A Mother's Love
One afternoon, a couple was traveling on by car when at a far distance they saw a woman in the middle of the road, waving frantically.
The wife told her husband to keep on driving because it might be too dangerous, but the husband decided to pass by slowly so he wouldn't stay with the doubt on his mind of what might have happened and the chances of anyone being hurt. As they got closer, they noticed a woman with cuts and bruises on her face as well as on her arms. They then decide to stop and see if they could be of any help.
The cut and bruised woman was begging for help telling them that she had been in a car accident and that her husband and son, a new born baby, were still inside the car which was in a deep ditch. She told them that the husband was already dead but that her baby seemed to still be alive.
The husband that was traveling decided to get down and try to rescue the baby and he asked the hurt woman to stay with his wife inside the their car. When he got down he noticed two people in the front seats of the car but he didn't pay any attention to it and took out the baby quickly and got up to take the baby to it's mother. When he got up, he didn't see the mother anywhere so he asked his wife where she had gone. She told him that the woman followed him back to the crashed car.
When the husband went back to look for her, he noticed that clearly the couple in the front seats were dead, one of whom was unmistakeably the woman who had flagged them down.
The Tundra
The native villagers around these parts say that there's a stretch of tundra just north of here that is occupied by benevolent spirits. These spirits grant insight and warning to whoever visits them at night, once the sun has disappeared entirely and left the world in jet darkness. I drove out to the middle of the frozen expanse of ice and waited, hoping to catch a glimpse of whatever commanded these people’s reverence. They send their children out, bundled in furs to keep from freezing, on the eve of their 15th birthday to seek an audience with these spirits. Once they have achieved this, the children run home to their parents to share the news. From then on these children are considered adults in the village. Engaged couples visit this tundra on the night before their wedding. The entire village stays up all night awaiting their return, as it is upon their return that the couple either decides to proceed with their marriage, or to abandon it. The elderly visit the tundra whenever they are sick or ailing, and often make their condition worse by staying all night in the cold. When they return, however, it is most often with an air of sheer serenity.
So I waited, curious to see what phenomenon might inspire people so powerfully. I waited for hours, bundled in my parka and sitting on the hood of my pickup. I waited until I felt that I was going to freeze to death, even in my thick clothing.
I heard the spirit before I saw it. A crunching of snow in the silence made me jump off my truck and spin around. A hunched, gray-skinned man stood a few meters away. Sad, yellowed eyes stared back at me, set inside a skull from which sprouted only a few greasy hairs. He breathed heavily, with a rattle that shook his fragile ribcage, and one of his arms looked as if it had been messily broken and then neglected, allowing it to knit back together imperfectly. Badly scarred flesh marred his splayed legs. The man stared at me for perhaps ten seconds, breathing in the frigid air and exhaling a sickly dribble of steam, before disappearing when I blinked my eyes.
I spun around, looking for the man, but he was truly gone. Approaching where he had stood, I found a pair of bloody footprints in the snow. Frantic with fear, I got into my pickup and headed for the village as fast as the ice would allow. A few villagers were waiting for me when I arrived, knowing that I had gone out and curious as to what might happen. I hastily got out of my truck and, approaching the nearest villager, I demanded, “What is so benevolent about these spirits? What is so insightful? How do these spirits help you?”
“What did you see?” he asked, the look on his face now mirroring the fear in mine. “I saw a man, horribly disfigured and desperately sick!” I screamed into his face, and the rest of the villagers around us backed away a step. “Why? What does that mean?” I begged him. “The spirits show only one thing,” the man explained. “They show their visitors, a year in the future.”
Upstairs
When I was a child my family moved to a big old two-floor house, with big empty rooms and creaking floorboards. Both my parents worked so I was often alone when I came home from school. One early evening when I came home the house was still dark. I called out, "Mum?" and heard her sing song voice say "Yeeeeees?" from upstairs. I called her again as I climbed the stairs to see which room she was in, and again got the same "Yeeeeees?" reply. We were decorating at the time, and I didn't know my way around the maze of rooms but she was in one of the far ones, right down the hall. I felt uneasy, but I figured that was only natural so I rushed forward to see my mum, knowing that her presence would calm my fears, as a mother's presence always does. Just as I reached for the handle of the door to let myself in to the room I heard the front door downstairs open and my mother call "Sweetie, are you home?" in a cheery voice. I jumped back, startled and ran down the stairs to her, but as I glanced back from the top of the stairs, the door to the room slowly opened a crack. For a brief moment, I saw something strange in there, and I don't know what it was, but it was staring at me.
Her Name
It wasn’t a big deal at first, you know? It was just another story online, one you’d read in the comments of a YouTube video, designed to scaring you into posting it on eight other videos. You know the kind, where you die a horrible death or your crush will reject you if you don’t spread the word? I didn’t think anything of it at the time, but now it’s the only thing I can think about.
The comment started by saying that “she hasn’t left [the poster] alone in days” and “by reading this, she’ll come for you.” I don’t even remember the exact wording because it was late and I was tired and I’d seen a hundred other comments like it before.
I forgot all about it.
Until she started coming after me.
It started with little things. A flash in the corner of my vision, a strange shadow on the hallway floor. Then it got worse. I started to hear whispering when I was alone in the house, giggling, the sound of footsteps. I now know that she was teasing me. Sort of like how a cat will clamp its paw over a mouse’s tail and bat at it before it kills it.
Mirrors were the worst. She liked to stand just out of frame when I was brushing my hair, so when I shifted my head to get the other side, she would be there, standing next to the bookshelf, with her long, tangled hair, matted with blood, falling down her shoulders. And that grin.
Oh, God, that grin.
Her teeth were always bloody. I was never sure if it was her blood, or… I don’t even know.
Every night it seemed to get worse. I would see her on my way to class, in the rear view mirror of my car, dragging her talon-like fingernails across her own, rotting flesh as I stared in abject terror.
For a while I put it off to sleep deprivation. Finals, you know?
And then she came to me.
It was late, so late it was technically early. I couldn’t sleep because all I could hear was her giggling. I covered my face with the pillow and shut my eyes tight, when I felt something cold on my hand.
I was paralyzed with fear. It was sharp and it was cold and it was moving down my arm towards my elbow.
“Come out to play,” she said in that lilting, upsetting voice I’d heard one too many times before.
I screamed and sat up but she was gone. For the moment.
My biggest mistake was when I talked to her. I’d just stepped out of the shower and she was right there when I opened the curtains. I shrieked and stumbled back and she leaned down to me.
“Why?” I asked. “Why are you doing this?”
She told me why. It was because I knew something about her. That altercation ended with a serious head injury that landed me in the hospital.
That’s where I am now.
I can’t take this anymore. I’m just one person, it’s too much. I know what I have to do. I think I always knew.
God, I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.
Her name is Nora. She should be there soon.
Marine Drives Through Amboy
I was driving a shortcut from Twentynine Palms, CA to Albuquerque, NM. Twentynine Palms is located in the desolate high desert east of LA. The shortcut was all two lane road through total nothingness, except for passing through Amboy, CA. Amboy is a nearly abandoned town nearly as far below sea level as Death Valley, with a dormant volcano and lava field on one side and a salt flat on the other. It was also, at the time, a hotspot for satanic group activity.
So I was driving by myself in the afternoon. I stopped in Amboy and snapped a picture of the city sign, just to prove I was there to friends who dared me to take that route to I-40. I got back in my car and proceeded to drive up into the mountain range between Amboy and I-40. Once I reach the top I am driving north through a canyon with high grass on both sides of the road. Up ahead I see some stuff in the middle of the road. As I approach I slow down to see a red Pontiac Fiero stopped sideways across both lanes, a suitcase open with clothes scattered everywhere and two bodies laying face down in the road, a man and a woman.
I stop a hundred feet or so away and the hair on the back of my neck is standing up. Being a Marine, I reach under the seat and pull out a 9mm pistol and chamber a round. Something seemed very wrong, it looked too perfect as if it were staged. An ambush? Was I being paranoid? Something was just wrong. Getting out of the car seemed unthinkable, it was the horror movie move.
As I scanned the road I saw a line I could drive. Pass the guy in the road on his left, swerve to the right side of the woman, behind the Fiero and I'd be on the other side. I dropped it into first gear, punched it and drove the line I planned.
I passed the back of the Fierro without hitting it or either of the bodies in the road. I continued forward a couple hundred feet and slowed down so I could breathe and let my heart slow down. As I looked up into the rearview mirror I saw that the two bodies had gotten up to their knees and twenty or so people emerged from the tall grass on either side of the road by the car and bodies.
At that moment my right foot smashed the gas pedal to the floor and did not let up until I had to slowdown for the I-40 east onramp. I will never know what would have happened to me had I gotten out of the car to check on the bodies or stopped my car closer to them. Somehow I do not think it would have been good. Sometimes real life can be scarier than a movie.
Gateway Of The Mind
In 1983, a team of deeply pious scientists conducted a radical experiment in an undisclosed facility. The scientists had theorized that a human without access to any senses or ways to perceive stimuli would be able to perceive the presence of God. They believed that the five senses clouded our awareness of eternity, and without them, a human could actually establish contact with God by thought. An elderly man who claimed to have “nothing left to live for” was the only test subject to volunteer. To purge him of all his senses, the scientists performed a complex operation in which every sensory nerve connection to the brain was surgically severed. Although the test subject retained full muscular function, he could not see, hear, taste, smell, or feel. With no possible way to communicate with or even sense the outside world, he was alone with his thoughts. Scientists monitored him as he spoke aloud about his state of mind in jumbled, slurred sentences that he couldn’t even hear. After four days, the man claimed to be hearing hushed, unintelligible voices in his head. Assuming it was an onset of psychosis, the scientists paid little attention to the man’s concerns. Two days later, the man cried that he could hear his dead wife speaking with him, and even more, he could communicate back. The scientists were intrigued, but were not convinced until the subject started naming dead relatives of the scientists. He repeated personal information to the scientists that only their dead spouses and parents would have known. At this point, a sizable portion of scientists left the study.
After a week of conversing with the deceased through his thoughts, the subject became distressed, saying the voices were overwhelming. In every waking moment, his consciousness was bombarded by hundreds of voices that refused to leave him alone. He frequently threw himself against the wall, trying to elicit a pain response. He begged the scientists for sedatives, so he could escape the voices by sleeping. This tactic worked for three days, until he started having severe night terrors. The subject repeatedly said that he could see and hear the deceased in his dreams.
Only a day later, the subject began to scream and claw at his non-functional eyes, hoping to sense something in the physical world. The hysterical subject now said the voices of the dead were deafening and hostile, speaking of hell and the end of the world. At one point, he yelled “No heaven, no forgiveness” for five hours straight. He continually begged to be killed, but the scientists were convinced that he was close to establishing contact with God.
After another day, the subject could no longer form coherent sentences. Seemingly mad, he started to bite off chunks of flesh from his arm. The scientists rushed into the test chamber and restrained him to a table so he could not kill himself. After a few hours of being tied down, the subject halted his struggling and screaming. He stared blankly at the ceiling as teardrops silently streaked across his face. For two weeks, the subject had to be manually rehydrated due to the constant crying. Eventually, he turned his head and, despite his blindness, made focused eye contact with a scientist for the first time in the study. He whispered “I have spoken with God, and he has abandoned us” and his vital signs stopped. There was no apparent cause of death.
The New Bride
During a wedding reception of a young couple the guests decided on a drunken game of hide and seek. It was decided that the groom was “it” and he eventually found everyone but his new bride. Eventually the man became furious and decided it wasn’t funny anymore and left her there. As weeks went by he accepted that she’d had second thoughts and went on with her life so he did the same. A few years later a cleaning lady dusted off an old trunk in the attic of the building where the reception had taken place, out of curiosity she opened it. Inside the trunk was the rotted body of the missing bride who’d apparently became locked in the trunk she’d hid in. Whether she’d suffocated or starved was unknown, but her face was frozen in a scream and there were huge scratches in the inside of the trunk where she had tried to get back to the man she loved.
Across The Border
There was a couple from Texas who was planning a weekend trip across the Mexican border for a shopping spree. At the last minute, their baby-sitter canceled, so they had to bring along their two year old son with them. They had been across the border for an hour when the boy got free and ran around the corner. The mother tried to find him, but he was missing. The mother found a police officer who told her to go to the gate and wait. Not really understanding the instructions, she did as she was told.
About 45 minutes later, a Mexican man approached the border, carrying the boy. The mother ran to him, grateful that he had been found. When the man realized it was the boy's mother, he dropped him and ran. The police were waiting for him. The boy was dead, and in the 45 minutes he was missing, he had been cut open, all of his organs removed, and stuffed with bags of cocaine. The man was going to carry him across the border as if he were asleep.
The Medic
In the winter of 1944, with overtaxed supply lines in the Ardennes, a medic in the German army had completely run out of plasma, bandages and antiseptic. During one particularly bad round of mortar fire, his encampment was a bloodbath. Those who survived claimed to have heard, above the screams and barked commands of their Lieutenant, someone cackling with almost girlish glee. The medic had made his rounds during the fire, in almost complete darkness as he had so many times before, but never had he been this short on supplies. No matter. He would do his duty. He had always prided himself on his resourcefulness. The bombardment moved to other ends of the line, and most men dropped off to sleep in the dark, still hours of the morning - New Year's Day, 1945. The men awoke at first light with screams. They discovered that their bandages were not typical bandages at all, but hunks and strips of human flesh. Several men had been given fresh blood transfusions, yet there had been no blood supplies available. Each treated man was almost completely covered, head-to-toe, with the maroon stain of blood.
The medic was found - sitting on an ammunition tin - staring off into space. When one man approached him, and tapped him on the shoulder, his tunic fell off to reveal that large patches of his skin, muscle, and sinew had been stripped from his torso and his body was almost completely dried of blood. In one hand was a scalpel, and in the other, a blood transfusion vial. None of the men treated for wounds that night, in that camp, saw the end of January 1945.
Baby Doll
In rural southern Illinois a toy company began selling "realistic" baby dolls to expectant mothers. But apparently after the mother had her child the toy baby would start crying. Eventually the "rocking motion" advertised to calm it down wouldn't work, and you couldn't get it to stop without shaking it. Eventually when it started crying the parent would have to beat it, and the beatings and thrashings would have to get harder and harder to get it to be quiet. The only thing that seemed to shut the baby doll up permanently was the bash its head against the wall to destroy whatever mechanism triggered the crying. On more than one occasion though, neighbors called the authorities to report child abuse, and when the police arrived they found the bloody remains of infants smeared across the walls and the floor. In most cases the mother couldn't understand why the police were there, she just "got rid of the stupid doll" as she rocked a baby-shaped bundle in her arms.
