family. It's
a weird mix of stuff from both sides of my parents families. My father has old, ratty
stuff like the old death bed, and my mother has expensive stuff from when her
family was rich and lived in a mansion. It's like we have stuff from Night of the
Living Dead, and The Haunting all in one place.
My mother has the family opals, which are exquisite pieces of jewelry that only
women in the family can wear, not because of tradition, but of some type of super
bad luck. She also has these 80+ year old ruby glasses. The glasses aren't made of
rubies, but they are a beautiful blood red and flawless. When she inherited them
about 10 years ago, she said she had to put them in a sturdy china cabinet or they'll
fall and break. That's because every other day you can hear someone run through
the dinning room and to the china hutch, where the glasses are.
My dad has this old trunk from Ireland that has the creepiest lamp (that used to be
kept in the séance room too) in it, pictures of my Indian (native American) relatives
that we no longer know who they are, and some sentimental news clippings from a
cousin of ours in Ireland who was with the IRA, but was really a child killer. No one
wants this stuff, the trunk used to be in the basement next to the séance room, and
it's ugly to boot, but it's old and has stuff from the family.
They just won't get rid of stuff that's old and has been in the family. Destroying the
death bed was kinda hard for my dad to do, but WE STILL HAVE PARTS FROM
THE MIRROR. All of it is ugly, everyone knows the pieces are cursed or at least
haunted, and we don't need any of the pieces at all, but they still keep them. I mean
Christ, those opals, once put on, cannot be taken off until right before the coffin
closes, and you are to be buried in the ground. If you take them off the body earlier,
or accept them as a gift while the original wearer is still alive, you will go mad.
Apparently that's not enough to call the pieces cursed since it has only happened
TWICE in the past 40 years. It also happens 100% of the time too, but that doesn't
matter.
I'll take as many pictures as possible while I'm there. It's like sentimental pieces
from a haunted mansion all over the place.
About why there are things happening in the basement to our house, I don't know.
There are things everywhere in the house, and the basement is no exception. I'll do
an outline of the house, and when I get a Chicago ghost hunt going, we'll stop by my
house for a quick tour.
Basement:
Only thing here is the shadow man and the swinging boxing bag. The shadow man
has only been seen twice, and has "charged" every time he knows you're looking. He
doesn't come straight at you, but follows the walls around.
The swinging punching bag was really fun. It happened about every other time
anyone was downstairs, and it was really cool. I had a 110 pound leather punching
bag attached to the ceiling of the basement. Really simple construction: just a swivel
hitch bolted into the ceiling, and a three chains attached to the hitch. You would be
sitting downstairs, watching TV or talking to friends, and the chain would start to
creak. For a while we thought vibrations somehow moved the bag, until two of us
saw how it started. The bag would be perfectly still, then it would move about a foot
in one direction, and then swing back. It was creepy because you knew something
was moving that bag.
Ground floor:
All you get are the occasional runner, the night light painting, and I guess orbs.
Once in a while you see a quick flash of light like a firefly, usually in the spring or
fall.
Upstairs:
This is where the mirrors are and the knocking. Sometimes you hear mumbling,
something moving papers (and always fucking up the system you have), lots of
motion in the mirrors (bathroom and metal frame), and one of our dogs growling at
something in the hallway briefly. If you have cat in your room, the cat will wake up
sometimes and just stare at the door for a good five minutes, and then sometimes go
under the bed. The upstairs is where the fun is.
Oh, and I should mention that our new dog won't go into the dinning room where
most of our inherited stuff is. He'll whine and cry if he looks in there, won't come if
you're offering him tasty hamburger, and will fight you if you carry him in there.
He gets over it, and then one night you hear the china cabinet move in the dinning
room, and he freaks out.
Until this thread, I never really thought about all the fucked up stuff we have in our
house. I knew we had some bad things, but I just realized how much we have there.
lørdag 1. januar 2011
The Ballad of Casuality Jane
Posted by: Causality Jane
*Warning, it's a long one.*
It’s not the darkness in my room that frightens me. The unidentified sound floating up from somewhere deep in my house doesn’t set my poor heart panicking. I’m not terrified as I try not to notice my barely open closet door. It’s the potential that gets me. It’s what could be there. The more you think about it, the more likely every possibility becomes as the shadows thicken and every stray noise or movement forces you deeper into your fear. The scariest part, to me at least, is that you’ll never know what is or isn’t there until you go have a look for yourself. Unless it comes looking for you, of course.
The rumors about my good friend Liz’s house took their dear sweet time reaching me. They were just whispers of things, ominous hints, and I brushed them aside fairly easily. Liz and I were close, so close that people even mistook us for sisters, and were there any dark secrets about her house, I would have known. Like me, she was a storyteller, and storytellers just don’t hide that kind of thing.
That is, unless it’s serious.
As luck would have it, I ended up spending an afternoon at Liz’s house to work on some project for Biology class. I had only been over to her place once or twice before, which even at the time I considered strange for best friends like us, but to a kid like me who had spent a good part of her life in apartments and military housing, the place was a dream. At just under 50 years old with 2 stories, 4 bedrooms, a massive basement area, and an equally huge backyard, the house was phenomenally beautiful. Sure it was a little too dark, but the weather was appropriately stormy, and that’ll make any place more than a little spooky.
Liz’s sixteenth birthday was a few weeks away, and we got onto the topic of what the party would be like. She and I had a reputation of being little party animals, and therefore we had to make this party as awesome as possible. I suggested using her massive basement, what with its pinball tables, TV, and stereo system.
“No parties in the house.”
Ah yes, the parents. They could be pretty troublesome for us wild teens, but I told her not to worry. If we could conjure up a few promises of no drinking, no smooching, and the like, we would get our party. Heck, I was already figuring out what food to bring.
“It’s not my parents.”
And that was how I got her talking.
Tick-Tock
Four years ago, Liz and her family had moved from their smaller, older house across town to the current one. At first no one sensed anything out of the ordinary. There were no creepy feelings, no moving shadows down the hallways, no nothing. Strangely, it was Liz’s baby brother, Sam, who picked up on whatever was in the house long before anyone else did.
Liz and her parents started noticing that as soon as they left Sam in his playroom he would start talking to someone. Sam had made a friend. His friend’s name was Tick-Tock. Why Tick-Tock was never really clear, but apparently he was a little shy. It took a few weeks for Tick-Tock to feel comfortable “talking” to Sam in other rooms of the house with other people present. They chocked it up to Sam playing with his first imaginary friend.
One afternoon, Liz was studying in their living room while Sam played with some of his toys. He was chattering away to no one in particular, and Liz wasn’t paying much attention to him. It was when he suddenly went silent that she looked up. Sam was standing in front of her, transfixed by something on the wall behind her. As she watched, his eyes followed the thing as it moved up the wall and along the ceiling. Of course, when she looked there was nothing there, but he was so still and so amazed by whatever the hell it was that she felt shivers scurry down her spine.
“Sammy, what’re you looking at?”
“Tick-Tock.”
Indeed.
From that point on Tick-Tock was no longer a friend. Sam couldn’t be left alone for five minutes without him screaming bloody murder. He stopped sleeping through the night, and her parents had to move him back into their room for a bit. His toys would turn on and off by themselves or go missing and turn up in the weirdest places. Sam and their cat, Jabberwocky, continued to watch things move along the walls, sometimes in unison.
Ok, so that was creepy, I’d admit to that, but it could also be explained. Sam was a little kid, and who knew what made them do the things they do? Some of the toys were hand-me-downs and could have been screwing up like old toys tend to after awhile. Jabberwocky might have been watching dust or whatever it is that fascinates cats.
“I guess so, but Jaber had other things to worry about.”
Jabberwocky and the Bandersnatch
“Bandersnatch” was the name affectionately given to the critter that lurked around the little shed in their backyard. Tools would go missing, wood piles would be scattered every which way, friends and family alike would see a small shadow curled beneath the old elm tree or darting around a corner. Liz spoke of the Bandersnatch like a pesky family pet rather than a possibly undead being, and it never sent out threatening vibes to any of her family members, with the exception of poor Jabber.
Jabberwocky hated the Bandersnatch and the Bandersnatch hated Jabberwocky. They loved to torture each other. Liz’s father was forever rushing out to break up extremely vocal catfights only to find Jabber hissing and spitting into the darkness. Jabber’s new pastime was chasing some unseen thing around the shed, darting this way and that before retreating to the safety of the porch. If Jabber ever chased anything with flesh and blood, it had some kind of camouflage, because no one ever laid eyes on it.
The only time the Bandersnatch ever really frightened Liz’s family was after Jabber ended up on the receiving end of a minivan and had to spend some time at the vet for surgery. Right around sunset, a long howl/growl/moan could be heard coming from the shed. Now, I forgot to mention something: Liz’s father always kept the shed locked, just in case, I don’t know, tool-snatching aliens invaded. Nothing could have snuck into it because not ever Jabber could find any suitable holes. In addition to that little fact, there was also the issue of the howl going on for a good 3-4 minutes straight and sounding, if anything, like a large wildcat or possibly a crazy person. The pitch and volume varied, shifting erratically unlike the call of a frog or most animals in distress. This was just low and angry and feral. After it finished, Liz’s father, armed with his hunting rifle, ventured out to unlock the shed and found it absolutely empty. To this day, they claim that the Bandersnatch was calling for Jabberwocky, angry that he wouldn’t come out and play.
So these stories were nice and all, but I still failed to see what the big deal was. So her brother freaked out, so something had made a nest in the shed, so what? I demanded a real reason as to why the party of the century could not be held in the perfect spot! I pressed her for more information on the house, and reluctantly, she continued. I would get my answer alright. This was only the beginning.
The rain had stopped by this time, and I knew that if I was going to get more out of Liz, I’d have to get her out of the house. I proposed a stroll around the block to stretch our legs and give me a chance to view the shed. She happily agreed. For the record, I was expecting some sort of ancient wooden monster, but the shed was actually very well kept, padlocked, and sealed tight. No sightings of the Bandersnatch for me, unfortunately.
As we strolled along, Liz became more emotional. It was as if she had been keeping all these stories bottled up inside of her for the longest time and now they were bursting out. Up next were the upstairs bathroom and the mirror.
Cue Theme from Psycho
The master bedroom had its own master bath, but the other two bedrooms upstairs had a bathroom situated between them. The bathroom was terrible. Liz always felt like she was being watched in the shower, handprints had a strange habit of appearing on the mirror for no reason ( “No, I will not show you.”), and she and her mother had both been physically tripped while bathing her brother. Could they have slipped on the wet floor? No, apparently this was a hand shoving them face first into the tile. The lights also had a habit of turning off on their own during inopportune times, leaving whoever was unlucky enough to be in there in complete darkness.
At one point Liz was home alone, lounging in her room. She distinctly heard the sounds of water running, complete with pipes clunking and such. After a bit, the water turned off, and someone or something started splashing and messing around in the bathtub. Liz slowly got up and stepped out into the hallway.
“Mom?”
If only. The only response was more splashing, still audible in the hall. The bathroom door was cracked open and the light was on. With a display of more guts than I could ever have mustered, Liz crept up, reached out, and pushed the door open with her finger tips. As the door swung up, Liz got ready to bolt at any moment.
The bathtub was completely empty.
Mirror, Mirror
I don’t mean to take any glory away from the famous TacoCriminal’s blood mirror, but this bad boy could very well have duked it out for supremacy, were they ever given the chance. The monster hung in the hallway. It was old and had evidently been left by one of the former tenants (though no one would claim it). The damn thing actually had a few gauges in it (or if you used your imagination they could almost be scratch marks), but what would be powerful enough to beat that thing up like that is beyond the realm of my imagination. Still, mirrors have a habit of being spooky, right? No big deal.
“Have you ever actually looked at the glass?”
What? Well… No, now that I thought about it, I had never really looked into it. In fact, I found myself walking as far away from it as possible, my shoulder always brushing against the opposite wall. Apparently no one looked directly at the mirror, and it took them years to figure this out. When the bright idea of confronting the mirror ever popped into their heads, they suffered a full blown panic attack, hyperventilation and everything. Everyone in her family had nightmares about shit coming out of that thing, stuff I won’t even go into because it’ll give me nightmares. In fact, I’m blasting loud, up-beat, obnoxious music as I type this.
The thing was evil. I apologize for my vagueness, but that’s the only word I can think of to describe it. No one had the courage to take it down, and for all I know, when Judgment Day rolls around, it’ll still be hanging there. Really, who knows what slinks around on the other side of mirrors? Sure, it’s just a little reflecting light, but tell that to all the stories and legends and whatnot. No, I never looked directly into that mirror, and you better believe I’m damn glad I didn’t. I firmly believe I would have stared straight into hell.
If memory has blurred or will blur anything about these events, it won’t be this. The memory of the two of us standing there with the house looming before us like some kind of sleeping giant is burned into my mind. It was as if the house were challenging us, and I was about to make a witty comment when I realized that Liz wasn’t paying any attention to me. She looked smaller, you know? Sort of sunk into herself. She was staring up at the highest window of her house, the one that reminded me of an angry, black eye.
“It’s the worst part. I don’t know why, but it is.”
The Attic
I guess you’ll have to take my word for it, but Liz’s family was a rational bunch of people. They decided early on that they were going to stay in the house, both out of stubbornness and lack of money. They had filed the ghostly activity into two groups: “Creepy but Generally Harmless” (Tick-Tock and the Bandersnatch) and “There’s Nothing We Can Do about It So Why Worry” (the upstairs bathroom and the mirror). As time passed, they got used to it, as most people do in such situations, and even started to joke about the oddities of the house.
Then the attic started up.
It began with pacing. Liz especially would hear something shuffling around at night, the ambling, wandering footsteps of something big. It usually traveled along a set path, but occasionally it would stop just above her head. On these occasions, she swore she could almost hear mumbling, though that could have been all in her head. After about a week of these sounds, Liz and her father gathered up the courage to go up and investigate.
Their family only used the area closest to the trap door for storage, so the rest of the attic was bare except for the few remains that the other tenants had shoved near the little window. Incidentally, this was also the area where the shuffling took place. The closer they got to the window the colder it got (strange when everything else was baking during a pretty vicious heatwave), and they became more and more uneasy.
Next to the window they found piles of old junk, the most notable of which were a heavy, locked trunk and an old rocking chair. They found absolutely no evidence of vermin, and the thick layer of dust hadn’t been disturbed in the least. After one more quick look at their surroundings, they quickly escaped down the stairs and securely shut the trap door behind them.
For the sake of brevity, I’ll sum up the attic like this: It started with shuffling, then scratching on the trap door, then wailing, and finally someone on the other side of the door would call out people’s names and whisper. Her mother was so upset about the whole thing that she called their church to ask for help. I’m not sure that their preacher really believed them as they weren’t exactly regulars at the church, and all he could suggest was to put up crosses in the house and read a few verses from the Bible. The crosses slowed down the activity, but apparently they had a habit of disappearing after awhile. The spirits, whoever or whatever they were, were there to stay.
You know that voice in the back of your mind that says, “This is not a good idea”? Well, I don’t have that voice. I live to put myself in situations like this, and when I was younger I was five times worse. I was going to live forever, right? Nothing could do me any serious harm!
Now, you know that one scene in horror movies, the one where you’re in the audiences thinking, “Walk away! Just walk away right now!” Yeah, this was that scene. It took me awhile, but I finally got her to agree on a small sleepover to find proof that these ghosts existed. There was a story just begging to be told here, and I was going to grab it.
I was stupid. Oh man was I stupid.
So now we come to the part you’ve all be waiting for: the sleepover. It took place after Liz’s party (movie and dinner party, totally not as cool) and included Liz, myself, Katie, and Jessica. We were like the generic name squad. Here’s what our amateur ghost hunting team brought to the house:
1) Flashlights – You’ll see what happens to those.
2) Tape recorder – Batteries died and we had no more AAA
3) Junk food – Consumed to give us strength against the spirits
4) Caffeine – Did more harm than good. Keep reading and you’ll understand.
5) Ouija Board – Because the Parker Brothers are obviously the masters of the occult
Oh yeah, we were set. We chose Liz’s room as our base camp, and spent a little time getting a tour of the place and playing in the basement. Liz’s parents and brother were in the house as well, but they stayed out of our way, allowing us chill and do girly things. Obviously, they had no idea we were here solely for the ghosts. If they had, we never would have been allowed to have the sleepover.
Now, you have to give me some credit. I said, “No frikin’ way!” to the Ouija idea. I don’t like those things, I never have, and even I could see that busting one out in that house was bad news. Still, my friends pointed out that we were there to find ghosts, and I was stupid if I didn’t go all the way. Even Liz was calling me a chicken, so I finally gave up and joined in.
We sat on the basement floor between the entertainment area and the foosball table (see the map I drew up). We brought out the tape recorder and pushed play but promptly found out that the batteries were dead. We pointed fingers and blamed stupidity, but after reading incarna’s thread, maybe it wasn’t our fault. At any rate, we didn’t have a spare set of AAAs, and asking Liz’s parents would have been too risky. We decided to proceed without it.
There was plenty of giggling and horsing around. We had “Elvis” make a guest appearance, along with “Ur Mom.” Nothing much came of it, but I can’t help but feel like our insults and mockery stirred something up. We soon abandoned our divining for video games and Mountain Dew. The real fireworks weren’t going to happen until much later that night.
* * * * *
“CJ, are you awake?”
No, go away.
“C’mon, I have to pee, and I don’t want to go alone!”
I shot Katie a pretty evil look, but the truth was that I hadn’t been sleeping too well (bad dreams), and I really didn’t care about escorting her. I grabbed my trusty flashlight, as we crawled out of our sleeping bags and made our way as silently as possible into the hall.
I don’t really know how to say this, but the house had changed. The shadows seemed unnaturally thick, and things were almost too silent, as if all sound were being muffled by some invisible barrier, I my pitiful flashlight just didn’t seem to want to penetrate the shadows. Katie was so spooked that I had to argue against standing in the bathroom with her. In the end, she left the door cracked, and I stood on the side farthest away from the mirror and the trap door. Things were going fine until my flashlight died. I started to shiver as the temperature dropped, and that’s when I heard it.
Footsteps, but not coming from the hallway. These were shuffling steps moving from directly over my head to the trap door. The shadows at that end of the hallway seemed to deepen, and I decided to keep my eyes locked on the space directly in front of me. Next came the scratching. When animals scratch, the sound is usually lighter and fast. This was heavy and slow, obviously the sound of nails on wood. It repeated a few times before I told Katie to hurry the hell up and get out.
“I’m coming! Will you chill out already?”
Easy for her it say. She wasn’t the one out here with the demon in the attic. It was at this point that time seemed to slow down, and I heard the sound that still haunts my dreams from time to time.
“Psssst…”
Oh no. No, no, no, that was not coming from the attic.
“Pssst! Hey! Come here!”
This was a sick joke. It had to be. Ghosts did not talk to people, especially not me!
“Look, just open the door. C’mon, please, please, please…”
Fat chance, buddy. I started singing a song in my head, hoping to make the voice go away.
“I know you’re there! OPENTHISDOORRIGHTNOWBEFOREICOMEDOWNTHEREANDTEARYOURFUCKINGHEADOFF!”
I don’t know what the voice was. It could have been a joke, I guess, but it was a really, really sick one. I don’t know if any of you have ever had the pleasure of being near someone who is truly unstable, but there is a certain twinge their voices get when they are really off their rockers. This voice had that feral twinge, and something like that is really hard to fake well. Hell, I was fooled.
I heard the blessed sound of the toilet flushing, and Katie came walking out of the bathroom. She saw my face and asked me what was wrong, and I told her to listen, that something was in the attic. We waiting a few seconds, but before she could call me a liar, we heard a muffled bumping noise. In all my paranoia, I was sure it was the attic door being pounded in.
“That’s not the attic. That’s the mirror!”
She was right. From where we were, we could just barely make out the mirror bumping against the wall. To say that we ran out of there is the understatement of the century. We shot down those stairs so fast, I swear we were flying.
We only had a few moments to stand in the foyer and wonder what to do next before we heard the growling and moaning coming from down the hall.
The playroom. The sounds were coming from the playroom. Determined to face whatever was tormenting us, I made my way to the end of the hall with Katie close behind me. We clutched each other’s hands and opened the door, preparing to come face to face with the yowling demons infesting our friend’s home.
It was Jabberwocky, pacing in front of the door. I’m completely against the harming of animals, but I swear I wanted to kill that stupid cat. I told Katie that he probably wanted to be let out as I nearly dragged her into the room.
I think I was a little too optimistic. Jabber’s fur was standing on end, and his ears were flat against his head. He was pretty worked up, and I was deciding whether or not I should get any closer to him when the door shut behind us. I asked Katie why she shut it, and, of course, she hadn’t. Jabber made himself as small as possible as he crouched against the door, his pupils nearly engulfing the rest of his eyes. Everything went completely still, and I think I actually held my breath.
Then things went batshit.
Every single toy in that playroom turned on by itself. Teddy Whatshisface, Tickle Me Elmo, the robot dude who does math, all of them were yammering away.The little TV used to play kiddie videos turned on full blast and started to (hell, I really don’t know how to say it exactly) manual fast forward through whatever tape was in it (I think 101 Dalmatians). Katie and I did what any red-blooded American girl would do in a situation like this: We screamed bloody murder and sprang for the door. I swear I almost had a heart attack when it refused to open, but thankfully Katie had the sense to turn the lock and set us free.
We sort of collapsed in the back yard and started bawling for no reason. We just sat their clutching each other as the dew soaked our PJs, trembling and sobbing. I like to imagine that even back then I was not that big a baby. It’s always taken a lot to make me shed a tear, and even something like that was not going to send me into hysterics. I felt like I was suddenly overcome with anger and terror and immense sorrow.
Let me put it this way: The next time I would cry like that in front of my friend would be a few years later in Katie’s hospital room after she lost the fight to viral meningitis. (Right after she was accepted in LSU on an athletic scholarship too. Life’s a bitch, know what I mean?)
Still, even in our pitiful state, we faired much better than the other members of our ghost hunting team.
Now, at that time I thought that our screams had just been incredibly loud. She was a swimmer and I had been taking voice lessons for about two years, so we had some lungs on us. This, however, was not the case. Our screams sounded loud to me because at that point Liz, Jess, and Sam all woke up screaming in unison. Jess was so upset that she bolted for the bathroom and vomited, and I’m not talking about a little dry-heaving either. Apparently this was the kind of soul-purging puking that makes you wonder when you last had that Chinese food. Also (and I can attest to this) she was covered in scratches.
Jabber was downstairs with us. The family had no other pets. If she inflicted those wounds on herself, what would make her do such a thing? Jess never told us. The most Liz’s parents and later her own family could get out of her was something about a nightmare and not feeling very well. It was Liz, during on of our last conversations together, who finally told me.
I can’t explain it, but this part is always hard for me to tell, and what with that whole rule against drunk posting, the going is going to be rough from here on out. You’ll have to forgive me if the writing goes to shit.
Liz had been through nightmares about the mirror before, but nothing like this. In her dream, she saw the mirror. She said it began to jump, much like it had before were made a run for it. Apparently a man had “spider-walked” out of the mirror. She said his arms and legs were bent at all the wrong angles, and he moved fast and jerky like in the movies when they mess with the film speed. He came into her room, got onto her bed, pinned her down, and started laughing like a maniac. As he laughed, he transformed into something that she refused to describe, but I suspect was pretty damn disturbing. Whatever it was, it had a mouth full of sharp teeth, and she woke up just before it could use them.
She was shaking as she told me this. She actually said, “I don’t know what it did to Jess.” As she wiped the tears from her eyes (and if I’m making this up, someone better refund me about a month’s worth of sleepless nights) I thought I saw bruises on her wrists.
It was at the point I decided, if you’ll pardon my French, to never go back to that fucking house ever again.
So that’s the story. What happened to us afterward? Well, rumors say that Jess became an insomniac and started taking medication after her sleep deprivation pushed her to a nervous breakdown. I can neither confirm nor deny this as she never looked any of us in the face again. Katie and I stayed friends long after this happened, but I told you about her earlier. Like I said, Liz and I had a falling out after this, I think because she and her parents blamed me for what happened that night, with good reason, I guess. I honestly hope they moved out of that house because whatever was in there was not going to stop. As for me, I moved (for the last time) at the end of the summer.
After all this time, you’d think curiosity might get the better of me. You’d think while visiting friends and relatives in that area, I might go look up that house, drive by a few times, maybe even ring the doorbell and ask if the current family happens to possess a certain antique mirror. However, there are some things even the wildest internet cowgirl won’t do. Sometimes, it’s just better to let things rest in peace.
*Warning, it's a long one.*
It’s not the darkness in my room that frightens me. The unidentified sound floating up from somewhere deep in my house doesn’t set my poor heart panicking. I’m not terrified as I try not to notice my barely open closet door. It’s the potential that gets me. It’s what could be there. The more you think about it, the more likely every possibility becomes as the shadows thicken and every stray noise or movement forces you deeper into your fear. The scariest part, to me at least, is that you’ll never know what is or isn’t there until you go have a look for yourself. Unless it comes looking for you, of course.
The rumors about my good friend Liz’s house took their dear sweet time reaching me. They were just whispers of things, ominous hints, and I brushed them aside fairly easily. Liz and I were close, so close that people even mistook us for sisters, and were there any dark secrets about her house, I would have known. Like me, she was a storyteller, and storytellers just don’t hide that kind of thing.
That is, unless it’s serious.
As luck would have it, I ended up spending an afternoon at Liz’s house to work on some project for Biology class. I had only been over to her place once or twice before, which even at the time I considered strange for best friends like us, but to a kid like me who had spent a good part of her life in apartments and military housing, the place was a dream. At just under 50 years old with 2 stories, 4 bedrooms, a massive basement area, and an equally huge backyard, the house was phenomenally beautiful. Sure it was a little too dark, but the weather was appropriately stormy, and that’ll make any place more than a little spooky.
Liz’s sixteenth birthday was a few weeks away, and we got onto the topic of what the party would be like. She and I had a reputation of being little party animals, and therefore we had to make this party as awesome as possible. I suggested using her massive basement, what with its pinball tables, TV, and stereo system.
“No parties in the house.”
Ah yes, the parents. They could be pretty troublesome for us wild teens, but I told her not to worry. If we could conjure up a few promises of no drinking, no smooching, and the like, we would get our party. Heck, I was already figuring out what food to bring.
“It’s not my parents.”
And that was how I got her talking.
Tick-Tock
Four years ago, Liz and her family had moved from their smaller, older house across town to the current one. At first no one sensed anything out of the ordinary. There were no creepy feelings, no moving shadows down the hallways, no nothing. Strangely, it was Liz’s baby brother, Sam, who picked up on whatever was in the house long before anyone else did.
Liz and her parents started noticing that as soon as they left Sam in his playroom he would start talking to someone. Sam had made a friend. His friend’s name was Tick-Tock. Why Tick-Tock was never really clear, but apparently he was a little shy. It took a few weeks for Tick-Tock to feel comfortable “talking” to Sam in other rooms of the house with other people present. They chocked it up to Sam playing with his first imaginary friend.
One afternoon, Liz was studying in their living room while Sam played with some of his toys. He was chattering away to no one in particular, and Liz wasn’t paying much attention to him. It was when he suddenly went silent that she looked up. Sam was standing in front of her, transfixed by something on the wall behind her. As she watched, his eyes followed the thing as it moved up the wall and along the ceiling. Of course, when she looked there was nothing there, but he was so still and so amazed by whatever the hell it was that she felt shivers scurry down her spine.
“Sammy, what’re you looking at?”
“Tick-Tock.”
Indeed.
From that point on Tick-Tock was no longer a friend. Sam couldn’t be left alone for five minutes without him screaming bloody murder. He stopped sleeping through the night, and her parents had to move him back into their room for a bit. His toys would turn on and off by themselves or go missing and turn up in the weirdest places. Sam and their cat, Jabberwocky, continued to watch things move along the walls, sometimes in unison.
Ok, so that was creepy, I’d admit to that, but it could also be explained. Sam was a little kid, and who knew what made them do the things they do? Some of the toys were hand-me-downs and could have been screwing up like old toys tend to after awhile. Jabberwocky might have been watching dust or whatever it is that fascinates cats.
“I guess so, but Jaber had other things to worry about.”
Jabberwocky and the Bandersnatch
“Bandersnatch” was the name affectionately given to the critter that lurked around the little shed in their backyard. Tools would go missing, wood piles would be scattered every which way, friends and family alike would see a small shadow curled beneath the old elm tree or darting around a corner. Liz spoke of the Bandersnatch like a pesky family pet rather than a possibly undead being, and it never sent out threatening vibes to any of her family members, with the exception of poor Jabber.
Jabberwocky hated the Bandersnatch and the Bandersnatch hated Jabberwocky. They loved to torture each other. Liz’s father was forever rushing out to break up extremely vocal catfights only to find Jabber hissing and spitting into the darkness. Jabber’s new pastime was chasing some unseen thing around the shed, darting this way and that before retreating to the safety of the porch. If Jabber ever chased anything with flesh and blood, it had some kind of camouflage, because no one ever laid eyes on it.
The only time the Bandersnatch ever really frightened Liz’s family was after Jabber ended up on the receiving end of a minivan and had to spend some time at the vet for surgery. Right around sunset, a long howl/growl/moan could be heard coming from the shed. Now, I forgot to mention something: Liz’s father always kept the shed locked, just in case, I don’t know, tool-snatching aliens invaded. Nothing could have snuck into it because not ever Jabber could find any suitable holes. In addition to that little fact, there was also the issue of the howl going on for a good 3-4 minutes straight and sounding, if anything, like a large wildcat or possibly a crazy person. The pitch and volume varied, shifting erratically unlike the call of a frog or most animals in distress. This was just low and angry and feral. After it finished, Liz’s father, armed with his hunting rifle, ventured out to unlock the shed and found it absolutely empty. To this day, they claim that the Bandersnatch was calling for Jabberwocky, angry that he wouldn’t come out and play.
So these stories were nice and all, but I still failed to see what the big deal was. So her brother freaked out, so something had made a nest in the shed, so what? I demanded a real reason as to why the party of the century could not be held in the perfect spot! I pressed her for more information on the house, and reluctantly, she continued. I would get my answer alright. This was only the beginning.
The rain had stopped by this time, and I knew that if I was going to get more out of Liz, I’d have to get her out of the house. I proposed a stroll around the block to stretch our legs and give me a chance to view the shed. She happily agreed. For the record, I was expecting some sort of ancient wooden monster, but the shed was actually very well kept, padlocked, and sealed tight. No sightings of the Bandersnatch for me, unfortunately.
As we strolled along, Liz became more emotional. It was as if she had been keeping all these stories bottled up inside of her for the longest time and now they were bursting out. Up next were the upstairs bathroom and the mirror.
Cue Theme from Psycho
The master bedroom had its own master bath, but the other two bedrooms upstairs had a bathroom situated between them. The bathroom was terrible. Liz always felt like she was being watched in the shower, handprints had a strange habit of appearing on the mirror for no reason ( “No, I will not show you.”), and she and her mother had both been physically tripped while bathing her brother. Could they have slipped on the wet floor? No, apparently this was a hand shoving them face first into the tile. The lights also had a habit of turning off on their own during inopportune times, leaving whoever was unlucky enough to be in there in complete darkness.
At one point Liz was home alone, lounging in her room. She distinctly heard the sounds of water running, complete with pipes clunking and such. After a bit, the water turned off, and someone or something started splashing and messing around in the bathtub. Liz slowly got up and stepped out into the hallway.
“Mom?”
If only. The only response was more splashing, still audible in the hall. The bathroom door was cracked open and the light was on. With a display of more guts than I could ever have mustered, Liz crept up, reached out, and pushed the door open with her finger tips. As the door swung up, Liz got ready to bolt at any moment.
The bathtub was completely empty.
Mirror, Mirror
I don’t mean to take any glory away from the famous TacoCriminal’s blood mirror, but this bad boy could very well have duked it out for supremacy, were they ever given the chance. The monster hung in the hallway. It was old and had evidently been left by one of the former tenants (though no one would claim it). The damn thing actually had a few gauges in it (or if you used your imagination they could almost be scratch marks), but what would be powerful enough to beat that thing up like that is beyond the realm of my imagination. Still, mirrors have a habit of being spooky, right? No big deal.
“Have you ever actually looked at the glass?”
What? Well… No, now that I thought about it, I had never really looked into it. In fact, I found myself walking as far away from it as possible, my shoulder always brushing against the opposite wall. Apparently no one looked directly at the mirror, and it took them years to figure this out. When the bright idea of confronting the mirror ever popped into their heads, they suffered a full blown panic attack, hyperventilation and everything. Everyone in her family had nightmares about shit coming out of that thing, stuff I won’t even go into because it’ll give me nightmares. In fact, I’m blasting loud, up-beat, obnoxious music as I type this.
The thing was evil. I apologize for my vagueness, but that’s the only word I can think of to describe it. No one had the courage to take it down, and for all I know, when Judgment Day rolls around, it’ll still be hanging there. Really, who knows what slinks around on the other side of mirrors? Sure, it’s just a little reflecting light, but tell that to all the stories and legends and whatnot. No, I never looked directly into that mirror, and you better believe I’m damn glad I didn’t. I firmly believe I would have stared straight into hell.
If memory has blurred or will blur anything about these events, it won’t be this. The memory of the two of us standing there with the house looming before us like some kind of sleeping giant is burned into my mind. It was as if the house were challenging us, and I was about to make a witty comment when I realized that Liz wasn’t paying any attention to me. She looked smaller, you know? Sort of sunk into herself. She was staring up at the highest window of her house, the one that reminded me of an angry, black eye.
“It’s the worst part. I don’t know why, but it is.”
The Attic
I guess you’ll have to take my word for it, but Liz’s family was a rational bunch of people. They decided early on that they were going to stay in the house, both out of stubbornness and lack of money. They had filed the ghostly activity into two groups: “Creepy but Generally Harmless” (Tick-Tock and the Bandersnatch) and “There’s Nothing We Can Do about It So Why Worry” (the upstairs bathroom and the mirror). As time passed, they got used to it, as most people do in such situations, and even started to joke about the oddities of the house.
Then the attic started up.
It began with pacing. Liz especially would hear something shuffling around at night, the ambling, wandering footsteps of something big. It usually traveled along a set path, but occasionally it would stop just above her head. On these occasions, she swore she could almost hear mumbling, though that could have been all in her head. After about a week of these sounds, Liz and her father gathered up the courage to go up and investigate.
Their family only used the area closest to the trap door for storage, so the rest of the attic was bare except for the few remains that the other tenants had shoved near the little window. Incidentally, this was also the area where the shuffling took place. The closer they got to the window the colder it got (strange when everything else was baking during a pretty vicious heatwave), and they became more and more uneasy.
Next to the window they found piles of old junk, the most notable of which were a heavy, locked trunk and an old rocking chair. They found absolutely no evidence of vermin, and the thick layer of dust hadn’t been disturbed in the least. After one more quick look at their surroundings, they quickly escaped down the stairs and securely shut the trap door behind them.
For the sake of brevity, I’ll sum up the attic like this: It started with shuffling, then scratching on the trap door, then wailing, and finally someone on the other side of the door would call out people’s names and whisper. Her mother was so upset about the whole thing that she called their church to ask for help. I’m not sure that their preacher really believed them as they weren’t exactly regulars at the church, and all he could suggest was to put up crosses in the house and read a few verses from the Bible. The crosses slowed down the activity, but apparently they had a habit of disappearing after awhile. The spirits, whoever or whatever they were, were there to stay.
You know that voice in the back of your mind that says, “This is not a good idea”? Well, I don’t have that voice. I live to put myself in situations like this, and when I was younger I was five times worse. I was going to live forever, right? Nothing could do me any serious harm!
Now, you know that one scene in horror movies, the one where you’re in the audiences thinking, “Walk away! Just walk away right now!” Yeah, this was that scene. It took me awhile, but I finally got her to agree on a small sleepover to find proof that these ghosts existed. There was a story just begging to be told here, and I was going to grab it.
I was stupid. Oh man was I stupid.
So now we come to the part you’ve all be waiting for: the sleepover. It took place after Liz’s party (movie and dinner party, totally not as cool) and included Liz, myself, Katie, and Jessica. We were like the generic name squad. Here’s what our amateur ghost hunting team brought to the house:
1) Flashlights – You’ll see what happens to those.
2) Tape recorder – Batteries died and we had no more AAA
3) Junk food – Consumed to give us strength against the spirits
4) Caffeine – Did more harm than good. Keep reading and you’ll understand.
5) Ouija Board – Because the Parker Brothers are obviously the masters of the occult
Oh yeah, we were set. We chose Liz’s room as our base camp, and spent a little time getting a tour of the place and playing in the basement. Liz’s parents and brother were in the house as well, but they stayed out of our way, allowing us chill and do girly things. Obviously, they had no idea we were here solely for the ghosts. If they had, we never would have been allowed to have the sleepover.
Now, you have to give me some credit. I said, “No frikin’ way!” to the Ouija idea. I don’t like those things, I never have, and even I could see that busting one out in that house was bad news. Still, my friends pointed out that we were there to find ghosts, and I was stupid if I didn’t go all the way. Even Liz was calling me a chicken, so I finally gave up and joined in.
We sat on the basement floor between the entertainment area and the foosball table (see the map I drew up). We brought out the tape recorder and pushed play but promptly found out that the batteries were dead. We pointed fingers and blamed stupidity, but after reading incarna’s thread, maybe it wasn’t our fault. At any rate, we didn’t have a spare set of AAAs, and asking Liz’s parents would have been too risky. We decided to proceed without it.
There was plenty of giggling and horsing around. We had “Elvis” make a guest appearance, along with “Ur Mom.” Nothing much came of it, but I can’t help but feel like our insults and mockery stirred something up. We soon abandoned our divining for video games and Mountain Dew. The real fireworks weren’t going to happen until much later that night.
* * * * *
“CJ, are you awake?”
No, go away.
“C’mon, I have to pee, and I don’t want to go alone!”
I shot Katie a pretty evil look, but the truth was that I hadn’t been sleeping too well (bad dreams), and I really didn’t care about escorting her. I grabbed my trusty flashlight, as we crawled out of our sleeping bags and made our way as silently as possible into the hall.
I don’t really know how to say this, but the house had changed. The shadows seemed unnaturally thick, and things were almost too silent, as if all sound were being muffled by some invisible barrier, I my pitiful flashlight just didn’t seem to want to penetrate the shadows. Katie was so spooked that I had to argue against standing in the bathroom with her. In the end, she left the door cracked, and I stood on the side farthest away from the mirror and the trap door. Things were going fine until my flashlight died. I started to shiver as the temperature dropped, and that’s when I heard it.
Footsteps, but not coming from the hallway. These were shuffling steps moving from directly over my head to the trap door. The shadows at that end of the hallway seemed to deepen, and I decided to keep my eyes locked on the space directly in front of me. Next came the scratching. When animals scratch, the sound is usually lighter and fast. This was heavy and slow, obviously the sound of nails on wood. It repeated a few times before I told Katie to hurry the hell up and get out.
“I’m coming! Will you chill out already?”
Easy for her it say. She wasn’t the one out here with the demon in the attic. It was at this point that time seemed to slow down, and I heard the sound that still haunts my dreams from time to time.
“Psssst…”
Oh no. No, no, no, that was not coming from the attic.
“Pssst! Hey! Come here!”
This was a sick joke. It had to be. Ghosts did not talk to people, especially not me!
“Look, just open the door. C’mon, please, please, please…”
Fat chance, buddy. I started singing a song in my head, hoping to make the voice go away.
“I know you’re there! OPENTHISDOORRIGHTNOWBEFOREICOMEDOWNTHEREANDTEARYOURFUCKINGHEADOFF!”
I don’t know what the voice was. It could have been a joke, I guess, but it was a really, really sick one. I don’t know if any of you have ever had the pleasure of being near someone who is truly unstable, but there is a certain twinge their voices get when they are really off their rockers. This voice had that feral twinge, and something like that is really hard to fake well. Hell, I was fooled.
I heard the blessed sound of the toilet flushing, and Katie came walking out of the bathroom. She saw my face and asked me what was wrong, and I told her to listen, that something was in the attic. We waiting a few seconds, but before she could call me a liar, we heard a muffled bumping noise. In all my paranoia, I was sure it was the attic door being pounded in.
“That’s not the attic. That’s the mirror!”
She was right. From where we were, we could just barely make out the mirror bumping against the wall. To say that we ran out of there is the understatement of the century. We shot down those stairs so fast, I swear we were flying.
We only had a few moments to stand in the foyer and wonder what to do next before we heard the growling and moaning coming from down the hall.
The playroom. The sounds were coming from the playroom. Determined to face whatever was tormenting us, I made my way to the end of the hall with Katie close behind me. We clutched each other’s hands and opened the door, preparing to come face to face with the yowling demons infesting our friend’s home.
It was Jabberwocky, pacing in front of the door. I’m completely against the harming of animals, but I swear I wanted to kill that stupid cat. I told Katie that he probably wanted to be let out as I nearly dragged her into the room.
I think I was a little too optimistic. Jabber’s fur was standing on end, and his ears were flat against his head. He was pretty worked up, and I was deciding whether or not I should get any closer to him when the door shut behind us. I asked Katie why she shut it, and, of course, she hadn’t. Jabber made himself as small as possible as he crouched against the door, his pupils nearly engulfing the rest of his eyes. Everything went completely still, and I think I actually held my breath.
Then things went batshit.
Every single toy in that playroom turned on by itself. Teddy Whatshisface, Tickle Me Elmo, the robot dude who does math, all of them were yammering away.The little TV used to play kiddie videos turned on full blast and started to (hell, I really don’t know how to say it exactly) manual fast forward through whatever tape was in it (I think 101 Dalmatians). Katie and I did what any red-blooded American girl would do in a situation like this: We screamed bloody murder and sprang for the door. I swear I almost had a heart attack when it refused to open, but thankfully Katie had the sense to turn the lock and set us free.
We sort of collapsed in the back yard and started bawling for no reason. We just sat their clutching each other as the dew soaked our PJs, trembling and sobbing. I like to imagine that even back then I was not that big a baby. It’s always taken a lot to make me shed a tear, and even something like that was not going to send me into hysterics. I felt like I was suddenly overcome with anger and terror and immense sorrow.
Let me put it this way: The next time I would cry like that in front of my friend would be a few years later in Katie’s hospital room after she lost the fight to viral meningitis. (Right after she was accepted in LSU on an athletic scholarship too. Life’s a bitch, know what I mean?)
Still, even in our pitiful state, we faired much better than the other members of our ghost hunting team.
Now, at that time I thought that our screams had just been incredibly loud. She was a swimmer and I had been taking voice lessons for about two years, so we had some lungs on us. This, however, was not the case. Our screams sounded loud to me because at that point Liz, Jess, and Sam all woke up screaming in unison. Jess was so upset that she bolted for the bathroom and vomited, and I’m not talking about a little dry-heaving either. Apparently this was the kind of soul-purging puking that makes you wonder when you last had that Chinese food. Also (and I can attest to this) she was covered in scratches.
Jabber was downstairs with us. The family had no other pets. If she inflicted those wounds on herself, what would make her do such a thing? Jess never told us. The most Liz’s parents and later her own family could get out of her was something about a nightmare and not feeling very well. It was Liz, during on of our last conversations together, who finally told me.
I can’t explain it, but this part is always hard for me to tell, and what with that whole rule against drunk posting, the going is going to be rough from here on out. You’ll have to forgive me if the writing goes to shit.
Liz had been through nightmares about the mirror before, but nothing like this. In her dream, she saw the mirror. She said it began to jump, much like it had before were made a run for it. Apparently a man had “spider-walked” out of the mirror. She said his arms and legs were bent at all the wrong angles, and he moved fast and jerky like in the movies when they mess with the film speed. He came into her room, got onto her bed, pinned her down, and started laughing like a maniac. As he laughed, he transformed into something that she refused to describe, but I suspect was pretty damn disturbing. Whatever it was, it had a mouth full of sharp teeth, and she woke up just before it could use them.
She was shaking as she told me this. She actually said, “I don’t know what it did to Jess.” As she wiped the tears from her eyes (and if I’m making this up, someone better refund me about a month’s worth of sleepless nights) I thought I saw bruises on her wrists.
It was at the point I decided, if you’ll pardon my French, to never go back to that fucking house ever again.
So that’s the story. What happened to us afterward? Well, rumors say that Jess became an insomniac and started taking medication after her sleep deprivation pushed her to a nervous breakdown. I can neither confirm nor deny this as she never looked any of us in the face again. Katie and I stayed friends long after this happened, but I told you about her earlier. Like I said, Liz and I had a falling out after this, I think because she and her parents blamed me for what happened that night, with good reason, I guess. I honestly hope they moved out of that house because whatever was in there was not going to stop. As for me, I moved (for the last time) at the end of the summer.
After all this time, you’d think curiosity might get the better of me. You’d think while visiting friends and relatives in that area, I might go look up that house, drive by a few times, maybe even ring the doorbell and ask if the current family happens to possess a certain antique mirror. However, there are some things even the wildest internet cowgirl won’t do. Sometimes, it’s just better to let things rest in peace.
The Secret Room
Posted By: Tahrajj
Okay I haven't posted this story because even though things worked out okay I was terrified and thinking about how she looked and how I felt makes me feel the same way when I remember it.
I lived in the second oldest house in my area near Waco, Texas, from when I was about 11 til I was 18. I don't know the significance of this really but I feel it’s the only possible explanation for any supernatural presence. I'm not sure when the house was originally built but the rest of the houses around mine were built in the 40s and 50s so I supposed it’s older than that.
The house seemed normal when we first moved in. Only two families had lived there over the years so it wasn't like there was a high turnover rate. In fact no one really noticed or mentioned anything supernatural with the house.
However, there was a "secret room." This room was actually a selling point for my parents to help us deal with moving. Even though my dad was in the military we had lived at our past house for quote awhile and didn't want to move. So of course when my parents said there was a secret passage connecting one of the possible bedrooms with a secret room we became excited about the new house. My sister and I fought for it but I won because the other bedroom already had flower wallpaper up. When I first saw my room I went straight to the closet to see the "Secret door."
The secret door wasn't really secret, it was right in the back of the closet and plain to see. However it was a lot smaller than any normal door. Even when I was only 11 or 12 I had to squat down to get in. It looked like it was made for a child to use.
Another interesting thing was that the door handle was not really built into the door, it was just a handle added as an afterthought. This made me think it was originally just some sort of attic or crawl space door and not meant for a room. The door was lockable by key from my side of the door, the other side had no handle or keyhole. When you open the door there’s a very small hallway which is the same height as the door and not really fit for an adult, but it’s just a few feet long and then you get into the room.
The room was just an empty room added above the garage of the house. There was no way out except for the "secret passageway" to my closet. There were no windows, one light with a string used to turn it on hanging from the ceiling, and the room was completely white with seemingly new wallpaper. There was no furniture or anything left in the room from the previous owners, in fact I don't think the previous owners used it at all. I believe it was sealed before or soon after they moved in and wasn't touched since then, since it was pretty dusty, but who knows. The lock did seem very old and had a hard time moving as if it was rusted or the wood was warped or something.
Now my parents thought the room could be me and my sister's own little toy room or whatever when they first saw it, but after moving in they had second thoughts. I'm not sure what it was but they said it was because they wouldn't be able to hear us if we got hurt in that room since it was so detached from the rest of the house. Of course since we wanted our own secret room so badly they gave in, but said that we had to tell them when we were playing in there and we had to keep the door to my room, my closet, and the secret room open at all times when we were there. So we went on and like I said earlier nothing much really supernatural happened in the rest of the house, and not even too much in the "secret room," at least not to me.
My sister began having an imaginary friend. Whenever I wasn't in there I could hear her talking and whispering to someone. I noticed that although at first she used to have fun in there that as time went on she kind of seemed sadder when she was in there. However up til now this could all be coincidence so I didn't give it much thought.
The only weird things that happened with me was at night I thought I could hear some sort of scratching on the walls behind my room, except it wasn't really with fingernails it was softer sounding. It wasn't on the door, but coming from inside the room.
Now I believe that I only heard this at night because it was quiet at night, and the scratching rubbing sound was so soft that you normally couldn't hear it. I really had no idea what it was, I told my dad once and he looked around for some animal but couldn't find any so we just forgot about it and I lived with it. Like I said it was so soft it never really bothered me. It could be some far off tree rubbing against the house for all I knew. This rubbing happened consistently but like I said I never paid it much mind, at least until my sister went into the room one night.
She knew about the rubbing too and never really said anything about it. One night though, probably about a year or so after moving into the house, the rubbing was going on as usual. I was in that limbo before falling to sleep when I thought that someone was in my room and unlocking the closet door. I thought it might have been a dream but I looked around and saw my door and closet door open, so I got up to check it out. I was a little scared but I realized it was probably mom or dad checking out the rubbing sound since I told them it still happened sometimes. I turned the light on in my closet and looked in. I saw a figure sitting in the room facing the wall. Now even when I was a kid, I had been pretty brave. I was still scared since I was pretty young, but I knew that you can't just run or you'll never know. I said "Hello?" and I heard "She wanted me to see" in what sounded like my sister's voice. The light was in the middle of the room, and it was tough taking even those few steps to get to it in the middle of that dark room. But like I said, I couldn't just leave so I just went there and turned it on. When I looked at the figure, it was indeed my sister, sitting and scratching at the wall paper. I touched her and she was crying so I pulled her up and took her out of the room. I'm really glad that I didn't just lock the door and run or else she'd be stuck in there all night (this is one reason why I never run away from anything abnormal). I locked the door, took her to her room and watched her as she went to sleep. I really thought she could've been sleepwalking or something although she never had before, and since it was over I didn't want to wake up my parents. I went back to sleep.
The next day I asked my sister in the morning if she remembered going into the room and she looked freaked out. I told her she was probably just sleep walking but she said that "the girl" asked her to come look at her pictures. She didn't start crying but she was about to because she was so scared. I didn't ask who "the girl" was. I told her it was just a dream and went to prove it. She didn't want to enter the room again so I went in and saw where she was scratching on the wall. Only a little bit was scratched away, so I started peeling some more wallpaper off. Under the wallpaper were different pictures drawn in what looked like crayon. They were typical kid pictures of mainly cats, and houses, however there was one picture that I thought was weird.
It was a little girl, a cat, a mom, and a dad. Now everything looked like a normal kid family portrait, except the dad had no face. It was just a circle. Of course my rational side said she just never finished it. But still the dad picture looked strangely out of place, like the lines were distorted like she had trouble drawing it. Anyway I told my parents and they yelled at me for pulling back the wallpaper. I didn't want my sister to get in trouble so I didn't say anything about her or what happened last night. My parents said we had to get it fixed now and were mad, and didn't let me play in there again as punishment. The whole thing still seemed normal to me. Kid draws on wall, parents put wall paper up to cover it up. I didn't realize until later that night when the scratching rubbing sound started up, that it sounded like a crayon. I really started thinking that it was "the girl" that my sister talked about was drawing on the wall.
Now after this happened, I started believing that the girl was actually in there. Once I started acknowledging her presence, weirder things began to happen. It happened really slowly. I was about 14 or 15 after the episode with my sister, and the weird things were happening slowly over the course of the next years I lived in the house up until I was 18. The changes were so subtle that I didn’t really notice that they were happening until much later. The drawing sounds increased a little bit and soon were audible even during the day. I also started hearing little pattering of feet. The more I heard these things the more emotional I felt about them. I started feeling angry the more I heard the sounds, especially when I was trying to sleep. However I always managed to control myself and try to think that this girl was obviously sad and just trying to have fun and I calmed myself down. However this was going on so long that I finally asked my sister when I was about 16.
I asked her if she ever heard the sounds. She said that she did, although they were pretty quiet. Now I didn’t think this was so weird since obviously I could hear them too, and I told her how annoying it was. She kind of looked at me as if she was hurt, and said that every time she heard the sounds she felt really sad. She had trouble talking about it, but I told her this is pretty important since it’s going to affect the rest of my years left in the house. She told me that “the girl” was the girl that she used to talk to when she played in the room. She didn’t know her name, but they used to play together. She said she looked just like a little girl about her age so they had fun together. However, as my sister got older, the little girl seemed to get older too, except very unnaturally. It was subtle at first but soon she began hating seeing her. She said she looked as if she “shouldn’t have been alive anymore.” I didn’t really know what this meant. My sister said she wore the same dress the whole time, even when the girl grew out of it. I asked her why she went into the room that one night to find the pictures, and she said she really didn’t want to but the girl made her feel so sad and she’d do anything to help her out. However this still freaked her out and I didn’t ask anymore questions.
Things got worse every night, and I hated hearing that sound. I was so mad that she wouldn’t just shut up so I could sleep. The weird thing was I was scared at the same time, since I knew that whatever it was in there wasn’t actually alive anymore. What also freaked me out was that the sound didn’t annoy my sister, but I guess she had more tolerance than I did.
I asked my parents who used to live here, and they said a family with two sons. Of course this didn’t have anything to do with the room, since they had it locked off the entire time they were there. So I asked if they knew anything about the family before them. They said the original owners were the ones who had the house built and that they didn’t know much about them, except that they had a daughter who died when she was 11. I asked if they knew how she died, but they said it was some sort of accident, so it wasn’t murder or child abuse or anything. I also asked if she died in the secret room, but they said they didn’t think so. I really think that this was the girl in the room, although I have no idea why she inhabited it still.
Once I knew this I sort of had an idea with what I was dealing with. Last year was when things got the worst. I heard almost constant drawing and her jumping around inside the room. The footsteps sounded heavier and were louder. If I ever heard it I’d pound on the door to the room and she’d stop immediately, but I’d hear soft whimpering or crying. She’d also start drawing again later on. Sometimes I’d scream at her to shut up. I really got mad every time it happened since it had been going on for 6 years. However, I knew that I had to do something about this. I was a lurker by this time so I’ve read a lot of ghost story threads, and I remembered how pussy most of the goons were regarding ghosts and never checked anything out. So I knew that I had to at least understand what was going on exactly, and if possible end it. I didn’t really have a plan but I knew I had to see the girl or talk to her or something.
Last year, shortly before I turned 18, my parents went away for the weekend, so I took the key to the secret room from their room (they kept it ever since locking it that day when I took off the wallpaper). I was determined to see her so I stayed up expecting to hear sounds. I couldn’t hear anything so soon I just fell asleep. It was about 1 am when I woke up to a loud bang, like someone jumped or fell. I heard her footsteps afterwards and of course the drawing. The first thing I felt before any fear was pure anger. I hated that she woke me up, even though this was what I wanted. I immediately grabbed the key and went to the door. I was pounding on it as I said “That’s it!” and unlocking the door. The sounds stopped and I heard whimpering. I threw open the door and this was the first time I saw the room in years.
The light coming from my room illuminated a figure in the room, much like when I saw my sister years earlier. This was when I began to feel a wave of different emotions. I was really angry, really scared, yet I also knew that I had to do this and remain calm. I went into the room and stood a few feet away from the figure which was standing in the corner. I turned on the light. What I saw was probably the most horrific sight I could probably have ever even thought of in my entire life. Any horror movie monster had nothing on how unnatural the girl looked.
I finally realized why my sister described her in such a weird way. Her body was taller than she should have been. Her limbs were so lanky and bony and stretched like she kept growing past how tall she should have been. She was wearing a really small dress, and it was really tight on her body. Her face looked as if her head had continued to grow but her face had not. The skin was stretched and the eyes were sunk back into her head yet wide open and her small, childlike teeth were exposed since her lips were stretched back with the rest of her face. Her hair was down to her waist, her face had tears streaming down. I took all of this in in just a moment, and as soon as we met eyes she let out a wail as if she was crying and moaning at the same time. It wasn’t a loud wail like most people describe ghosts, it was pretty soft and it was as if she was in terrible pain, but I couldn’t tell her expression since her face was so unnatural and stretched.
As soon as I heard the wail all the anger in my body was overcome by fear and I ran. I wish I could say I ran for a video camera, but I just ran. I know I’ve been talking about how much I hate when people don’t investigate things but I was so terrified that I ran. Once I got out of my room I ran to my car and drove away and spent the night at a friend’s house. Once I realized what happened I was in a cold shiver and scared out of my mind for the entire night. I was too scared to go back home until my parents came home.
I waited until they came back on Sunday, and then I came over. They asked me why I took the key and left the closet door open and I just told them I wanted to see if I could sell any of my old toys on eBay. I took one last look in the room and locked the door. Ever since then nothing happened. I don’t know why things stopped, but I’m always hoping its not because I “let her out” like in the Ring or something and that she’s really evil. Since nothing has happened since then I do really hope that I helped her out in some way, but in all honesty I don’t care. My parents moved after I went to college, and I have no intention of ever going back. I came up with a theory that the male family member in her life was really mean to her and hated her playing in there, and possibly beat her, while the female family member always felt sad (hence my sister, and the girls willingness to open up to her first). Anyway like I said that’s just all theory but it kind of makes sense. This all happened last year, and the more I think about it the harder it is to remember. Sorry for typing such a long post, I didn't realize I had this much to tell.
Okay I haven't posted this story because even though things worked out okay I was terrified and thinking about how she looked and how I felt makes me feel the same way when I remember it.
I lived in the second oldest house in my area near Waco, Texas, from when I was about 11 til I was 18. I don't know the significance of this really but I feel it’s the only possible explanation for any supernatural presence. I'm not sure when the house was originally built but the rest of the houses around mine were built in the 40s and 50s so I supposed it’s older than that.
The house seemed normal when we first moved in. Only two families had lived there over the years so it wasn't like there was a high turnover rate. In fact no one really noticed or mentioned anything supernatural with the house.
However, there was a "secret room." This room was actually a selling point for my parents to help us deal with moving. Even though my dad was in the military we had lived at our past house for quote awhile and didn't want to move. So of course when my parents said there was a secret passage connecting one of the possible bedrooms with a secret room we became excited about the new house. My sister and I fought for it but I won because the other bedroom already had flower wallpaper up. When I first saw my room I went straight to the closet to see the "Secret door."
The secret door wasn't really secret, it was right in the back of the closet and plain to see. However it was a lot smaller than any normal door. Even when I was only 11 or 12 I had to squat down to get in. It looked like it was made for a child to use.
Another interesting thing was that the door handle was not really built into the door, it was just a handle added as an afterthought. This made me think it was originally just some sort of attic or crawl space door and not meant for a room. The door was lockable by key from my side of the door, the other side had no handle or keyhole. When you open the door there’s a very small hallway which is the same height as the door and not really fit for an adult, but it’s just a few feet long and then you get into the room.
The room was just an empty room added above the garage of the house. There was no way out except for the "secret passageway" to my closet. There were no windows, one light with a string used to turn it on hanging from the ceiling, and the room was completely white with seemingly new wallpaper. There was no furniture or anything left in the room from the previous owners, in fact I don't think the previous owners used it at all. I believe it was sealed before or soon after they moved in and wasn't touched since then, since it was pretty dusty, but who knows. The lock did seem very old and had a hard time moving as if it was rusted or the wood was warped or something.
Now my parents thought the room could be me and my sister's own little toy room or whatever when they first saw it, but after moving in they had second thoughts. I'm not sure what it was but they said it was because they wouldn't be able to hear us if we got hurt in that room since it was so detached from the rest of the house. Of course since we wanted our own secret room so badly they gave in, but said that we had to tell them when we were playing in there and we had to keep the door to my room, my closet, and the secret room open at all times when we were there. So we went on and like I said earlier nothing much really supernatural happened in the rest of the house, and not even too much in the "secret room," at least not to me.
My sister began having an imaginary friend. Whenever I wasn't in there I could hear her talking and whispering to someone. I noticed that although at first she used to have fun in there that as time went on she kind of seemed sadder when she was in there. However up til now this could all be coincidence so I didn't give it much thought.
The only weird things that happened with me was at night I thought I could hear some sort of scratching on the walls behind my room, except it wasn't really with fingernails it was softer sounding. It wasn't on the door, but coming from inside the room.
Now I believe that I only heard this at night because it was quiet at night, and the scratching rubbing sound was so soft that you normally couldn't hear it. I really had no idea what it was, I told my dad once and he looked around for some animal but couldn't find any so we just forgot about it and I lived with it. Like I said it was so soft it never really bothered me. It could be some far off tree rubbing against the house for all I knew. This rubbing happened consistently but like I said I never paid it much mind, at least until my sister went into the room one night.
She knew about the rubbing too and never really said anything about it. One night though, probably about a year or so after moving into the house, the rubbing was going on as usual. I was in that limbo before falling to sleep when I thought that someone was in my room and unlocking the closet door. I thought it might have been a dream but I looked around and saw my door and closet door open, so I got up to check it out. I was a little scared but I realized it was probably mom or dad checking out the rubbing sound since I told them it still happened sometimes. I turned the light on in my closet and looked in. I saw a figure sitting in the room facing the wall. Now even when I was a kid, I had been pretty brave. I was still scared since I was pretty young, but I knew that you can't just run or you'll never know. I said "Hello?" and I heard "She wanted me to see" in what sounded like my sister's voice. The light was in the middle of the room, and it was tough taking even those few steps to get to it in the middle of that dark room. But like I said, I couldn't just leave so I just went there and turned it on. When I looked at the figure, it was indeed my sister, sitting and scratching at the wall paper. I touched her and she was crying so I pulled her up and took her out of the room. I'm really glad that I didn't just lock the door and run or else she'd be stuck in there all night (this is one reason why I never run away from anything abnormal). I locked the door, took her to her room and watched her as she went to sleep. I really thought she could've been sleepwalking or something although she never had before, and since it was over I didn't want to wake up my parents. I went back to sleep.
The next day I asked my sister in the morning if she remembered going into the room and she looked freaked out. I told her she was probably just sleep walking but she said that "the girl" asked her to come look at her pictures. She didn't start crying but she was about to because she was so scared. I didn't ask who "the girl" was. I told her it was just a dream and went to prove it. She didn't want to enter the room again so I went in and saw where she was scratching on the wall. Only a little bit was scratched away, so I started peeling some more wallpaper off. Under the wallpaper were different pictures drawn in what looked like crayon. They were typical kid pictures of mainly cats, and houses, however there was one picture that I thought was weird.
It was a little girl, a cat, a mom, and a dad. Now everything looked like a normal kid family portrait, except the dad had no face. It was just a circle. Of course my rational side said she just never finished it. But still the dad picture looked strangely out of place, like the lines were distorted like she had trouble drawing it. Anyway I told my parents and they yelled at me for pulling back the wallpaper. I didn't want my sister to get in trouble so I didn't say anything about her or what happened last night. My parents said we had to get it fixed now and were mad, and didn't let me play in there again as punishment. The whole thing still seemed normal to me. Kid draws on wall, parents put wall paper up to cover it up. I didn't realize until later that night when the scratching rubbing sound started up, that it sounded like a crayon. I really started thinking that it was "the girl" that my sister talked about was drawing on the wall.
Now after this happened, I started believing that the girl was actually in there. Once I started acknowledging her presence, weirder things began to happen. It happened really slowly. I was about 14 or 15 after the episode with my sister, and the weird things were happening slowly over the course of the next years I lived in the house up until I was 18. The changes were so subtle that I didn’t really notice that they were happening until much later. The drawing sounds increased a little bit and soon were audible even during the day. I also started hearing little pattering of feet. The more I heard these things the more emotional I felt about them. I started feeling angry the more I heard the sounds, especially when I was trying to sleep. However I always managed to control myself and try to think that this girl was obviously sad and just trying to have fun and I calmed myself down. However this was going on so long that I finally asked my sister when I was about 16.
I asked her if she ever heard the sounds. She said that she did, although they were pretty quiet. Now I didn’t think this was so weird since obviously I could hear them too, and I told her how annoying it was. She kind of looked at me as if she was hurt, and said that every time she heard the sounds she felt really sad. She had trouble talking about it, but I told her this is pretty important since it’s going to affect the rest of my years left in the house. She told me that “the girl” was the girl that she used to talk to when she played in the room. She didn’t know her name, but they used to play together. She said she looked just like a little girl about her age so they had fun together. However, as my sister got older, the little girl seemed to get older too, except very unnaturally. It was subtle at first but soon she began hating seeing her. She said she looked as if she “shouldn’t have been alive anymore.” I didn’t really know what this meant. My sister said she wore the same dress the whole time, even when the girl grew out of it. I asked her why she went into the room that one night to find the pictures, and she said she really didn’t want to but the girl made her feel so sad and she’d do anything to help her out. However this still freaked her out and I didn’t ask anymore questions.
Things got worse every night, and I hated hearing that sound. I was so mad that she wouldn’t just shut up so I could sleep. The weird thing was I was scared at the same time, since I knew that whatever it was in there wasn’t actually alive anymore. What also freaked me out was that the sound didn’t annoy my sister, but I guess she had more tolerance than I did.
I asked my parents who used to live here, and they said a family with two sons. Of course this didn’t have anything to do with the room, since they had it locked off the entire time they were there. So I asked if they knew anything about the family before them. They said the original owners were the ones who had the house built and that they didn’t know much about them, except that they had a daughter who died when she was 11. I asked if they knew how she died, but they said it was some sort of accident, so it wasn’t murder or child abuse or anything. I also asked if she died in the secret room, but they said they didn’t think so. I really think that this was the girl in the room, although I have no idea why she inhabited it still.
Once I knew this I sort of had an idea with what I was dealing with. Last year was when things got the worst. I heard almost constant drawing and her jumping around inside the room. The footsteps sounded heavier and were louder. If I ever heard it I’d pound on the door to the room and she’d stop immediately, but I’d hear soft whimpering or crying. She’d also start drawing again later on. Sometimes I’d scream at her to shut up. I really got mad every time it happened since it had been going on for 6 years. However, I knew that I had to do something about this. I was a lurker by this time so I’ve read a lot of ghost story threads, and I remembered how pussy most of the goons were regarding ghosts and never checked anything out. So I knew that I had to at least understand what was going on exactly, and if possible end it. I didn’t really have a plan but I knew I had to see the girl or talk to her or something.
Last year, shortly before I turned 18, my parents went away for the weekend, so I took the key to the secret room from their room (they kept it ever since locking it that day when I took off the wallpaper). I was determined to see her so I stayed up expecting to hear sounds. I couldn’t hear anything so soon I just fell asleep. It was about 1 am when I woke up to a loud bang, like someone jumped or fell. I heard her footsteps afterwards and of course the drawing. The first thing I felt before any fear was pure anger. I hated that she woke me up, even though this was what I wanted. I immediately grabbed the key and went to the door. I was pounding on it as I said “That’s it!” and unlocking the door. The sounds stopped and I heard whimpering. I threw open the door and this was the first time I saw the room in years.
The light coming from my room illuminated a figure in the room, much like when I saw my sister years earlier. This was when I began to feel a wave of different emotions. I was really angry, really scared, yet I also knew that I had to do this and remain calm. I went into the room and stood a few feet away from the figure which was standing in the corner. I turned on the light. What I saw was probably the most horrific sight I could probably have ever even thought of in my entire life. Any horror movie monster had nothing on how unnatural the girl looked.
I finally realized why my sister described her in such a weird way. Her body was taller than she should have been. Her limbs were so lanky and bony and stretched like she kept growing past how tall she should have been. She was wearing a really small dress, and it was really tight on her body. Her face looked as if her head had continued to grow but her face had not. The skin was stretched and the eyes were sunk back into her head yet wide open and her small, childlike teeth were exposed since her lips were stretched back with the rest of her face. Her hair was down to her waist, her face had tears streaming down. I took all of this in in just a moment, and as soon as we met eyes she let out a wail as if she was crying and moaning at the same time. It wasn’t a loud wail like most people describe ghosts, it was pretty soft and it was as if she was in terrible pain, but I couldn’t tell her expression since her face was so unnatural and stretched.
As soon as I heard the wail all the anger in my body was overcome by fear and I ran. I wish I could say I ran for a video camera, but I just ran. I know I’ve been talking about how much I hate when people don’t investigate things but I was so terrified that I ran. Once I got out of my room I ran to my car and drove away and spent the night at a friend’s house. Once I realized what happened I was in a cold shiver and scared out of my mind for the entire night. I was too scared to go back home until my parents came home.
I waited until they came back on Sunday, and then I came over. They asked me why I took the key and left the closet door open and I just told them I wanted to see if I could sell any of my old toys on eBay. I took one last look in the room and locked the door. Ever since then nothing happened. I don’t know why things stopped, but I’m always hoping its not because I “let her out” like in the Ring or something and that she’s really evil. Since nothing has happened since then I do really hope that I helped her out in some way, but in all honesty I don’t care. My parents moved after I went to college, and I have no intention of ever going back. I came up with a theory that the male family member in her life was really mean to her and hated her playing in there, and possibly beat her, while the female family member always felt sad (hence my sister, and the girls willingness to open up to her first). Anyway like I said that’s just all theory but it kind of makes sense. This all happened last year, and the more I think about it the harder it is to remember. Sorry for typing such a long post, I didn't realize I had this much to tell.
The Bwystfel
Posted by: (Original poster still under investigation)
Reposted by: Humboldt squid
I was maybe seven when my great grandmother died at the age of 96; she was Welsh, and a smiling, stooped-back woman with keen blue eyes and a maze of wrinkles. Apart from several stories -– which I recall my grandmother being annoyed that I was told -– I know little about my greatgran. Scared I would forget her altogether, a few years after she died, I sat down and tried to remember what she'd told me, making notes for myself. The below is taken from the notes I and my own memory.
You can read these two stories in a number of ways – a very old tale of a shadow person/ghost/demon/faerie beast, or a child's imaginings, or maybe just an attempt to frighten me. I'm repeating them as I was told them.
Spellings of (probably) Welsh words are all approximate; where there's a *, I've quoted directly from the notes, but am not sure what she/I meant.
The Bwystfel and the Bone Den
"When I was a child, I lived in Radnorshire, one of seven children and the youngest of six girls. As my parents had six other girls and an infant boy to take care of, they left me to myself, and I ran about like a wild thing. Not that they didn't love me, but they had other things to do.
I was about five when I began to see the Bwystfel. It roamed about the farm, slipping in the shadows, and the only way to see it was to look for the shapes that were darker than the spaces between stars. Its mad eyes were like coal sparks, it laughed like a goat in pain, and it was always angry. I watched it from a distance: one spring, I saw it kill a nest of sparrows – closing its hands about the nest until the little naked birds smothered on its flesh* -- one summer, it poisoned the sheep, biting the ewes' legs until rot and infection ate into their flesh that no about of doctoring could fix. Later, it skulked into the shed and sliced the handyman's chest open, then danced his blood up the walls and over the rafters. My parents said it was an accident, but knew better. "The Bwystfel did it," I told my father, and he boxed my ears for being a liar. No one believed me at all. . . except the Bwystfel itself.
It grew angrier. At night, it crept into my room, giggling and ripping the blankets away and pinching me. I shared a bed with two of my sisters – we didn't all have separate rooms like you do – and when the Bwystfel came, we shivered together, too afraid to move until morning. We were very little girls, and nobody trusted us with a candle, so we had no way to drive the thing away. It tormented us in whispers, calling us names and telling us we were bad children, because our prayers that it would leave us be weren't answered. My sisters refused to speak a word of it, and they wore the Bwystfel-inflicted bruises like jewellery – saying they'd fallen over or been bitten by the cat.
I decided I would have to find the Bwystfel myself and scare it away. I took the statuette of Florence Nightingale that my mother gave us to hold when we were sick and a stone with a hole in it, both for luck. As it turned out, I would need the luck.
I walked for ages, got lost, and eventually stumbled into a small wooded copse where I had never been before. Under the trees it was cold air, and pine needles and dried leaves lay thick upon the patchy grass. I clutch Florence. . . and then I saw the bones.
Bleached and ancient, they lay scattered in so-wide* circle: small bones, large bones, bones half buried in the loam, bones with scraps of dried flesh still clinging to them. A sheep skeleton hung suspended in the tangle of a blackberry bush, and canes had grown through the eye sockets of birds. I started to cry – I knew I'd found the den of the Bwystfel.
The Bwystfel appeared from nowhere, crouched down on the tawny grass like a cat about to pounce. The ivory of the bones jutted up around it like little fingers, clawing, trying to drag it down. "You'd better run, small girl," the Bwystfel hissed. "Better run, or your brother-boy will break his bones, snap-snap." It vanished, only to appear again, behind me. Terrified, I flung my lucky stone at it; the stone passed right through its head, and the ghoul screamed.
I'd seen enough. I bolted, dropping Florence, rushing headlong towards where I thought the nearest road should be. Once there, I kept going, my skirt ripped to ribbons by thorns and my legs stung with nettles, until, turning a corner, I ran smack into my grandfather. He was a big man, my grandfather, and he swung me off my feet and held me as I sobbed.
"What's wrong, darling?" he asked, when I calmed some. I told him of the Bwystfel and what it had said, and instead of being angry, as my father had been, he listened. His brow furrowed. "Are you feeling brave, darling? Do you think you could be brave for me?" When I nodded, he had me show him were I'd gone – then he sat me on a bank and gave me his best silver snuff box to hold. "I'm going after the Bwystfel," he told her. "You stay here in the sunshine and I'll be back soon. If any bad bwcy* comes, you hit it with that."
So I waited, shaking, afraid for my granddaddy and afraid of the Bwystfel and afraid of what Mother would do if I lost Florence. Finally, back Grandad came; flushed, and bleeding from a hundred cuts on his hands. He looked angry, more angry then I'd ever seen him, for he was the mildest of men. "The Bwystfel-beast is dead again," he told me, "and under the soil where it belongs." He spat upon the earth and ground the moisture in with his boot heel.
"What do you mean, dead again?" I asked.
Grandad was quiet for a time, then he said. "The Bwystfel was an unchristian/damned* who hurt small things because he loved pain. When I was a boy, Old Thomas* killed him, but Young Thomas found where he lay and let him out. I'll sort him out for good soon and he won't bother you any more." When he arrived at my father's house, he made excuses for my torn dress and tear-stained face, saying I'd been attacked by a dog, and Florence had been broken as I'd tried to escape.
And then, without another word, he went to the shed and fetched the dead handyman's bottle of whiskey and gun powder and a box of matches.
I never went back, but I heard of a fire that burned bone den trees to the ground."
If nothing else is true, the Florence Nightingale statuette still exists, and has indeed been broken and glued back together.
The Bwystfel and the Handyman
I loved the Bwystfel story -- wouldn't you be pleased to know your great granny tried to kick some paranormal butt? -- and after many pleas and the repetition of the original story dozens of times, I convinced my Greatgran to elaborate. While I have mismatched, incomplete notes on some of the other stories, this was the one she told most often.
"The handyman was a widower and a drunk, yet good natured and pious all the same. He never swore in front of ladies, and he always tipped his cap to Mother. . . . Somehow, tho, he angered the Bwystfel. Everywhere he went, the thing would follow, cursing low and solid in his ears. It pushed him into ditches and stuck bramble canes in his bed, so would awake in covered in needle-point scratches. The handyman and Father were good friends, and the handyman often ate with my family. As the weeks past, the man grew paler and paler and became jumpy, starting at every sound. I watched the Bwystfel slithering around his ankles and snickering. He couldn't see it, but he could hear it, and he thought he was going mad.
At dinner one night, the handyman told us that he was having nightmares – horrible nightmares of rotting things – and that he could smell the carrion when he woke. By this point, my father was worried for his friends, and together they pried the floorboards up, looking for dead mice. . . and found them. . . along with the handyman's missing cat, curled up under the floor just below the foot of the bed, where it used to sleep. Everyone agreed that the cat must have been hunting mice and become trapped and starved.
That didn't explain the broken necks.
Or the dried corpses of a hundred bees, lying in rows under the bed.
Eventually, the handyman, too, began to see what I knew was the Bwystfel. He said, that he could feel its stare, and when he slept the shadows seemed to move: growing larger, then smaller, then larger again. Things tapped on the walls at night, and knocked on the windows and breathed cold breath on his face. The milk turned sour and the butter rancid and cracks appeared in every plate the handyman owned. And then things got even worse.
I was playing nearby when the scream came. The Bwystfel shrieked with its goat laughter and the sound of crashing and scraping metal echoed out of the shed. Chickens ran willy-nilly, and the dog, lying beside me, barked and barked, the hair on its back bristling like a brush. Mother burst from our house and ordered me away.
Every rusted farm tool in that little shed had come off its hooks. The handyman died a few days later from a blow to the head and an infection from a pitchfork cut. He had never having woken up."
Naturally, I cannot vouch for the accuracy of these stories, nor do I know what a Bwystfel is. All I can add was that the smiling Greatgran I knew didn't exist when she recounted these stories. At least once afterwards, she stayed up all night with the light on. Also, out of my grandmother's hearing, and after a good bit of sherry, she made me promise that if I ever met anything like the Bwystfel, I was to go straight to the nearest church and stay there.
Reposted by: Humboldt squid
I was maybe seven when my great grandmother died at the age of 96; she was Welsh, and a smiling, stooped-back woman with keen blue eyes and a maze of wrinkles. Apart from several stories -– which I recall my grandmother being annoyed that I was told -– I know little about my greatgran. Scared I would forget her altogether, a few years after she died, I sat down and tried to remember what she'd told me, making notes for myself. The below is taken from the notes I and my own memory.
You can read these two stories in a number of ways – a very old tale of a shadow person/ghost/demon/faerie beast, or a child's imaginings, or maybe just an attempt to frighten me. I'm repeating them as I was told them.
Spellings of (probably) Welsh words are all approximate; where there's a *, I've quoted directly from the notes, but am not sure what she/I meant.
The Bwystfel and the Bone Den
"When I was a child, I lived in Radnorshire, one of seven children and the youngest of six girls. As my parents had six other girls and an infant boy to take care of, they left me to myself, and I ran about like a wild thing. Not that they didn't love me, but they had other things to do.
I was about five when I began to see the Bwystfel. It roamed about the farm, slipping in the shadows, and the only way to see it was to look for the shapes that were darker than the spaces between stars. Its mad eyes were like coal sparks, it laughed like a goat in pain, and it was always angry. I watched it from a distance: one spring, I saw it kill a nest of sparrows – closing its hands about the nest until the little naked birds smothered on its flesh* -- one summer, it poisoned the sheep, biting the ewes' legs until rot and infection ate into their flesh that no about of doctoring could fix. Later, it skulked into the shed and sliced the handyman's chest open, then danced his blood up the walls and over the rafters. My parents said it was an accident, but knew better. "The Bwystfel did it," I told my father, and he boxed my ears for being a liar. No one believed me at all. . . except the Bwystfel itself.
It grew angrier. At night, it crept into my room, giggling and ripping the blankets away and pinching me. I shared a bed with two of my sisters – we didn't all have separate rooms like you do – and when the Bwystfel came, we shivered together, too afraid to move until morning. We were very little girls, and nobody trusted us with a candle, so we had no way to drive the thing away. It tormented us in whispers, calling us names and telling us we were bad children, because our prayers that it would leave us be weren't answered. My sisters refused to speak a word of it, and they wore the Bwystfel-inflicted bruises like jewellery – saying they'd fallen over or been bitten by the cat.
I decided I would have to find the Bwystfel myself and scare it away. I took the statuette of Florence Nightingale that my mother gave us to hold when we were sick and a stone with a hole in it, both for luck. As it turned out, I would need the luck.
I walked for ages, got lost, and eventually stumbled into a small wooded copse where I had never been before. Under the trees it was cold air, and pine needles and dried leaves lay thick upon the patchy grass. I clutch Florence. . . and then I saw the bones.
Bleached and ancient, they lay scattered in so-wide* circle: small bones, large bones, bones half buried in the loam, bones with scraps of dried flesh still clinging to them. A sheep skeleton hung suspended in the tangle of a blackberry bush, and canes had grown through the eye sockets of birds. I started to cry – I knew I'd found the den of the Bwystfel.
The Bwystfel appeared from nowhere, crouched down on the tawny grass like a cat about to pounce. The ivory of the bones jutted up around it like little fingers, clawing, trying to drag it down. "You'd better run, small girl," the Bwystfel hissed. "Better run, or your brother-boy will break his bones, snap-snap." It vanished, only to appear again, behind me. Terrified, I flung my lucky stone at it; the stone passed right through its head, and the ghoul screamed.
I'd seen enough. I bolted, dropping Florence, rushing headlong towards where I thought the nearest road should be. Once there, I kept going, my skirt ripped to ribbons by thorns and my legs stung with nettles, until, turning a corner, I ran smack into my grandfather. He was a big man, my grandfather, and he swung me off my feet and held me as I sobbed.
"What's wrong, darling?" he asked, when I calmed some. I told him of the Bwystfel and what it had said, and instead of being angry, as my father had been, he listened. His brow furrowed. "Are you feeling brave, darling? Do you think you could be brave for me?" When I nodded, he had me show him were I'd gone – then he sat me on a bank and gave me his best silver snuff box to hold. "I'm going after the Bwystfel," he told her. "You stay here in the sunshine and I'll be back soon. If any bad bwcy* comes, you hit it with that."
So I waited, shaking, afraid for my granddaddy and afraid of the Bwystfel and afraid of what Mother would do if I lost Florence. Finally, back Grandad came; flushed, and bleeding from a hundred cuts on his hands. He looked angry, more angry then I'd ever seen him, for he was the mildest of men. "The Bwystfel-beast is dead again," he told me, "and under the soil where it belongs." He spat upon the earth and ground the moisture in with his boot heel.
"What do you mean, dead again?" I asked.
Grandad was quiet for a time, then he said. "The Bwystfel was an unchristian/damned* who hurt small things because he loved pain. When I was a boy, Old Thomas* killed him, but Young Thomas found where he lay and let him out. I'll sort him out for good soon and he won't bother you any more." When he arrived at my father's house, he made excuses for my torn dress and tear-stained face, saying I'd been attacked by a dog, and Florence had been broken as I'd tried to escape.
And then, without another word, he went to the shed and fetched the dead handyman's bottle of whiskey and gun powder and a box of matches.
I never went back, but I heard of a fire that burned bone den trees to the ground."
If nothing else is true, the Florence Nightingale statuette still exists, and has indeed been broken and glued back together.
The Bwystfel and the Handyman
I loved the Bwystfel story -- wouldn't you be pleased to know your great granny tried to kick some paranormal butt? -- and after many pleas and the repetition of the original story dozens of times, I convinced my Greatgran to elaborate. While I have mismatched, incomplete notes on some of the other stories, this was the one she told most often.
"The handyman was a widower and a drunk, yet good natured and pious all the same. He never swore in front of ladies, and he always tipped his cap to Mother. . . . Somehow, tho, he angered the Bwystfel. Everywhere he went, the thing would follow, cursing low and solid in his ears. It pushed him into ditches and stuck bramble canes in his bed, so would awake in covered in needle-point scratches. The handyman and Father were good friends, and the handyman often ate with my family. As the weeks past, the man grew paler and paler and became jumpy, starting at every sound. I watched the Bwystfel slithering around his ankles and snickering. He couldn't see it, but he could hear it, and he thought he was going mad.
At dinner one night, the handyman told us that he was having nightmares – horrible nightmares of rotting things – and that he could smell the carrion when he woke. By this point, my father was worried for his friends, and together they pried the floorboards up, looking for dead mice. . . and found them. . . along with the handyman's missing cat, curled up under the floor just below the foot of the bed, where it used to sleep. Everyone agreed that the cat must have been hunting mice and become trapped and starved.
That didn't explain the broken necks.
Or the dried corpses of a hundred bees, lying in rows under the bed.
Eventually, the handyman, too, began to see what I knew was the Bwystfel. He said, that he could feel its stare, and when he slept the shadows seemed to move: growing larger, then smaller, then larger again. Things tapped on the walls at night, and knocked on the windows and breathed cold breath on his face. The milk turned sour and the butter rancid and cracks appeared in every plate the handyman owned. And then things got even worse.
I was playing nearby when the scream came. The Bwystfel shrieked with its goat laughter and the sound of crashing and scraping metal echoed out of the shed. Chickens ran willy-nilly, and the dog, lying beside me, barked and barked, the hair on its back bristling like a brush. Mother burst from our house and ordered me away.
Every rusted farm tool in that little shed had come off its hooks. The handyman died a few days later from a blow to the head and an infection from a pitchfork cut. He had never having woken up."
Naturally, I cannot vouch for the accuracy of these stories, nor do I know what a Bwystfel is. All I can add was that the smiling Greatgran I knew didn't exist when she recounted these stories. At least once afterwards, she stayed up all night with the light on. Also, out of my grandmother's hearing, and after a good bit of sherry, she made me promise that if I ever met anything like the Bwystfel, I was to go straight to the nearest church and stay there.
Only God
Posted by: rammark
As I’ve mentioned a few times before, my family is very fundamental Christian.
They do not admit to believing in ghosts or spirits or demons… despite the fact that Jesus made a practice of driving demons out of people in the Bible. So you can understand their chagrin when their youngest kept insisting that there was a scary old man that wouldn’t let him sleep at night.
We’d been living in our new apartment for about a year and a half. My brother and I attended a public school about three blocks from home and despite being country boys now living in a fairly large city, we fit in rather well with the other children in the neighborhood. However, despite Dad’s new job paying better than he used to bring in being a small town cop, money was tight. Mom took a day job so we could afford to eat something other than pancakes, hot dogs, and that disgusting canned chicken noodle soup. It took a little while to get used to it, but soon my Brother Gabe and I were in a routine.
We would walk home from school together and sit down at the table together to do our homework. Seeing as how it was kindergarten, I didn’t have much in the way of homework, so I usually ended up watching Gabe do his math and spelling for a while before I’d get bored and go watch GI-Joe. Mom would come home around 6:00 and start dinner. Dad would come home at 7:00 and we’d all eat and watch M*A*S*H before I got sent to bed.
It was late May, shortly after my 5th birthday. It was one of the first hot and muggy nights of the year, so I had the window open and I was sleeping on top of my blankets. A cough woke me. It was the sort of cough I would later learn to associate with my maternal grandfather, who would die from pneumonia after a long battle with emphysema. It was wet and labored and from the sound of it, whoever was coughing should have been doubled over in some serious pain.
I opened my eyes and standing at my window was the oldest man I’d ever seen. His face was a giant mass of wrinkles and his head was nearly completely bald, save for the Picard ring around the sides of his head. His long white beard was stained yellow around his lips and he absolutely reeked of cigarette smoke. We made eye contact.
His eyes were the most intense blue I’ve ever seen. If there’s one thing I will take with me from that incident, it will be those piercing blue eyes and the way they shimmered in the darkness. He didn’t say a single word; just stood there, stooped against the window sill and stared at me.
I screamed like the little girl my mother’s always wanted and ran crying out of my bedroom. My parents were in the living room still, which means it couldn’t have been terribly late yet. I gibbered something about a man in my bedroom and Mom held me close and told me it was ok while Dad took his gun from overtop of the fridge where Gabe and I couldn’t reach it and went to investigate. Of course, there was nobody there and I’d had a bad dream and should go back to bed. I refused and spent the night sleeping in my He-Man sleeping bag at the foot of their bed.
The next night I made dad check the room with me. Nobody was in the closet. Nobody was under my bed. And the window was closed and locked. It didn’t matter. Somewhere after midnight I woke to the sound of a wet, lung tossing cough followed by the sound of wheezy breathing. I lay very still and pretended to still be asleep. The stench of cigarette smoke began to fill the room and I started having trouble breathing through it all. I forced myself to open my eyes long enough to find the door and ran for it.
Mom held me. Dad yelled. That night they wouldn’t let me sleep in their room. Intead, I took up residence on Gabe’s floor. Something he was none too happy about. I laid out my sleeping bag and curled up inside it, crying softly until Gabe hit me with his pillow and told me to shut up. I shut up. But I didn’t sleep. I waited. I waited because I knew, as only a child can, that the old man would be back that night. I waited for hours. And then, just before dawn, I was rewarded. There were footsteps out in the hall. Footsteps that were drawing closer and closer to Gabe’s door. Footsteps that stopped. The smell of smoke permeated the air and even Gabe started to cough a little bit in his sleep.
The door rattled. I moaned a little and curled up into a little ball hidden deep in my sleeping bag. The door rattled again, harder this time. I started to cry again and begged the old man to just go away and leave me alone. The door continued to rattle until finally when it sounded like it was going to come flying off its hinges, it broke off and went completely still. I risked a peek out from under my sleeping bag. The smoke still lingered in the room but it was fading fast. I breathed a sigh of relief until I heard heavy footsteps come pounding back down the hallway and up to the door. It burst open.
I screamed louder than I had the night before. And with good reason too. It was my dad and he was pissed at being woken up again. He yelled at me for banging on the doors and when I tried to tell him that it was the old man he spanked me for lying. I don’t know what hurt more, the spanking or that my own father thought I was a liar. I spent the rest of the pre-dawn darkness standing in the corner doing what seemed at the time to be an odd punishment; repeating the phrase that my father wanted me to say: “There are no ghosts in this house. Only God.”
This was to become quite familiar to me over the years and while it still strikes me as odd to deny a spirit’s existence, the probably billions of times I’ve repeated it have made it seem like a normal, everyday expression. There ARE no ghosts. Only God. What this means is that God is a nasty old man with emphysema and smoke stains in his beard who likes scaring the shit out of little kids. Bastard.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch…
The next few weeks plowed on like this. I would wake at random times during the night with a coughing old man stinking my room up with his smoke smell. He wasn’t actually smoking anything though. It was like his very essence was made up of tobacco smoke, like he’d smoked so much in his obviously very long life that his lungs were still full of the stuff and it just came out when he exhaled. That would explain the coughing. Every time he showed up I would start changing the mantra. “There are no ghosts in this house. Only God. There are no ghosts in this house. Only God.” Over and over again and it never seemed to do anything. I imagine it really freaked my parents out, though. Waking up to me screaming this at the top of my lungs about every other day for weeks on end.
One night in mid-June he finally acknowledged me. I was mid-mantra when he coughed. This time it wasn’t a gut wrenching cough but more of a “Pardon me good fellow, but I’d like to say a few words.” sort of cough. All this time, I’d been refusing to look at him but being a curious person, I just had to look.
He was leaning against the window sill, in the same place he’d been in the first night I saw him. His eyes were still as piercing blue as ever and they drew my gaze like a magnet. “Rammark,” he said. “You shouldn’t be afraid of me. I’m just an old man.” And then the jumped out the window.
I never saw him again.
I would really like to write all of that off to a five year old’s over-active imagination or a recurring nightmare or something. In retrospect, this wasn’t all that scary. But at the time, I was ready to piss my pants.
As I’ve mentioned a few times before, my family is very fundamental Christian.
They do not admit to believing in ghosts or spirits or demons… despite the fact that Jesus made a practice of driving demons out of people in the Bible. So you can understand their chagrin when their youngest kept insisting that there was a scary old man that wouldn’t let him sleep at night.
We’d been living in our new apartment for about a year and a half. My brother and I attended a public school about three blocks from home and despite being country boys now living in a fairly large city, we fit in rather well with the other children in the neighborhood. However, despite Dad’s new job paying better than he used to bring in being a small town cop, money was tight. Mom took a day job so we could afford to eat something other than pancakes, hot dogs, and that disgusting canned chicken noodle soup. It took a little while to get used to it, but soon my Brother Gabe and I were in a routine.
We would walk home from school together and sit down at the table together to do our homework. Seeing as how it was kindergarten, I didn’t have much in the way of homework, so I usually ended up watching Gabe do his math and spelling for a while before I’d get bored and go watch GI-Joe. Mom would come home around 6:00 and start dinner. Dad would come home at 7:00 and we’d all eat and watch M*A*S*H before I got sent to bed.
It was late May, shortly after my 5th birthday. It was one of the first hot and muggy nights of the year, so I had the window open and I was sleeping on top of my blankets. A cough woke me. It was the sort of cough I would later learn to associate with my maternal grandfather, who would die from pneumonia after a long battle with emphysema. It was wet and labored and from the sound of it, whoever was coughing should have been doubled over in some serious pain.
I opened my eyes and standing at my window was the oldest man I’d ever seen. His face was a giant mass of wrinkles and his head was nearly completely bald, save for the Picard ring around the sides of his head. His long white beard was stained yellow around his lips and he absolutely reeked of cigarette smoke. We made eye contact.
His eyes were the most intense blue I’ve ever seen. If there’s one thing I will take with me from that incident, it will be those piercing blue eyes and the way they shimmered in the darkness. He didn’t say a single word; just stood there, stooped against the window sill and stared at me.
I screamed like the little girl my mother’s always wanted and ran crying out of my bedroom. My parents were in the living room still, which means it couldn’t have been terribly late yet. I gibbered something about a man in my bedroom and Mom held me close and told me it was ok while Dad took his gun from overtop of the fridge where Gabe and I couldn’t reach it and went to investigate. Of course, there was nobody there and I’d had a bad dream and should go back to bed. I refused and spent the night sleeping in my He-Man sleeping bag at the foot of their bed.
The next night I made dad check the room with me. Nobody was in the closet. Nobody was under my bed. And the window was closed and locked. It didn’t matter. Somewhere after midnight I woke to the sound of a wet, lung tossing cough followed by the sound of wheezy breathing. I lay very still and pretended to still be asleep. The stench of cigarette smoke began to fill the room and I started having trouble breathing through it all. I forced myself to open my eyes long enough to find the door and ran for it.
Mom held me. Dad yelled. That night they wouldn’t let me sleep in their room. Intead, I took up residence on Gabe’s floor. Something he was none too happy about. I laid out my sleeping bag and curled up inside it, crying softly until Gabe hit me with his pillow and told me to shut up. I shut up. But I didn’t sleep. I waited. I waited because I knew, as only a child can, that the old man would be back that night. I waited for hours. And then, just before dawn, I was rewarded. There were footsteps out in the hall. Footsteps that were drawing closer and closer to Gabe’s door. Footsteps that stopped. The smell of smoke permeated the air and even Gabe started to cough a little bit in his sleep.
The door rattled. I moaned a little and curled up into a little ball hidden deep in my sleeping bag. The door rattled again, harder this time. I started to cry again and begged the old man to just go away and leave me alone. The door continued to rattle until finally when it sounded like it was going to come flying off its hinges, it broke off and went completely still. I risked a peek out from under my sleeping bag. The smoke still lingered in the room but it was fading fast. I breathed a sigh of relief until I heard heavy footsteps come pounding back down the hallway and up to the door. It burst open.
I screamed louder than I had the night before. And with good reason too. It was my dad and he was pissed at being woken up again. He yelled at me for banging on the doors and when I tried to tell him that it was the old man he spanked me for lying. I don’t know what hurt more, the spanking or that my own father thought I was a liar. I spent the rest of the pre-dawn darkness standing in the corner doing what seemed at the time to be an odd punishment; repeating the phrase that my father wanted me to say: “There are no ghosts in this house. Only God.”
This was to become quite familiar to me over the years and while it still strikes me as odd to deny a spirit’s existence, the probably billions of times I’ve repeated it have made it seem like a normal, everyday expression. There ARE no ghosts. Only God. What this means is that God is a nasty old man with emphysema and smoke stains in his beard who likes scaring the shit out of little kids. Bastard.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch…
The next few weeks plowed on like this. I would wake at random times during the night with a coughing old man stinking my room up with his smoke smell. He wasn’t actually smoking anything though. It was like his very essence was made up of tobacco smoke, like he’d smoked so much in his obviously very long life that his lungs were still full of the stuff and it just came out when he exhaled. That would explain the coughing. Every time he showed up I would start changing the mantra. “There are no ghosts in this house. Only God. There are no ghosts in this house. Only God.” Over and over again and it never seemed to do anything. I imagine it really freaked my parents out, though. Waking up to me screaming this at the top of my lungs about every other day for weeks on end.
One night in mid-June he finally acknowledged me. I was mid-mantra when he coughed. This time it wasn’t a gut wrenching cough but more of a “Pardon me good fellow, but I’d like to say a few words.” sort of cough. All this time, I’d been refusing to look at him but being a curious person, I just had to look.
He was leaning against the window sill, in the same place he’d been in the first night I saw him. His eyes were still as piercing blue as ever and they drew my gaze like a magnet. “Rammark,” he said. “You shouldn’t be afraid of me. I’m just an old man.” And then the jumped out the window.
I never saw him again.
I would really like to write all of that off to a five year old’s over-active imagination or a recurring nightmare or something. In retrospect, this wasn’t all that scary. But at the time, I was ready to piss my pants.
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