They Were Devils

I was discussing Creepypasta’s with my grandfather. He had never heard the term before, and kind of snickered at it. After I explained to him what they were, he said, “We used to just call them urban legends.”

He wanted some examples, and I gave him a few of the obvious ones – Slenderman, Ben Drowned, etc. I then told him about one I’d recently read, a story called “The Milk Boy”. It took place in the 1800’s, and dealt with a young boy who was lured into the woods by men who were long dead. Then, he stumbles upon a marble that shelters the dead men’s souls. After the boy loses the marble, he becomes obsessed with finding it, eventually murdering everyone in his town. But the marble was gone. The boy failed to recover it, and its alluded to that he will keep killing until he finds it.

I was surprised by my grandfather’s reaction after I told him that. He clammed up and became really awkward. I asked him if he was okay and he only nodded. He then seemed to get weak and lost his balance. I assumed it was just the vertigo he suffered from. My grandmother took him home after that to rest.

A week later, my parents and I dropped off some groceries to my grandparents house. I was a little anxious to see my grandfather since I hadn’t spoken to him since the day he had his spell. We went inside, and he was in his recliner watching an old black and white western movie. He seemed fine now. He smiled and gave me a hug when I went over to him. My mom and grandmother were in the kitchen, talking and putting away the groceries. That left just me, my dad and my grandfather in the living room. The western movie was still on, and none of us were saying anything. I fiddled with my phone, my dad was zoned out, and my grandfather was glued to his movie.

Eventually my grandfather finally spoke up, and talked about how his car’s check engine light had been on. I thought it was a little odd that that was the first thing he started talking about, and out of nowhere really. But, he knew my dad worked on cars. My dad seemed to jump at the chance to escape the awkward silence, and he went to the garage to take a look at the old car.

My grandfather immediately muted the television after that. He looked over at me as I sat on the couch. He swallowed hard, and said, “They were devils.”

I became extremely anxious right away. I didn’t know what he was talking about, and everything now seemed a little…creepy. I questioned him, and he repeated the same three words.

“They were devils.”

“Who?” I asked.

“The long-dead men in the woods. From that story you told me about.”

I knew then that he was referring to “The Milk Boy”, the story I had told him about just before he had his vertigo spell a week earlier. It turns out, my grandfather had been told a similar story by his father. As he began to tell me the story, for some reason my instinct was to hit record on the voice memo feature on my phone. Here is what I was able to transcribe from the recording:

When I was little, we lived in New England. It’s such a beautiful place, so what I saw and heard seemed very out of place. It was a summer night, a day or two before my tenth birthday. I couldn’t sleep. The sun hadn’t gone down yet, and I still had energy built up from the day. So I went to my window and opened it up. I sat there for almost forty-five minutes and watched the sun dip down behind the mountains. When the dark came, I still wasn’t tired. So I continued to just sit there. I saw raccoons scamper out from the woods and sniff around the trash cans by the garage. I saw bats flying above the trees. Those were all normal sights for living where we did. Then, just as I was starting to get tired, I heard some more rustling from the woods behind our house. I assumed it was just another raccoon at first. The moon seemed brighter that night than usual, so everything out my window was illuminated by the moon’s glow.

I saw something dark moving just within the trees, and then it stopped. It moved again, and then stopped. I shook off my fatigue and tried to focus on whatever was moving in the woods. A long shadow then extended from within the trees. It grew long and then disappeared just as fast. The shadow did this again, and then a second shadow joined it. As the shadows stretched across the yard, they reached the trash cans. The trash cans moved as the shadows made contact with them, and one of the metal lids crashed to the ground. That’s when I realized they weren’t shadows at all. I gasped loudly, and the dark appendages retracted quickly back into the woods like they were scared. As soon as they were out of sight, a horrible, dry, howl emerged from the darkness. It shattered my nerves and I fell backward. I rushed to my bed and tossed the covers over my head. I could still hear the howl, but it had faded – like whatever it was, was now retreating in the opposite direction. I felt dizzy after that, never having experienced such a bizarre moment. I passed out and didn’t wake up until the morning. When I woke up, the first thing I did was go to my window. It was still open, and now a musty smell had come in through it overnight. It was foggy outside, so I blamed the fog for the odd scent. The trash cans were still there, and one of the lids was still on the ground. At breakfast, I told my father what I had seen. He didn’t say a lot at first, other than I shouldn’t have been awake and out of bed at that time. But a little later in the day, after the fog had burned away, I was outside with him, helping carry firewood to the side of the house. He picked up the metal lid and put it back on the trash can. He looked out into the vast sea of wilderness that surrounded our little house, and told me to come closer. When I did, he pointed to the woods.

“Is that where you saw it?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said.

He then told me a bizarre story that both scared me, and scarred me. About a hundred years earlier, there was a family of four who lived in our house. There was a sickness that was going around, a virus that made the father ill. He died within days of contracting it. That left only the mother to care for her two children, a boy and a girl. The mother went to work every day, sometimes not coming home for up to eight or nine hours. That left the boy to care for his little sister. At ten years old, he was the eldest of the two children. He would fix meals for his sister, play with her, help teach her things. One afternoon for lunch, the boy had poured his sister a glass of milk. The milk had gone bad, but he didn’t know it. The girl drank it, and screamed at the foulness of it. She fell ill immediately, violently throwing up and breaking out into a high fever. The boy panicked and said he would go get help. The closest neighbor was roughly a mile away, but the boy knew that if he cut through the woods, he could save himself about a quarter of a mile.

He got his sister comfortable in her bed with a wet rag on her head, and he took off into the woods. He ran and ran, but the woods seemed different to him. They seemed contorted, or even backwards. The boy stopped when he realized he was lost. That’s when he heard a voice. It was a deep voice, almost inhuman. He looked around but didn’t see anyone. He called out, and then heard the voice again. It was saying “HE’LL BE THE SIXTH…”

The boy turned around again, and this time what he saw made his blood run cold. There was a small group of trees that stood in front of him, each with human remains tied to them. The boy gagged as the overwhelming stench of decay overpowered his senses. The boy heard the voice again. This time it asked who he was. “Doyle,” the boy responded, still unsure of where the voice was coming from. The voice spoke again in a different language. Doyle didn’t understand the words he was hearing, but started to hallucinate and see things in front of him. The trees were bare, and a mob of villagers from somewhere were dragging five naked men through the woods. They had the five men bound and gagged, but the men didn’t seem to be putting up a fight. It was almost like they had accepted their fate, or even wanted it. Doyle watched as the villagers tied the five men to the trees, and condemned them to die for their dark practices, calling them each a devil. One of the villagers held a long blade of some kind, and then systematically went through all five men, slicing them open from head to toe. As the bodies all hung there, spilling their blood into the dirt below, the villagers claim to have all heard ghostly laughter that they assumed came from the dead men.

The bodies were left there to rot, and are said to still be in the woods somewhere to this day. Doyle was reported missing that night when his mother came home to find him gone, and his sister dead in her bed. The official story of what happened to Doyle is unclear, but it’s heavily assumed that the five devils had changed him into a sixth, one more ghastly and repellent then they were. One which unnaturally crawls through the woods, discharging a grim howl, and committing vile acts ordered by the five devils.

I turned the voice recorder off after that. As my grandfather told me this story, I could see the similarities between it and “The Milk Boy”. Both stories took place in the New England area, dealt with similar themes, as well as included a boy named Doyle. My grandfather remains convinced to this day that the shadowy appendages of what he saw coming from the woods that summer night was a more ghastly iteration of Doyle. He said what he saw was real, and combined with the story his father told him, there was no other explanation for what he witnessed. I can’t imagine something like that even being real, but now, there seems to be multiple versions of the same story. As I looked deeper into the Creepypasta story, I realized it was part of a larger story called “The Whool” – which deals with a supernatural entity (designed by the milk boy legend) violently mutilating people in small towns, who emits a dry, hollow cry.

Now I am convinced that maybe there are more stories like this out there. Maybe other people have heard a terrible cry from deep in the woods in New England. Maybe others have smelled the unexplained foul odors. Whether or not the story is real, my grandfather has never lied to me. I believe him.

The fear he feels to this day is undeniably real.

Credit : •Anonymous Monster•

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