“Lukas. He’s- he’s dead.” Ellie said, a clear terror in her voice, while I stood in the middle of my Penn State Dorm at 7 am , almost dropping the phone.
I stood there for a while, silent for seconds without a word, processing what had happened to my best friend.
“Lukas is dead?” I said, still struggling through the weight of what I just heard.
“He was found dead in an alleyway, murdered .. ”
“M-Murdered?” I felt shock and horror before my blood began to boil as rage flooded my body. “Who is the bastard that killed him!?”
“That’s what I came to talk to you about.”
“They found him?”
“No, they didn’t find the culprit, but I.”
“You know who it is? Then what the hell are you calling me for?! Your dad’s a cop, tell him and the police!”
“They would put me in a hospital if I told them! I don’t even know if I’m insane or wha!”
“What can’t you tell them but you can tell me?!”
“Andrew the way Lukas died, do you have the stomach?”
I was taken aback by the question, immediately horrified by its implications. Had Lukas’s murder been a grizzly ordeal? But what does Ellie know about the murder that makes her think she knows who did it? Why the hell was she not telling the police? What is this about her being crazy? Is she connected with the murder somehow?
“Go ahead and tell me the details. I can handle it.” I said, with some false confidence admittedly. I’m not a squeamish person but like everyone else, there’s only a certain level of gore I can handle, especially if it was someone close to me like Lukas.
“He,” Ellie hesitated to speak for a moment, almost as if speaking further would cause her to puke out the food in her stomach. “He was burned, burned badly. But not burned in any conventional way. My dad was… he was the one who found him. From what he was willing to tell me, it looked like he was burned from the inside out like the fire had started from his internal organs, and then spread to his entire body. His eyes look like they bursted like balloons and if it wasn’t for the Driver license, they wouldn’t have been able to identify him.”
I dropped my phone to the ground barely able to maintain my composure as memories flashing back to that day hit me.
It was July 6th, the summer before my senior year of university began, and I was invited to hang out with Lukas and some of his friends at one of their houses. Now what enticed me to go to this was Ellie Bryne. When I saw her dark green eyes, rich brown hair, and a slender yet curvaceous body, I had a crush on her. When I got the chance to potentially make a move on her I took it. A little while later, I was sitting on the couch at that friend’s house, and I was lucky to be sat right next to her.
The group of people I was with, around 9 including myself, were sharing our own personal scary stories. Most of them were dumb stories about alleged encounters with ghosts or the supernatural. Mine personally was a made up encounter with the Moth Man. However Ellie’s story stood out from the rest. I’m going to try to tell the story word to word from her own mouth.
“I uh, well my family has a bit of legend they passed down for generations.”
“A legend?” Erica, one of the girls in the group, asked.
“Well yeah.”
“Well, do you feel like telling us?” I asked
“Uhm, my mom doesn’t approve of me sharing it outside the family.”
“Oh come on sweetheart, it’s not like they’re going to know.” Lukas said.
“I’m not sure, I mean the last time I tried sharing it with people outside my family was when I was 14 with a group of friends at my house, she slapped me hard multiple times for it.”
I was hooked in, more so because I was genuinely intrigued by her story than the fact I was head over heels with her.
“Well come on Ellie! Don’t be such a bore.” Samantha, a petite Goth chick who Ellie was close friends with, said.
“Besides, why was your mom so particular about it?” I asked.
She looked away for a second, a little hesitant about it.
“She never gave me a proper answer. More like the whole ‘Very bad things will happen if you tell people about this.’ “
“So what’s the story?” Samatha asked. “It’s not like she’s around to stop you.”
Ellie thought about it for what felt like minutes before beginning with
“Are any of you well versed in history, specifically British and Irish history?”
“What part of that history specifically?” I asked. I consider myself pretty well versed in history especially European and American history so I thought I would know what she was talking about.
“Around the time of the Protestant reformation.”
“Oh yeah I know about that. Isn’t that when there were religious conflicts between the Irish Catholics and English protestants?”
“Yeah, it was around the beginning of the 17th century.The English were in the habit of seizing the land of Catholic Irishmen and replacing them with Protestant Englishmen. One of these pieces of land was a decently sized village, around 150-220 people with the local pastor of the village being a man named Sean Cormac. He led around 50 of his congregation in peaceful prayer and protest against the English and those.” Ellie stopped herself, clearly wanting to curse but not doing so.
Something I found unusual was how she was telling this story more as if it was actual history. If I were to compare it would be what I would imagine a Native American would tell about the suffering their tribe went through due to westward expansion.
“They butchered the innocent men, women, and children and proceeded to burn the village to the ground.They tied up Sean Cormac to a stake preparing to burn him. He swore his spirit would return from the grave and cast righteous judgment on the Englishmen as they laughed at him and his screams of agony echoed throughout the hills of Ireland. The Englishmen who butchered the village people seized the land and began to settle there. The men settled first, wanting to establish themselves, before they brought their wives and children. Around a year and a half in, as they were in the midst of building their various estates, they were not heard from for a period of six months as if they completely disappeared off the earth. When the English sent a surveyor to discover what happened and they saw a ghastly sight before them.”
Ellie took a moment to pause. I think she was thinking of how to describe the scene in the most vivid and gorey details possible.
“They found several of the men burned alive. But it was like they weren’t burned in the normal way, it was like someone had burned them from the inside out. Some of the men had their eyes popped out, some had their reproductive organs burned off.”
“He burned off their dicks?!” George, a complete pothead said.
Ellie gave him a death stare before continuing with. “The estates the men built were also reduced to mere ashes. A few attempts were made to settle the village again and again but almost always either ending in the same result, or some other unspeakable tragedy. Eventually the land was deemed too dangerous to settle and the area was abandoned.”
I was at the time, very unnerved by the story. It felt much more authentic than the nonsense my friends guzzled out of their months. Perhaps it was because of the historical elements, the feeling that there was something more to it or perhaps a combination of both. But there was something about the story that still puzzled me though.
“If that’s the story, why was your mom so adamant on you not telling anyone outside your family?” I asked.
“Well because that’s not the entire story.”
“So what’s the rest of it?” George asked.
“The spirit of Cormac didn’t target only the Englishmen and it didn’t stay where he was burned at the stake. He roamed the countryside, punishing people for sinning with no sense of discrimination. Man or woman, English or Irish, Protestant or Catholic, it didn’t matter. All that mattered was you committed some sin in his eyes worthy of him bringing the fires of hell to you. He became so feared throughout much of Ireland that he’d called the Hellwalker.”
“Is this Hellwalker guy still around haunting Ireland?” I asked.
“Well, as the story goes into my family, one of my ancestors sealed him away.”
“Hold on, sealing, like magic?” Miguel, a fellow track runner along Lukas asked.
“I don’t know, my mom never went into much detail about that other than the pure silver cross around my necklace is supposedly where the spirit of Cormac lays dormant.”
“Really? Your cross?” Samatha said, a devious smile forming on her face.”
“Why does your mom get so angry when you tell this story?” Adrian, a shorter, kinda nerdy kid who was Samantha’s twin brother, asked, “After all, it’s probably just a tall tale parents tell their children so they don’t go out at night or break rules.”
“Because well, my mom is a firm believer in it.”
“No way!” Samatha started giggling, “Your mom actually is that superstitious? What, does she also believe in Freddy Kruger?”
I started seeing some others in our group and started to chuckle a little bit, much to Ellie’s embarrassment.
“Well, I, I um.”
“Oh come on Ellie baby, you don’t actually believe in that story do you?”
“What? No no, it’s just a story that’s…”
“With how defensive you’re getting it seems like you believe it.” Ellie looked away in what I can only describe as a mixture of embarrassment and deep thought before meekly saying no.
“You know I have a fun idea, I know this girl who’s very into mystical stuff like rituals and stuff like that. I remember having a lot of fun doing some rituals and having the living shit scare out of us. How about we summon this Hellwalker of yours?”
Ellie looked at Samantha, her face a mixture of surprise, confusion, and perhaps anger. “Wha, why would anyone want to do that?”
“Well then, come on, don’t be boring. ”
“Hey, if she doesn’t want to do it, then don’t pressure-” I said, partly because I wanted to impress Ellie.
“I’ll do it.” Ellie said.
“I thought you were the devout Catholic girl? Whatever happened to that?” Samatha teased with Ellie not responding at all.
Nothing of note happened after that other than I got Ellie’s phone number. I went home not really paying no particular mind to Ellie’s story at the time other than thinking it was a good horror story.
Now, as I snapped back to the present, standing there as the realization hit me after connecting the dots with how Lukas was murdered, and Ellie’s story.
I quickly picked up my phone off the ground, grateful that it didn’t suffer any damage, and said to Ellie “Don’t tell me that,”
Ellie started to cry over the phone. “I thought it would just be stupid dare! I just didn’t want them thinking I was boring so I did what they wanted!”
I asked Ellie to calm down and collect herself to which it took her around 2 minutes to do so and explain what exactly went down.
“It was at Samatha’s dorm, and she had that friend she mentioned over. I took off my Silver cross and they did some-something and, and suddenly the power went out for what felt like two minutes.”
“Hold on, was it around 3 weeks ago?” I asked, remembering the time where the power went out for around 4-5 minutes.
“Yes.” Ellie stuttered.
My mind at the time was running every rational explanation through my head.
“These were all just coincidences, the power went out because of issues with the generator, whoever murder Lukas was just some deranged serial killer with a taste for burning people to death. There is no Hellwalker, THERE IS NO HELL WALKER!”
Yet the more I thought about it, the more I realized that the chance that these were just coincidences was improbable.
“Please Ellie, tell me that story was just a scary story and nothing more.”
“I, I’m so sorry.” Ellie broke down in tears before hanging up the call.
I stood there, paralyzed, unable to move a muscle. My mind felt like it was tearing itself apart with the rational side in a brutal battle with the primitive, survival side telling me that I’m going to die. The adrenaline ran through my veins as I started panting heavily. I haven’t been a believer in God or religion since I was in high school and I have always been a skeptic about these things. However, one singular thought kept running on my head on repeat that I sincerely hope is just a delusion.
He is here and he is coming for us all.
Update: Some more events have unfolded recently and seeing that this post has gotten a decent amount of attention, I thought it important to post a follow up on what has happened. Here’s the link.
https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/16pl1ss/hellwalker_part_2_the_monster_that_killed_my_best/