Hey guys, I just want to start out by saying I hope this is the right place to post this story. It’s not my own, but rather a friend of mine’s. A friend who has been missing for a very long time. To give you some context, I received a journal in my mailbox yesterday. It was signed off by my friend and had his own handwriting, so I figured it had to be his. How did this journal get into my mailbox? I have no clue. But the shit I read it in was weird, too weird to report to any authorities. Not just weird, but it gets super disturbing, so don’t read this if you can’t handle something like that.
After some looking around on the internet, this looked like the best place to post this. I’ve made an entirely new Reddit account, as I don’t want my personal involved with this. I’ve also changed the names of everyone in this story for their privacy. It’s too long to post at once, so I’m gonna have to split it up into parts. I’m gonna get into the journal now, which the first page in the journal was simply titled:
“I regret the day I played hide and seek with a god.”
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Hello, my name is Jeremy Boom, and I really need some help. I’m writing this down to document my own story, and to warn as many people as possible to stay away from what I’m about to tell you. Things have been getting pretty weird, so I decided I’m gonna start documenting what’s going on. I always wanted to be a writer anyway. And this is also a warning to anyone who happens to stumble upon this game.
STAY AWAY.
I cannot warn you enough.
Now if you’re reading this, you’re probably wondering, what game? Well, my friend and I thought it was an ARG. For those who are unfamiliar, ARG is short for “alternate reality game”. Basically, it’s essentially a set of puzzles or something like similar that you complete in real life instead of a virtual world. As you complete these puzzles or tasks, it advances the narrative. As a kid, I was obsessed with these from the moment I got my car. My best friend and I, Gavin, did as many as we could with what we had. It helped that we grew up in Atlanta, a relatively big city. Most of the ones we found were short and simple, as there wasn’t exactly a huge community for it, but as teenagers, we thought it was fun. Once we got to college, our interests turned to girls and drinking. It’s not that we wouldn’t have done them, it’s just we had very little time for a lot of hobbies. I got a serious girlfriend, and my friend well attempted to get one. He wasn’t exactly Mr. Suave with the girls. I mean neither was really I, but the girl I found was special. Her name was Lizzie, a short brunette. I don’t know what she saw in me, but I wondered often what I did to deserve such a pretty girl.
Recently we both graduated, and she had plans to move far across the country. Unfortunately, this led to a breakup. One that completely devastated me. I had graduated with a degree in journalism and was struggling to find a job. My friend who majored in film wasn’t having much luck either. And when June rolled around, we were stuck in our college town working shitty restaurant jobs. I had fallen into a deep depression and spent most of my summer nights getting drunk and watching Netflix or playing Minecraft. This is when my friend came up with the idea of something to cheer me up, a cross-country road trip. It was something we had always mentioned would be fun, but never anything we actually thought would actually come to any fruition. We now had enough money saved up to make it possible.
And this is when I got back into ARGs. I suggested to Gavin that we should make this road trip more fun and try to find an ARG that possibly expanded across the entire United States. I knew the odds of finding a game like this were slim, but nonetheless, I took to browsing the internet. When I came to Reddit I made a post about it on r/ARG and had one user, whose name I’ll keep secret for your safety, dm me. He told me he knew about a very difficult ARG game, one called “Hide and Seek Byond.”
He told me he couldn’t give out the details of the game, but sent me a link to a website that had the rules and a sign-up for it. He also told me very few people were participating in it, as it was quite challenging. I’ll name the website since it was seemingly gone after we signed up, it was
I won’t’ say everything on the website but I’ll sum up the rules. Basically:
You would be playing hide and seek with a god across the entire continental United States. You can only win this game by finding Homebase.
Once you sign up for the game, you will receive a necklace in the mail. Once you receive this necklace, you are in the game. You will put on this necklace, as it will hide your location from the god. From there you are free to travel wherever you want to hide, as the god can still find you. But as you wear this necklace, reality will begin to distort and shift around you. Sometimes it happens quickly, sometimes it takes a long time to start. Removing the necklace will reset this distortion, but reveal your location to the god. If the god gets you, you lose.
I found it very intriguing, especially how vague it was with the lack of details. One hot Saturday afternoon after getting our asses kicked in beer dye, my roommate and I returned to our house. He was in a good mood from his buzz so I thought now would be a perfect time to convince him. He had never been into the ARGs as much as I was and seemed reluctant about doing one on this road trip.
“Hey Gavin, I found something interesting,” I called to him as a plopped down on the couch and opened my laptop. I had left it sitting on the website the night before. He set down the beer he was nursing and walked over.
“What’s that?”
“It’s an ARG I found. and I know what you’re gonna say… but just take a look at this one. It’s pretty freaking weird. And I think we should at least give it a try, could be intriguing.”
He scoffed as he bent down to look at my laptop screen. And after taking a few moments to quickly skim the page, he gave me an opinion.
“Sounds fucking stupid. Hide and seek with a god? It’s probably just some scam to get money somehow, I guarantee it. Have you found anything else about it online? Surely a game that big would have a large following, and be more popular than just an obscure website.”
“Yeah, maybe.”
I shut the laptop down and got up to get a soda to drink, as I was trying to cut down on how much beer I was drinking. Ever since my break up I had been hitting the gym hard and wanted to make a serious transformation. I was already a regular gym goer but now I felt like I was taking it way more seriously and getting a lot stronger.
Looking back, I should have seen all the red flags with this website. But there was no way I could have imagined the world of madness and terror I was about to step into. In order to sign up, the website had a form you filled out with your email and address so it could ship you the necklace. It stated it would also then send you the link to the chatroom in which you could communicate with other players. In the rules, you were encouraged to meet up with them and try to find Homebase together. I wasn’t scared of giving out my address, as Gavin and I were avid hunters and kept a few shotguns and rifles with us. It was a nice white one-story house in one of the nicer neighborhoods of Oxford. Our parents had put a lot of money into the house for us, including an alarm system.
That night the urge was just too tempting for me, and I returned to the web page and signed up both Gavin and me. I received a link to the chatroom almost immediately, which prompted me to make an account. I choose the username sharktail00, as I was from Florida and thinking about home at the moment. When I signed up, that’s when I noticed the first strange thing. The chatroom was completely devoid of any users. I decided to text into it a couple of times to see if something would happen, thinking this was maybe part of the game.
sharktail00: Hello?
sharktail00: Is anyone else online?
After waiting a few minutes and receiving no reply I went to bed. I knew Gavin would find out I had signed him up, but he was usually pretty chill so I didn’t expect him to be that mad. I expected to find out through his emails first, but he woke me up the next day around 10 about something else.
“Hey Jeremy, wake up bro,” he whispered as he shook me. I opened my eyes and yawned as I sat up in bed.
“Dude can you at least let me sleep till 11, I was up to 3 last night watching youtube. I gotta have that perfect 8 hours you know?”
Gavin chuckled a little bit.
“Well, there’s two packages on our door, one for each of us. I think it might be a prank because I sure didn’t order anything.”
I jumped out of bed right away, knowing what it had to be.
“Where are they?” I asked as I put a shirt on and left my room.
“The kitchen,” he said, following me. I made my way to it and discovered the two brown packages he had laid out on the counter. They were taped up and each had a simple slip of paper with probably the best cursive I had ever seen on it. One read “Gavin Henderson” and the other “Jeremy Boom”
I quickly grabbed a butter knife, cut the tape, and tore into my package. There wasn’t anything in it but a necklace and a note that read “Welcome to the game”
The note had been written in the same handwriting, and the necklace was honestly gorgeous. it was golden with a tiny green crystal. And inside the crystal was what looked almost like an ever-moving cloud of mist. It looked like something pulled straight out of Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings to me. Gavin figured out what had happened right away.
“Is that the necklace from the ARG game you wanted to do?” He questioned as he stepped over to his own package and opened it.
“Mhm, and look at this thing. You know I’m not really a jewelry person but this is gorgeous! What kind of crystal even is that?” I said, not taking my eyes off of it. There was something almost hypnotizing about it. Even holding it seemed to fill me with some sort of warmth. Gavin lifted his own necklace out of the package and begin to intently study it.
“You know even if there is no game, this gotta be expensive. I bet Lizzie would have loved this,” I said as I set it back down and went over to the fridge to grab water. My throat was dry and itchy, like it was every morning I woke up.
“Where did you find this game? The freaking dark web? What if these are like stolen from some top-secret art vault in France and now they’re shipping them out so the trail leads straight to us. And next thing you know the FBI is gonna be breaking our door down,” Gavin talked fast.
“You know that’s an awful elaborate scheme for an ARG,” I replied. He begin to flick the crystal, and it oddly made no noise.
“Either that or these are fake,” he said and set his back down. He had a good point about them being fake.
“You know you’re probably right, and they’re probably part of the game. I wonder if these have like some tracker in them and whatever player is it has to like hunt us?”
“That’s a lot of dedication, but if you wanna do this game, fine. I know you’ve been down after what happened with you and Lizzie, and if this is what helps you to feel better I’m all for it.”
“Thank you, let’s do it then,” I said with a smile. Gavin was always an understanding friend, and I knew he wouldn’t be mad I signed him up.
The only problem was that the necklaces had arrived two weeks before we were scheduled to leave. I had no clue how they had gotten to our house so fast either. We decided to just leave the necklaces sitting on the countertop, and I would soon learn this was a big mistake.
Things quickly begin to turn weird. At first, it was your typical creepy stuff. Starting that very night, I. begin to hear noises in the house, like someone was walking through the hallways. Naturally, I assumed it was Gavin so I called out to him. There was no reply. The next day the footsteps were accompanied by knocks along the walls. Worried it could be an intruder I stormed out with my 12 gauge, but the hallway was empty. Along with the noises came other odd occurrences, such as objects not being where I left them and lights turning off and on. I thought maybe I was just having weird nightmares or that I was so stressed I was seeing things until the third night. That’s when I awoke to the screaming of our alarm going off and once again ran outside with a gun. This had also awoken Gavin who came out with his .308 bolt action Browning. Every door in the house was still shut and locked, along with the windows.
“This is ridiculous, tell me you’ve been hearing other noises too right?” I said to Gavin after we finished searching the house.
“Yeah, it’s like something straight out of a ghost movie. You don’t think our house is haunted do you?”
“Well hell, I don’t believe in ghosts like you. But if it was haunted don’t you think this crap would have happened sooner? I mean what if it’s the necklaces? This stuff didn’t start until it they arrived.”
“I agree, those damn necklaces are probably haunted or connected to some demon-type shit. You know how horror movies go? Let’s throw those things away and put a stop to this now,” Gavin said and set down his rifle. He made his way over to the necklaces and started to reach for them, but I called out and stopped him.
“Hey wait, this could be part of the game. I mean come on these necklaces aren’t haunted or some shit. They’ve probably got some like advanced technology in them. Something that maybe messes with electronics around it and creates noise? I mean it claims the necklaces alter reality in the rules, so maybe this is just the fun way of doing that. I mean what if we’ve stumbled upon some like super cool high-tech club.”
I really didn’t want him to end this game before we even started. And as for the things that were being moved around, I chalked it up just to me misplacing them and placebo.
Gavin seemed hesitant about reasoning.
“Ok fine, maybe. But if things get any weirder than that, then these necklaces are gone.”
“Alrighty then.”
And things did only get weirder from there. Like many college towns, Oxford is filled with stray cats. Our house and neighborhood has a stray cat problem as usually seem them around every day. But the cats started to act strange after the third day. At first, I just noticed one or two staring at our house. But that two turned into and into ten. They sat on our backyard fence and watched our house all hours of the day and night. Next, the cats began to bring dead animals to our house. At first it was just mice and birds, but it soon became bigger animals like other cats and even dogs. The other cats and dogs would have horrible things done them. Their eyes would be missing or their skin would be peeled off. Stuff I knew no cat would do to another animal.
One day there was a pile of like five dead and gutted cats on our front door, and a car drove by just as we were trying to clean up the mess. it was a girl and another student, and she demanded to know what we had done to the strays, threatening to call the cops and what not. After about thirty minutes of calming her down, we convinced her that it was something the pledges in our fratenity had done to get back at us for hazing. She wanted to call the police really badly but we convinced her not too. I was more worried about our neighbor seeing it, as she was a lonely elderly woman named Mrs. Riley. She was also one of the nicest people I had met, and we never threw house parties out of respect for her. This incident with the girl threatening the police was too much for Gavin.
“Ok, I’ve had enough. I am taking those necklaces and dumping them.”
The next day after work, I came home and parked my car. As usual, about five or so cats were lined up at the fence, watching me with narrowed eyes. The expressions on the faces were almost human like ones of anger at me. Hurriedly I shut my car off and started making my way to the backdoor. But I didn’t even make it a few steps before the cats all rushed me. Next thing I knew I was being scratched at and clawed at, throwing the cats off of me as I ran inside and shut the door behind me.
“What the hell happened to you?” Gavin stood up from the couch quickly, almost dropping his bong he had on his lap. He had instantly noticed the scratches and bite marks all over my arms and face, which were now seeping blood.
“T-Those fucking cats, they jumped me!” I replied through panted breaths.
“Well let’s go ahead and get rid of those necklaces this instant. I thought about flushing them earlier, but figured we better dump them far away from our house.”
“Good idea.”
We waited until the cats went away, and then got in my SUV with the necklaces and dumped them in a dumpster a few streets over. We didn’t want to risk throwing them away anywhere near our house. Whatever screwed up ARG this was, I didn’t want to be a part of it. I don’t know if the necklaces had something imitating a pitch that drove animals crazy or what, but it was too much for me. However, this act only made things worse for us.
That night, the cats began to circle our house, what had to be about fifty of them. Never in my life would I think I would be scared of cats, but we stayed up most of the night sitting in the living room holding our guns.
“I wanna just go out there and blow one of their heads off, send them scattering,” I sneered as I watched them through the window, my grip tightening on my shotgun.
“Chill man, I don’t think they’re coming in. Plus firing a gun in our neighborhood would result in the police showing up, and probably some real charges,” Gavin said to me. He was sitting on the couch playing Minecraft and oddly calm about this. He had a point, and with a gun and plenty of other makeshift weapons in our house, stray cats weren’t exactly a threat. He hadn’t been the one who was attacked outside earlier, however. As the night went on the cats didn’t do anything new, and around 2 AM, Gavin went to bed. I tried to stay up longer but fell asleep on the couch. When I awoke the next day, what I saw sitting on the table in front of me shocked me so much I was instantly fully awake. Perfectly laid out on the table where the two necklaces. Right away I jumped up and went to get Gavin.
“Did you go back and get the necklaces again?” I questioned him as I shook him awake.
“No… Why?”
“They’re back on our table again.”
Over the course of the next week, we continued to try to get rid of the necklaces, and they continued to return to our house. The cats kept our antics, the weird noises continued, and our neighbor Mrs. Riley started acting weird. At first, I would catch her just staring. Sometimes she would be staring at our house from her window, sometimes she would just be staring up at the sky or the ground in her backyard. The fence between our backyard and hers was just a simple metal wire one so we could see everything that went on. The lack of privacy at first had just been a minor complaint with the house, but now it opened up a view of disturbing happenings. The cats made their way to Mrs. Riley’s house, where they began to swarm. One night I looked out and saw her hunched over in the corner of her backyard by a tree.
Naturally, Gavin and I had become super concerned for her well-being as whatever power the necklaces had was affecting her too. I just didn’t know how I could help her. But seeing her like that made me even more worried, and I stepped outside and cautiously walked to her. Gavin wasn’t home or I would have gotten him to come with me. He had been spending as much time away from this place as possible, and so had I really. We had discussed leaving the house entirely and staying with friends, but we figured the necklaces would follow us anyway, and didn’t want to bring anyone else into this.
As I approached Mrs. Riley, I began to hear the sound of something being chewed.
“Uh… Mrs. Riley?” I cautiously asked. She slowly turned around to look at me, and my jaw dropped at what I saw. Her face and shirt were covered in blood, and in her arms was a cat. Its stomach was ripped open and its insides were hanging out. Her eyes widened as she smiled at me.
“Oh Jeremy! Would you like some dinner?”
She extended the cat out to me. I jumped back and let out an audible gasp. I didn’t know what to do, I didn’t even know if this was real. But I wasn’t scared of her.
“Look, you need to put that down Mrs. Riley and get inside, I can help you,” I said and took that cat out of her hands, dropping the cat right away. The stench of death had overtaken her too. I helped her too her feet and led her to her house, where I was met with an even more gruesome sight. Her kitchen was littered with dead cats and dead cat parts.
“You know it’s so rare these days for young men like you to be true gentlemen. That little girlfriend of yours is a real lucky lady,” Mrs. Riley spoke to me casually, not even phased by what was going on.
“Mrs. Riley what is all of this?” I questioned her loudly.
“Oh these are just my pets. You know I get so lonely,” she said and walked over and began to pet the head of a black cat that was sitting on a plate on her table.
“What? These cats are all dead? Are you eating them all?”
“Why of course, so they can become one with me,” she smiled again and picked up the head, ripping off the ear with her teeth and chewing. I felt like I was gonna be sick.
“Mrs. Riley this is not ok. I think you need to take a vacation from town for a while. What about your family you’re always telling me about?” I talked fast, and began searching for a garbage bag. I found them under the sink, and pulled one out.
“What are you doing?” Mrs. Riley questioned, her expression of joy fading. I ignored her and began sweeping the insides of a cat off into the bag that had been laying on a plate. Luckily there was a roll of paper towels sitting nearby so I didn’t have to use my hands. She frowned at me.
“What are you doing!?” She yelled, this time angrier. I was honestly frightened and immediately dropped the intestines.
“Just trying to help you clean this mess Mrs. Riley,” I tried to calmly explain to her, but I could hear my own heart beating. I didn’t know if she was gonna attack me or what. She stepped to me, but instead of doing anything to me, she began to harm herself. She began to scratch at her skin frantically, clawing at it almost until blood was coming out. I was horrified.
“Mrs. Riley please!” I reached out to her and tried pulling her arms away, but couldn’t. For an old lady she was seemingly stronger than me. And that’s when I began to wonder if it was Mrs. Riley at all. A chill ran down my spine as I dropped the trash bag and ran out of her house. I knew what needed to be done. I saw an Uber pull up to our house and Gavin stumbled out, clearly drunk. I started to walk to him, but heard an odd noise coming from behind me. It sounded like a person attempting to mimic an owl. I spun around expecting to see Mrs. Riley, but instead found something far more frighting. Sitting on a tree limb was a large white owl. Or at least it would appear as an owl at first glance. Its sat back in dark black sockets, but it had no break. Instead, it bore a human mouth, one that was pressed open in a wide smile.
“Hell no,” I said and took off running towards Gavin.
“Woah man, just take it easy,” he said to me through slurred words.
“You know I had probably pulled the hottest girl I ever had tonight at the bar. But guess fucking what? She was from Alabama and staying with her friends on their couch. So we couldn’t go back to her place. She kept asking me to take her back here, but no, I didn’t want to be responsible for cursing a girl that attractive, because I am a gentleman…”
I grabbed his shoulders and shook, getting him to focus on me.
“Gavin! Just shut up and listen to me. Let’s get inside right now, where it’s safe,” I said as I watched the Uber drive away.
“Fineeeeee…” Gavin uttered, taking off his glasses and rubbing his eyes. Once we were inside I made him black coffee and instructed him to eat. After about an hour I thought he was sober enough to have a serious conversation with.
“Mrs. Riley dude, she isn’t ok. Tonight while you were out partying I just had to deal with her eating stray cats, and scratching off her own skin. Oh and now we have a creepy humanoid owl out there in the backyard.”
“Hey man, whatever is going on, it’s not harming us. I think it just wants to scare us.”
“Yeah maybe so, but it’s clearly harming others around us, and we can’t continue you to let that happen.”
“Well that I do agree with you on. But do you have an actual fix? I mean shit our entire lives might be fucked now.”
“I think it’s pretty clear what the point of all this is. It’s the necklaces, telling us to play the game.”
I walked over to them and picked one up, squeezing the crystal in my hand. I felt its power run through every vein in my body. It was a near indescribable feeling, but was giving me energy like I had just done five lines of cocaine.
“We aren’t scheduled to leave for another week. If we just up and leave right now we’ll be fired for sure from our jobs. We could be gone for a long time too. People will start to worry about us.”
“Hey man, we’re 22. And we both know we have money from our parents to make a trip like this. I say we start packing tomorrow morning and try to leave by at least midday. We’re smart people, I think we can solve this game in no time, a week or two at most. If all these necklaces cause are just spooky hallucinations…”
“Whooo…. Whoo..”
Once again, I heard the hooting of the human voice imitating an owl. Except it didn’t sound like it did last time.
“Whooo…Whooo…”
“Is that our new owl friend?” Gavin asked as he looked around. It was coming from the front outside the house, and sounding like Mrs. Riley’s voice this time.
“Oh no,” I mumbled under my breath and ran out the front door. Gavin followed me out. It didn’t take long for me to spot her. Across the small one-way street was a set of telephone poles and wires. And perched like an owl on the wires was Mrs. Riley. Her skin was all still scratched up, and now she was wearing some sort of white owl costume.
“Whoo… Whoo…”
She flapped her arms like a bird. I took a step towards her and she eyed me. Suddenly she stopped moving, falling forward and off the wire onto the pavement below.
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This is where I’m gonna cut it off, as it starts to get pretty gruesome after this. I don’t want anyone who doesn’t want to keep going to have to read it. But if you do, I’ll keep posting the rest of the journal. I need y’all’s help with this. I want to find out what really happened to my friend. If this journal is just some sick joke but someone I know then it means nothing. But something about this feels real. Jeremy was always a good writer, and a lot of the stuff that happened in the journal matches up with real life. I’ve looked around ARG forums for anything about this game but have yet to find anything. If anyone knows anything about it, or anything about gods and mythology that sound familiar to this, please help me