Dare We Share Some Spooky Stories?

Started by Spookie Monster, October 01, 2017, 04:42:23 AM

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Spookie Monster

Horror often likes to announce when it's arrived -- with the bite of a knife, maybe, or the screech of tires, or a scream in the night.  Sometimes, though, it prefers to creep up on us instead and wait until we notice it.  We peer into the mirror one morning only to realize that our best days are behind us.  A fight with our partner makes us understand that the romance died months, years ago.  Dust has once more settled on the photo of a long-lost friend.  That leftover potato salad in the refrigerator simply must be gotten rid of.  Things have changed.

The Season of the Witch does seem to enjoy this latter method of approach, now doesn't it?  Little by little the drizzle grows colder; leaves clatter down one by one until, finally, some sullen-faced person shuffles out to rake them into heaps; northerly winds whistle more and more boldly; and, all at once, you know that the Season of the Witch has arrived.  Exactly when it did can be argued -- no single raindrop, no single leaf, no single gust marked the occasion -- but that it has cannot.  The nights will now be filled with mist, magic, and terror.

Therefore, I suggest to all and sundry that we share some spooky stories.  For a few years we engaged in a round of hyakumonogatari kaidankai, the ancient Japanese tradition where people tell stories amid one hundred candles, extinguishing them as they go.  That went just about as well as we could have hoped, so we began a round of de duizenderotischeprikkennacht, the ancient Dutch tradition where people gather together to tell one thousand spooky stories.  When that one-thousandth story is concluded, we will experience a wonderful and strange visitation from the Otherworld.

So they say.

If you have a spooky story to share, please post it in this thread.  It can have happened to you or to someone else; it can be brief or sprawling, simple or elaborate; it can be true or perhaps slightly less than entirely, completely true.  Ghost stories, urban legends, chilling parables, and tales of utter despair are all very welcome.  Stories can be eerie, suspenseful, gory, even humorous.  I would be delighted if you told multiple stories, but please do include only one story per post.  Finally, please give credit where credit is due.  The editing of a source is perfectly acceptable.  Your own stories are not only super, but super-duper (unless a skeleton poppeth out).

As noted above, horror sometimes prefers to sidle up to us until we finally feel its breath on our neck.  With that in mind, I'd like to resume our round of de duizenderotischeprikkennacht with a story that I found here; it's called "Sticky Notes."



Sticky Notes

One afternoon a teenage girl came home from school and found the house empty.  Her mother had left a sticky note on the fridge for her.  It said that her mother was out shopping, her father was working late, and her younger brothers were at soccer practice.  She was alone in the house for a while.

The girl locked the doors, just in case.  She then went upstairs to her bedroom to get changed.  As she was getting dressed, she saw another sticky note on her bed.  She picked it off and looked at the message.

It read I am in the house.

She assumed that it was her younger brothers trying to play a trick on her, so she crumpled the note and threw it away.

"O.K., very funny, guys," she called out.  "Did you two skip soccer practice?  Mom's going to be mad!"

No one answered.

"I know you're here," she shouted.

Still nothing.  The girl went downstairs to the kitchen to grab herself a snack.  When she opened the fridge, she discovered still another sticky note.

It read And you're stuck in the house with me.

"Hey guys, this isn't funny anymore," she called out.  "Stop it."

There was no answer.  She went to the nearby door, which led into the backyard, to make sure it was locked.  There was yet another note stuck to it.

It read No one here but you and me.

She unlocked the door and turned the knob, but it wouldn't open.

Screaming, she reached for her phone, but she'd forgotten it when she changed her clothes.  She jumped to the landline to call the police.  There was yet another note stuck to it.

It read You didn't think it would be that easy?.

She snatched up the receiver: Sure enough, no dial tone.  The frightened girl desperately tried to think of what she should do.  She needed a knife to defend herself!  When she pulled out the drawer, though, it was empty.  All of the knives were gone, and in their place was still another sticky note.

It read Children shouldn't play with sharp things.

She ran upstairs to her bedroom.  Her phone was gone, of course.  She locked the door.  Bracing herself, she then checked inside the closet and under the bed.  There was nobody there.  She sighed in relief; then, all of a sudden, her TV turned on.  On the screen was yet another note.

It read Now I have you right where I want you.

The girl flew into a panic and started shouting, "Help!  Help!  Somebody help me!"

All at once she remembered her tablet.  She dug it out and started posting on Facebook and tweeting.  "HELP!!!  TIHS IS NOT A JOKE!!!  CALL THE COPS!!!  THERES SOMEBODY IN MY HOUSE!!!" she wrote over and over.

Minutes later, she heard the sound of sirens outside.  The police arrived and broke down her front door.  Two officers burst into her bedroom and found her cowering in the corner, shaking and quivering with fear.

The police quickly searched the entire house from bottom to top, but they found no one.  As the officers proceeded to question the girl, however, one of them noticed a sticky note attached to her back.  He pulled it off.

It read I was this close....



One more to get us just that much closer to a thousand!

Spel
Like Elliquiy?
My ONs and OFFs
~ R.I.P., Cam ~ ~ R.I.P., Judi ~ ~ R.I.P., Steph ~

Spookie Monster

This is a shorter story -- one that could fit on a sticky note, in fact.  It's one of those two-sentence dealies that have come to cruise the information superhighway in the dead of night.  I found it (more or less) here(If you like super-short horror, incidentally, you might want to check out this recent article, which discusses the history of "For sale, baby shoes, never worn," often attributed to Ernest Hemingway.)



The Unexpected Visitor

I just got a visit from my best friend, who I hadn't seen in a long time.  That kind of thing would normally be really nice, but he died two years ago.



The Season of the Witch is upon us.  Do you have a spooky story to share?

Spel
Like Elliquiy?
My ONs and OFFs
~ R.I.P., Cam ~ ~ R.I.P., Judi ~ ~ R.I.P., Steph ~

Valerian

A story found around the net:

About ten years ago my three year old son and I moved into a new house. Well, it was new to us, but it was actually a very old house. The inside of the house always seemed to be just a little darker and a little colder than it should be. I had noticed that the first time I went to view the house but as it was summer I figured it would save on cooling costs.

Soon after we moved in a friend of mine came by. We were sitting and talking for a few minutes but she seemed uncomfortable the whole time. Then I saw in her face that something in the other room caught her attention. Her eyes got big. She said "I have to go." I asked her what was wrong but she said she didn't want to tell me. I kept after her because her reaction was kind of freaking me out. On her way out the door she finally said "This house is haunted" but she wouldn't tell me what made her think so. Still to this day ten years later she refuses to tell me what she saw.

About a week after that night my three year old asked me who the old lady in the bathroom was.
"To live honorably, to harm no one, to give to each his due."
~ Ulpian, c. 530 CE

Lilias

Intuitive Advertising

Intuitive ads.

You see them everywhere now, and don’t really give it a second thought. Ads that use tracking cookies to track your browsing history or personal profile and provide suggestions that might appeal to you.

You know. The way Amazon suggests new books based on what you just read. Or when you search for something on Google, and then start seeing ads for it on other websites. Or when you’re a 20-something-year-old girl “in a relationship” on Facebook and suddenly all of your ads are for engagement rings and wedding planners.

The point is: We’re all so used to this that we don’t really pay attention it anymore.

But lately…these targeted ads have been…unnervingly on-point.

“Buy plastic sheeting in bulk!”

“Electric chainsaws on sale now!”

“Affordable dry lime. Overnight shipping available!”

I don’t know how they’re doing it. I don’t know what technology is driving these changes. But somehow, it’s like the Internet is reading my mind, showing me ads for things that it couldn’t possibly know I wanted. I swear to god, I didn’t touch a keyboard, I didn’t do a search…I was so careful to keep all of my plans and research and ideas offline.

How is it doing this?

How does it know about the bodies?
To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.
~Wendell Berry

Double Os <> Double As (updated Feb 20) <> The Hoard <> 50 Tales 2024 <> The Lab <> ELLUIKI

RedRose

I love those stories!
My family happens to have some, passed down from générations, I really should get to type them down..
O/O and ideas - write if you'd be a good Aaron Warner (Juliette) [Shatter me], Tarkin (Leia), Wilkins (Faith) [Buffy the VS]
[what she reading: 50 TALES A YEAR]



Valerian

This is an interactive story in the form of a text conversation.  It's much better a piece at a time, I think, hence the link rather than a copy-paste.  Watch out for those late-night conversations...
"To live honorably, to harm no one, to give to each his due."
~ Ulpian, c. 530 CE

Lilias

Darkness in the Rear View Mirror

I have always been uneasy driving alone at night. It was worst the first few times, when I had just gotten my license, but the nagging fear has never gone away to this day. It’s disorienting to look into the mirrors and see nothing, and I mean nothing but the consuming blackness of the night. It makes me hesitant to check the mirrors should I see this dark void, or worse, someone sitting in my back seat staring at me.

In the summer of 2013, I found myself driving home alone on highway 902 from a party. It was almost midnight, and needless to say it was pitch black. As was usual at night, I was on edge. I had the radio off, and could hear nothing but the muffled roar of tires on pavement and the dull hum of the engine. I stole a glance into the middle rear view mirror, and saw nothing but darkness through the back window.

I know that I looked backward and saw nothing. I’m sure of it. Just the seemingly endless blackness of the night. I remember it so clearly because not ten seconds later a car passed me to the left. Headlights on. I had one of those sudden adrenaline rushes like when you think you see a person outside your bedroom window when it’s just a tree, or when you start awake at night with the feeling of falling. Ten seconds earlier, nothing had been behind me. Suddenly, a car. I drove all the way home shivering and knowing something was off.

The next morning, I found two sets of scratches near the back of my van. One was on the left rear, one was on the right. The car was pretty old. They could have been there for months, but that was the first time that I distinctly remembered seeing them.

In hindsight, there are two possibilities for what happened that night. Possibility one. By some glitch in reality, or something paranormal, this other car had somehow appeared behind me within ten seconds of me checking my mirror. Like some weird ghost crap or something. However, the second option is what makes my blood run cold whenever I consider it.

It didn’t even occur to me until months after the fact, but it makes me dread driving alone at night even more. Possibility two. The car was normal. It had approached me from the rear and passed me to my left. However, something large, and wide, and as black as the night had been clinging to the rear of my car, obscuring my view through the window and leaving deep scratches on the sides.

And I had inadvertently driven it home with me.
To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.
~Wendell Berry

Double Os <> Double As (updated Feb 20) <> The Hoard <> 50 Tales 2024 <> The Lab <> ELLUIKI

Valerian

Charlotte

When I was 8, my family moved into an old Colonial that was built in 1810. My father still lives there. Until I was 17, every before I feel asleep, I would feel pressure next to me as if someone sat down on the bed next to me. This would always be accompanied with a feeling of increased pressure in the air. Although I knew this probably didn't happen to everyone, I didn't think about it much.

Until I got a cat. He was a present for my twelfth birthday. Each night, he would sack out on the bed near my feet. Each night, he would bolt from a dead sleep and glare at something in the doorway before hightailing it out of there. A few moments later, the pressure would return.

Again, while this was a weird thing to happen, I didn't really question it. Maybe the cat was just neurotic. I didn't talk about this nightly occurrence to anyone. However, I did refer this feeling/presence/what have you as "Charlotte." I don't know why.

So one day in the summer when I was thirteen, an elderly man and his middle-aged daughter pull up to our house and explain that the father lived in the house with his aunt while he was a boy and that he raised his family there for a few years. They had been visiting family in the neighborhood, and they wondered if they could take a tour for old times' sake. My mom said sure. She, my sister and I led them around the house, and they recalled different memories.

Afterward, my mom asked them if they remembered strange occurrences or stories about the house. "Like ghosts?" the old man asked and chuckled. His daughter became very quiet and said firmly, "It's not funny, Dad." The man explained that everyone who slept in one bedroom felt a little unsettled, and his daughter interrupted to say that she always felt as if someone sat on the edge of the bed as she tried to go to sleep. Her father said they used to joke that it was just his aunt looking out for them—his Aunt Charlotte.
"To live honorably, to harm no one, to give to each his due."
~ Ulpian, c. 530 CE

Spookie Monster

#8
Thank you very much for those stories, Valerian and Lilias!  Creepy stuff, as always.  Thank you, too, for those encouraging words, RedRose: It's really great to know that people out there enjoy these threads.  Once you set down those stories, please don't forget that they'd be very welcome here!

I'd now like to bring you a tale called "Daaaaancing!"; it was originally posted by an individual on Reddit, but I myself found it here.



"Daaaaancing!"

My fiancé and I rent a house together, and we live alone.

About two years ago, my fiancé and I were lying in bed.  It was actually pretty late in the morning -- 10:30 or 11:00 AM., or so.  I'd been awake for about ten or fifteen minutes, and my fiancé was just waking up.

We lied there, talking softly about whether or not we should get up yet, or try to go back to sleep for a bit, since he had the first half of the day off of work, and it might be nice to catch up on sleep since we'd had a busy couple of days.  He was lying on his back, staring up at the ceiling, and I was on my right side, facing him, with my hand on his chest while we talked.  In that position, I had my back to our bedroom door, which was maybe 8 or 9 ft. away from the bed behind me.

Suddenly, an odd feeling came over the room.  Seriously, it felt like the air in the room was suddenly either sucked out, or made very, VERY heavy, and it almost felt like I was under water, or gravity changed... and the room seemed to almost feel like it was tilting to the side.  It felt like the air in the room was pressing down on top of my body, while at the same time slowing down time and making me dizzy and loopy.  My ears were popping.

Well, I thought it was just me feeling this, and for a moment, I wondered if I was having a blood pressure drop (I get those sometimes, though it still wasn't quite what it felt like), but my fiancé said in a very frightened voice that sounded like he couldn't breathe very well, and like he couldn't get out the words without struggling, "Do you feel that, too?  What's happening?!..."  And that was when I knew something odd and scary was going on, because he was feeling the exact same thing.

I tried to speak, but my speech actually came out kind of slurred and I had to force the words out of my mouth to say "I don't know... I can't move..."

He said "I can't... either..." and I saw him trying to turn over onto his side, and trying to raise his arm up.  He just kept saying "what's happening?  What's happening?"

I tried to raise my arm up, too, and found that I couldn't.  Again, it was like being under water, and in an intensely pressurized room.  I started trying to push myself up, to see if I could sit up... I couldn't do it.  It was just too heavy.

Then, we both heard the doorknob of our bedroom door turning.

It was turning over and over again... almost like someone was trying to come in, but they weren't jiggling it, or trying to open the door... it was actually turning in a rhythm.  It was turning back and forth, back and forth, in a rhythm at about the same tempo as a metronome.  Like a beat to a song.  It was very deliberate.

We were both terrified and we froze -- the first thought in my mind was that someone had broken in, though I couldn't figure out why they would turn the doorknob back and forth, back and forth in a deliberate rhythm, especially because our bedroom door has no lock on it.  They could just open it and walk right in.

We couldn't move, that weird heavy-gravity feeling that was holding us down still would not allow us to move, but I was trying to, and I could feel my fiancé trying to, as well.  All I was able to do was turn my head very slowly and look over my shoulder at the doorknob, and watch it turning.  I could see it.

Then, we both heard it... singing.  Two children's voices, what sounded like a pair of young girls, started singing a song that I could not make out most of the lyrics to, and the only clear lyrics that I could make out was the very last word at the end of the sentence: "dancing".

So let me clarify what I'm trying to describe: These two young girl's voices were singing an almost nursery rhyme type song outside our bedroom door, while turning our bedroom doorknob back and forth, to match the tempo of what they're singing: the doorknob is going chhck-chhck, chhck-chhck, chhck-chhck, chhck-chhck, as these little girls' voices are singing:

"Something, something, something something!  Something, something, daaaaancing!  Something, something, something, something, something, something, daaaaaancing!"

... and the doorknob would turn with each word they sang, keeping perfect rhythm.

I couldn't make out nearly any of the other words of this song they were singing, except for the word "dancing" at the very end of each stanza.

And they were singing it in a way that was kind of playful and taunting... maybe, for instance, kind of like two little girls would do if they were teasing an older sibling, or their mom or dad, by coming up to a room they're in, shaking the doorknob and singing at them, just to tease -- the song almost sounded made up, the way kids sometimes sing little made-up songs to be silly or playful....  Just trying to give you a feel as to how this sounded.  It also sounded like they were laughing, or trying not to giggle while doing it.

So, as this is all going on, and I'm watching the doorknob turn as these voices sing at us, and near the end of the song, I turn my head -- in slow motion -- back to my fiancé to see if he's seeing and hearing the same thing I am, and I can now see has finally managed to be able to turn his head and he was watching the doorknob, too, and the look on his face... was just... I'll never forget it.  His eyes were as big as dinner plates, I've never see him that shocked or that scared... his face was just white.

And then the song ended.  It was short, just two stanzas, then just as soon as it started, the doorknob just stopped turning on the very last word of the song, "daaaaanciiiing", and all at once, that heavy, dizzy weight that had been holding us down and making it so hard to move and breathe just lifted.  Just went away.  Just like that.  Suddenly we could move again, and the air and gravity felt normal.

It seriously was all over, from start to finish, in about 10 seconds.

My fiancé sat up and goes "What the hell just happened?", and he jumped over me and out of bed, raced to the door and yanked it open.  Nothing was there.  We don't have a hallway, it's a small house and our bedroom door opens right up into the living room, and he just looked out into it and goes "Nobody's out there!"

I got up and ran over to him, and looked for myself.  No one there.  House empty, and our two cats were both backed up against the far wall of the living room, hissing and growling.  They'd either heard it, too, or even seen what did it... and from the spot right in front of our bedroom door, all the way through the living room, through the dining room, and out to the kitchen door, there was this trail of heat.  I don't know how else to describe it, it was just a trail of heat.  The air just felt hot and oily, and you could almost see a haze, like fog, trailing from our bedroom door, through the house, to the kitchen door.

We checked both the front door and the kitchen door.  Locked.  Both locked.

We both sat back down on the bed, and we were just shaking.  We kept asking each-other "Did that really just happen?  We both heard the same thing right?" and yeah... we both felt the air pressure holding us down in bed and making us move in slow motion, and we both heard and saw the bedroom doorknob moving back and forth in rhythm, and then both heard the two little girls singing that song.  So, I know it wasn't a hallucination or anything.

The only difference was that my fiancé understood a couple more of the lyrics of what they were singing, though not many -- he said it sounded something like "and we come in a'dancing!" or "and we go a'dancing!"

It was just so unsettling and spooky.  And to be honest, the way the girls' voices sounded, they didn't sound mean or creepy -- they seriously sounded like two, real little girls who were just having fun and teasing us.  It didn't feel or sound malevolent, or anything... it still creeped us out, just that it happened, though.  We were both shaken up for the rest of the day, and I BEGGED him not to leave for work that afternoon (but he had to).  The whole time he was at work, I kept every light in the house on, along with both the TVs in the living room and our bedroom.  It's never happened again, but it still creeps us both out just talking about it.



Do you have a spooky story to share?

Spel


Edit: I foolishly forgot to fade in!
Like Elliquiy?
My ONs and OFFs
~ R.I.P., Cam ~ ~ R.I.P., Judi ~ ~ R.I.P., Steph ~

Valerian

The Chair

When my sister Betsy and I were kids, our family lived for awhile in a charming old farmhouse. We loved exploring its dusty corners and climbing the apple tree in the backyard. But our favorite thing was the ghost. We called her Mother, because she seemed so kind and nurturing. Some mornings Betsy and I would wake up, and on each of our nightstands, we’d find a cup that hadn’t been there the night before. Mother had left them there, worried that we’d get thirsty during the night. She just wanted to take care of us.

Among the homes’ original furnishings was an antique wooden chair which we kept against the back wall of the living room. Whenever we were preoccupied, watching TV or playing a game, Mother would inch that chair forward, across the room, toward us. Sometimes she’d manage to move it all the way to the centre of the room. We always felt sad putting it back against the wall. Mother just wanted to be near us.

Years later, long after we’d moved out, I found an old newspaper article about the farmhouse’s original occupant, a widow. She’d murdered her two children by giving them each a cup of poisoned milk before bed. Then she hung herself. The article included a photo of the farmhouse’s living room, with a woman’s body hanging from a beam. Beneath her, knocked over, was that old wooden chair, placed exactly in the center of the room.
"To live honorably, to harm no one, to give to each his due."
~ Ulpian, c. 530 CE

Lilias

The Oneirophage

In the late ’40s of the last century, after a decade of private research involving experiments with binaural beat brainwave frequencies, extrasensory cognition, and rare extracts of a South American vine, Dr. Tomás Roessner perfected a technique whereby one could actually intrude into the psyche and “see” another’s thoughts. Despite having exhaustively documented his rigorous work, he could find no institution that would even offer to review it. Forced to sell his invention, he found by word of mouth among those through whom he procured narcotics a prospective buyer, the bête noire of an old New York family, Mr. John M. Dunn, a voyeuristic connoisseur of the supernatural and the obscene, who had squandered his idle youth in the great libraries of Paris, those catacombs of departed authors, rummaging among their hordes of dusty and obsolete works; a literary ghoul who disturbed with profane fingers the charnel-houses of decayed philosophies. He readily agreed to the Dr.’s asking price without haggling, delighted at the prospect of exploring such a bizarre novelty.

Once adept at the operation of the apparatus, Dunn paid Dr. Roessner off and under an assumed name rented a shabby house within view of Sing Sing prison. In the timeless night, while the convicts fitfully slept, with the aid of a set of stolen blueprints and his new mindreading device, he raided their memories cell by cell at liberty to savor the forbidden thrill of thefts, molestations, moonlit homicides, in secret, without remorse or consequence.

Within a month, the prisoners, telling each other about the nightmares from which they had all begun abruptly to awaken, discovered they shared striking similarities: first, processions of alligators and tortoises filed through a swamp crowded with faceless people and shrieking orchids; next, a shadow man, at whom they looked directly but could never quite see, would watch them in utter stillness from an empty house while invisible hands probed behind their eyes as they had to stand naked, legs locked in place, unable to run away. Their compared descriptions of the house were identical, including its location just outside the walls. By mutual agreement, it was planned that the first of them to receive parole or be released would search this house out to find if it really existed, and investigate the source of their troubling dreams.

A few days after being freed, their chosen spy was able to inform them with a smuggled message in code that not only was the house real, but he had broken into it at night and found a gaunt, moustached man in a silk smoking jacket seated bolt upright, head thrust back, both eyes gaping, mouth stuck open in a stiffened gasp, clenched hands gripping the arms of his chair, in front of a “scientific machine.” A handwritten journal on the desk told the whole story of his adventures prying unconstrained through their psyches, plundering the haunted memories of criminal after criminal, seeking ever more shameful and audacious experiences until finally he wrote, on July 7th, of his overwhelming desire to witness telepathically the next execution in the prison’s notorious electric chair.
To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.
~Wendell Berry

Double Os <> Double As (updated Feb 20) <> The Hoard <> 50 Tales 2024 <> The Lab <> ELLUIKI

Spookie Monster

Thank you very much, Valerian and Lilias!  Spooky!  (And Lilias, I myself have one of those South American vines!  I have not as of yet obtained such an unusual "scientific machine," however...)

As I must have mentioned at some point, I do love a good bad curse.  People can be cursed, of course; sports teams can be cursed; things like jewels and paintings and cars and furniture and dolls can be cursed.  I think that places can be cursed -- certainly they can be accursed, if I've learned anything from reading old pulps -- that's close enough for me.

Whispers have suggested that movies, too, can be cursed -- those of the Superman series, for example, and those of the Poltergeist series.  (Indeed, I talked about the curse that is said to clutch the film Incubus here years and years ago.)  In fact, some say that there's a movie that's so cursed, no one can get it made: an adaptation of the novel The Incomparable Atuk.  (I'll be drawing from this concise article here.)



The Curse of Atuk

In Hollywood movie lore, there have been several movies deemed to be "cursed," bringing misfortune and even death to primary participants in the film project.  But only one movie script has proven so deadly and wrapped with misfortune that directors and actors no longer want anything to do with the as-yet-unfilmed movie project.  Thus far, the Curse of Atuk is rumored to have killed all four renowned actors who were offered the lead part.

Atuk is the name of an unfilmed comedy screenplay written by Tod Carroll and based on an adaptation of the 1963 novel The Incomparable Atuk.  The basic premise of the story involves a proud, mighty Inuit Eskimo (atuk means grandfather in the Inuit language) moving from Alaska and trying to adapt to the fast-paced life of New York City.  The script for the film has been in existence since the early 1980s, with several Hollywood film studios expressing keen interest in the project.  So why has the Atuk movie yet to surface in your local theater?  In its quest to become a film, it has passed through the hands of four famous comedians who died unexpectedly and under unusual circumstances while working on the project.

Comedian and Saturday Night Live star John Belushi first read the role of Atuk in early 1982.  A comedy based on a heavyset man roaming around a big city getting into and out of trouble -- Belushi was said to have found the role perfect for his type of character.  He immediately expressed interest in the project and was set to play the character on screen when only months later, on March 5, 1982, he was found dead in his room at the Chateau Marmont in Hollywood, California.  His sudden and startling death was originally ruled a "drug-related accident" but later, after the case was reopened, a friend of Belushi's was charged with first-degree murder (a plea bargain reduced the charge to involuntary manslaughter).  Belushi's untimely death killed any chances of the film's production continuing -- for a while anyway...

Four years later, in 1986, the project was rekindled and popular stand-up comedian Sam Kinison was offered the part of Atuk.  Kinison accepted the offer and production was scheduled.  Kinison filmed one scene for the film but was reportedly not happy with the result and demanded rewrites of certain parts of the script to put them more in line with his expected character.  An expensive lawsuit resulted, which was largely responsible for Kinison's latter-day financial woes.  In 1992 talks began again in an effort to continue production of the movie.  During the period of the negotiations, Kinison was travelling in his 1989 Pontiac Trans Am along U.S. Route 95 when he was struck head-on by a pickup truck.  Kinison was pronounced dead on the scene.  The other occupant of the car, his wife Malika Souiri, survived the accident with only mild injuries.

Refusing to give up and set on seeing the movie come to fruition, in 1994, two years after Kinison's death, wonderfully funny comedian and actor John Candy was the third person approached for the role of Atuk.  At this time, there was only a glint of worry about any sort of mysterious curse surrounding the film.  Candy gladly accepted the script and began reading through it.  In March of that year, while Candy was still considering the part of Atuk, he died unexpectedly of a heart attack at 43 years of age.  For the third time, Atuk was once again shelved.

Several months after Candy's death, his good friend Michael O'Donoghue (who had also been close to Belushi and Kinison) died unexpectedly of a cerebral hemorrhage.  When it became public that O'Donoghue had read the Atuk script with Candy shortly before his death, rumors of a "curse" on the ill-fated project began circulating through Hollywood.  Was a "cursed" script killing, one-by-one, Hollywood's most famous comedic actors?

By 1997, fears of a mysterious curse had subsided and the film project surfaced once again.  This time the part of Atuk was offered to comedian and Saturday Night Live star Chris Farley.  Knowing that his idol, John Belushi, had been previously offered the role, he quickly expressed interest and was said to be about to accept the offer when, like Belushi, he died unexpectedly of a drug overdose on December 18, 1997.  He was only 33 years old.



It might be unwise to drop a curse bomb and then skedaddle, so...

Spel
Like Elliquiy?
My ONs and OFFs
~ R.I.P., Cam ~ ~ R.I.P., Judi ~ ~ R.I.P., Steph ~

Spookie Monster

Step by step, story by story, we move deeper into the Season of the Witch.  Whether we progress slowly or quickly, whether we march straight ahead or follow a circuitous path, the spirit of the season ensures that we will get where we're going.  In that vein, I'd now like to offer you a tale called "Step by Step," which I found here.



Step by Step

Lucy was given a small doll by an ancient great-aunt who had recently passed away.  Lucy was inwardly unnerved by the doll, which had nasty little black eyes that seemed to follow her around the room.  Nevertheless, she had to accept the doll, as she was well brought up and didn't want to upset her parents by telling them how uneasy it made her feel.

The note that came with the doll said that its name was Annabella.  Lucy was even more afraid now that the doll had a name.  It seemed to make it more human -- and if it was even slightly human, what might it be capable of?

Lucy didn't really believe that the doll could do anything to her, of course.  It was just a doll, after all, and it only reached up to her knee.  Just in case, she stuffed Annabella into the little cupboard under the stairs where she wouldn't have to see her -- or be seen by her.

When Lucy was lying in bed that night, she heard a strange noise, a shuffling sound, which went on for about five minutes.  She then heard a brief dragging noise and finally a scuttling, like light footsteps walking very fast.  By now Lucy was pinned to the bed with fear.

All at once she heard a tiny voice call out, "Luuuuucccccccyyyyy... I'm on the first step!"  She then heard some more scuffling, as if whatever was speaking turned tail and rushed back to its place of hiding.

Lucy was so scared that she didn't sleep a wink; rather, she lay awake in bed until the break of dawn, when her mother came in to get her up for school.  Lucy tried to explain to her mother what had happened the night before, but her mother passed it off as "just a dream."  Lucy began to wonder whether her mother was right.

Nevertheless, Lucy begged her parents to get rid of the doll.  They insisted that she keep it, though, for it had been the great-aunt's wish that it be left to Lucy.  She checked the cupboard under the stairs, but Annabella was exactly where Lucy had left her.  She went to bed that night only with great reluctance, repeating to herself that it had just been a dream.

That night, Lucy fought sleep but eventually drifted off.  Suddenly she was woken by the shuffling, the dragging, the scuttling, and finally the tiny voice.  "Luuuuucccccccyyyyy... I'm on the second step!" it said this time.  Surely it was Annabella!  Then came the scuffling noises and silence.

Lucy cried all night, but still her mother didn't believe her.  And when Lucy told her friends at school about the doll, they all laughed at her.

Night after night this happened, with Annabella climbing a little higher each time...

"Luuuuucccccccyyyyy... I'm on the third step!"

"Luuuuucccccccyyyyy... I'm on the fourth step!"

"Luuuuucccccccyyyyy... I'm on the fifth step!"

"Luuuuucccccccyyyyy... I'm on the sixth step!"

"Luuuuucccccccyyyyy... I'm on the seventh step!"

"Luuuuucccccccyyyyy... I'm on the eighth step!"

"Luuuuucccccccyyyyy... I'm on the ninth step!"

"Luuuuucccccccyyyyy... I'm on the tenth step!"

"Luuuuucccccccyyyyy... I'm on the eleventh step!"

"Luuuuucccccccyyyyy... I'm on the twelfth step!"

Lucy finally brought herself to count the steps.  Thirteen!  Tonight Annabella would reach the top!  Yet still, no one would believe her when she told them.

Just as she began to doze that night, Lucy heard the shuffling, the dragging, the scuttling, and finally the tiny voice.  "Luuuuucccccccyyyyy... I'm on the top step!"

Lucy shivered beneath her blankets...

But then -- nothing!

Where was Annabella?!  What was she doing now?!  Lucy felt more frightened than ever.  She would have to try to make it to her parents' bedroom!

Her heart pounding, her body quaking, Lucy crept out of bed.  With a quivering hand she stepped out into the unlit hall...

Her parents found her body at the foot of the stairs, Annabella cradled in one arm.  The authorities concluded that she had slipped at the top of the stairs.  Her parents decided that Lucy must in fact have loved the doll very much, since she had had it with her when she'd perished, so they decided to bury it with her.



Do you have a spooky story to share?

Spel
Like Elliquiy?
My ONs and OFFs
~ R.I.P., Cam ~ ~ R.I.P., Judi ~ ~ R.I.P., Steph ~

Valerian

The Definition of Insanity

It has been said that the definition of insanity is "doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results". I understand the sentiment behind the saying, but it's wrong.

I entered the building on a bet. I was strapped for cash and didn't buy into the old legends of the hotel to begin with, so fifty bucks was more than enough to get me do it. It was simple. Just reach the top floor, the 45th floor, shine my flashlight from a window.

The hotel was old and broken, including the elevator, so that meant hiking up the stairs. So up the stairs I went. As I reached each platform, I noted the old brass plaques displaying the floor numbers. 15, 16, 17, 18. I felt a little tired as I crept higher, but so far, no ghosts, no cannibals, no demons. Piece of cake.

I can't tell you how happy I was as I entered that last stretch of numbers. I joyfully counted them aloud at each platform. 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 44. I stopped and looked back down the stairs. I must have miscounted, so I continued up. 44. One more flight. 44. And then down ten flights. 44. Fifteen flights. 44.

And so it's been for as long as I can remember. So really, insanity isn't doing something repeatedly and expecting different results. It's knowing that the results will never ever change; that each door leads to the same staircase, to the same number. It’s realizing you no longer fall asleep. It's not knowing whether you've been running for days or weeks or years. It's when the sobbing slowly turns into laughter.
"To live honorably, to harm no one, to give to each his due."
~ Ulpian, c. 530 CE

Lilias

'In the Broad Sense'

There is something wrong with me. I cannot hide it anymore. I fear my family suspects that something is not quite right with me. They reach out to me, but I pull away. If they came too close, they would know I am different and I am dirty.

Once, only my mother’s voice mattered. It is strong, soft, and pleasant. She tells me everything I need to know and I follow her instructions without question. She rewards me with her singing, which none can match in tone and beauty. It was only once, a brief distraction by another sound, I chose not to listen to her. For one brief moment, I listened to another song and that was all it took. I can still hear her voice, but now there is another voice; a malicious voice from within my head. I cry out for help, but it restrains my speech. It forces me away from the sight of others; my mother completely unaware of my absence. I struggle against the will that overpowers me and manipulates my limbs. One leg in front of the other, it marches me out into the forest beyond the safety of my home. It grants no rest or reprieve. It is not long before I can no longer hear my mother’s voice. I rebel against its control and it answers my struggles by making it clear, it is much more than just a voice in my head. I can now feel it moving in my head.

The pain in my head is causing flashes of light to explode in front of my eyes as I shuffle onwards. It halts my body in an unfamiliar place deep within the forest. An invisible hand grabs my head. It pries my mouth open to an unnatural width. With insidious intent, it clamps my mandibles down on the stem of a leaf. It is an eternal grip of death that will never be broken. I feel it severing the muscles in my six extremities, making them useless and immobile. The pressure and pain build in my skull and the light grows dim before my eyes. Just before complete darkness falls upon me, I think I hear faint singing from my mother coming from the distance. I hear a comforting lullaby being sung as a fleshy stalk explodes from my head.

It emerges from the shell that was its womb, glad to be freed from the constraints of its expendable vessel. Now, all it needs to do is grow and wait. Soon its spores will appear and fruit all over its body. They are separate but still one mind and one body. The spores will soon be released and travel on the currents of the air and across the lands, listening for the voice of another royal mother. Their only desire is for her children to listen to its song instead of hers. Just a moment is all it needs.

O. unilateralis only needs to grow and wait.
To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.
~Wendell Berry

Double Os <> Double As (updated Feb 20) <> The Hoard <> 50 Tales 2024 <> The Lab <> ELLUIKI

Spookie Monster

Thank you very much, Valerian and Lilias!  Is it getting spookier in here, or is it just me?

So smack-dab in the middle of this particular Season of the Witch comes a Friday the 13th.  Now, it is true that a lot of people laugh at the notion that any particular day could be unlucky.  Some contrarians actually say that Fridays the 13th -- or Friday the 13ths -- eh, you know what I mean -- some contrarians actually say that these days bring them good luck.  A great many of us, however, believe that a Friday the 13th is bad juju: We're friggatriskaidekaphobes.

For right now I'll ignore the Bhola cyclone -- one of the worst natural disasters in human history, responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people -- which tore through South Asia early on November 13, 1970.  I'll ignore King Philip IV's order to arrest the Knights Templar (October 13, 1307).  I'll ignore Australia's terrible Black Friday bushfires (January 13, 1939), the collapse of the Royal Plaza Hotel (August 13, 1993), the Uphaar Cinema fire (June 13, 1997), and the grounding of the Costa Concordia (January 13, 2012).  I'll ignore the murder of Kitty Genovese on March 13, 1964 -- the textbook example of the saying "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing."

Instead, I'll concentrate on a plane crash that occurred on October 13, 1972.  No, no, not that of Aeroflot Flight 217, which killed all 174 aboard and which was in fact the deadliest aviation disaster to date.  A different plane crash on that day: that of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571.  (I'm going to use this here, but if you'd like you can check out the official site (!).)



Alive

On October 13th, 1972, a Uruguayan airplane carrying 45 passengers crashed into the middle of the Andes.  Extensive search and rescue operations were launched and supported by authorities in Uruguay, Chile, and Argentina, but after ten days with no results the passengers were presumed dead and the search was called off.  Then, 70 days after the crash, two bearded and emaciated boys appeared in Chile, coming on foot out of the Andes and declaring themselves to be passengers of the lost plane.  A disbelieving world looked on as the boys led rescuers to discover 14 other survivors from the plane who had lived for over two months on the mountain.  Their rescue became an instant media sensation and people from all over the world were aflame to know how they had survived for so long in such a hostile environment.  How could such a thing happen?

There were 27 survivors in the initial crash; most were members or supporters of the rugby team which had chartered the plane to fly to Chile for a match.  Although they were certain of imminent rescue, the survivors, under the leadership of rugby team captain Marcelo Pérez, organized their efforts over the next few days to clear the plane of debris, melt snow into water to avoid dehydration, and devise ways to keep from freezing to death in the subzero temperatures of the night.  They had a small amount of food and wine, and these they rationed severely until rescue would arrive.

But no rescue came, and after ten days they heard the news on the small transistor radio that they had found in the plane that the search had been called off.  Desperate, starving, and with no hope of being saved, the survivors made the difficult decision to eat the bodies of the dead in order to stay alive.  With food in their stomachs they were determined to escape on their own, but they still suffered terribly from hunger, cold, sickness, and bad weather.

One of the worst moments came on October 29th, when an avalanche hit and filled the plane with snow, killing eight people.  One of those eight was Marcelo Pérez, whose death left the group without solid leadership.  The void he left was eventually filled by the three Strauch cousins (Eduardo, Fito, and Daniel Fernández), who were trusted and highly respected among the other boys.  After the avalanche the remaining survivors were buried alive in the fuselage for three days.

Although many of them believed that dying would be easier than going on living, the survivors kept fighting for life and organized expeditions aiming to escape the mountain.  Finally, after more than two months on the mountain, two of the boys, Nando Parrado and Roberto Canessa, climbed across the Andes on a heroic ten-day journey to civilization and sent help for the rest of the survivors.  After spending 72 days on the mountain and enduring unimaginable hardships against all odds, 16 boys were brought home alive.  This event quickly became one of the most famous and enduring stories of survival ever told, and the details of what they went through in those 72 days still captivate and inspire the world today.



Unfortunately, it seems that this tragic event has in its way just claimed another person's life.

As a note, a different cannibal, Alfred Packer, was sentenced to death on Friday, April 13, 1883, with the judge declaring that he should be hung by the neck until "dead, dead, dead" -- and you know that a judge is serious when he goes full Bellman on you.  However, Packer's luck subsequently improved: His death sentence ended up being reversed and he was sentenced instead to forty years' imprisonment (which, on the other hand, was apparently the longest custodial sentence in U.S. history to that point).

Break a leg today!  Do you have a spooky story to share?

Spel
Like Elliquiy?
My ONs and OFFs
~ R.I.P., Cam ~ ~ R.I.P., Judi ~ ~ R.I.P., Steph ~

Lilias

Human Echolocation

I’ve been blind since birth. This in and of itself is not what this is about, but it’s a crucial part of the story. Throughout my life, I’ve used lots of different kinds of assistive technology; braille keyboards, voice command apps, adapted smartphones… Recently, I tried human echolocation for the first time in my life. For those of you who don’t know what this is, it’s a technique emulating that of how bats find their prey in the dark. By making clicking noises with your mouth, you are able to hear the sound bounce off of objects it hits, and in that way “see” where the objects are. A friend of mine, let’s call her “J”, had seen a couple of videos about it on Youtube, and asked me if I had ever tried it. I told her I hadn’t, though I had heard of it.

Long story short, I decided to test it out. It took a lot of concentration at first, but after a few days I felt like I started getting the hang of it.

The next time I met J, she sounded excited and congratulated me when I told her I was doing really well. Practice makes perfect, and I was able to avoid any major obstacles without much trouble. We went to a park, and J asked me to demonstrate what I could “see” around us with my current abilities. I laughed, and told her that I’m not exactly Daredevil, but that I’d give it a go. After a few clicks, I told her I thought there was a small wall or building to our left, and a tall thing in front of us. It was “blurrier” for me to make out, so I guessed it was some kind of bush. J got quiet then, and had a hint of worry in her voice when she spoke again. “Well, you’re right about the wall… but there’s nothing in front of us at all. Just… grass.”

I froze. I knew that I was a beginner at this, but the sound clearly bounced off of something. It was much taller than a person, and only a few steps in front of us. Could I have messed up what I heard that bad?

I decided to laugh it off with J, and said that I apparently wasn’t ready to go out and fight crime just yet. Feeling very uneasy, I hurried us away from there, and we continued our walk. By the time she dropped me off at home, she seemed to have forgotten about it. I doubt I ever will.
To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.
~Wendell Berry

Double Os <> Double As (updated Feb 20) <> The Hoard <> 50 Tales 2024 <> The Lab <> ELLUIKI

Valerian

The Armoire

The house where I grew up was newer than any of the other houses on the block. A typical one-story ranch house that you might see in any stretch of American suburbia. Likewise, all the furniture in the house was pretty par for the course. My room had a little-kid bed, a nightstand, a table and chairs where I would color - all of these things probably came from the mid-nineties equivalent of IKEA. And then there was the armoire.

The armoire was this massive antique beast of a cabinet made of some sort of dark wood, with these old-fashioned brass fixtures. It literally towered over everything else in the room, including me. It stretched most of the way to the ceiling and took up half the wall. It had a couple of pull-out drawers at the bottom, and the rest of it consisted of these double doors that pulled open to reveal a cavernous space where coats and stuff were supposed to hang.

The armoire had been in my room since I could remember. I guess it didn’t bother me much when I was a baby, but as I started getting older I started becoming more aware of it. Mostly I was aware of something not being quite right. I started to dread being told to put my toys away, because things I would put in there would come back... wrong. Sometimes they would be filthy, covered in some sort of black dust. Sometimes they would be broken, or ripped up, and some of the pieces would be missing.

Once I put a box of crayons in there, and when I went back to get them the box was a cinder and the crayons had melted into a mosaic at the bottom of the drawer. Another time, I was given a doll that I didn’t really like, so I stuck it in a drawer of the armoire and forgot about it. A month or so later, the aunt that gave me the doll came to visit. I was told by my mom to produce the doll and pretend that I liked it. I went to my room and opened the drawer... and it was gone. I ransacked the armoire front to back, but the only thing I could find was one of the doll’s shoes. My parents were not impressed by the shoe or the story, and I got in trouble.

I started to resent the armoire. My parents blamed me for the filthy, broken, and missing toys, because of course they did. They wouldn’t listen when I tried to tell them that it was the armoire that was ruining everything. My room had a normal dresser, too, a perfectly ordinary three-drawer affair. I didn’t know the word for armoire at the time, so whenever I tried to tell them that “the dresser was bad”, they’d go for the normal dresser and attempt to prove to me that it was totally normal, nothing to be scared of. I usually got so frustrated at my inability to explain myself that I’d start crying. Eventually, I resolved to just stop using the untrustworthy thing. My mom never put my clean clothes in there anyway, so all I had to do was stop putting toys in there... and try to ignore it when it would sometimes creak and groan during the night.

Fast forward a few years to elementary school. I had a friend over for my first-ever sleepover, and I was SO PSYCHED. Both of us were huge book nerds, and we spent the evening watching the old Lion, Witch, and the Wardrobe animated movie from the seventies. We bonded over listing all the ways it was different from the book, which we both loved. When it was time to go to bed, my dad helped her roll out her sleeping bag in my room. As soon as she entered the room, her eyes went huge at the sight of the armoire. After my dad said goodnight and left, she started gushing about how it was just like the one from the book, and what if there was a portal to a magical land in there, and had I ever gone inside? When I told her I hadn’t, she insisted that we open it up RIGHT NOW and hop inside to see if we could make it to Narnia.

In my whole life, there is nothing that I’ve wanted to do less than crawl into that cabinet. I tried hard to distract my friend, but she was totally adamant that we had to get inside that armoire - and make sure to close the doors, otherwise the magic wouldn’t activate. In the end, she got frustrated at my stalling and pulled the doors open herself. Before I could stop her, she leapt inside the closet part and pulled the doors shut behind her.

I tried to play it cool. “Oh, haha, did you find the way to Narnia? Should I grab my winter coat?” But there was no answer. After a minute or so I rapped on the side with my knuckles, like, okay, time to get out now. Still nothing. I noticed the armoire swaying slightly and I figured she was moving around inside, but she still wouldn’t answer me. Eventually I got annoyed and, in a show of bravado, flung the doors open.

Fire roared. The inside of the cabinet was an inferno. Burning smoke blasted directly into my face. I could feel all the little hairs on my face withering in the heat. I want to be totally clear, here - one second everything was totally normal, and the next, the world was on fire, no in-between state. I screamed my friend’s name, but the thick smoke stung my eyes and I couldn’t see anything. In a blind panic, I tried to slam the doors shut and burned my palms on the red-hot brass fixtures. The pain was unreal.

I ran out of the room, screaming for my parents. I grabbed my shocked mom by the arm and dragged her back into my room, and… nothing. The armoire doors were closed, there was no smoke, nothing was on fire. My friend was lying in her sleeping bag with her back toward us. As I let go of my mom in confusion, I noticed that even my palms were unburned, though the pain was still searing. My mom gave me a very strange look and hissed at me to be a good host to my guest before leaving the room.

Still reeling, I went to go check on my friend. I found her white and trembling, curled into the fetal position in her sleeping bag. Neither of us said a word. After a few minutes, she got up and left the room to call her mom, who came and picked her up. I tried a few times to talk with her at school, but she never spoke to me again.

After that night, I refused to sleep in the same room with that armoire. I closed the door to my bedroom and started sleeping in my parent’s bed, way after the age when it was normal to do so. Early experience had taught me that I wouldn’t be believed if I told them the truth, so I just sort of... collapsed in on myself. My grades suffered; I chased all my friends away; I started hyperventilating at the smell of smoke. My parents got more and more concerned about my behavior, and bought all sorts of books about dealing with ‘problem children’. One of the books told them to stop letting me sleep in their room, which they did. I started sleeping in front of their bedroom door instead.

One day a few months after the sleepover incident, I came home to find my bedroom door ajar. There was new wallpaper and a new rug on the floor, but more importantly, the armoire was gone. I felt like a huge rock that had been in my stomach for years had suddenly vanished. I gave my mom a huge hug and told her I loved the redesign. Things totally turned around for me after that - my grades and my social skills improved dramatically. My mom and dad still like to joke whenever I’m in a bad mood that maybe they should go redecorate my room, since it worked so well the last time.

Sorry that this is getting a little long, but there’s one more part to my story. Last week, I was home from college on winter break, doing some research for a Japanese class paper. The subject was “translate a historical article from your hometown”. I was clicking randomly through my small town newspaper’s online archive when the word FIRE caught my eye. The front page of an issue from November of 1932 had a headline that read “TRAGIC FIRE CLAIMS THREE LIVES AT [ADDRESS]”. The photo showed a family posing for a portrait inside their house - a man, a woman, and a little girl. The girl was holding a doll and staring directly at the camera.

The address in the headline was the same as my address. And in the background of the photo was the armoire.

I screamed, and my mom came racing in. I shoved the laptop in her face, jabbing my finger at the armoire in the picture. Even now, as an adult, I tend to struggle with my words when I get upset. My mom, trying to understand my distress, read the headline and looked at the photo. Her eyes widened. “Oh!”, she said. “Same address, right? I guess I never told you when you were a kid. The house that used to be on this spot burned down in the thirties, just like the headline says. That poor family. The lot stood vacant for a few decades, until your father and I snapped it up really cheap just before you were born and built this house!” She smiled at me triumphantly, expecting me to be impressed by her savvy bargain-hunting skills.

I finally found my voice. “Not that, Mom. The armoire! The armoire in the picture is the same one that was in my room when I was a kid!”

She frowned, studying the picture again. “What armoire?”

I jabbed my finger at the screen again. “That one, right there! Remember? It’s exactly the same!”

She gave me a weird look. I will never forget her next words.

“We didn’t have an armoire.”
"To live honorably, to harm no one, to give to each his due."
~ Ulpian, c. 530 CE

Lilias

Neighbors

This week, I moved into a new house. The house itself is lovely, with two stories, three bedrooms, two baths, a fenced-in backyard, and a big kitchen. The tree in the front yard is tall and strong and does a fine job of blocking my living room windows from the street, the water pressure is fabulous, the closets are large, and the wood floors are new. The only problem I’ve had so far is that my neighbors are rather loud. Our houses connect on one side, so we share a living room, bedroom, and kitchen wall. All day long, I can hear them banging around their kitchen, watching loud movies, talking, and their small child crying. It’s a bit trying, but nothing I can’t live with, I suppose.

Now, to get directly to the thing that really concerns me, it started when I was in the shower this morning. I usually like to have music playing while I shower, but today, I decided that I’d rather just enjoy the silence. The activity was fairly uneventful, until, as I was in the middle of washing my hair, I heard my neighbors talking from the other side of the wall. I couldn’t make out what they were saying, but it sounded strange to me. It seemed that they were mumbling something, whispering, and occasionally laughing quietly, but I couldn’t figure out how I could hear them if they were evidently speaking quietly. I thought that they must be standing absurdly close to their side of the wall in order to be so audible in the midst of my shower.

I didn’t think too much of this incident until I was leaving for work an hour later. As I started to open my car door, I turned back to the house, feeling like I’d forgotten something. As I looked up at my bedroom window, I realized that the neighbor’s house shares a wall on the opposite side of the house from the bathroom. On the other side of the bathroom lies my bedroom closet.
To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.
~Wendell Berry

Double Os <> Double As (updated Feb 20) <> The Hoard <> 50 Tales 2024 <> The Lab <> ELLUIKI

Spookie Monster

Thank you very much, Lilias and Valerian!  Superb as always.

I myself would like to offer a couple of stories today.  The first is about a child who disappeared under bizarre circumstances; I'll be using this post on Reddit.  Whatever happened, it must have been terrible indeed.



The Missing Boy of Somosierra

June 25, 1986.  Around 6:00 in the morning, a Volvo F-12 truck carrying 20,000 liters of nearly pure sulfuric acid for industrial use begins the descent of the Somosierra mountain pass north of Madrid province, Spain with increasing speed.  The driver first overtakes a truck on the same lane, then the one before it, this time passing so close that he knocks the lateral mirror off the other truck.  He approaches a third truck next without changing the lane; instead, he pushes it from behind until the other vehicle is forced out of the road.  It is evident to other drivers that their colleague has a problem with the brakes.  A few seconds later, the inevitable happens and the Volvo crashes on another truck coming on the opposite direction at the astounding speed of 140 km/h.  The Volvo overturns and its tank ruptures, spilling its content over the cabin and the terrain next to the road, rising a toxic cloud that covers the immediate area to top the sudden hellish scene.

Road rescue rushes to the area.  A justice of the peace from a nearby town notices a man and a woman in the cabin of the first truck, already dead and showing signs of acid corrosion.  They are the only fatal victims.  Since they can do nothing about them, the rescuers center their efforts in evacuating the other injured drivers and pouring sand and lime over the acid to neutralize it before it reaches the nearby Duratón River and causes an ecological disaster.  Three hours later, they recover the bodies from the cabin and identify them easily as Andrés Martínez, a truck driver from Fuente Álamo, Murcia and owner of the vehicle, and his wife Carmen Gómez, who sometimes accompanied him in his travels.  As for the acid, it was taken in Cartagena the previous evening and was expected later that day in Bilbao, on the other side of the country.  That afternoon, a Civil Guard agent picks up the phone and delivers the news to Carmen's mother in Murcia.  Her reply surprises him: "And the boy?  Please tell me the boy is alright!"

What Interpol would dub "The Strangest Missing Person Case in Europe" had just begun.

Juan Pedro Martínez was 10 years old and the only child of his parents.  He had accompanied his father in other travels, but never in one this long.  He had been told about the cows grazing on the green, humid Basque pastures at school, a world apart from the Murcian semi-desert, and was so obsessed with it that he had made his father promise to take him there if he got good grades in school.  Since the school year had just ended and Juan Pedro had delivered, his father felt the obligation to take him in the next delivery to the Basque Country.  Andrés talked his wife into accompanying them so she would watch over the child while he unloaded the truck in its destination, and they'd visit the Basque Country together in the following days.  Thus, on June 24 Andrés arrived at Fuente Álamo in the car of his sister, and the three left for Cartagena at 19:00, where the truck was loaded and ready.  This was the only vehicle owned by the family.

But was Juan Pedro on the truck when the accident happened?  Examination of the cabin found child-oriented cassettes and boy's clothes in the back area but no trace of the child.  They lifted the truck with a crane to see if he had fallen outside during the impact and the vehicle landed over him (Juan Pedro would be travelling with no seatbelt on) but he was not there.  Several groups from police to volunteers, students, and the military combed the area looking for the child or his remains for days.  They dug the sand and lime to check if he had been overlooked and accidentally buried, but the only thing they found, one running shoe's sole, was a size different to Juan Pedro's and was most likely there before the accident.

Of course, the fact that the truck was carrying sulfuric acid, the cabin had been showered with it, and a child was missing was not lost on anyone.  But chemists denied that Juan Pedro's body could have been dissolved entirely in the acid and leave no trace.  For one, the body would have to be entirely submerged in the acid, not just showered with it.  They performed tests with animal and human remains and found that even if this had happened after the body fell in a ditch or an enclosed area within the cabin itself that got flooded and acted as a tub, he'd have to remain there for 24 hours before all the soft tissue was lost and up to five days before the bones were seriously damaged.  Even in this case, elements that don't react to the acid like hair, nails, teeth, and parts of his clothing should have been found.  There was nothing, and as such Juan Pedro's status as a missing person remained.

The truck's tachometer was recovered intact, revealing that it had made the scheduled stops at Venta del Olivo (near Cieza, Murcia), Las Pedroñeras (Cuenca) at 0:12, a gas station near Madrid at 3:00, and the inn "Aragón" near Cabanillas, at the beginning of the mountain pass, at 5:30.  The waiter had no trouble recalling the family and even what they asked for: two coffees for the parents and a pastry for the boy.  They ate, paid, and left undisturbed.  He did not see them board a vehicle but shortly after he saw through the window that a tanker truck was leaving the parking lot.  Up to this point, the family's voyage was proceeding as normal.

The tachometer also revealed that something weird happened next.  On the ascension of the mountain pass, the truck made 12 extremely brief stops, the shortest lasting less than one second and the longest, the last one near the highest point, about twenty.  Truckers familiar with this stretch of road claim that they'd make one stop at most and that two is a waste of time (moreso if, like Martínez, they had just stopped at Cabanillas).  There wasn't a traffic jam at the time that would justify this many stops.  Furthermore, examination of the truck found that, contrary to what everyone had assumed at the time of the accident, the Volvo's brakes were not damaged at all, and that Andrés Martínez had speed to that degree on purpose.

The trucker that had been pushed out of the road from behind declared that, in the immediate aftermath of the accident, a white Nissan Vanette van had stopped by his vehicle.  It was driven by a mustached man that talked in a foreign accent, who was accompanied by a blonde woman.  The man told him to not worry -- that the woman was his wife and that she was a nurse.  The woman only checked his injuries briefly before the van departed to check on the truck that had crashed head-on into the Volvo, whose driver was gravely injured, and was not seen again.

This testimony is clearly the origin of one claim that is routinely brought up in "spooky" sites and programs about this case.  It is said that two shepherds saw a white van stopping by the Volvo in the aftermath of the accident, from where an unusually tall, Nordic-looking man and woman dressed in white doctor's outfits descended and picked a package from the truck's cabin.  This tale is as old as the accident and police did in fact try to locate the two supposed local shepherds to interrogate them but found none in the area that had witnessed the accident.  The strange vanishing gained notoriety in the press and soon attracted the usual arrange of psychics, UFO-chasers, conspiracy theorists, and fake sightings that marred the investigation.

Common speculation is that the family was victim of a random encounter with drug traffickers.  It is said that there was a police checkpoint in Somosierra that morning (I'm not sure if this is confirmed) and that in order to pass it safely, drug runners had forced the truck to stop on the way up and offered Andrés to carry the drugs for them, reasoning that a family driving a legit transport truck would be beneath suspicion.  Andrés refused and the drug runners kidnapped the child, so he chased them with the truck until the accident happened.  Followers of the shepherds' story that don't try to turn it into a supernatural encounter claim that Andrés accepted and the child was taken as leverage by the people in the van, who would later pick up the drugs they had put on the truck cabin before road rescue showed up.  In either scenario, the accident happens and the traffickers dispose of the child later to leave no witnesses.  Others bring up pedophiles, cults, and organ traffickers, either kidnapping Juan Pedro on the way up and his father chasing after them, or Juan Pedro himself being the mysterious "package" retrieved from the cabin after the accident happened for unrelated reasons.

In 1987, national newspaper El País, usually a serious source, published that traces of heroin had been found in the truck, though not in the cabin but in the tanker itself, which doesn't make sense for the random encounter scenario.  There was an investigation into Andrés Martínez's business but they could not tie him to anyone in the drug business or other criminal enterprise.

An officer involved in the case proposed an alternative "Good Samaritan" hypothesis.  According to him, someone (possibly the couple in the white van) picked up a severely injured Juan Pedro from the crash site and drove him to a hospital, but he died before reaching it and they disposed of the body to avoid questions.



One more...

Spel
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~ R.I.P., Cam ~ ~ R.I.P., Judi ~ ~ R.I.P., Steph ~

Spookie Monster

We're now more than halfway through this Season of the Witch.  Maybe we can rekindle our courage in knowing that things have been going smoothly so far.  Then again, we're sometimes at our most vulnerable even when we seem to be at our safest, as this story reminds us (this one's from Reddit, too).



He Stood Against My Window

I don't know why I looked up, but when I did I saw him there.  He stood against my window.  His forehead rested against the glass, and his eyes were still and light, and he smiled a lipstick-red, cartoonish grin.  And he just stood there in the window.  My wife was upstairs sleeping, my son was in his crib, and I couldn't move -- I froze and watched him looking past me through the glass.

Oh, please no.  His smile never moved but he put a hand up and slid it down the glass, watching me.  With matted hair and yellow skin and face through the window.

I couldn't do anything.  I just stayed there, frozen, feet still in the bushes I was pruning, looking into my home.  He stood against my window.



Do you have a spooky story to share?

Spel
Like Elliquiy?
My ONs and OFFs
~ R.I.P., Cam ~ ~ R.I.P., Judi ~ ~ R.I.P., Steph ~

Valerian

Two Bullets

I was a rookie cop when my brother committed suicide. He was one of my older siblings but we were very close. He died in another state, and I had a lot of guilt about not recognizing the signs.

About a week after he died, I was back at work one night, and my partner and I see a pimp pistol-whipping one of his girls. I jump out and the pimp sees me and the foot chase was on. I was running after him, gun in hand, and he cuts through a narrow corridor under a building that leads to a courtyard in the middle.

Right before I reach the courtyard, I hear "It’s okay," in my dead brother’s voice. I hit the courtyard and the guy is against the side pointing a gun at my head. He squeezes the trigger twice. I froze for a millisecond and then started beating him in the head with my revolver. Till this day, I don’t know why I didn’t just shoot him, cuff him and walk him back to the street and find my partner. I tell my partner about him squeezing the trigger, but not the voice I heard. We unload the .32 revolver right there, and two bullets have strike marks on them.

Take the gun to the lab for testing. Tell the tech the story. He puts the two bullets with strike marks back in and shoots into the test tank. Both bullets fired.
"To live honorably, to harm no one, to give to each his due."
~ Ulpian, c. 530 CE

Lilias

Voices

You’ve never liked the silence. Ever. At first you thought it was just something you were scared of. For no reason. But as you grew older, you realized that there was a reason. There had always been a reason.

You’ve always slept with your creaky ceiling fan running. No matter how cold it was. You’d take extra blankets, you’d shiver but you’d never switch the creaky thing off. Because you knew how much you dreaded the silence.

Because you knew that once it was silent, you’d hear them.

At first, it had started out as soft hissing noises. You’d ignored it. But then you’d realized that it sounded like someone was whispering something. To you. It took you time to decipher them. You finally did. You’d never forget that.

They had told you about the Underworld. Hell. The place where everyone went once they died. There was no heaven. There was only hell. They told you about the creatures there, how every monster you’d ever feared was real. They told you terrible things.

Then they told you how your grandfather’s soul was inching closer. To hell. To death.

You remembered being at your grandpa’s funeral the very next day, shaking, more out of fear than grief.

They were real. It was real.

Since then, you’ve never allowed the silence to envelop you while you slept. You’re scared you’ll hear them. The things they spoke about still gave you nightmares.

You’ve never slept in complete darkness either.

Because that’s when you see them.
To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.
~Wendell Berry

Double Os <> Double As (updated Feb 20) <> The Hoard <> 50 Tales 2024 <> The Lab <> ELLUIKI

Valerian

Julia

Back in the mid-1800s, Julia Legare was visiting family on Edisto Island, South Carolina. She became ill and slipped into a coma. Her family anxiously awaited the day she would wake up, but that day never came. The family physician declared the young girl dead.  The child was lovingly dressed for her funeral where loved ones would pay her one last goodbye… or so they thought.

In those days, the ceremonial activities surrounding death were conducted at a rapid pace in order to avoid the inevitable decomposition. Poor Julia was buried on the same day of her death after loved ones had a chance to pay their respects.  Her body was taken from the church and interred in the family’s mausoleum. After she was placed inside the crypt, the marble door was closed and securely locked, providing a sense of finality to the tragic death of the child.

Julia’s family went on with their lives as best as they could after losing a child so young and in time the pain of her death was replaced with happy memories from her life.

Fifteen years later, another death in the family required the mausoleum to be opened. It was then that the family realized what a tragic error they had made.

Julia’s remains, which had so long ago been entombed, were crumpled at the foot of the mausoleum’s door. She had been buried alive.

It is thought that her respiratory and heart rates had dropped so precariously low that they were undetectable by the family’s physician and so he declared her dead. When she was interred that fateful day, she was merely in a coma. This led to the horrible realization that she had woken up in her own tomb next to the remains of long-dead relatives where she was unable to escape and had to wait for her actual death to free her of the terror.

The girl’s remains were entombed once again, as were those of the relative whose death led to the grim discovery, and the door was securely closed.

Still reeling from the horrible discovery at the mausoleum, the girl’s family members soon revisited the mausoleum to pay their respects. When they did, its door was open.  Thinking it had to have been the result of being improperly secured at the recent funeral, they shut the door again and left.

A few weeks later, a clergyman at the church saw that the door was open and ordered it to be closed. This happened again and again throughout the years. Chains and locks were used to keep it sealed tight, but they would always break and the door would open. As little as 50 years ago a door was put on that could only be removed by industrial heavy machinery and that door was not only opened but pulled from its hinges.

That’s when everyone gave up trying to close the door. The original door is nothing more than broken bits of marble that sit in the grassy doorway to the tomb.

Now that there is no door to the mausoleum, it is thought that Julia’s spirit can rest. But there are still some who say that she guards the mausoleum just to make sure that nobody dare get the notion to put a door back onto the building that killed her all those years ago.
"To live honorably, to harm no one, to give to each his due."
~ Ulpian, c. 530 CE

Lilias

I'll Be Waiting

You don’t know me. No one knows me. Only Master knows of my existence. But Master and I know all of you. We visit all of you, my friends, during the witching hour.

I’m never there during the day. The sun’s rays penetrate my shadowy soul and obliterate my flesh. My bones turn to ash and my organs become dust. Daytime in one place is nighttime in another though, so Master and I always are traveling. Never in one place for too long.

After the sun has died and the moon lives again, I come. I’ll get close up to you and breathe in the scent of your life. I listen to your heartbeat and breathing. Master then starts work on you, putting one finger on your forehead and whispering Latin words. You always end up squirming or screaming. Master calls them nightmares. I always want to comfort you, hold you close. But I can never touch, not ever. Master tells me never to touch.

I’ve learned not to touch. Master hurt me badly, and my skin, my scarred, sensitive skin, has paid the price. But sometimes I can’t help myself. When Master isn’t looking, I strike. I brush my fingernails down your arms, trace your lips, comb your hair away from your face. But my skin kills your kind, breaks the blood vessels, bruises your body in mysterious ways you can never figure out. I’m sorry, I really am. I just can’t help myself. I want to show you how much I love you.

When Master and I are done with you, I always remember to take a souvenir. Usually it’s something small that you won’t notice is missing, like a coin or a pen, snatched up from behind Master’s back. But sometimes you don’t have very much. When that happens, I take something else, with Master’s permission of course. Hair. Nails. Eyelashes. A part of you. And it will always be mine.
To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.
~Wendell Berry

Double Os <> Double As (updated Feb 20) <> The Hoard <> 50 Tales 2024 <> The Lab <> ELLUIKI