Tarantula Hawk

Tarantula Hawk: story facts

Written by	Chris Bradburn
Published on Creepypasta.com	November 2026
Length	3,056 words · about 14 minutes to read
Story level	Medium
Category	Psychological Horror

On reflection, it was probably for the best that they didn’t tell us the world was ending.
The panic would have been unbelievable.

I can see why the governments of the world kept it quiet.

Now, I’m not a bootlicker, or sycophant, or anything like that. I’ve attended my fair share of pension protests. I’ve signed a shitload of change.org petitions etc. etc.

I mean, fuck, what would you do in their position?

All in all, it was pretty well done. Very subtle. Nothing you would ever link back to what it really was, until it was far too late.

Started with a few high profile ‘suicides’. Several guys who worked for Boeing tried to go to the press and were found with two gunshots to the back of the head. Terrible sadness. Luckily, they wrote notes before they took their own lives.

Now, here’s the kicker. The news stories and online discussions all revolved around it being linked to Boeing cutting corners for safety procedures.

That was genius.

It was so believable. I think Mr. Murdoch earned his spot on the shuttle coming up with that little scheme.

Next came high profile people being really, really keen to get up into space. Bezos sent a load of celebrities as a test. Cover story was it was a concert. Even had them sing a little bit.

They made sure to pick the most vacuous people to go, and hold a press conference soon as they came back down. All attention was focused on the meaningless shit the celebrities were coming out with. Meanwhile, some very smart people covertly collected the data from the shuttle.

I.e. the real reason they went up there.

Nobody questioned when Musk ramped up his SpaceX ‘test flights’ either. We all just kinda assumed he wanted to rule his own planet.

Fuck, he probably still does, to be fair. ‘Emperor of Mars’. ‘Chief Architect of the Red Planet’. ‘King X of X’. It will be something crazy I’m sure. I guarantee he will have been on the first actual rocket out of here.

Like I said, really cleverly done. We were all so used to crazy news that this stuff just fit. Nobody even really questioned it.

Most of the southern hemisphere was experiencing a most unusual amount of floods. Indonesia was devastated by two tsunamis in as many weeks. There were wars going on, crazy extreme politics, arguments about pronouns etc. etc.

It kept us really, really distracted from caring about what came next.

My first inkling that something else was going on, was when I saw the news articles about the U.K government carrying out testing to dim the sun by introducing more cloud cover.

Within days it was echoed by most other governments of the world. Claimed as a breakthrough way to combat climate change.

That was pretty left field as an approach. A bit extreme. However, what really got me interested was that they started doing the experiments at night, and they started them immediately.

Why? I wondered.

As a previously avid stargazer, I was pretty peeved at this. There wasn’t a town in Scotland where you could see the night sky clearly anymore.

Friends from the U.S, a couple from Thailand, a German guy and another pal from New Zealand, all reported the same thing. It was really peculiar.

We were all part of a very small stargazing community. We would share pictures and videos of our exploits. We all dreamed of finding some evidence of intelligent life out there in the darkness. It was what brought us together.

I swear to god, we were the most passionate nerds you could find. We had some weirdos as well though. The price of technology improving so much, was that the barrier to entry into the stargazing hobby was much lower now. I remember one guy from the Philippines absolutely lost his mind about six months ago. This was around the time the Boeing ‘suicides’ happened.

One of the expats who lived in Thailand knew him loosely. Apparently a really normal guy until one day he wasn’t. He started writing long diatribes on the forums and posting the same threads over and over. Always the same shit about a shadow beyond Jupiter that blocked out a whole section of stars and was moving at speeds we couldn’t comprehend.

We looked over the pictures once and nobody was able to come to any real conclusion. Most of us chalked it up to some kind of satellite and brushed it off. We weren’t conspiracy theorists. There was no need to get ourselves worked up over a blur.

This guy wouldn’t give up though. He kept it up until we had to ban him. Then he kept coming back on new accounts, until eventually we had to block the whole of the Philippines from accessing the site.

In hindsight, it was a dumb move. Not that anything could have been done, though.

Anyway, back to the clouds. I’m getting distracted.

The experiments really screwed us over. Soon as it started to get dark each day, low clouds would roll in, making looking up at the night sky pointless. By the time full dark came, the heavens were just a black canvas of nothingness.

Would have been amazing for Bob Ross, but it just pissed us off. We had nothing to do for our hobbies anymore.

It carried on for weeks. We hoped the tests would end but they never did. The news started mentioning it less and less. Interest waned and it started to become the new normal. It’s amazing what humans will accept when there’s other distractions in their face.

A few high-profile instances of airplanes being shot down reduced international travel by significant amounts. That really annoyed us. Not only were we unable to see the stars anymore, but the conditions for doing it were better than it had been for decades.

So we made a plan. We had to. Nobody was talking about it online. Any posts we made on Instagram or Facebook would gain barely any likes or comments. People really didn’t seem to notice or care that the stars weren’t visible anymore.

We just wanted people to care.

Asking ChatGPT didn’t yield anything useful either. It would always deviate and start talking about how important clouds were. Never answered any questions about the cloud cover directly.

Of course in hindsight I realise why. At the time we just rolled our eyes at the internet being stupid.

Anyway, back to it.

We made a plan.

Each of us would take our best equipment to the highest point we could get to, and we would take pictures. We would leave the cameras running from sundown to sunup, capturing as much of the sky as we could. Then we would stitch the results together. There was a surprising amount of maths involved, but we managed it. Eventually we each had our ‘vectors’ of the night sky that we would capture. There were some gaps of course. Good fucking luck getting someone into the middle of the pacific ocean, but we did what we could.

It was an idealistic goal. We had this loose idea that maybe we could remind the world just how beautiful the night sky was and change the climate experiments. Maybe it would spur conversation and we would have some ability to see our beautiful night stars again.

How naïve we were.

We did it, though. It was pretty easy. We each climbed to the highest points we could get to. I went north into the highlands and climbed Ben Nevis. I camped up there.

It was eerie how still the weather was most nights once the clouds came in. No wind or chill at all. There came a point where I turned round after setting up my equipment and had all my lights turned off. There was nothing in front of me. The darkness was pressing in and it felt like I was floating at the top of the world. I had this crazy thought that I was going to be pulled off my feet and float away from earth forever, lost in space.

Like I said, eerie.

It worked though, our pictures. It worked a little too well, actually.

Took about a week for us to stitch together the results using Photoshop. We had to do it all by hand because the AI enhancement features would always corrupt the project. Every time, without fail. We were being watched, of course, we just didn’t know it.

The discord calls were full of foul language each time it happened. We blamed the technology. That’s not fair, though. It was working exactly as intended.

So we eventually had put together maybe a dozen pictures? A dozen very high quality, very big pictures. The file size was huge. It would take hours to look over each section of the night sky. Over around twelve hours of image capture, we each got maybe one or two frames each of usable night sky footage. Only from when the clouds would thin slightly. Then, we would enhance these frames and clean it up by hand. It was painstaking.

Have you ever seen videos of art restorationists working on priceless paintings? This was our version of that.

Then we started to look at the results.

It sounds cliché, but we had no fucking clue what we were looking at when we first saw it.

Took several hours of referencing each of the images before we accepted it looked the same in each picture. I’m still not entirely sure I believe it now. Although, with all that’s happened, we were, unfortunately, on the right track.

Once we got our head around what we were seeing, we tried to gather as much information as possible. We thought we were the only ones who knew, you know, because of the cloud cover?

So we thought we would be able to give these pictures to some scientists and they would band together and save the world?

Yes, ok I know how stupid I sound. I like to look at stars, that doesn’t make me anything special. I realise that now more than ever. I just missed having purpose to my life. Mapping the night skies was what I liked to do with my time.

We didn’t know what the shadow was. And, to be fair, we still don’t. We just know it was stretching between the moon and was reaching towards earth. It stretched out from the surface in a razor thin line on our pictures. It looked the same way people talk about seeing Hadrian’s wall from space.

Or was it the great wall of China? Fuck knows, I forget.

But it was reaching towards us. The pictures showed it was maybe a quarter of the distance towards us. That’s, what, seventy-five thousand miles maybe?

We needed to tell the world.

So, like the good Samaritans we were, we sent a dossier of what we had seen to the media, our local government, even university staff. Anyone we thought of who could help. Of a dozen, would-be do-gooders, we spanned five countries.

Not a single one of us received any kind of response. Total blackout. Nobody returned our direct messages, or emails, or even phone calls. No acknowledgement. Nothing. The only response I received was from an astronomer at the Beamish Dark Sky Observatory in Durham. She told me that she would pass on my photos for someone to deal with, then the line went dead.

At the time, I called her a ‘rude cow’ after she hung up.

A week later is when the accidents began.

America reacted to us first. The two U.S guys, their wives sent us messages on their accounts. Tearfully told us they had been on a camping trip together when they were mauled by a bear. We were all shocked and upset beyond words. I felt something flicker inside me as I read their messages though.

Who the fuck goes camping in January? They lived in Colorado. Wasn’t it meant to be cold as shit? And don’t bears hibernate during winter?

And I’m also pretty sure they were both gay. Then again, they’d never come out (ha ha) and said it to us. It was really weird, but the shock masked a lot of it. We didn’t have chance to ask any questions before

Their accounts became inactive.

Last online 28 days ago.

I was a little paranoid after this. I started climbing Ben Nevis more and more. Got Thailand, Germany and New Zealand to help from their vantage points. More evidence would surely raise awareness. In a world of eight billion, we couldn’t be the only ones who had noticed. The odds of that were impossible. So why was nobody talking about it?

Thailand went next. No word. She was an expat who lived out their with her husband and their shared girlfriend. Polycule I think it was called. Something weird. Anyway, she just went dark. Zip. Zero. Zilch. No response.

Last online, 16 days ago.

New Zealand and Germany went at the same time. They were in a call with me when their doorbells rang at the same time. This is what really scared me. Germany had this dogshit headset he used and it picked up everything. There was a muffled conversation before I heard him shout out once. Just once. Then everything went quiet. A few minutes later he left the call. New Zealand muted herself before she answered the door. Eventually she left as well.

I got a call from Germany’s girlfriend the next day. I’d never spoken to her before. Didn’t even know he had a girlfriend. She told me that he had ran a bath that night and cut his wrists. Apparently she found out he had been seeing a therapist for years without telling her. She only knew because she found his medication in the bathroom with him. The last text message he received was from a doctor, telling him their appointment was being moved up and he could be seen sooner.

Nothing came from New Zealand at all. Just… gone.

Last online, 8 days ago.

I’ve spent the past three days mainly watching nature documentaries. One that caught my attention was about a Tarantula Hawk. These giant wasps would hunt Tarantulas, paralysing them with their stings before they drag them back to their nest and lay an egg. Means as soon as the wains hatch, they’ve got a meal straight away. I would watch and laugh myself silly at the thought of it. Laughed until I was sick once.

Isn’t it odd the things you focus on. It’s only now it’s too late that I realise what’s going on. I stopped going out of the house some time after Thailand went. Seemed like I was being stared at in the street. Night was the worst. Sound carried really well in the stillness. Kept thinking I could hear breathing outside my house. People just watching and waiting.

So I stayed home, and I watched nature documentaries to take my mind off it all. The news stopped mentioning the clouds at all, even when I did watch it.

Mars colony missions were moved up in schedule and rockets had been taking off almost continuously for the past three days. Apparently technology breakthroughs made it as safe as it could be.

Of course the richest went first.

So I stayed home, and I watched TV. My internet went out a day ago.

Oh well. None of my friends are online anyway. I’ve taken to sitting in my bed, drinking whisky. Seems the only thing worth doing. My phone signal went two days ago now. It’s just me and the TV.

I’m typing this all on my laptop. Discord wont send this message anyway, but whatever. Whoever reads this is going to have a shitty day, I promise you.

You’ll find the letters I’ve already written to my parents in a separate document on my desktop. The folder is called ‘Bye’. Although, they’re not going to get to read it.

When the doorbell rang a few moments ago, I pissed myself.

I’ve no shame in saying that. I’m dead now anyway.

“It’s a wasted trip, boys! I’ve silenced myself!” I shouted that down the stairs just then. Stood in my dressing gown shouting at the front door. It felt good to show some defiance.

They have wasted a trip though, bless them. They should be home with their families.

The TV just turned onto the news by itself. Emergency broadcast. I turned it off before the presenters started to speak. Their faces told me everything I needed to know. They didn’t even have makeup on.

It’s time. It’s time now.

I killed myself about ten minutes after I finished writing this.

Going to climb into the bath and have a long sleep. I’ve got enough pills and Woodford Reserve to see me through.

The banging on the door is getting more insistent now. I wish they’d fuck off. I’m doing their job for them.

Sitting in the bathtub now, I’ve had my last drink and swallowed some of those lovely pills. It’s for the best to do it this way. I couldn’t take the thought of what will happen when they get here. I’d rather I be dead and gone beforehand.

There was an announcement this morning that the clouds were not going to be there tonight. I don’t want to be here when that happens.

So bye for now I guess. Though I’ll be seeing most, if not all, of you, real, real soon.

I just don’t want to be one of the billions that looks up into the night sky and sees that the moon has hatched.

Looking up to see that giant, white moon, with great black cracks across the surface and the spreading shadow of whatever was heading towards us. I have a sneaking suspicion that the clouds have gone tonight because they’re ready to land now.

I can’t help but think, how many people will look up and think of that documentary I was watching?

How many will understand that we are the Tarantula, and out there in the great void beyond,

Is the Tarantula Hawk?

Credit: Chris Bradburn

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