Hi guys.
Since last night It’s gotten worse. So much worse.
I see her everywhere now, all the time, even outside the confines of my home. Last night she stood over me in bed all night, just gurgling at me. I can feel her spittle on my face as she talks with what must now be a broken jaw dangling out at me. I couldn’t sleep, I just closed my eyes and prayed it stopped.
She looks worse every day. It’s like she’s decaying. Her skin is mottled and looks rotten, her milky eyes look like marbles, rolling around in their sockets. She won’t leave me alone for even a second.
I followed your advice and contacted a medium. She took a look around my house for all of fifteen minutes, stared into my bedroom from the doorway, then took off running. Despite her fake tan, she turned white as a sheet. I guess that was a waste of $400. That’s what I get for looking on Facebook Marketplace for spiritual help.
It’s left me more broke than before and feeling really uneasy. I moved up my psychiatry appointment to this morning. Without sleep, waiting till Monday just wasn’t feasible. The psychiatrist says if I’m having auditory and visual hallucinations, then I’m probably having some kind of schizophrenic break or a psychotic episode. He prescribed me something…I don’t think I’m going to take it. My gut tells me this isn’t in my head, at least not entirely. There’s got to be a reason this entity, whatever she is, is so persistent.
I called my dad and asked him if I could come visit the house for a bit and he seemed okay with it. I didn’t tell him why, but can you blame me? He’d probably commit me. Carl says he can manage mom for a week if I need to take some time to see dad. My flight is tonight. I guess I’ll update you all from Montana. Wish me luck.
…
Hi again, I figured I would put these updates together since it’s only been a day.
I got to my dad’s house yesterday and it’s been really nostalgic. I’m back in my childhood bedroom on the second floor. The house is much quieter than it used to be, dad spends less time in the basement, if any at all. I asked him why he’s no longer as interested in his hobbies down there, and he told me his back isn’t what it used to be so he isn’t physically able to do this work anymore…I’m not really sure how a bad back would prevent him from doing taxidermy and carpentry, but I guess it’s not my business. It’s also padlocked now, which he didn’t offer an explanation for, and I didn’t ask. That’s kind of how our relationship has always been, I feel like asking too many questions would only bother him.
Now, back to the main point.
I haven’t seen the girl since I arrived, save for one instance. When I got up last night, she was sitting in the corner of my room, curled into a ball. She almost looked pitiable, if not for the repulsive decay of her body.
I got up and crouched beside her. She wasn’t speaking or doing her chant, and I wondered if something had happened. Maybe this silence signaled the end of her torment of me. The silence, while at first welcome, became eerie.
She looked up at me, her dark hair parting down the middle of her palid, rotting face, those milky eyes staring vacantly in my direction. Her mouth opened and I prepared myself to hear her chant again, but the silence continued. I stared at her, her jaw dangling like a ventriloquist dummy. Then, she softly groaned. The air from her open mouth smelled like death and must. I stifled a gag. A rush of wriggling, white insects began to pour from her open mouth.
She wretched as the swarm of maggots spilling from her mouth intensified. Tears streamed from her vacant eyes as the insects continued coming. I fell back away from her, crawling back away from her as quickly as my body could carry me. I involuntarily cried out, and my dad came running, throwing open my bedroom door and frantically looking around. It may have been my imagination, but I swear I saw his eyes lock on the girl. Something like recognition, and perhaps fear, glinted in his eyes. When I turned to look back at her though, she was gone.
I told my dad that I had a nightmare and it just startled me out of bed. He nodded, gave me a strange look, and left the room, wishing me goodnight. I returned the sentiment and crawled back into bed. I didn’t sleep again that night.
Since then there’s been no sign of her, it’s only been 24 hours but I’m hopeful. This is the longest I’ve been without her. My dad has been a little weird today, but I’m sure he was just startled by my episode last night. The only thing that’s really bothered me are the bugs…
I was having lunch in the living room and I saw one of them squeeze its way under the cellar door. I watched it as it inched its way across the floor before it moved out of view from my vantage point on the couch. I’ve seen a few more crawl out from under the door in the past hour in groups. It’s really starting to make my skin crawl. I told dad he has a bug problem and pointed them out. He just kind of nodded and stared at the door. I’m getting a bad feeling about this…
I’ll keep you all posted.
…
Hi,
Sorry for the delay in updates, things have taken a bit of a turn. I’m not really sure how much of this I should talk about. I’ve been thinking about this a lot and I guess this is the only place I can talk about this since it’s kind of anonymous.
I left my dad’s house last night, I can’t stay there anymore. I’m in a hotel in the next town over from his and I have a flight back home tomorrow morning. He keeps calling me but I don’t have the strength to pick up the phone.
After the incident two days ago, she still hasn’t shown up. Not like she used to, anyway.
My dad went into town the day after the incident for groceries and other essentials. It’s about a forty-five minute drive to the nearest town with a shopping center. I offered to go run the errands for him, but it’s winter and he said he’d rather take his truck. It’s four wheel drive and meant for difficult terrain, unlike my rental car. He’s particular about who drives his truck; I wasn’t even allowed when I was practicing for my driver’s test. So, I stayed at home while he went to shop, expecting him to be home in a few hours.
While I was alone in the house, I began to hear scratching from the basement. I tuned it out at first, being so used to strange sounds in dad’s house from his activities in the basement. After about half an hour of business as usual, though, it struck me that I was alone, and no one should be in the basement. A bead of cold sweat dripped down my temple. The scratching continued.
I looked at the basement door, eying it wearily. The padlock was off the door, dangling limply from a chain attached to the wall. Dad must’ve undone it when I wasn’t looking; maybe he had to grab something down there and forgot to lock up before he left. My childhood fear of the basement and the intense feeling I shouldn’t go down there blared like an alarm through my racing mind, but I needed to know what the scratching was. I don’t know why I was so curious, I wish to God I hadn’t been.
I thought it could be some poor creature trapped down there, like a raccoon or a squirrel. I took a deep, calming breath, turned the handle and opened the door. Before me was a long, dark, exceedingly narrow wooden staircase. I searched in vain for a light switch, but to no avail. I finally settled for inching my way down the stairs, groping the scratchy handrail for balance and direction in the abysmal darkness. After a minute or two of struggling, I finally reached the bottom of the stairs. The air was heavy down here and smelled vaguely foul. The scent of death was a fine mist in the air. I saw the faint glint of a light bulb dangling near what I assumed was the ceiling, outlined by the sliver of light visible from the upstairs doorway at this angle. I pulled the cord attached to it, lighting up the room. The air whooshed out of my lungs and I staggered back towards the stairs.
It was horrible.
The room was a dungeon. There were chains and shackles built into the walls and ceilings. A drain was installed in the floor, and the red staining on the ground, specifically the thick ring around the drain itself, spoke to its heavy use.
A small, wishful part of my brain thought it was for his taxidermy. He must have skinned the animals here. That must be what this was…but, the pair of handcuffs rigged up in the center of the room, swinging softly, mocked my naïveté. Suddenly, every strange sound, putrid smell, and waking hour that my father spent within this basement made sense. The power tools weren’t for woodworking, the screaming and crying wasn’t the TV or the house ‘breathing’, and he wasn’t skinning animals.
I lurched into the corner of the room and vomited onto the floor. I puked a few more times, followed by some dry heaving, before shakily straightening myself up. Behind me, something scratched on the wall. I spun around, looking straight at the wood paneled back wall. My stomach turned again.
I knew what would be back there, I don’t know how but I knew. The picture was becoming clearer with every passing second.
I grabbed a hammer from the work table by the stairs, willing myself to ignore the stains on the metal tool. I wedged it into the gap between the middle two panels and tugged. Nothing. I braced myself, putting my foot up against the adjacent panel. I tugged on the hammer again, leaning back with all my weight. Still nothing, but the gap looked a little wider. The rancid smell seeping out of the wall was confirming my fears.
I leaned back to tug again when the panel snapped and gave way, sending my hurtling to the floor in front of the wall. I looked up and met the dead eyes of the girl. She was probably about twenty, or she had been. She was a rotting corpse, just as she had been in my hallucinations. It hit me with another wave of nausea that she had only been decaying for a couple months at most. The lack of refrigeration, moisture, and bug damage made her look ghastly, but she was strangely well preserved despite it. Someone…my dad had ‘cared’ for her.
I stared at her eyes. The scarring from chemical burns around her eyes was thick, purplish gray and wrinkled. He had blinded her. A carrion beetle squirmed beneath her right eyelid before crawling out of the socket. I rolled over and wretched again. She had been here, alive, all this time. For fifteen years, this girl had been here, subjected to God knows what, right beneath my feet.
He went down each day to torture her…then he came upstairs and made me pancakes. The girl in the kitchen wasn’t a ghost, she was a very alive, frightened child trying to escape. And what did I do? I ran away. I left her to be taken back by him.
I felt someone breathe against the back of my neck. I was frozen in fear, staring at the rotting body of the ghost that tormented me. A woman’s voice whispered, the pronunciation weak and wobbly
“Gavenee…G-ave N-eeee…gyuy hihhn oo gave neeee…”
“Please,” I murmured, tears silently streaming down my cheeks, my heart feeling heavy and frozen in my chest, “please, I don’t understand.”
The woman whimpered before saying, clearly now:
“Save me. Why didn’t you save me?”
I gasped and spun around, but no one was there. In the same instant, I heard the front door open, and my dad called out to me from the living room. Panic coursed through my entire body. I scrambled up the stairs, eyes wild.
Would he kill me now that I know his secret?
I hated the thought but what was stopping him? Fatherly affection? Did he even have that? Was he an emotionless psycho? A sociopath? The coldness in his gaze and other strange traits finally made sense.
Another question burned in my mind: how many more like her were there?
I stood in the threshold of the basement to see him, dumbfounded, standing still in the living room. He still had his grocery bags. He didn’t move, he didn’t speak, we just stared at each other in silence. In understanding. I knew. He knew I knew. Where we would go from here was anyone’s guess.
I didn’t give him any time to decide. I ran past him and out of the door. He didn’t even try to stop me. I left all my belongings at the house, leaving with just my work stuff and wallet which, through sheer dumb luck, was in my carry-on bag in the car.
I know my next move should be to call the police, but I don’t know if I can sentence my father to life in prison or death. I know he deserves it, but, in some strange way, I still love him. I don’t know what to do. Right now I’m just frozen, trying to process this all. Maybe that’s why he let me go, maybe this lingering affection for him was what he was counting on. I don’t know what to think anymore.
I think this is gonna be my last post. The original problem is solved, but at what cost? She doesn’t appear anymore while I’m awake. However, every night when I go to sleep, she waits for me in my dreams. She always asks the same question, and I never have an answer. I don’t think I ever will.
“Why didn’t you save me?”