Back in late August of 2019, a journalist at a small-town Minnesota-based newspaper was found murdered. There were many peculiar details surrounding this case, but the two foremost were;
One – the victim was decapitated with an axe.
Two – a golden apple was placed in the victim’s mouth.
While gruesome in and of itself, things like this happen all too often. People don’t look twice at murders anymore; myself included. With the daily atrocities we’re exposed to, the untimely demise of a single journalist sails pretty far under the radar.
But this murder was peculiar for a couple more reasons. And these reasons are why I want to post this for the common public.
Let’s call her Vicky. Vicky and I were colleagues, working at the same newspaper. While we rarely collaborated, she sat across from me in the bullpen. We knew each other pretty well. She had the kind of face you’d instantly recognize in a crowd, and I could spot her laugh from two rooms away.
Vicky was an unlikely target for this kind of attack. While some of us work the political angle in our stories, or covered subjects that could cause controversy, Vicky exclusively worked puff pieces. She was a part-timer because of a bad leg, and she’d just turned 61. She worked on graduations, feel-good stories, competitions, lottery winners, festivals, local events… that kinda stuff. There was no immediate reason for anyone to target her. Hell, we had an in-office Miss Congeniality contest one year, and she brought home the gold. I made the medal myself.
But there was more to it. The old-timers around the office were being suspiciously quiet about it, and the police were keeping the investigation close to heart. Something was up. While I’d never reported on a murder before, I couldn’t picture this being ordinary procedure.
I thought I was going down a deep conspiratory hole when I began looking into Vicky’s death, but as it turns out, the answer was out in the open all along. One of my older colleagues, Harris, cued me in over lunch.
“Yeah, we looked into it,” he said, slurping down his decaf cappuccino. “Turns out she put the ‘Bad Name’ into her last article. The one about the Tomskog mathlete team going to state.”
“What do you mean by ‘Bad Name’?”
“There’s a name that attracts a lot of… nasty attention,” Harris continued. “It is an unspoken rule to not write about it. It’s old school, but, uh… still very much a thing. You’re not supposed to print it.”
It sounded ridiculous. I almost laughed, but Harris didn’t even crack a grin. The man wasn’t known for his sense of humor.
“I’ve never heard that before,” I said. “Never.”
“It’s just one of those things,” he continued. “Like how some buildings don’t have a 13th floor. It’s superstition. But every so often, there’s a victim.”
“And no one’s questioning why?”
“Look,” he shrugged. “Sometimes it’s a lone whack job. Other times, it’s a group of whack jobs. It comes to a point where it’s easier just not to poke the bear, you know?”
For security reasons, I won’t share the actual name; but it’s not an unusual one. It’s just a collection of three somewhat uncommon names, written in a specific order. An equivalent would be something like Sylvester Oscar Wheeler. Again; not the actual name. But it’s just a collection of three names. The Bad Name.
Turns out, Vicky printed the Bad Name by accident. There were three students from the mathlete team that went by these names, and Vicky wrote them in that order. It must’ve been an oversight; if she’d written them alphabetically, it would’ve been fine.
Perhaps she’d never heard about this rule, or forgot about it. According to Harris, there’re just a handful of people who knows not to write it nowadays – and most of those people have been retiring as of late.
Obviously, I couldn’t let this go. I’d never heard of it, and I don’t like having an unknown force step into my workplace. I took to the internet to see if anyone’d heard anything.
I posted about it a couple of times, but I got downvoted to hell and back. Maybe people thought I was joking – like I was trying to start some kind of rumor, or urban legend. I mean, it sounds one. I get it.
Still, I got a few messages. For example, some anonymous folks in law enforcement had seen it before. One source told me that there were written records about these types of murders reaching all the way back to San Francisco in the 1910’s. Some claimed they’d heard it going back even further. Back then the perpetrators had left blue sunflowers at the site of the murder. There was no mention of golden apples.
Several newspapers were reportedly getting around the Bad Name by either shortening it, misspelling it, or adding a few spaces between certain letters. It just seems to be that specific spelling, in that specific order, that evokes violent attention. But when asked about who’s doing the killing, and why, there weren’t a lot of answers. It was just one of those things – a superstition manifested by the collective mind of madmen. At least that was the most common explanation.
The police were kicking up their investigation as well. Pretty much everyone at the office were questioned – myself included. Mostly about our whereabouts, our relationship with the victim, and if we’d heard or seen any abnormal behavior prior to the attack. Of course we hadn’t. This woman was sweeter than sugar. Still, it was encouraging to see them taking it seriously. Superstition or not; a murder is a murder.
Now, in hindsight I might sound a bit cold about it, but at the time I was a walking wreck. I was having constant nightmares, and I could almost hear the whoosh of the axe at night. I could feel the impact as metal met flesh. But it didn’t stop with dreams; I’d catch a glimpse of what looked like a golden apple in the grocery store. I’d hear a yawn and mistake it for a pained groan. Little pokes and prods, pushing me to focus on this one thing.
Sometimes, I’d wake up to the sound of an ear-splitting scream. As my eyes popped open, my ears would ring from the silence.
I couldn’t ignore it. So I did what I do best – I dug deeper.
My investigation began in earnest a couple of weeks later, when I got a tip about a woman named Lauren Moser. She was one of few people who’d been caught, tried, and sentenced for one of these ‘Bad Name’-murders back in the 90’s. Lauren was still serving her sentence. I could find little to nothing about her, so I decided to see her in person.
I was allowed meet Lauren on a foggy Thursday morning. I made my way through the various prison checkpoints and found myself sitting across from her in a sterile, well-lit room. It smelled of cheap detergent. Lauren was chained to a table, but it didn’t seem to bother her.
Lauren was a thin woman in her 60’s, with a shaved head, and a thousand-yard stare. Her brown eyes looked black. She didn’t seem anything like I’d imagined her. She wasn no snarling beast. She was just a smiling old woman.
We looked at one another for a moment, then I got to the point. Again, I won’t use the actual name.
“I’m here to talk to you about Sylvester Oscar Wheeler. The Bad Name,” I said. “Would you mind answering a couple questions?”
“Not at all,” she smiled.
“Can you tell me, just… what it’s about?”
“Couldn’t tell you if I wanted to,” she said. “It’s just a name that must not be written.”
“And why is that?”
She gave me a curious look, letting the question soak. Finally, she leaned forward, and sighed.
“Speak no evil, lest it listens,” she said. “That phrase has stuck with me over the years. ”
“And that’s what your victim did? They spoke of evil?”
“I suppose they did.”
“So to keep it unspoken, you killed them.”
Lauren shook her head, leaning back in her chair. The chains rattled.
“Yes, I was there,” she said. “But no, I didn’t kill them.”
“But you’re the one found guilty. Are you saying you had an accomplice?”
“Something like that,” she huffed.
She fiddled with the strap on her arm, sinking deeper into her own thoughts.
“There’s no… cult,” she added. “No group. No organization. No conspiracy. It just… happens.”
She looked up at me with a tired smile with a shrug.
“I was there. It was my hands, and my muscles, but the intent was…”
Her eyes drifted off as her focus returned to nothing. She looked straight through me.
“… not mine.”
I wasn’t enthused about this, but there was something earnest about the way she said it. I thanked her and left. It wasn’t unusual for a murderer to claim innocence, or to point fingers at something else, so I wasn’t sure what to make of it. Not at that time, at least.
Considering the victims I’d found in my research, the murders only seemed to trigger from printed media; not hand-written notes, and not electronic communication. You could say the Bad Name all day long, but you couldn’t have it printed. It was too specific; there had to be a reason for it.
As Lauren couldn’t give me any solid answers, I decided to reach out to one of my old professors at MSU. When I was getting my English major back in the day, there was a professor Mawley who taught folklore studies, which included expertise in state tradition and what she called ‘cultural wisdom’. She, if anyone, probably had a couple of answers. Too bad I never took her class.
Luckily, she was eager to talk.
I got there one late Monday afternoon, just past the lunch rush. Professor Mawley took a break from grading papers to sit down with me; all it cost me was a pre-packaged lunch sandwich. Curry chicken.
We shook hands and took some time discussing the case overall. The police were putting in some serious mettle to name a suspect, but they were very careful about the way they questioned people. They’d contacted professor Mawley earlier for the same reason that I had, so the topic was fresh on her mind. The Bad Name was getting put back in the spotlight.
“It’s not really an urban legend,” Mawley mentioned in-between bites. “Urban legends spread. This one has been kept quiet.”
“I don’t get that part,” I admitted. “If more people knew not to do it, it wouldn’t happen by accident.”
“No, but it would happen willingly. Consider silly scare games like Bloody Mary or Three Kings. Most people will shrug it off as superstition and give it a go. Except with this, if they try it…”
“…they put themselves in real danger,” I finished.
The professor finished her lunch, washed her hands, and made herself a cup of coffee. She showed me a stained notebook of hers.
“I’m not sure about the origins,” she said. “Some say the Bad Name’s the name of the author of a… blasphemous text. Others say that it’s something being summoned. That the name is not really a name, but a sort of… summoning spell. That the pronunciation just happen to match”
“Please tell me you’re not suggesting a ghost.”
“Not a ghost, no,” she chuckled. “But it’s… complicated. It’s like with moon cycles.”
“Moon cycles?”
“Yeah, moon cycles,” she nodded. “There is an overrepresentation of crimes committed three days before, and after, the full moon. It’s an event that, despite having no real impact on us, still seems to subconsciously alter our behavior.”
“And you’re thinking this is something similar?”
“It’s plausible,” she said. “Something has got to make people start killing one another, don’t you think?”
We shared a cup of coffee, discussing the various mysteries surrounding this. The axe, in particular. Mawley got stuck in a rant about the cultural significance of using a tool for murder, and attempted a kind of makeshift psych profiling of the murderer. But before we finished our get-together, I turned to ask the professor one last thing. From everything I heard, this one detail still didn’t make any sense to me.
“What’s up with the golden apple?” I asked. “I haven’t seen it mentioned.”
She squinted at me, crossing her arms. Finally, she just shrugged.
“Never heard of it.”
That was the one thing I couldn’t find anything about. Not in previous reports, discussion boards, articles – anywhere. It was the one missing puzzle piece. It bothered me to the point where I’d lie awake at night, holding my fingers up towards the ceiling; trying to imagine the size of it. I had such a clear mental image that I just couldn’t ignore it.
I dreamt about it every night. Sometimes I’d be a fly on the wall, watching the room from upside down. Other times it’d just be dark, with desperate screams in the distance.
And this one time, there was a dark shadow standing over me, holding out a golden apple. Offering me to take it.
Or else.
Then one day, I couldn’t take it anymore. I woke up, cursed another ruined night, and reached for my phone. I managed to get in touch with one of the officers working Vicky’s case, and I asked them directly.
“I have to know about the golden apple,” I said. “There’s gotta be something there. A detail, something I’ve missed.”
There was a long pause as the officer on the other end considered this.
“Excuse me,” he finally said, stepping away from the phone.
I was put on hold for a couple of minutes. I wasn’t sure what to make of it. As the call resumed, there was a different voice on the line.
“Are you the one asking about the… fruit?”
“Yes, the apple,” I repeated.
“The apple?”
“The apple,” I sighed. “The golden apple.”
Another short pause, followed by a determined change of pitch.
“I need you to come down to the station.”
So I did.
As I walked in, there was about a dozen officers waiting with furrowed brows. They barely said a word. There were no courtesies offered, no friendly remarks. They just pointed me to one of the interrogation rooms and left it at that.
I sat down with one of the senior detectives. It wasn’t one of those darkly lit rooms from the movies, but a pleasant and neutral well-lit room in the back of the station. The chairs were awful though.
We went through a couple of routine checks, like my rights, my name, my information, and some clarifications. But when proper questioning started, there was that one question he’d been eager to fire my way.
“How did you know about the golden apple?”
I didn’t know what to say. I stuttered, trying to unfurl my memory.
“It’s… common knowledge,” I said. “It was the first thing I was told about the murder.”
“By whom?”
“I-I don’t know,” I admitted. “I’ve only known two things about what happened. The axe, and the golden apple.”
Turns out, the only people who knew about the golden apple were two forensic investigators, and a handful of detectives. It’d been privileged information from day one.
There was no way I could have known about it.
Well, there was one way.
Those dreams weren’t dreams. They never had been. They were memories.
My body being pulled out of my bed. Grabbing an apple from my kitchen and painting it with the gold spray I’d once used to make our Miss Congeniality medal. Fetching my neighbors’ wood axe. Walking all the way across town by the cover of darkness.
And then just… gore. The same scream I’d heard in my nightmares. Again, and again, and again.
Until I stopped it, with the swing of my axe.
I must’ve zoned out. I snapped out of it as tears tickled my cheeks. I didn’t even realize I was crying.
“The best thing you can do is to tell us your side of the story,” the senior detective said.
As I looked up, my hands trembled. I could feel the texture of the axe handle on my fingers. My face felt cold without the blood spatter. The room was quiet without the screams.
But as I looked the detective, I saw something standing behind him. A large, dark, looming figure. So tall it had to bow its head to fit in the room, with arms long enough to reach across the table. A being with the same shade of black as when I closed my eyes.
“There’s no point in going quiet now,” the senior detective added. “Now, what does this… ‘Bad Name’, mean to you?”
He flipped a handful of documents over, sliding them across the table for me to read. And at the very top, printed in black, was the Bad Name.
He’d printed it.
The black figure was gone.
“No,” I cried.
And as my arms raised themselves, like a floating corpse, I could tell it was already too late.
It was my hands. My muscles.
And yet - not mine.
Looking at it now, I feel like an idiot. I never even questioned it. I just took for granted about reading the story somewhere, and just… knowing it. But had I thought about it, I’d have remembered that there was no way to know about it as early as I did.
And just to clarify – no, I’m not in jail. The trial dragged on for ages, as they did their best to keep the details about the case quiet from the media. I went through hell in that courtroom. Inadmissible evidence, a missing witness, and the complex nature of the case itself made sure I was tied up for much longer than anticipated.
I was found not guilty. While the details of my knowledge were strange, there wasn’t enough physical evidence on-site to convict me. Neither were there any witnesses. Just a strange sequence of events. Rsaonable doubt.
I never managed to assault the senior detective. While I hear officers telling me I tried, I have no memory of it. Apparently, they wrestled me to the ground and handcuffed me. All the while I was screaming something incomprehensible. A croaking sound, like “Eo! Eo! Eo!”. No idea what that’s about.
I was sentenced to eleven months in prison for obstruction of justice though. After that, I’ve been trying my best to pick up the pieces of my life. I couldn’t exactly go back to working at a newspaper where people considered me murderer.
I’ve moved a couple of towns over, got myself a new name, and a new job. I’ve tried putting it all behind me, but that’s easier said than done. I still get flashes sometimes. I still hear the scream.
But there’s this… itch. You know, when someone prints the Bad Name. I feel that figure coming closer, waiting for a chance to grab me. It bears the Bad Name, and it wants to make itself known; to project its will.
A couple of nights ago it was close. I’ve started tying my legs together before I go to sleep. I’ve woken up twice from falling out of bed. I’m not sure how many more times it will work.
I don’t know what to do. If I share the name, people might try printing it. If I don’t, someone might print it accidentally. There’s no winning.
The Bad Name is a sequence of three. If you write more, or less, you should be fine.
But while I figure this out, please, just be careful.