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The Letters



Estimated reading time — 2 minutes

You were out of town for the weekend. When you came back to your apartment, your mailbox was stuffed full. At least 30 letters. Letters with no return address, several of them felt soggy and heavy, as though they were recently wet, or perhaps contained a liquid. All of the letters have your name and address written on them, and many of them had your name scratched all over them in red in. They don’t smell nice, they smell like rotting meat and old garbage and you’re reluctant to take them back to your room, but curiosity gets the better of you. You manage to cart them all back to your room, you dump them in your kitchenette sink because you don’t want them smelling up the rest of the apartment.

You grab one that doesn’t seem damp and isn’t covered with writing, and open it up. There’s pictures inside. Pictures of people you don’t know, with their eyes torn out, teeth missing, unhinged jaws hanging open, throats ripped out. You’re horrified and yet you can’t help but wonder what’s in the rest of the letters. You open more, and more to discover increasingly gruesome photos of dead people. Piles of bodies with limps missing, splayed open corpses on operating tables with their vital organs removed, hanged bodies that have been gutted and bled dry. Some of the soggy letters had blood and other fluids in them.

The more letters you open, the more you notice that not all of the people are strangers. Some of them were people you see at work, others people you went to high school with. By the time you get to the last few letters, the pictures are of the mutilated bodies of your close friends and family members.

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Eventually you reach the last letter. You don’t want to know what’s in it, but it’s not like you have a choice now. You peel the letter open, and it’s a picture of yourself. Not dead, eyes intact, no limbs missing. It’s a picture of you entering your apartment building earlier that day, shortly before you collected your disgusting letters.

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As you hear a door elsewhere in your apartment open, you black out.

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69 thoughts on “The Letters”

  1. I kind of agree with the folks questioning the logic of the black out. People panic, scream, run away, grab weapons or do any number of things when they are frightened, but short of seeing the devil himself appear before you, I can’t see blacking out as being near the top of the list of possibilities.

    Also, I’ve seen this said on other pastas on this site: Don’t write the story so that the reader is the person in the story. For some people this makes it more scary because they place themselves in the shoes of the person in the story, but anyone can do that anyway if the want. Most folks dislike this style of writing, since they don’t want to be TOLD what they would do in a given situation.

    In this case, I think most people would like to image they would choose a more productive course of action than passing out…

  2. You\’re all stupid. Listen – The story says that the picture of himself shows himself walking into his apartment omgBEFOREomg he had checked his mail. Not WHILE he was getting it. So someone could have taken the picture of him walking in, slipped it into his mailbox before he had gotten there, and then snuck up into the guys closet. And guys, he didnt open them in any order? It just said that as he opened them, he realized that not all of them were strangers, some of them were people he\’d worked with or seen. That could mean after the fourth letter of strangers, he\’d seen someone he knew. It never says anything that suggests he opens them in order. Him not opening a picture of his dead family is simply chance? I mean out of the 30, its not very likely the first he\’d pick up is a family member. So yes, the story makes sense. Go ahead, tell your friends.

  3. How the hell could he pick up an envelope containing a picture of him walking into his apartment building if the picture was there before he entered the building? WTH.

  4. Why the hell do I black out? Where some of the fluids drugs? Am I going to be killed? What if that door opening is just my room-mate waking up? He has a night job, you know?
    You didn’t say I was hit over the head or anything…I just hear a door open and then black out. Ghey.

    You hear door open. What you do?
    A. Black out.
    B. Black more out.

  5. Wow. I dig it. It’s not bad. Though, it’s just like eight million other pastas.

    B- for effort. Try something more original next time, yeah?

  6. Nice one, very delicious.

    Only bit of a flaw is the perfect order he opened them in, unless he was going by dates? Maybe the first one said August 3rd, then the second was August 4th, etc. But I also don’t get how you would get the envelope of you coming into your apartment in your hand. Did you come home, leave, get your mail, and enter again?

    Makes sense, then.

  7. “Piles of bodies with limps missing”
    Good God noooooooo! The horror, the humanity that evil bastard! They must be made to gimp again!

  8. Good Pasta. If my letters stank i’d obvioudsly bin them straight away and if i didnt and opened one the pictures would tell me enough to know to bin the rest and get out of there.

  9. If I had a bunch of soggy old mail in my letter box that stank, I’d simply bin them.

    That, or open them outside. I don’t want my house to smell of rotten shite.

  10. Any moron that passes out when a killer is entering his home deserves to die.

    Other than that, fail. Cause he couldnt have taken the photo and put it in the letter box before he got there.

  11. Boo. How the hell did someone take a picture of you taking the mail out of your box and still manage to get the picture in with all the other mail???

    BIG GAPING PLOT HOLE!

  12. Yeah, this was definitely a better telling of the “photos” stories than most, primarily because the photo of the…reader?…doesn’t show them already dead, which would immediately negate any possible reality in the story. Much spookier this way. :3

  13. I’m not exactly a fan of those “pictures of mutilated bodies” stories, but this one was good because of the suspense at the end. Any other ending would have ruined it for me.

  14. i actually liked this…except the fact that the letters were opened in perfect order…
    i’m not that curious…creepy letter scribbled n such that stink of deadness and garbage?
    PASS!

  15. Very good story, the posts about a movie make me want to start making them. I don’t have the best equipment or editing software, but I’d love to give it a try. This sounds like the perfect beginning to a movie.

  16. Theoretically, most (good) creepypastas would make excellent movies (depending on who made them). This pasta I regard as one of my favorites, if not because of the tangible horror then for, as Lemony points out, the cringeworthy notion of it actually happening to you. Come to think of it, that’s probably what makes most pastas good.

    So, yes. Thumbs up for this one.

  17. This would have been better if the letters had come over a period of time, as many have said.

    Also, it feels like it should be a little of a background plotline for a larger, creepier story.

  18. I agree with Hippie. A little plot thickening and some mentally ill strangers could really get a movie off it’s feet. I really liked this one. The concept is good, and as with many pastas and horror flicks I try to put myself into the main character/narrator’s position. That’s probably why all of my bricks were shat.

  19. That was great! It’s like ‘Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon’, with a few vital differences…wonder if any serial killer would adopt it as a modus operandi?

  20. it seems like you would probably want to call the police after the first one you opened, otherwise i enjoyed it very much

  21. @Manduwala Agreed, if the letters had taken longer to show up it would have been better to build the suspense, good story though.

  22. This reminds me of a Stephen King short story called “The Road Virus Heads North.” A guy buys a painting and the murderer in the painting shows that wherever the man has been he goes and kills whoever was there.

  23. Comment Leaver

    I love this one. It just seemed odd to me that efter dumping out the letters that he would open them in perfect order. I love it though, so perfectly sinister.

  24. I wasn’t to sure about this one. The set up seemed so gruesome there wasn’t a real payoff. Maybe if the letters came over a series of days? Still, has potential.

  25. This pasta was very good.

    Imagine this happening to you, getting photos such as those in the mail. It would horrify you.

    Then, you start to see your friends and loved ones dead. It would break your heart.

    Then, you see you’re the next one to die. But not until you experience the loss of those you love.

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