It was always a treat for the three Levine children when they got to visit Gran’s house. Gran’s house was big, with plenty of rooms for hide-and-seek, and a pond in the garden filled with fish and frogs. For the Levines, who crammed together in a four-bedroom apartment, Gran’s house was a fairytale castle. It was also a veritable treasure-trove of toys; bags of shiny marbles, ebony dominoes stacked neatly in their boxes, striped hoola-hoops and skipping-ropes, boxes of coloured chalk that the children could use to draw on the flagstones around the pond, teddy-bears in all shapes and sizes, and a plethora of dolls with curly hair and frilly dresses.
Then there was the box.
Some days it was in the front room, proudly displayed on the mantel above the fireplace, other days it was in the dining room, hiding among myriad framed photographs, and other days still it was upstairs in Gran’s bedroom. Sometimes it wasn’t on display at all but just sitting on the floor or halfway up the stairs.
The youngest child, Vivian, once asked, “Why do you always move the box, Gran?”
Something dark flitted across Gran’s face like a storm-cloud blocking out the sun. “I don’t. That box has a mind of its own.”
“You mean it moves by itself?” This wasn’t incomprehensible to a six-year-old.
“The box does what it feels like and I don’t interfere,” Gran said.
Vivian’s sisters were more interested in the dolls. They’d spend hours brushing their hair or rearranging their clothes, but nothing peaked Vivian’s curiosity like that box. She was never allowed to touch it, no matter where it moved itself to. Every time they went round, Vivian would look at the box and wonder. What was its secret? Why wasn’t she allowed to touch it?
Years passed and visits to Gran’s house became less and less frequent. The girls were growing up; they had their own lives to live. When Vivian was twenty-two she moved to the heart of London and that was the last she saw of Gran for a while. She’d stopped thinking about the box a long time ago.

Until Gran died.

The wake was held in Gran’s house – it was the only one big enough to fit everyone in. Gran had made a lot of friends in her lifetime.
Vivian felt a sharp pang in her chest when she stepped over the threshold. It had been years since she’d been in this house yet everything looked the same. Older, perhaps, more faded, but still igniting the potent memories of childhood.
Everyone wanted to offer platitudes and condolences but all Vivian wanted was some time alone. It would probably be the last time she was in the house she’d loved as a child, and she wanted to indulge in a memory-lane trip. While the guests congregated at the buffet table, Vivian quietly slipped upstairs. Everything was as she remembered it, the carpet patterned in various purples, the off-white wallpaper and the paintings of Gran’s old dogs that lined each and every wall.
Somehow she found herself in Gran’s bedroom. The shelves on the walls were still lined with glassy-eyed dolls but their curls were limp now, covered with a grey film of dust. And on the dressing table, surrounded by pots of powder and lipstick tubes, was the box.
Vivian froze when she saw it. All her childhood curiosity came flooding back. Gran’s mysterious box that no one had ever been allowed to touch. Looking at it now, Vivian didn’t even know it had fascinated her. It was a plain wooden box, thirteen by six inches, the brass catch fastened by a padlock. It was nothing pretty, nothing special but Vivian could swear it was calling to her. It wasn’t a voice as such, more like a tugging sensation as if invisible hands were trying to pull her towards it.
She took a tentative step forwards and picked up the box. Suddenly she felt six years old again, breaking Gran’s most stringent rule. She half-expected Gran to come into the room and start scolding her. But Gran wasn’t here anymore.
Vivian made up her mind there and then. She was taking the box. She slipped it into her handbag and didn’t think about it again until she got home.
It was ten o’clock by the time Vivian arrived back in London. Her flat was located above a butcher’s on the corner. She hated walking past the butcher’s during the day when all the slabs of meat were on display, sitting in pools of blood. At least at night the windows were dark, the meat stored away.
Up in the flat, Vivian took the box from her handbag and placed it on the freestanding bookshelf by the side of her bed. She didn’t plan to keep it there permanently but she was too tired to find a proper home for it now. Kicking off her shoes she flopped into bed. Sleep crept over her in minutes.
Vivian dreamed she was standing in a field, waist-deep in grass. There was nothing around her but green, an endless countryside. The sun was setting; it looked like spilled blood on the horizon. Dread prickled up her spine. There was something wrong with this place. She couldn’t see it but she could feel it, some bone-deep sense of self-preservation that kicked in when danger was close.
She started to run. Somehow she had to get out of this field. She hadn’t run more than a few metres when a hand broke through the ground, scrabbling blindly at her ankles. It was grey-skinned, the yellow finger-nails gnarled and broken. Vivian screamed and kicked the hand away but another punched through the earth. It caught her foot and she pitched forward onto the ground. More decaying hands broke through the ground, fumbling over her body, pinning her down. She fought and kicked and writhed but the hands were too strong. A pair closed round her throat. Vivian tried to scream but she couldn’t even breathe.

She snapped awake, clutching at her throat, gasping. Her lungs ached as if something really had been trying to choke the life out of her.
Gran’s box was sitting on the nightstand next to the bed. Vivian frowned. She was sure she had left it on the bookshelf. Gran had told her the box had a mind of its own but that seemed like such nonsense to Vivian now. Besides, that had just been some story for Gran to tell the children. She hadn’t actually believed it…had she?
By the time the sun was up, Vivian felt thoroughly silly for allowing a dream to frighten her so much. Dreams were nothing but the workings of the unconscious mind. True, she hadn’t had a nightmare in years but on the night following her Gran’s funeral, she was hardly going to be dreaming about rainbows and candy-canes. And she must have moved the box to her nightstand without realising it. It was the only explanation.
Still, Vivian felt a twinge of unease when night fell. The shadows shifting through her flat seemed more menacing now, as if grey-skinned hands might burst forth at any second. Her nightstand was empty now except for the lamp; she’d moved the box into the kitchen. It didn’t look quite right there either.
The nightmares were worse this time. Instead of grasping hands, whole skeletons climbed out of the lonely field, their eyes empty and blind but all turned in Vivian’s direction. The air was heavy with the stench of blood and meat. The skeletons opened their mouths to speak but all Vivian could hear was creaking bone.
This was a dream. She had to wake up
Vivian lurched awake gasping. The blood stench still clung to her nostrils, so strong she could taste it. It was like someone had slaughtered a pig in her flat and she could smell everything spilling out of its body.

Take me back

The sibilant hiss slithered through her mind. Vivian bit back a scream. Gran’s box was sitting on the nightstand, angled towards her. The wood-whorls looked like eyes glaring out at her.
This time Vivian knew she wasn’t imagining things. She had left that box in the kitchen. There was no way it could have got in here unless…what if Gran had been right? What if the box did have a mind of its own? All those years Vivian had visited Gran’s house and been forbidden to touch the box. What if Gran had a good reason for keeping it away from people?
The next morning Vivian took the box and threw it in the bin. It was silly to be frightened by a piece of wood but every time she looked at it, she got the feeling there was something sinister luring just at the corner of her vision. She was never fast enough to see it but it was there, a presence.
She hoped that with the box out of the house that would be the last nightmare she’d have, but that third night they were worse than ever.
It was raining in the lonely field, fat red blood-drops falling from black clouds. The creaking sound of skeletons trying to talk scraped against Vivian’s ears. In the distance she could see a house and she started running towards it. As she drew nearer she recognised the front door with the lion’s head knocker, and the flowers overflowing from their window-boxes. It was Gran’s house.

Take me back

The voice lashed the air, deeper and angrier than it had been the night before.

Take me back to my house

Vivian gasped and clutched her chest. It felt like something had just hit her with a baseball bat. She fell to her knees as her lungs constricted. There was a dead weight on her chest, like something was slowly suffocating her.
When she opened her eyes Gran’s box was sitting on her chest. Vivian screamed and threw the box across the room. The lid rattled as it hit the floor and that terrible voice came spilling out.

Take me baaaaaaack

Gran’s house had been in the nightmare. That was where the box wanted to be.
Vivian grabbed her car-keys. She didn’t want to touch the box and wrapped it in an old towel. As soon as she was in her car, the smell of blood and meat filled the air. Vivian opened all the windows but it didn’t make any difference. Gran’s house was three hours away from London but Vivian made it there in less than two, violating every speeding law known to mankind.
Gran’s house stood dark and empty, the windows like sad eyes. When Vivian lifted the box from the backseat, it seemed to tremble in her hands. Like it knew it was coming home.
Vivian didn’t have a key and the box wouldn’t fit through the letter-box, but she couldn’t explain that to it. So she did the only thing she could think of – she threw the box through the window. Amid the noise of shattering glass she thought she heard a deeply satisfied sigh as the box thudded on the carpet.
Vivian got in her car and drove away. She didn’t look back.

It was years before she was in the area again. Despite everything she couldn’t resist walking past Gran’s house again. The flower-boxes and the lion’s head knocker were gone. The door had been painted red. Vivian’s steps slowed as she tried to peer through the window.
On a coffee table in the living room was the box. It didn’t have a face but Vivian sensed that it was deeply content. It was back where it belonged.
Vivian never visited Gran’s house again.

Credit To – Bella Higgin

It all started when I got fat.
I had been wanting to lose weight for a while, but being a not-exactly-starving-starving artist, I didn’t have the money to join a gym or buy equipment of my own. Yeah I could have gone running, but who want’s to do that? Not me! Never could run as a kid so I was pretty sure I wouldn’t be able to as an adult.
That was when I decided to check out Craigslist to see if there was any free equipment that wasn’t too ancient. I didn’t want to end up with one of those “shake the fat away” machines. You know, the one with the belt? Yeah. No thanks.
Anyway, I was lucky enough to find an elliptical that someone was giving away for free! What luck! Right? From what I saw in the pictures it looked to be a few years old. One of the speakers on it was busted but I didn’t have an MP3 player to hook into it anyway. I decided to give the “seller” a call.
After talking on the phone to a woman named Jeanette, a time was set for me to go to her home and pick up the elliptical. She sounded strangely relieved to be getting rid of the equipment but I was too excited to be getting it for free that it really didn’t phase me at the time.
So, that Friday, I borrowed my dad’s truck and some rope and headed out to get my new treasure. On the way I thought of how in a few short weeks I would be on my way to a swimsuit season bod. I already had my mind set that I would buy a cute bikini.
After driving for around a half hour, flipping a couple u-ees and stopping at stop signs long enough to be honked at, I made it to Jeanette’s. Surprisingly, she was waiting outside. I thought it was a little odd, but again, I didn’t pay much attention.
Jeanette looked to be in her mid fifties and about 5ft 6in. Her skin was a bit pale and she had dark circles under her eyes. Her hair was a little unkempt and it sort of looked as if she had just then thrown on whatever clothes she could find.
“Hi! Jeanette?” I held out my hand to shake hers.
“Yes, hello.” She said quietly.
Her handshake was soft and reserved, and she had a bit of a worried look in her eye. “Please come in.”
I followed her into the house and then into the living room. There it stood in all it’s free glory.
“Niiice.” I said, eying up the elliptical.
“Okay then. Would you like me to help you out with it?” She asked quickly and nervously.
“Oh, uh, yeah sure thanks.” I was a little surprised that she hadn’t offered any kind of reason why she would be getting rid of the machine for free, so I asked.
“Oh.” She said nervously. “It just takes up too much space and I don’t really need the money. I can’t see getting much for it anyway.”
She kind of half smiled and began to try and lift the back end of the machine. I rushed over to assist.
After a few minutes and a lot of heave hoeing we eventually got the elliptical into the bed of the truck. I thanked her once again and headed home.

The machine sat in the bed of the truck until my boyfriend made it over to my apartment. It took a few tries and some remembering of high school geometry but we successfully got it through the door and into the living room. I looked it over and, like I saw in the pictures online, the only thing wrong with it was the one broken speaker. Other than that it was absolutely perfect! Here I come beach body!
I jumped on and started pressing buttons. “Oh ok! This one tracks your heartbeat, this one shows how many calories you burn…”
My boyfriend laughed at me and told me I looked like a kid at Christmas. After a little while, he left for work and I was left to play with my new toy. I had apparently worked out a little too hard because by 9:00 pm I was pooped and collapsed on my bed. The next thing I remember was waking up to a strange noise.
In a daze, my brain tried it’s damnedest to figure out what the sound was. Was the faucet on? Was it raining outside? I opened one eye and looked at my window. I could see the moon. No clouds.
The more I came out of my slumber, the clearer the whooshing sound got, and I realized what it was. The elliptical.
“Uhhgggg! John what the hell!? I am trying to sleep!” I said, assuming my boyfriend had come back over and decided to fool around on the machine.
The whirring didn’t stop. “JOHN!” I yelled.
It still didn’t stop.
I decided, groggily, to get up and throw something at him. JOH…” I stopped mid name as I turned the corner into the living room.
No one was there. The machine wasn’t moving at all and the whirring had stopped.
“John?” I said quietly and confused.
No one answered.
I decided it must have been some kind of goofy dream. I went to my front door to make sure the lock was still on, it was, and then went back into my room. The rest of the night was quiet.

The next morning I woke up with the sun on my face. I instantly remembered the night before but decided to shrug it off. I stood up and moaned. I was so sore but I needed to keep a tight exercise schedule if I wanted buns of steel by May.
I changed out of my pajamas and into my workout clothes, blasted some music and hopped on the machine.
As I went to press the button to turn on the machine, I noticed that there were steps logged in the system. I knew I had cleared it out the night before and shut it down. I figured it was probably a glitch; one of the reasons it was free. But in the back of my mind I still held onto what had happened the night before.
After my workout I once again cleared the screen and turned off the machine. I went into the bathroom and was about to step into the shower when I, again, heard the familiar whooshing sound.
In a towel, I ran into the living room and came around the corner just in time to see the machine moving. I froze. “What the hell did I just see!?” I thought to myself.
I gathered my courage and walked toward the machine. It was still.
I looked at the screen and it was lit up with a log of 10 steps. I couldn’t believe what I was witnessing. Was there some kind of speed setting or something? I checked the screen, still in my towel, and tried to find anything that would be an auto setting. As I figured, there was no setting other than resistance. No speed. It was all manually powered.
I turned the machine off, and a bit shaken, went back into the bathroom and took my shower.

Later that evening, my boyfriend, John, came over after work. We had a nice meal and decided to sit down in the living room and watch a movie. I believe it was called “The Shrine”. As I recall it was a pretty freaky movie, but that could be because I was on edge all evening from my mishap with the machine earlier that day.
As we sat, cuddled up on the couch, I started to smell something. I kept sniffing to the point my boyfriend asked if I needed a tissue. I said no, of course, and told him I smelled something. He sniffed to and made a face.
“Jeeze! I know you have been working out and that is great but you really need to take showers afterword.” John laughed.
“It isn’t me!” I paused the movie.
“Well it isn’t me either!” John said.
I sniffed around the couch. It didn’t seem to be coming from that area so I got up and as Toucan Sam would say, I followed my nose. The stench brought me to the elliptical.
“What the hell?” I said softly.
“What is it?” John said from across the room.
“It is coming from the elliptical!” I said.
Just as fast as the smell came on, it was gone. I sniffed and sniffed and couldn’t find a trace. The incident from earlier and this phantom smell got me to thinking of Jeanette. She seemed so shifty. Maybe there was another reason she wanted to get this cursed gym equipment out of her house.

The next day I decided to pay an unexpected visit to Jeanette. She answered the door with a smile. She looked well rested and much less frazzled than before. As soon as she saw me, however, the happy, rested look turned into a look of worry. “Oh, hi. Can I help you?”
“Hello again,” I said smiling politely, “I was just wondering if you had a moment. I just have a couple of questions about the machine that I picked up the other day. May I come in?”
She hesitated, then reluctantly welcomed me in. “Is the machine not working? If not just take it to the junkyard. I don’t want it back.” She said quickly.
“Oh no no no.” I said, still trying to be as polite as possible, “It isn’t that at all.”
The worried look on her face turned to dread and a knot began to form in my stomach. Something wasn’t right. “Would you mind if we sit for just a moment. I really don’t mean to intrude.”
Jeanette seemed to partially snap out of her funk and said, “Of course! Let’s sit in the dining room. I’ll put on a pot of tea.”
She showed me into the dining room and told me to have a seat while she put the tea on. I sat for a few moments and then my attention was grabbed by a photo on the wall. It was Jeanette and a man about the same age. I assumed it was her husband.
A few minutes later, Jeanette shuffled into the dining room with two cups of hot tea. “Good to have on a cold day like this.” She said, trying to hide her nervousness.
I smiled and took a sip. “Is that your husband?”
It almost seemed like she jumped at the question. “I’m sorry?”
I pointed to the photo on the wall. “Oh! Oh Yes. Sadly, he passed away a few months ago.” She began to look even more nervous.
“Oh, I am so sorry to hear that.” I said, trying my best to look sympathetic. “How did he pass, if you don’t mind me asking.”
She closed her eyes, I thought she was going to start crying. I was about to say never mind when she let out a sigh. “Well,” she said. “He had gained some weight and the doctor said it would be a good idea to start getting some exercise into his schedule. You see his weight was effecting his blood pressure.” She sighed again and paused for a moment.
“He actually had a heart attack and died while on that elliptical.”
I dropped my tea.

Credit To – J.L. Kempen

Last winter I was walking through a park near my apartment when I came across five young boys attempting to smash an object with a hammer. Granted, Chicago children are probably more violent than most, but I am not used to seeing such things in my particular neighborhood. I jogged over to them mostly out of curiosity, but also to make sure they weren’t torturing some poor squirrel or a pigeon or something. If I had known the sort of thing I was about to come in contact with I would have probably went home and bolted the door.

One of the boys was clutching some sort of dark wooden board covered with black paint, and holding it at arms length with his face turned away and his eyes closed. A second boy (I remember one of his friends calling him either Peter or Paul) was aggressively prying the hammer out of the hands of the boy who had been swinging at the wooden board moments earlier while the other two kids watched without saying a word. In spite of all the hammering and arguing, the surface of the board looked perfectly smooth and intact from the angle I was approaching. I put on my toughest adult voice and got the kids to quit yelling and fighting over the hammer just long enough to ask them what in the hell they were trying to do.

The boy holding the hammer (Peter or Paul) looked me straight in the face and said, “we’re gonna break the devil into six pieces and bury him in the woods.”

I was stunned but also amused. I figured he had seen something like this on television and sort of laughed it off as I asked, “so you kids thing this plank is the devil?”

Peter or Paul was clearly not pleased by this question and said something along the lines of “Are you stupid or what? That thing aint a plank!”
As I took my first look at the wooden board up close I was surprised to see that the entire surface had not been painted with black paint as I had at first thought. It was actually hand painted to the point that it was nearly covered with a language I wasn’t familiar with. It looked vaguely Asian or middle-eastern. It was entirely alien to me aside from the upper left and right corners, which displayed very detailed paintings of the sun and moon. In the center of both the sun and moon were unnerving faces with blank expressions. As I thought about this last detail it became clear to me that this board was some sort of antique hand-made Ouija.

Peter or Paul explained to me that his grandfather owned an antique store and was on his deathbed. He had requested that the boy’s mother take this board from his store safe and break it into six pieces and dispose of it immediately, burying each piece in the woods not less than a mile apart from each other. He would not say why this had to be done, but continuously referred to the board as “that wooden devil.” When the boy’s mother had refused, thinking it ludicrous as any rational person would, the grandfather had enlisted the boy and his friends, given them the store key, and told them the safe combination. I remember he kid telling me he was disappointed; he had always thought the safe held his grandfather’s stash of ancient pirate treasure.

Upon grabbing the wooden board from the safe, however, the boys had run into two problems. Firstly, the board was hard as stone and the best way to break the thing was turning into a point of argument now that the hammer had failed. The second issue was that woods in Chicago are scarce, and woods large enough for burying things miles apart from each other are even scarcer. Realizing it was most likely not the best idea to get in the way of a group of kids’ family issues when a hammer and a wooden slab are involved, I figured my best option was to break the thing myself to make sure the kids didn’t get themselves hurt, then be on my way.

This proved to be extremely difficult. I remember thinking that the board had to be reinforced with a steel plate or something. I was beating on the thing with the hammer for the hundredth time when I remembered that I had a hacksaw I had bought to remove a broken tree limb two years earlier, and had never touched it since. I told the kids to sit tight and jogged down the block to my apartment. By the time I got back it was snowing and the boys were picking up the snow and throwing it at each other in clumps rather than snowballs. It was an unusually mild winter for us last year and I think this may have been the beginning of the only snowstorm we had all year if I remember correctly. The five of them continued to play with the snow as I hacked into the board with my saw.

It took an unusually long time but it worked. When the first piece snapped off I picked it up and saw that the grain where it had been cut was unlike anything I had ever seen before, spiraling in a very distinct pattern that I can still picture in my head. The unstained wood was a deep reddish-brown.

When the board was in six pieces Peter or Paul grabbed the corner with the picture of the sun, then he and one of his friends ran a short distance into a wooded area on the edge of the park and buried it about a foot down. As this was going on the other boys explained to me that they were planning on spending the day riding the elevated train and taking the pieces to the various wooded areas they had come up with. They just needed one more place to bury the sixth piece and hadn’t come up with anything yet. As it happened to be a Sunday, if I recall, I offered to do it on the way to work the next day and they agreed that it was a good plan. As the five of them walked away toward the north I saw them enter a station for the Blue Line train and I never saw them again.

Later that night as the snowstorm started to get really bad I remember thinking that I hoped I hadn’t made a mistake by letting them go off on their own, but a strange adult hanging around with five neighborhood kids tends to give people the wrong idea, regardless of whether he’s looking out for their safety. I hoped they had gotten their task finished before the storm had really hit.

The corner of the board I had wound up with was the corner with the painting of the moon with the blank expression. I had really planned to bury it, I swear I did, but we all wound up snowed in the following morning and it ended up in the drawer of an end table. I don’t know if you’ve ever been snowed in during a Chicago winter, but when this happens they tend to send out these huge monolithic snow plows that push all of the snow into mountains on top of all the parked cars, none of which will be capable of moving an inch for at least two days.

The day was rather uneventful, but as nightfall approached I was taken by the eerie notion that someone was watching me through my living room window. I kept glancing toward it expecting to see someone peering in at me, despite the fact that I live on the third floor and my living room window faces the street. After a while I shook off the notion, and I believe I went to sleep around eleven.

Around one a.m. I was awoken by what sounded like a mechanical device humming loudly and assumed it to be my heater, possibly being overworked due to the snowstorm. I stood up and put my ear next to the vent, but the sound wasn’t coming from there. I walked into the living room to check the settings on my thermostat, and immediately every hair on my body stood at full attention. The sound was coming from the direction of my living room window, and as I turned to look I caught the ghastly image of a solid white face with a wide mouth and dark eye sockets on the other side of the glass. I quickly turned on a light and the face disappeared. The mechanical droning noise seemed to recede.

Had it all been my imagination I wondered? When I was younger I once had an episode of sleep paralysis where I witnessed a tree devouring my neighbor’s dog through a bedroom window, but when I came out of it the tree was back to normal and the dog was perfectly fine. Had this been something similar? Nevertheless I hardly slept the rest of the night. I kept thinking I was hearing that deep mechanical drone somewhere in the distance.

By the next night I had regained my wits and fell asleep in my bed some time around midnight. I awoke once again, terrified, to the sound of the same mechanical drone as the previous night, but this time much louder. As I sat up in bed I saw the ghastly white face with sunken eyes on the other side of the window near the foot of my bed, no more than three feet from where I lay sleeping. It had no neck, arms, torso, nothing. It seemed to just float there above the streetlights below, emanating that horrible humming sound. I instinctively grabbed the drapes and pulled them closed, but the sound continued. Remembering what had happened the night before, I ran to the lights and flipped the switch. The noise slowly faded but I was too afraid to open the drapes for the rest of the night.

The next morning I was still unable to get to work due to my car being frozen beneath a seven-foot pile of ice, but I absolutely had to get out of that apartment. I thought that if the face was going to come back that I would have to be ready for it somehow. I went to a sporting goods store in the neighborhood and purchased a box of ammo for the .22 range pistol I hadn’t used in years. It wasn’t much but it was better than nothing. I also bought some caffeine tablets and a bag of coffee.

Before nightfall I set up camp in my living room with the pistol and a coffee pot, took one of the caffeine tablets, and rigged up a portable audio recorder that I sometimes use for work. I don’t own a camera and my cell phone’s video function had not been working for months, so the best I could do was attempt to snap some photos in the dark with the cell if the face appeared again.

It showed itself around three in the morning. I was beginning to crash from all of the caffeine when I began to hear the droning sound approaching from the distance. I readied my gun in one hand and my cell phone in the other but the face didn’t appear at the window. I began to wonder if perhaps the face was outside my bedroom window, and as I snuck through the dark toward the door the sound seemed to get louder. However, as I entered the room, the door slammed and locked behind me and I heard glass shattering in the living room. Suddenly the apartment was filled with the noises of things being smashed, thrown, and torn to pieces. The droning noise was deafeningly loud and I covered one ear and turned my head away as I clawed at the doorknob with my other hand, but it simply would not open. It was as if the lock had been welded shut. After about thirty seconds of this I raised my foot and smashed the door open with two kicks. Immediately the crashing in the living room stopped, but the room itself had been completely torn to pieces . And as I looked up above the debris at the shattered window I saw the face one last time staring at me from the other side of my demolished venetian blinds. It opened its mouth exposing a wide dark cavern the likes of which I hope to never see again, and the horrible sound got louder and louder as I snapped a single photograph with my camera and the flash went off.

Then in an instant the face was gone. All I have to prove my story is a single blurry photograph and the audio taken by my portable recorder in those last few minutes. But the thing about it that disturbed me the most is the corner of the wooden board with the painting of the moon was sitting atop the debris in the exact center of the room, and the face had been altered so that the expression was identical to what I had just seen in the windowpane with the wide, gaping, cavernous mouth.

I buried it in the woods the following morning.

Credit To – Nick Ledesma

One day, I was walking home from school. I only lived about a block away, so that was easy. But as I was walking home one day, I saw something peaking out of the sand. It was a little grey videogame cart. It had to be for the old gameboys, or maybe the gameboy colors. This was on, like, the last day of middleschool, in 2005. Shows you how old I am, right? I took it home, and put it in my Gameboy Advance (which I swore I was going to get rid of, any day now, really. No, really! I’m gonna get a DS… Eventually.)

It didn’t have a label. That should have given me a clue something was up. But I put it in the Gameboy, and it was Tetris DX. Awesome! I looked through it, and I found them. The highscores table. And at the top of the highscores table was someone named DAN, with a highscore of 683,092.

I started playing. Trying to beat that highscore. But I had homework to do, so I didn’t get very far. I went to school and told my friends about it the next day. They found it cool, and we all got together and started speculating about who DAN was, and whether he missed his game, and how he got so good at Tetris.

I came home, and stayed up… Honestly, way too late, trying to beat it. That night,t hough, I only got 49,594 as the highest. But something weird happened. When I left for school, there was a note on my front porch.

“Don’t beat my score – DAN”

There was a little picture of a stick man with a knife in his chest.

I figured one of the guys from school had put it there. Maybe Ben. Eh, whatever. Pranks aren’t very funny if you just come out IMMEDIATELY and say you did it.

It happened the next day.

“Don’t beat my score – DAN”

This time the stick figure was decapitated. I put it in my pocket and went to school. I didn’t even mention it, ‘cause I figured that they knew I’d found it. And that night, I went home, and played Tetris.

And that morning, I got a note from DAN.

“Don’t beat my score – DAN”

The stick figure was being shot in the groin by another one.

I was getting annoyed, but my friends were smart guys. They know comedy. Rule of 3s. After three times, it stops being funny. At lunch, I kind of tried to lead the conversation that way. See if I could get them to tell me about it. Tell me it was all a joke, just fun and games. But they seriously had no idea.

Eh.

Okay. That’s how they wanted to play it? Fine.

I kept playing. Every night, I went home, and played Tetris.

Every day, I got another note.

“Don’t beat my score – DAN”

And a stick figure who’d been murdered in a new, creative, gruesome way.

And then one night, finally, after a month of this, I was doing it. I was getting really, really good. Seriously, I was starting to kick ass and take names. I was up in the 100,000s regularly. Even the 200,000s sometimes.

And then, this night, I was getting in the groove. You know how there’s the right level of tired, the right level of drunk, where you’re REALLY GOOD at things?

Well I hit it. I’d been up all night, and I was getting good.

Icould tell this was it. This was going to be my high score. No, this was going to be THE high scre. I was so excited. It was going to happen. I was going to beat Dan. The Tetris tower was getting bigger. And bigger. I was in the zone, racking up points like it was my last day on earth.

And that was the night. My best night. My highest scoring Tetris night. I was playing up until the sun rose. And I went out on the porch to see if DAN was coming.

And you know what happened?

Nothing.

Monsters aren’t real. There aren’t killers stalking you, waiting for you to break some arbitrary rule, some made-up thing that only they know about. Fall into some arcane trap or push the wrong button and have your world destroyed. Have your life torn apart because of some weird videogame. That only happens in horror movies and creepypastas.

Although, to be fair, I only got 128,859

So maybe I just suck at Tetris.

Credit To: Redhat

Ever since I could remember, ever since I had been a child, I had been afraid of the dark depths of any sea or deep lake. Dark blue or green water had a nauseating affect on me, and seaweed dancing sinuously at the bottom of pools made me shudder. Worse than that, however, was the feeling I got when viewing a large, upright stone or the hulk of a barnacle-encrusted wreck of a ship or submarine looming, ghost-like, out of black waters. Sights like these made me tremble with fear and look constantly over my shoulder, afraid to one day see behind me a rusty hull, corroded pale green by barnacles, swaying and creaking horribly…

At the same time as being horrified, I found the fear ridiculous. Far away from any truly large bodies of water, and therefore, far away from any sunken ships – besides which, how would they just appear behind me? – I was safe for the nonce.

However, two years after receiving my degree in archaeology, I found myself relegated to an island off a coast of South America, with a group intent on digging up a series of standing stones, the tips of which had been spotted by a native over a week ago.

I soon came to realize that our entire excavation was a mistake – we should have given up early on, we should have not even come. I am not a superstitious person by any means, but as bad luck and accidents continued to assail us, I knew that someone, something, was trying to warn us away.

At first, it was merely storms, and I was silent, believing it to be bad luck, nothing more – storms were highly common around this area, after all. But the storms became wilder and wilder, and when this did not deter us, an odd brittleness seemed to creep into our tools, which broke over and over. Nervous jokes became common within the group, but my suspicions were only aroused at this time.

Our communication to the outside world kept going down, technical difficulty after difficulty, which caused our excavation to halt almost completely time after time. I suggested we give up our endeavor, but my advice was turned down – we were halfway done, the others argued, we couldn’t just give up on such an important discovery, not just because of a little bad luck.

But it wasn’t just bad luck. If only the fools had listened…

So, we continued. Storms had not stopped us, nor had difficulties with tools or communication. Now, the presence that was trying to warn us became harsh. Accidents began to happen, accidents that, at first, merely wounded our pride. Harsher still, the presence became – twisted ankles and wrists, sore muscles, fevers and sickness, broken bones. I had become frantic. I pleaded for them to stop. They tried to soothe me with promises that tomorrow would be the last day – only a few more pounds of earth, and then we could see the stones, the strangely carved and shaped stones, in all their glory.

Tomorrow came. The stones were uncovered, and rose from the ground like a row of rotting teeth. They had an odd, pale green tint to them – an odd tint that makes me shudder to remember it now. We thought it was some kind of vegetable matter, but when one from our group tried brushing it off, he found that the residue on the brush was curiously like rust. Even still, it was easy to see the strange markings carved into the stone, markings that seemed to hover above the foul coloring, markings that depicted… but I cannot, will not describe it fully. The damned implications… a scaly being larger than a whale… bulging, fishy eyes, gills, bloated lips… monstrosity from that dark, indistinct world I so feared and hated… half fish, half… God, I must stop, I am already half-mad…

A figment of imagination from a long dead culture. After realizing that this was all it could be, the group breathed easier. Silly to be so fearful of an obviously fake being, created by a people who were merely thankful to the bounty of the ocean.

That deep, dark, hateful ocean…

The day passed quickly. No accidents, no bad luck, no difficulties. We contacted our base in Washington, preparing transportation of the stones. We stood around our discovery, unease replaced by a moment’s pride, sharing opinions and hypothesis about our megaliths.

Perhaps, after all, we had merely been jinxed – if only that was the case. That night, I was to realize that our luck had not changed, but had merely worsened. The presence that had tried so desperately to chase us away, to protect us from our horrible fate, had left us, had given up. Such is the folly of man and his greed for knowledge, knowledge of dark, unknown things, things that mankind should not awaken, things mankind has no earthly right to know about, lest madness wrap around us and drag us screaming into the black abyss of Sheol…

That night, my peaceful sleep was interrupted by a noise, a noise that haunts me right now as I struggle to keep quiet, to not scream and alert it to my hiding place – a noise that has, however, strengthened my resolve to end everything after my tale is told. The world must know that some things are better left alone…

I awoke slowly, not realizing what had jarred me out of my dreams at first. But as my grogginess faded, and the noise grew louder – it was coming closer – I began to shiver beneath my light cover.

The creaking… the creaking of a rusty ship, looming out of the dark, behind me…

I darted out of the tent, looking wildly around for the thing that could make such a sound on dry land. Left, right… up.

And when I saw the monstrous sight, looming over the trees, staring with its glazed, bulging eyes, its mouth with the puffy, obscene lips parting to make that sound, a wild scream tore from my throat and I ran. I ran from it, leaving my comrades behind like a coward. I can only pray that they were able to run, to hide, and if not get away, I pray their end was quick and painless, although I fear that is not the way of this beast.

I do not know what we unearthed. I do not know what was so important about those grotesque stones that the daemon surfaced because of our finding them. I do know why huge stones and wrecks under fathoms of water bother me so – it was never the object, but the resemblance to a half-remembered, aeons old dark being, covered in barnacles, pale green and white and red-brown in color, making that awful, nonliving creaking noise, slowly appearing, rising, rearing out of dark, unknown depths…

I am thankful I sleep with a pistol. Now I will end it – for I know there is no chance of escaping. Even if I could, what of my sanity? I have seen the thing, I have seen Dagon, fish god of man’s earliest ancestors, unholy creature that still resides in our being… and yet, my tale will merely be laughed at. I will be confined to an asylum…

So I will put the gun to my head, and pull the trigger, and sweet, peaceful oblivion will be mine.

The creaking. It’s so close. I would have been fine… have died quickly, with some semblance of sanity intact. But the noise caused me to pause, to stiffen, and to slowly set the gun down. I continue to write because I do not want to give into my maddening desire to look over my shoulder. But I must. I must look, even though I could pick up the gun right now and end it all without looking… because I know what I shall see. My greatest fear will be realized once I finish this sentence – when I turn and look, I will see a rust colored body, corroded pale green by barnacles, swaying and creaking horribly…
Credit To – Apocrypha
Credit Link - wouldjakoindly@gmail.com

Posted: January 11th 2013, 9:02 PM

Hey, I’m still kind of new here. My name’s Matt, and I’m looking for an old game that my dad and I used to play together on the SNES, taking turns switching the controller over after the other died. I remember the game-play pretty well, I just can’t seem to remember the title of the game or what the cartridge looked like, aside from having the main character on it. Figured I’d play the game for old time’s sake when my dad was still here…=/ All I remember in the title is it had the word Mayan somewhere in it, I think.

The game itself had a kind of darker background and atmosphere to it, and that’s probably why I remember it so well, compared to all the other brightly colored games from Nintendo, like the Super Mario Bros games. In the corner of the screen, there was a crocodile that’s mouth gradually closed down on your character as you got closer to dying. To progress, you climb up vines on trees or jump on spider webs, and find your way around like a maze of of the jungle, and they had some sand traps that opened and closed on the ground, as well as different animals that would attack you on your way, like snakes, monkeys, crocodiles, a boar and I think a jaguar at the end that was like the boss in the first level. You collected things like rocks or pouches full of them that you sling at the animals, and I think a bomb and whip as well. I thought it was something like Indiana Jones at first, but turns out it wasn’t.

My dad and I used to play for hours to get away from the little annoying chores around the house and school work for me, we were really close then. =) But after a while… he moved out after a big fight with my mom and I only got to see him once in a while, but sadly, each time I saw him, he seemed to be losing touch and his actions became more and more rash, and just oddly out of character for him…He left one day without even saying anything about why or where he was going. And I moved into his old apartment when it was available, since he had left some stuff there that I was hoping he would come back to.

So, this is really important to me, we haven’t spoken in over two years now, and its the only thing I have that’s still a good memory with him that my mother hasn’t ruined that I can hopefully share with my son in a few years. He was just born October, I named him after my father, Allen. =) I’ve tried looking through the few boxes of games he kept in his room, but no luck finding it. I wonder if he took it with him, wherever he went. But I just got a call from a storage company in the next town over that says payment for his bin is overdue, which I didn’t even know he had. So I’m going to check that out within the week, or they might auction it off, so I’ll see if there’s anymore games or family pictures or anything of personal value in there. It would help out a lot if any of you could tell me what the game was called, so I know what to look for. It would be very much appreciated. I don’t know what happened to the SNES either, maybe its in there, if not I could probably just buy it on eBay or something if I find the game.

Posted: January 13th 2013, 5:33 PM

Well, I’m back…and I found it, Pitfall. I’m a bit shaken up after all the weird shit that’s gone on from this though. I couldn’t very well have typed all this out in such little time, so I’ve started up my voice-to-text program to tell what’s happened. Which brings me to ask this, since I don’t remember having these experiences from the game ever before…Has anyone else had strange experiences with this game that they couldn’t find an easy explanation for? I mean, I know some of it could be explained if its just a hacked game or whatever, but truth be told I wasn’t scared by most of the images, or texture changes in the game. There were however these really odd noises that I’ve never heard before, that didn’t even sound human. And there were strange things going on around me, with my senses, and in my dreams…I’ll be honest, because I must sound like some kind of hippy right now, I don’t really believe in ghosts or paranormal phenomenon or anything like that, but I can’t find any rational explanation for what this game seems to have done, it’s gone far beyond breaking the fourth wall and I don’t know what’s going to happen next, which terrifies me. Maybe I’m just going crazy, I’d just be happy to know that that was true. But considering I’ve recently seen a psychologist for a routine check-up, since I usually have alot of stress in my job and daily life, and having been told a couple weeks ago my mind was just as sharp as any other person’s, I just don’t get it. What’s happening to me, it’s not normal, it can’t be.

Okay, let me try to explain what I’ve experienced in a bit more detail if that helps. See, I didn’t have a car to go check the storage containers a couple days ago, I usually just borrow my roommate’s car to get to and from work, and to see my wife and son sometimes. But he’s been away for vacation this last week. And…I just couldn’t wait to play the game, so I found a download for a Super Nintendo emulator that worked fine, and a download for Pitfall: The Mayan Adventure.exe on Piratebay the next morning after my last post. It took a while to download, because I’m using a crappy Asus laptop. But it played fine at first, just like I had remembered it. Aside from my father not being there, I was having fun figuring out the tricks to the game again and the controls on my computer were simple enough.

I would go into more detail of the gameplay at the beginning, but just play the game for yourself and you’ll see its not the most complicated game there is, I don’t want to bore you with detailed explanation of hours of gameplay, and don’t feel I have too much time left before my turn is up, so I’m speaking to my speech-to-text program and just going to use the spell-check with it, while its still fresh and clear in my mind. Here’s hoping it gets it right. But I have to know if anyone else has experienced any of this and if so, how to stop it, or at least I can hope to help other people avoid the same fate I fear my dad and I are going through now. I know he’s still alive, he has to be…I know it now.

Well, if you’ve ever played this game, you know that every time it froze on a Super Nintendo system, whether from the cartridge having dust, or you accidentally moving the system an inch, you would have to reset the game and start over no matter where you were. After I had been playing for a while, I was trying to be thorough playing through the levels and as soon as I got up to 443,550 points, with three pouches left, and two lives, the game on my laptop froze and the game crashed altogether. I was pissed off at first, but I noticed something when I went to the files to launch the game again, there was another file added that said, “HeyBuddy”. I hadn’t really thought about it at the moment, but that’s usually how my dad would address me as a kid. Out of curiosity, I clicked the file and it opened a box of text that said, “Your turn is up.” Which I remembered my dad and I used to say to each other when the other had died.

It was a bit strange for me, to say the least, but it…the program, started itself up after I went to close the text-box. I noticed the three lights on the bottom of my laptop, that were usually white, green, and flashing white from left to right were now all solid red, which I’d never seen before as my computer started making that noise it makes when it gets heated up after being on for a while, but it was louder than it usually is. I didn’t mind it much, it just sort of stuck out in my mind for a moment. The screen was just black for a while, so I figured it was going to crash again…but then the animation before the title screen of the game popped up and played like it does whenever you reset. The text played normally, as I expected, but when the shadow of the boy’s father shows up at the doorway, it isn’t grabbed by anything, the shadow actually looked like his dad was stabbed and he fell to the floor. The boy didn’t exclaim “DAD!” he asked “Dad?” and ran towards the door. He was pulled through the door by something I couldn’t see on the screen and red lines ran down the stone face in the room the boy was in as static started playing…it was obnoxious. I didn’t realize until a little later that the red lines were supposed to be blood. Until red ran in through the door in a small puddle I guess it was, from where the boy’s father fell to the ground and where the boy was abducted. It was a bit odd, and unexpected.

Honestly, at this point, I wasn’t very scared though, it did seem odd and nothing like I remembered, but I thought it was pretty cool that someone was making this a more interesting game-play experience and potentially changing the story line, though this was a Super Nintendo game…there wouldn’t be much story line anyway. And since I’d pretty much beaten it in the previous play-through before it crashed, I actually hoped there was more, and unfortunately I was right. I moved over to options at the title screen, because I wanted to see if the controls were as I had set them before it reset, but the static sound picked up, as if the game was getting angry with me and the cursor moved itself over to play and it was selected.

At this point, I was just hoping my computer didn’t have some kind of virus from downloading the game. It wouldn’t be the first of my computers getting a virus from something like that. But this was an entirely different virus from anything I had seen before, if it was a virus that is. Maybe just an exceptionally good programmer.

The static sound stopped as soon as the screen transitioned to black and came up with the screen that said the first level name, “Ceiba Jungle”. Once it showed the play screen with the character, I saw the character wave to me, I paused for a moment and awkwardly waved back…I don’t know why I did, I just felt compelled to for some odd reason. The level looked exactly the same. But then, I noticed something, the main character looked different, he looked like he was trying to talk to me, and like he was in a panic at the same time. I felt the same for a split second, and when he tried to talk to me I realized…that was a sprite of my dad on the game. This brought a mix of emotions to me that were disturbing, part of me felt hatred for him leaving, partly was happy to see him there like we were playing the game together again, and the last part was the onset of genuine fear and paranoia. I thought, maybe someone was messing with me, and who was watching my life and doing this to me and why?

I pressed escape over and over again, trying to close the game and even tried to manually turn my computer off by holding down the power button, but nothing was working. And the character on the screen, he was still silent, there was no sound as he ran to the left of the screen, he ran straight into a tree trunk with a thud and fell to the ground a couple times. What scared the fuck out of me was that every time he did, I heard a slam against the door down the hall, in time with the game. When he stopped, it stopped. My heart was racing by now, and I rushed to look out the window overlooking the front door, but there was nothing, absolutely nothing and no one at the door, and I was the only one in the apartment. I was pretty scared to say the least, and half-expecting him to be there. I stood there for a minute, baffled, thinking I was going insane.

I ran back over to my laptop and wanted to see more of what was going to happen, but the character was gone. And as soon as I sat down, the game crashed again, and when I went to re-launch the file, it gave me another phrase that said; “YourTurnSon.” I clicked it, it read: “You’ll soon find out why.” I was a bit confused at that, but I didn’t want to restart the game, I was done with this weird shit. It did the same as before, it launched itself, went to black, then skipped the intro and went straight to the menu. And again, it wouldn’t let me press escape or manually turn off the computer. So I figured I’d outsmart it, I closed the laptop and unplugged it, hoping the battery would die soon and the next day I’d have it reformatted to get rid of the obvious virus. But it wasn’t that simple, even though I had muted my sound the last time it crashed, I heard a loud scream coming from my laptop, it was a scream of torment and torture, and it sounded like it was in my dad’s voice. I panicked and threw the laptop at the wall, but it got louder. I’m surprised my crappy laptop still works to be honest. It didn’t stop until I opened it up again and pressed play.

When it came to the first level again, I immediately noticed the level was different, everything was black and white, the only thing separating the black things and background was all the outlines traced in white. I couldn’t really tell if my character looked the same as before or not. But I also saw my health, it usually always started you at three lives, but it started me with two this time. I heard something that sounded like a record playing something in reverse…That didn’t bother me so much as the in-humane screaming and crying I heard from the left speaker, leading me to go where I’d last seen my dad’s character. I walked back to the left of the screen where the open tree trunk was, it looked like the hole in the trunk was all red though, and it looked sort of like a portal.

I didn’t want to go in yet, so I turned back and walked to the right, I went as far right as I could. And as I did, I started to see white things sticking out of the ground, I thought they were spikes or something like that, that I just jumped over. But when I stepped on one, I heard the cry of a wild boar that sounded like it was being tortured. And suddenly I realized, these were the skeletal remains of the animals that I had faced before on the ground. I heard some strange noises from my speakers that sounded like low laughter. Like that of something not human, demonic almost as I ran to the left of the screen again, towards the red portal. It got louder the closer I got.

The game crashed again when I went through. I was relieved. This time I could avoid clicking the files and reading whatever ridiculous things it had to say and try to shut down the computer without the game running at the same time. I checked again to make sure my speakers were muted, and I took the laptop and stored it under the stairwell outside between some blankets and old pillows next to the trashcans. Hell I would have welcomed someone trying to steal it. But I needed to get some sleep, it was a lot later than I thought it was by now. I knew the limits of my speakers and I knew I wouldn’t hear it from my bed at the least, I just wanted to forget about that game and give my laptop away to any unfortunate random pawnshop owner the next morning.

But that night, last night, I had some very strange dreams. I heard the screams again, the crying, and distorted laughter. I saw everything in the game play in my dream over and over, but I was seeing through the eyes of the character and it all seemed so real. But I heard my father, he said; “Help me Matt, buddy I need your help. Find it.” I didn’t know what he meant by that ‘find it’ part, but I knew in that dream exactly where he was, he’d gone to find the Mayan ruins from the game, to find something that I wasn’t clear of. After that, I saw him, and his body violently purge his skeleton from his flesh, there was blood and organs scattered everywhere around the pile of bones mostly mangled together, as he screamed and to my amazement started to laugh too. I don’t know why, or how he would have found them, but I knew I’d find him there and maybe there was a chance I could still help him and get him back before anything like that happened to him. Now I knew where to look.

So, at about 3 AM I was startled awake with tears down my face, then went to get the laptop and plug it back in to find out more. It had already brought up the game files, with a message that read: “WelcomeBack” and when I clicked it, the text-box said; “Come find me, you’re ready.” Then, I didn’t give it the chance to launch itself and I launched Pitfall myself and just pressed play, and the game let me this time. Now there was nothing, but my dad’s character, and pitch-black all around. There was this quiet music playing, that sounded like a pipe organ, and some low dark chanting or hymns or something, there were a lot of words I couldn’t quite make out. But I started feeling a burning sensation throughout my body, I almost couldn’t stand it as I heard flames crackling, I wanted to claw my skin off and I smelled fire for a split second. I got up when the sensation faded and checked around the apartment, I was the only one here, I never smoked, and our apartment can’t even facilitate fixtures for a stove of any sorts. The windows were all closed and we had no air vents, I still couldn’t imagine where that smell came from. When I got back to it, the last life went from one to zero and the game crashed for the last time and, when I checked, it had deleted itself completely from my computer. I had also used my Windows audio recorder to record some of it, but the files were either deleted or renamed and moved when the game crashed the last time. I’ll keep looking for that audio file. I tried to find the name of the author of the file download today, and I remembered the name was “Hourglass11″, but the file was just gone and I couldn’t download it again to find out more of what was going on. I have to see what’s on that damned cartridge…maybe it will give me more to go off of.

Posted: January 14th 2013, 12:11 PM

I’ve calmed down a bit now, as I type this last part myself. But that will only last until the next dream haunts me, and calls me to find him. But I realized today, that I am actually becoming my father in a way, as much as I don’t want to accept it, I’ve been rapidly drawing away from my family and becoming more reclusive because of all this. As much as I want to stop looking and break the chain now, I just can’t…I already took a vacation from work and went to the storage container when my roommate got back. I didn’t bother explaining to him, I knew he wouldn’t believe me. And I found both the game and the SNES in the same box with nothing else in it. Everything on the cartridge sticker were blacked out, except the character, that looked just like my father…a lot of people say I’m a mirror image of him. I’m going to find out where exactly he is and buy tickets to Mexico to find him and those ruins.

It was around Thanksgiving when my grandparents came to visit. It had been almost two years since I and my younger brother and sister, Eric and Breanna, got to see them. They were always so lively when they came around. For an old man, my grandpa had a very interesting hobby. He collected action figures. Any sorts of them. He had collections of He Man figurines, to Power Rangers, to the Thunder Cats.

But the best part about them coming to town was that every time my grandpa came, he always brought a small collection for us to play with. Never to keep, but it was always fun playing with some of his favorite toys with him.

As our grandparents entered our home to stay for the weekend, my mother greeted them with a smile. She always had at least a grin on her face. She was one of the most ecstatic people that I’ve ever seen. She always seems to bring light to a dark day. Not just to me and my siblings, but to everyone it seems.

But for some reason, my grandmother never came through the door, and my grandpa walked in with a blank look in his eyes. They looked dead to me, which is the complete opposite of what they usually generate. He didn’t even say hello. He just walked in, with a bag in his hand.

My mother asked him, “Where’s Mom?” That of which my grandpa only replied to with, “…She went away for awhile.”

This puzzled my mother. I could see it in her facial expressions. She tried to bring up more on the subject but Grandpa quickly dismissed it, as if it were no big deal and to stop talking about it. So she did, thinking they must be going through some troubles that he would rather not discuss. Just as my mother and my father had.

Grandpa looked over at Breanna, (who was currently taking a nap on the couch,) and gave an almost sinister smirk. One that I’ve never seen on his face in my entire life.

“Isn’t it fascinating how easy it is to watch someone sleep,” He said.

He and my mom moved into the kitchen, where I finally gave my greetings,
“Hi Grandpa! How’ve you been?”
He replied with a quizzical stare. What was wrong with my grandfather? Why was he not so jumpy and delightful as his previous visits?

I dismissed the abstract, silent reply, and moved onto my next subject.
“Whats in the bag?”
Again he looked at me with that same stare, but this time he spoke,
“Just some figurines I found.”
He dumped out the bag, which was much more empty than usual. Instead of the ten or twelve action figures he usually brought, what fell from the bag, were two, very old, very creepy looking, tiny action figures. I quickly picked them up to look at them. At first glance they looked like regular old action figures, but the odd thing was, I&’ve never seen them in my life. No cartoon I’ve ever seen or anything have ever had these characters. One looked like an old man, his face riddled with dirt and grime. He was wielding what looked like a short dagger. He was also in loin cloth robes. The other one, also had the face of an old man, but he was wielding a hatchet. His face was also covered in dirt. He also had no clothes to accommodate his figurine body. He looked like one of my sisters Ken dolls that she lost all the clothes too. They were the two creepiest dolls that I’ve ever seen. But on the other hand. As I held them, I began to enjoy them. I had an inexplicable urge to put them in my pocket and keep them…

I looked up at my grandfather, ready to ask him where he got them. But when I was about to open my mouth, I noticed his expression changed again. He looked as if he was in a silent rage, staring at the dolls, and then almost instantly at me. There was a fire in his dead eyes as he spoke.

“Give them to me, Now! NOW!”

I looked at him startled. But by then he had tried lunging at me, for the two figurines. I, being as scared as I was from the incident, shot backwards to avoid his advance toward me.

My grandfathers knee must have faltered in his attempt to grab the two figurines, because quickly he fell to the ground. My mother quickly reached down and tried to pick him up. But by then he was clutching his heart, and gasping for air in a rather terrifying way. My mother called 911, but he was dead before the ambulance could arrive, from a heart attack.

In the next week, my grandfathers funeral had taken place. We had no way to contact my grandmother. We had no idea where she could be. So the funeral went on without her. But even whilst all of these sad events were taking place, my obsession for these two figurines began to grow rapidly. Not so much the the old man with the hatchet, as the man with the dagger. My brother, Eric, had subsequently taking a great liking to the man with the hatchet, so I gave it to him. It seemed like no matter where we went. We always had our figurines with us. In my experience with the dagger wielding old man, it gave me a sort of spark in my soul. There’s really no other way to describe it. It kept me eccentric, and happy, in a weird sense.

In the next coming months though, things had changed. I began to resent the old figurine. It stared at me in the most menacing way, and for some reason, made it unable for me to sleep. I knew I should get rid of the doll..but..I can’t… I’ve tried many times… but I always seem to pick it back up. I can never be rid of it. Not to mention the fact that it was giving me nightmares. And not normal nightmares either. Ones where people are watching me sleep and try to murder me, but more, the other way around. I would have dreams of myself, being in my brother or mother’s room, with a dagger, just as the old man figurine has, and just watching them sleep. Always in the shadow of the corners, never getting too close. And not a nightmare that you realize that you imagined so many different events in a small amount of time. It wasn’t that way at all. I would stand there, for hours, and just watch them sleep… and do nothing. Just… watch.

These nightmares scared me. But there was nothing that I could do, my brother was just as silent and lifeless anymore as I was, and we had both began to grow apart from our mother and sister. So silence was our only option. And for now, it had been sufficing.

One night, I woke up startled. I looked around my room to see nothing was there. But felt a cold wetness in my sheets. I reached down and felt the wet area. It seemed I had wet the bed. Oh great, how am i going to explain this to my mother.

I got up, and immediately looked for my figuring, (I’ve gotten to the point where I go nowhere without it,) but couldn’t find it. It pained me to go anywhere without my seemingly life companion, but I decided just to head to my mother’s room.

I stepped through her slightly cracked door and walked to her bed. I nudged her trying to wake her up to tell her the embarrassing thing I had done. It was 3am, and very dark in her bedroom with no windows. I tried nudging her again, but something was wrong, she was also wet.

I turned on he small light on her nightstand, and stood there, awe struck. There..lying in bed..was the cold, lifeless, blood soaked body, of my murdered mother. I looked at myself, I was covered in blood, and my mother looked like she had been carved like someone had been trying to cut pieces out of her. And there, sitting in her neck… was a dagger…

I grabbed it, and pulled it out of her neck. Its blood soaked blade shined in the dim light of the lamp. And I just stood there terrified, most people scream when they’re scared. But I was passed that point. I couldn’t even muster a sound out of my throat. I froze, scared to even turn around.

I glanced around my dead mother, and sitting there, on the top of the covers, was my figurine. Dagger in hand, laying there, like my mother was holding it before she fell asleep. Out of instinct I quickly grabbed it. And once I did, I felt its spark come into me again. Without being frightened or worry about my mother anymore, I looked at her body once again. All I could think of was,

“Isn’t it fascinating how easy it is to watch someone sleep?”

I took the dagger, and my figurine, and walked ever so slowly, into my brother Eric’s room. For no apparent reason, I just felt the urge. I had too…I had too…

I crept into his room, and hid in the shadows, staring at his bed. I saw the mound in his bed that was his helpless, sleeping body. And I watched him. I watched him for what seemed to be about two hours, the whole time only thinking.

“Isn’t it fascinating how easy it is to watch someone sleep?”

It was almost 5am now, and I was still,… just watching him, when I had another thought flow through my head, this one not in my own voice. But what seemed like the voice of an old man.

“Gut him, Nicholas, gut him.”

Without a second thought, and clutching the blood stained dagger in one hand and figurine in the other, I walked over too his bed. I lifted the dagger, and plunged it into the mound that was my brother. But… it felt soft, unlike a body.

I quickly lifted the covers to see that my brother was not in his bed at all, it was just a mound of covers and pillows that seemed made out to look like a person.

I stared at the mound, quizzical of what was going on, and then looked at my figurine.

What have you done to me?

Abruptly I heard a footstep behind me, I spun around, to see my brother stepping out from behind his curtains. The moonlight shining on his bloodstained face and night shirt. I looked right and saw the mangled, shredded corpse… of our sister.

I looked back at him, he had obviously been there awhile considering he couldn’t get there without walking right by where I was standing in the first place, and he just stared at me, with a hatchet in his hand, and his figurine in the other as he said,

“Isn’t it fascinating how easy it is to watch someone watch you sleep?”

Credit To – Sunshine Wayne

Your mother had been sick for years. You never did know exactly what was wrong with her though. Countless doctors had examined her and all had to admit she was suffering some something they had never seen before. However, even though they could not pinpoint the disease itself, they all seemed to agree on one thing: it was terminal. Eventually, this mysterious illness would take your poor mother’s life.

You can remember back when your mother fist got sick. It happened after visiting family in a small town in West Virginia. The trip had ended abruptly when your aunt became furious with your mother for accidentally breaking a picture of your grandmother. You never did understand why your aunt had become so upset, it was just a photo. Regardless, your family had to pack up and leave that next morning. On the drive home, your mother seemed to be dealing with some allergies. Assuming it was just some of the local fauna getting to her, no one thought much of it. Everyone assumed it would clear up shortly after returning home, but it never did. Weeks, and then months after returning, your mother’s new “allergies” were still steadily growing worse. It was always a slow, but she never got even a little better even for a day. Back before it really got bad she always used to joke that “those darn allergies must have moved in and loved me so much they decided to stay and take over!” Eventually though, she stopped joking about her sickness. It took so much out of her that it made her angry and bitter. She would snap and yell at you for the smallest things, and she would become exhausted and just fall asleep at random times. A few times you even saw her fall asleep while walking. She would be walking one way, then her eyes would slowly close as she drifted off in another direction before jerking awake. You tried to help make things easy on her as much as you could, but there wasn’t much you could do. Every time she yelled you tried to remind yourself that it was just the disease and exhaustion talking so you wouldn’t start yelling back and just make her feel even worse.

The disease affected more than your mother though. Her slow deterioration began to wear out the rest of the family emotionally; as she grew worse, you watched your father and little brother grow worse as well. You felt yourself crumbling too, but you did your best to fight it and pretend like nothing was wrong. Eventually, it became too much for your father. You woke up one Thursday morning to find a note from him explaining that he couldn’t stand to be in the house with your mother anymore. He said he had left for good and taken your brother with him. The note didn’t say where he intended to go. He was gone, and you were left to care for your mother alone.

For years, it was just the two of you. Every day she continued to worsen, and every day you fought harder and harder to keep from breaking as your father had. Every week more and more doctors saw her and gave you the same clueless, useless answers. It was something they’d never seen before. It worked in unusual ways they couldn’t understand. It didn’t make any sense. It was terminal.

It was terminal. There was always that. Eventually, you gave up on doctors completely. Your mother was almost entirely bedridden by this point, and there was nothing they could do anyways, so why should you waste what time you had left with them? Instead, you stayed home everyday to care for her. In those brief moments when you were not occupied by some household chore, you would sit and try to read. You never did process very many of the words anymore, but it was easier to deal with books than it was to deal with television. Besides, if the tv had been on you might not be able to hear your mother when she faintly called out for you because she needed something. As the months dragged on, those calls became much more frequent and much more faint.

In those final few years, there seemed to be only one thing you could do to bring a tiny smile to your mother’s face: take her picture. She had always loved having her picture taken, even as a little girl. You could remember all the stories she and your grandmother had told you about how she would run to anyone she saw with a camera and beg to have her picture taken, even if the person was a complete stranger. As she grew older, she obviously learned not to approach random strangers for photos, but she never lost her love for being photographed. So, every single day you would get out the camera and go into her room. You would sum up all the cheerfulness you could as you raised the camera and called to her, “Time for your picture, Mom! Say cheese!” That faint smile you came to know all too well would slowly crease her face, the flash would go off, and then you would put the camera away until the next day.

One evening, while your eyes were sliding over the words of a book whose title you could not even remember, you realized you hadn’t heard your mom call for you in a while. Concerned that you had zoned out and missed her call, you put the book down to go check on her. As soon as you entered her room, your heart dropped. She was dead. After all these years, the disease had finally claimed her life. In a small way, you were glad because she no longer had to suffer, but that did not change the immense sense of loss you felt. Now you were completely alone.

With your mother gone, you had no idea what to do. For years, taking care of her had consumed your life, but now she was gone. Unsure of what to do, you remained in the house alone most days, still running your eyes through books without ever realizing what you were reading. A day or two after your mother was buried, you remembered the camera and all the photographs you had taken. You printed out that final picture, dug out an old picture frame from a dusty box in the attic, and hung it above the headrest of her bed. You stood there and cried for hours after you first hung it; you couldn’t believe she was gone. Some nights, while you were “reading,” you even thought you could hear her faintly calling you as before. You would close your book and start to stand before it would hit you again–she was gone, you were just imagining things. Most of the time, this realization sent you into another uncontrollable fit of tears.

One night, as you were making your way to your bedroom, you thought your heard your mother’s voice again. You knew that you were imagining things, but still you decided to go and look into her room. On your way, you absentmindedly grabbed the camera and took it with you. You poked your head into her room like you always had, but this time you looked up to her picture instead of her bed. Noticing the camera in your hands, you brought it up to your face, aimed it at the photo on the wall and said, “Time for your picture, Mom! Say cheese!” choking on every word as the tears began to well up in your eyes. Just before you took the picture, you almost thought you could see the smile forming on her face again, and that was when you lost control completely. In a fit of tears, you threw the camera to the far side of the room where it bounced harmlessly off a pillow. You dove onto your mother’s bed and ripped the picture from the wall and hurled it into the ground. As the glass shattered and spread across the carpet, you fell down on top of it on your knees, snatching up the now-broken frame. Cutting your hands on the bits of glass that remained in the frame, you tore the picture out and began ripping it to shreds, sobbing. You spent that night curled up on the carpet crying, clutching firmly to the shreds of the photo.

In the following days, you returned to your habit of attempting to read. Everything seemed normal, or at least as normal as things had been since your mother had died. However, you no longer thought you heard her voice. You guessed that your tantrum with the photo had served as some sort of release to help you accept her death, and that that had gotten the illusion of her voice out of your mind. You were extremely grateful for that, as it was easily the worst part of your suffering. Now the only suffering you had to cope with was some minor new allergies.

Credit To – SnoringFrog

“The trust of the innocent is the liar’s most useful tool.”

-Stephen King

Somewhere out there in this great blue world of ours, across oceans and throughout time, there is a familiar face. Attached to this face is of course, a familiar person. This is a person that you can only recall in the vaguest sense of memory, someone that you may or may not actually know as a person at all. More or less, they appear as only a fleeting moment of human interaction, but not as an individual. Really, if anything at all, to you, they’re simply the negation of everyone whom they are not. It is in this way that this seemingly random stranger is timeless, immortal if you will. There will always be a familiar stranger, a stranger that you think you may remember from a past experience, ingrained into the backdrop of some greater scene of drama. Keep in mind though, that this stranger has a name. It could be Mike, or Lindsey, or Brian. Maybe it’s one of your father’s old coworkers, or perhaps a neighbor from that one house you used to live in when you were thirteen. You know that you know them, but from where, well, you just can’t put your finger on that part.

One day, you’ll be passing a downtown café in Chicago, and outside on the patio, you’ll see him. He’ll wave and smile and you’ll wave and smile back, the whole time trying to think of who he is.

“Do I know him? Didn’t we go to high school together?” You’ll ask yourself. Or maybe you’re walking across a bridge in Dublin, and look, there she is, offering you that cigarette you’ve been craving all morning. You think you remember her name, but you won’t be sure, not really.

“Isn’t she my sister’s friend? The one who was dating that one guy?” It could be, but who knows? You’ll see her motioning for you to approach her, or you’ll see him offer you a seat, the way a casual acquaintance would. Go ahead, join them for a moment. You know each other, even if you lack the memory. Join them, and have yourself a chat. Follow them for a while if the opportunity comes about, it’s perfectly fine. After all, they may be a stranger, but that doesn’t mean you can’t trust them. It’s okay, just take a nice walk, and catch up if you can. Try to get their name if you can. It shouldn’t be that hard, it’s been on the tip of your tongue since you laid eyes on them at the bridge. Or in the parking lot. Or at the library.

If they seem friendly, it’s only because they are. Always urbane, always witty. No need to be cynical here, just because you lack the certainty of their motivations. If you begin to doubt that they are who they say they are, then feel free to ask as many questions as you please. Ask them anything, things like, “Who are you again?” or, “Where are we going?”  You’ll probably forget a few minutes later, but that’s okay. All that you need to stay focused on is the box.

Oh, did I forget to mention that, or did you already lose track of the situation? Well, you may want to check again, just to be sure. You’ll notice it eventually, tucked under one arm of your long lost friend. Your familiar friend, your pleasant friend. Yes, you’d be correct in saying that it is a box, a wooden box. Small and polished, with steal bolted to the trim. It’ll have a handle too, and even a lid. You won’t recognize this box. It’s something far too important to be swept under the carpet, even if it means nothing to you now. Despite the generally mundane nature of this small, banal box, you’ll still notice it regardless. It’s much too intriguing to ignore, in a simple way. Naturally, you’ll become curious, and conversation will inevitably lead to the contents. Here’s your chance to learn something, somethingvery interesting.

“What’s that for?” You ask the stranger. If you two find yourselves walking, your company will cease all movement. If you find yourselves near a bench or a few chairs, they’ll take a seat. No no, don’t worry about it, it’s perfectly normal. Just sit down, and try to enjoy yourself. If the mood is still right, the person you are with, whoever they may be, they’ll start to speak.

“Why do you want to know?” they’ll ask you, but only if you truly want to find out. Trust me, you do want to know.

“I was just wondering.” You’ll ask, or something similar to those words. Your friend, the stranger, they’ll start to smile. They’ll hold the box out in front of their chest, almost offering you to take a look inside.

“What do you think it’s for?” You won’t be sure how to answer that question. It could be anything for all you know. Anything at all, or nothing at all. Maybe even both. The stranger, if they are in fact a stranger, will see the confused look on your face. They’ll know that you don’t know, and smile.

“It’s a portal to hell. It’s every nightmare you’ve ever had.” They might say in grave voice. Or maybe, “It’s an abomination, a crime against nature, the likes of which you’ve never seen.” Or something like that. Then, they’ll stare at you, with a look of engraved seriousness.

Then you’ll laugh. You’ll both laugh; because there’s no way those things could be in that box. It would silly to think those things. There’s absolutely nothingdangerous about this box. Don’t even consider it. But, it does hold something that all containers hold until opened, an intangible thing. In that old box, in that strange and familiar box, held in the hands of that strange and familiar friend, there sits a secret ready to be rediscovered. More of a surprise really, a pleasant surprise. Definitely not a bad surprise. Just keep telling yourself that as reach towards the lid. Just keep telling yourself that you want to open the box.

Because you do want to open it, don’t you? Who doesn’t like a little adventure now and then? Now now, don’t worry about a thing. It’s normal to get a little nervous now and then, just so long as you don’t let those feelings get the best of you. Just have a little faith, and everything will be alright. Don’t be scared, it’s just an old wooden box, with a latch and a lid. Just open it up and take a look inside, just a little peek. It’s a good thing to be a little bit reckless now and then, curiosity has always been a good thing. Besides, what’s the worst thing that could possibly happen? It’s absolutely and perfectly safe.

So when you meet that certain familiar person, and you most certainly will, go ahead and just ask to look in that nice old box of theirs. Don’t be skeptical or rude or pessimistic. Open that box, and experience something that few others have. What’s there to lose? What’s the worst that can happen? It’s perfectly safe, so go ahead and look.

You can trust me.

Credit To – Stephan D. Harris

DERPNOTE: Since the “This Man” post was seemingly well-received, I’m going to continue tossing in these sorts of posts every so often. They’re not actual pastas, but interesting things to read about “real life” paranormal events and experiences. My hope is that you will enjoy both learning about and discussing the events described in these sorts of posts, and maybe even glean some inspiration for future submissions.

With that said, what follows is the original text of a very famous eBay auction where a harried seller tried his best to unload a possibly cursed item: The Dibbuk Box.

–

All of the events that I am about to set forth in this listing are accurate and may be verified by the winning bidder with the copies of hospital records and sworn affidavits that I am including as part of the sale of the cabinet.

During September of 2001, I attended an estate sale in Portland Oregon. The items liquidated at this sale were from the estate of a woman who had passed away at the age of 103. A grand-daughter of the woman told me that her grandmother had been born in Poland where she grew up, married, raised a family, and lived until she was sent to a Nazi concentration camp during World War II. She was the only member of her family who survived the camp. Her parents, brothers, a sister, husband, and two sons and a daughter were all killed. She survived the camp by escaping with some other prisoners and somehow making her way to Spain where she lived until the end of the war. I was told that she acquired the small wine cabinet listed here in Spain and it was one of only three items that she brought with her when she immigrated to the United States. The other two items were a steamer trunk, and a sewing box.

I purchased the wine cabinet, along with the sewing box and some other furniture at the estate sale. After the sale, I was approached by the woman’s granddaughter who said, I see you got the dibbuk box. She was referring to the wine cabinet. I asked her what a dibbuk box was, and she told me that when she was growing up, her grandmother always kept the wine cabinet in her sewing room. It was always shut, and set in a place that was out of reach. The grandmother always called it the dibbuk box. When the girl asked her grandmother what was inside, her grandmother spit three times through her fingers said, a dibbuk, and keselim. The grandmother went on to tell the girl that the wine cabinet was never, ever, to be opened.

The granddaughter told me that her grandmother had asked that the box be buried with her. However, as such a request was contrary to the rules of an orthodox Jewish burial, the grandmothers request had not been honored. I asked the granddaughter what a dibbuk, and keselim were, but she did not know. I asked if she would like to open it with me. She did not want to open it, as her grandmother had been very emphatic and serious when she instructed her not to do so, and, regardless of the reason, she wanted to honor her grandmother’s request.

I finally ended up offering to let her keep what seemed to me to be a sentimental keepsake. At that point, she was very insistent and said, No, no you bought it!

I explained that I didn’t want my money back, and that it would make me feel better to do what I thought was an act of kindness. She then became somewhat upset. Looking back now, the way she became upset was just plain odd. She raised her voice to me and said, you bought it! You made a deal!

When I tried to speak, she yelled, we don’t want it! She began to cry, asked me to leave, and quickly walked away. I wrote the whole episode off to the stress and grief she must have been experiencing. I took my purchases and politely left.

At the time when I bought the cabinet, I owned a small furniture refinishing business. I took the cabinet to my store, and put it in my basement workshop where I intended to refinish it and give it as a gift to my Mother. I didn’t think anything more about it. I opened my shop for the day and went to run some errands leaving the young woman who did sales for me in charge.

After about a half-hour, I got a call on my cell phone. The call was from my salesperson. She was absolutely hysterical and screaming that someone was in my workshop breaking glass and swearing. Furthermore, the intruder had locked the iron security gates and the emergency exit and she couldn’t get out. As I told her to call the police, my cell phone battery went dead. I hit speeds of 100 mph getting back to the shop. When I arrived, I found the gates locked. I went inside and found my employee on the floor in a corner of my office sobbing hysterically. I ran to the basement and went downstairs. At the bottom of the stairs, I was hit by an overpowering unmistakable odor of cat urine (there had never been any animals kept or found in my shop). The lights didn’t work. As I investigated, I found that the reason the lights didn’t work also explained the sounds of glass breaking. All of the light bulbs in the basement were broken. All nine incandescent bulbs had been broken in their sockets, and 10 four-foot fluorescent tubes were lying shattered on the floor. I did not find an intruder, however. I should also add that there was only one entrance to the basement. It would have been impossible for anyone to leave without meeting me head-on. I went back up to speak with my salesperson, but she had left.

She never returned to work (after having been with me for two years). She refuses to discuss the incident to this day. I never thought of relating the events of that day to anything having to do with the cabinet.

Then, things got worse.

As I already indicated, I had decided to give the cabinet to my Mother as a birthday gift. About two weeks after I made the purchase, I decided to get started refinishing it. I was surprised to find that the cabinet has a unique little mechanism. When you open one of the doors, the mechanism causes the opposite door, and the little drawer below, to open at the same time. It is very well made. Inside the cabinet, I found the following items: 1 1928 U.S. Wheat Penny; 1 1925 US Wheat Penny; One small lock of blonde hair (bound with string); One small lock of black/brown hair (bound with string); One small granite statue engraved and gilded with Hebrew letters (I have been told that the letters spell out the word SHALOM); One dried rosebud; One golden wine cup; One very strange black cast iron candlestick holder with octopus legs.

I saved all of the items in a box intending to return them to the estate. The family has refused the items, so they will be included in this sale of the cabinet.

After opening the cabinet, I decided not to refinish it. I cleaned it, and rubbed in some lemon oil. It was at this time that I noticed that there was an inscription in Hebrew carved into the back of the cabinet. I have no idea what it says or if it is significant. I have included a picture of that inscription below. On my mother’s birthday, October 28, 2001, my mother called to tell me that she was going out of town with my sister for three days, and we postponed celebrating her birthday together until she returned. On October 31, 2001, my mother came to my shop. We were going to have lunch together, but before we were going to leave, I gave her the wine cabinet. She seemed to like it. While she examined it, I went to make a phone call. I hadn’t been out of sight more than 5 minutes when one of my employees came running into my office saying that something was wrong with my mom.

When I went back to see what the matter was, I found my mom sitting in a chair beside the cabinet. Her face had no expression, but tears were streaming down her cheeks. No matter how I tried to get her to respond, she would not. She could not. It turns out that my mother had suffered a stroke. She was taken to the hospital by ambulance. She ended up suffering partial paralysis, and losing her ability to speak and form words (she has since regained the ability to speak). She could understand things being said to her, and could respond by pointing to letters of the alphabet to spell out words she wanted to say. When I asked her the following day how she was doing, she teared up and spelled out the words: N-O G-I- F-T. I assured her that I had given her a gift for her birthday, thinking that she didn’t remember, but she became even more upset and spelled out the words: H-A-T-E G-I-F-T. I laughed and told her not to worry. I told her I was sorry she didn’t like the cabinet, and that I would get her anything she wanted if she would promise to get well soon.

Still, I didn’t associate anything that had happened with the cabinet itself or anything paranormal. Frankly, I don’t think I ever even used the term paranormal until this last month.

I’ll try to make this short now. I gave the cabinet to my sister. She kept it for a week, then gave it back. She complained that she couldn’t get the doors to stay closed and that they kept coming open. There are no springs in the door mechanism and I have never found that the doors come open. I gave it to my brother and his wife who kept it for three days and then gave it back. My brother said it smelled like Jasmine flowers, while his wife insisted that it put out an odor of cat urine. I gave it to my girlfriend who asked me to sell it for her after only two days. I sold it the same day to a nice middle aged couple. Three days later, when I came to open the shop for the day, I found the cabinet sitting at the front doors with a note that read, This has a bad darkness. I had no idea what that meant. Anyway, I ended up taking it home.

Then, things got even worse.

Since the day I brought it home, I began having a strange recurring nightmare. Every time I have the horrible dream it goes something like this: I find myself walking with a friend, usually someone I know well and trust at some point in the dream, I find myself looking into the eyes of the person that I am with. It is then that I realize that there is something different, something evil looking back at me. At that point in my dream, the person I am with changes into what can only be described as the most gruesome, demonic looking Hag that I have ever seen. This Hag proceeds then, to beat the living tar out of me. I have awakened numerous times to find bruises and marks on myself where I had been hit by the old woman during the previous night. Still, I never related the nightmares to the cabinet, nor do I think that I ever would have.

About a month ago, however, my sister, and my brother and his wife came over to my house and spent the night. The following morning, during breakfast, my sister complained that she had had a horrible nightmare. She said that she recalled having had it a couple of times before, and went on to describe my nightmare exactly to the last detail. My brother and his wife froze as they listened, and then chimed in that they had both had had the exact same dreams during the night as well. The hair was standing up on the back of my neck and still is. As we talked, it became clear that the common denominator was that each of us had had the nightmare during the times that the cabinet was in our respective homes. I called my girlfriend and asked if she could recall having any nightmares recently. She described the same nightmare, same Hag, everything. When I asked her if she remembered the date when she had the nightmare, she said she did not. Then I asked if it happened to be the night before she gave me the cabinet back to sell for her. She said, Yeah!  Hey, how did you know that?!!!

Now then, since my family discussion, it seems like all hell is breaking loose. For a week afterward I started seeing what I can only describe as shadow things in my peripheral vision. In fact, numerous visitors to my house have claimed that they have seen these shadow things. I put the cabinet in an outside storage unit and was awakened when the smoke alarm in the unit went off in the middle of the night. When I went to see what was burning, I opened the door and didn’t see any smoke. However, I did get hit with the smell of cat urine. When I went back inside, the smell was there in my house. I DO NOT OWN A CAT AND I NEVER HAVE. I went back outside and grabbed the cabinet. I brought it back inside and tried to research it on the Internet. While I was surfing the net, I fell asleep and once again had the same freakin nightmare. I woke up at around 4:30am (when it felt and smelled like someone was breathing on my neck) to find that my house now smelled like Jasmine flowers, and just in time to see a HUGE shadow thing go loping down the hall away from me.

I would destroy this thing in a second, except I really don’t have any understanding of what I may or may not be dealing with. I am afraid (and I do mean afraid) that if I destroy the cabinet, whatever it is that seems to have come with the cabinet may just stay here with me. I have been told that there are people who shop on EBAY that understand these kinds of things and specifically look for these kinds of items. If you are one of these people, please, please buy this cabinet and do whatever you do with a thing like this.

Help me.

You can see that I have no reserve price or minimum bid. If I can make things any easier let me know and I will do everything within my abilities.

One more note. On the same day my Mom had her stroke, the lease to my store was summarily terminated without cause.

The measurements are 12.5″ x 7.5″ x 16.25″

ALL OF THE ITEMS THAT I ORIGINALLY FOUND INSIDE THE CABINET ARE INCLUDED IN THE SALE AND WILL BE DELIVERED WITH THE CABINET.

On Jun-12-03 at 02:15:30 PDT, seller added the following information:

There is no way that I can respond to all of the e-mails I’ve received since I put this thing on-line. I’ll try now to update and answer the most common questions I’ve been receiving.

1. No, I am not religious.

2. No, I do not wish to have or participate in any sort of exorcism, or case study, or photo sessions at my home.

3. No, I will not sell any of the individual pieces which were originally found separate from the other pieces and the cabinet.

4. No, I do not speak Hebrew nor do I know what the word “keselim” means. I don’t know that the word is even or or a Hebrew word.

5. At the end of the auction, I have decided to take an opportunity to speak with the winning bidder for two reasons: a.)To make sure that the winning bidder is a serious adult who has employed some valid reasoning skills in making the decision to accept whatever this is. I will not be judgmental. Do whatever you want or need after the sale. b.)To offer full details of the events that have transpired. After I have carried out those responsibilities, and upon payment, I will have the cabinet and its contents delivered by U.S.MAIL, FED-EX, or UPS to the winning bidder. At that point, I will have no further involvement with the matter in any way, shape, or form. Period.

6.) To all of you who have offered to pray, I may not be religious, but I am certainly open to the possibilities –no matter what your religion might be. THANK YOU!

On Jun-14-03 at 05:216 PDT, seller added the following information:

Here is another update for everyone following this listing.
NO! No, I will not circumvent, or make any deals outside of EBAY – EVEN FOR MORE MONEY THAN THE FINAL AUCTION PRICE!!! If you want to win the auction and have the kind of money some of you are offering, there shouldn’t be any reason why you cannot simply place your bid in an open honest fashion. I’m sure you can understand why I might be suspicious.

ALSO….

For those of you wanting to know if I am still experiencing anything out of the ordinary, I thought everything was going OK until I got home on Friday – the 13th of June – and found that the fish in my fresh water aquarium – all 10 – were dead.

I’m still hoping that all of this is coincidental crap.

–

DERPNOTE PT2: Now, I seem to recall that more follow-up information was initially available on this website, but it seems to have been removed – most likely, to encourage interested parties to just bite the bullet and buy their book about the whole thing instead. For now, I’m just linking the book, but if anyone else stumbles onto pages that go a bit more into detail with the follow-up investigations and other details about this particular story, I’d appreciate if you would drop me a link in the comments. I’ll edit it any new links into this post as they come, so that eventually we can have a nice little “main menu” page here about the dibbuk box for both discussion and discovery.

Mirror of the original eBay auction
Paranormal Review Podcast Episode: The Dibbuk Box with Jason Haxton
Mysterious Universe Episodes 209 and 524 both deal with the dibbuk box
The Dibbuk Box on Amazon - full disclosure: our referral link is included.
Syfy’s Paranormal Witness episode on the topic – full disclosure: our referral link is included.
The “official website” of The Dibbuk Box
The wikipedia entry