I, like many of us it seems, enjoy exploring abandoned places. Something about looking into the past and seeing nature reclaim things, is just fascinating. I’m just a hobbyist – I’m not a professional, by any means and I just use my crappy phone camera.
I saw something on my last trip, though, and now I will never be alone again.
Todd and I were driving back from visiting one of the schools he had been accepted to for a master’s degree. I was so incredibly proud of him; I wish our parents had been here to see him get his acceptance letter. He would have been the first one in the family to go.
Before we made that one fateful stop, it had been a really nice trip.
He had on what I had affectionally dubbed his grandma sunglasses – they looked like someone took my grandma’s giant glasses from the early 90s, changed the frames to be hot pink, and made them into sunglasses. He always dressed like he wasn’t trying to impress anyone, which I thought gave him an effortlessly cool vibe. The early morning air was streaming through the windows and felt amazing. He smiled at me, the slight gap between his front teeth that we both shared just worked so much better for him than it did me.
That moment in time is so vivid to me still. It’s how I want to remember my baby brother, not how he was towards the end.
Every time we drove by an abandoned building, he’d turn down the music (I think at that time we had hit Dio era Black Sabbath since we started in chronological order), look at me over his ridiculously over-sized sunglasses, and ask me if I wanted him to pull over. He was serious, too – he was willing to go out of his way for my weird hobby. I tried not to take him up on it too often, though, so we’d actually make the 8-hour drive in one day like we had planned.
I’m so sorry, Todd. You deserved so much better.
There was one town we drove through that I absolutely could not resist stopping at. Like several areas we had passed, there were the sad, broken structures framing the entrance to the town like a dilapidated welcoming committee. There wasn’t a single populated building in sight. But what made this place even more unique, was the sign. Under the town name, it said ‘Population 25,000’ As of 2019, per the date at the bottom of the sign.
That was what had caught my attention.
I wondered where 25,000 people had gone in the past three years. The crumbling and decaying buildings looked relatively new, stylistically. It was like someone sped up the clock on houses built in 2007 and put 75 years of wear on them.
I hopped out, while Todd sat in the car. He gave me his phone for pictures, since mine was charging and being used to navigate with.
The town had a strange atmosphere. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but as I wandered down the empty streets, the thought of entering any of these homes felt extremely disrespectful, like the idea of a glamour photoshoot in a mausoleum. I took some pictures of the outside of the homes, of a decaying playground where the cheerful purple dinosaur plastic slide was crumbling, and a school where an entire wall looked to have disintegrated. In the classroom I could see into, there were piles and piles of shoes near the whiteboard. I took a picture and headed back towards the car.
On my way back, I found one home with the door open – I couldn’t fight my curiosity and figured just peeking into the door couldn’t hurt. It looked to be falling apart and smelled like an old book. A thick ashy looking dust coated everything. Just like in the classroom, there was a pile of shoes in one corner. The shoes looked modern in design, but they were discolored and almost crumbling into dust themselves. I noticed a reflection on the wood floor, where bare footprints had been made in the thick dust. Recently. I backed away slowly – I had this weird feeling that I shouldn’t turn my back to the house.
I thought I heard something creak inside.
Once I got a safer distance away, I sped-walked back towards the car. I hesitated, but decided I’d snap one picture of ‘the’ house, although I didn’t even bother stopping. I didn’t really care if it was blurry, I just wanted to get back in the car and have evidence that I saw it, for later research. I was so, so glad we made this excursion in broad daylight.
On my way back to the car I took a few last pictures of the town, of the population sign with the abandoned buildings in the background, and of a moldy looking fountain. I wanted to read up more on this place, it was grimly fascinating.
“You get all your pictures?” Todd asked me, as I slid back into the passenger seat.
“I think so,” I squinted at the phone screen, my eyes readjusting from the brightness outside, but looked at the last two, of the town and the sign as we got back on the small highway. I handed him his phone back since I tend to get car sick if I’m not focused on a point in the distance when we’re in motion.
After we switched, and as I drove, Todd looked through the pictures.
“Who’s that?” He asked me.
“Hmm?” I was focused on not missing the exit.
“The woman in the picture? In the window?”
I looked when we stopped for gas. It was blurry since I had been walking away, but sure enough, in the picture, there was a woman, staring at me out of the window of the house.
“Maybe a holdout, doing her best to live normal a normal life?” Todd mused.
I had no response. He hadn’t seen the dust, the state of disrepair. There was no normal life in that town. I couldn’t wait to get the hell out of the state.
Sometimes, when I can’t sleep at night, I fixate on how if I had never gone with him on this trip, he’d still be here. There’s no possible turn of events where I wouldn’t have stopped, but the only reason that my poor brother got involved, was because he was with me.
We stopped at a couple of touristy places. A few times I noticed Todd brush at his shoulder or look behind him, but nothing was there. I took out my phone to take a picture of him in front of a wooden Bigfoot statue (don’t judge), but what I saw nearly made me drop my phone.
A woman was behind him and she had a hand on Todd’s shoulder. She was staring at him with a smile – well, if you defined a smile as ‘Open your mouth as widely as you can while showing all of your teeth’, she was nailing it.
Black liquid coated her teeth, dripped from her mouth, and dripped down Todd’s shirt where her hand had touched the fabric.
I lowered my phone screen, it was just Todd, his shirt was pristine. I raised it again; through my phone camera, I could see the woman and the stains.
I didn’t know what else to do – so I took the picture. When we were back in the car, I showed it to him. At first he thought I had found the world’s creepiest filter. Once he realized the truth, he was unsettled, but tried laughing it off. We joked that the statue was haunted.
We took a selfie when we stopped for dinner, though, and she was behind him, turned around in the booth behind us. She had been twirling a lock of his curly hair in her dark, dripping hands. So it wasn’t the statue, then.
Todd developed a cough shortly after we got home. It was a wet sounding cough, and I worried about him when several days had passed and he seemed to be getting worse rather than better.
He’d text me every so often, sometimes he’d mention the woman. One time he said that she was so close to him, he could hear her breathing in these shallow, ragged breaths. He sent me a picture of the black footprints, his walls were streaked with black – he said that when she wasn’t sitting next to him, she’d walk around the apartment, leaving footprints and dragging her dirty hands along the walls. You couldn’t see the black streaks without a camera, but when I eventually came in person, I could see that the wallpaper had yellowed. It was peeling in the places she had touched.
It really worried me, when he sent me that picture of himself. Yes, she was next to him, her hand on his cheek, the black dripping down his face and her forearms – but at that point I was somehow numb to that. What scared me more, was how he looked.
He always had curly thick brown hair that he’d let grow just past his ears. That, and his large brown eyes gave him a boyish quality. In the picture he sent me, he was gaunt. His hair had thinned and greyed at the roots and his eyes were sunken and devoid of the brightness they usually had. I’m three years older than him, but he looked like he could’ve been twice my age. Worse yet, in the picture, black liquid dribbled down his chin from his mouth. I could see it staining the front of his t-shirt.
I finally convinced him to go to the doctor. The doctor asked him how many packs he smoked a day; he had never smoked a day in his life. The doctor didn’t believe him.
Within a month, he became so sick that he couldn’t care for himself, he stayed with me in my guest room. When I went to pick him up from his apartment, I noticed his shoes piled up near his door.
Todd had always been the fiercely independent one – I knew it hurt him to be so reliant on me. He became withdrawn, distant towards the end. He had to take a leave of absence from school, he had only one semester left before he graduated and he was devastated. I told him he’d get better, that he could defer his admission to his master’s program. I promised him he’d finish and we’d all be there to watch him cross the stage.
My brother passed away two weeks later at the age of 22.
I knew she was behind it somehow. She started following me the same day that he left this world.
When I finally arrived home after that awful day at the hospital, you can see me on my video doorbell being closely trailed by the woman. She’s barefoot, wearing a clean, if dated, summer dress, but her feet, and her hands drip with this thick tarlike liquid. She stands only inches from me as I unlock the door.
While I was planning the arrangements, she’d stand behind me, gently humming while she ran her dirty hands through my hair. I hated her so much. One time, when I felt her there, I reached behind me trying to slap her away, but my hand just went through air. She used her wet dripping hands to tuck a strand of hair behind my ear in response.
At his funeral, our friends and extended family were shocked at my appearance. I’m sure a great deal of it was stress, but I noticed that I had begun to undergo a change similar to my brother’s. In just those few days I looked like I had aged considerably.
She sat with me at his funeral, you know. Pressed up beside me in the pew, forcefully interlocking her fingers with mine, had what felt like her head on my shoulder. It was all l could do to keep my composure.
Sometimes I think she walks around my house, other times I feel her, sitting shoulder to shoulder with me, or behind me. Sometimes she strokes my cheek or touches my hair. I feel her cold hands, I feel the wetness of the black liquid they always seem to be coated with, but I can’t see it with my naked eyes. That’s probably for the best, I really don’t think I could bear to see her again.
She’s here right now as I write this, running her hands through my hair. I genuinely do not understand what she wants from me.
My house creaks and groans more now. When she’s not touching me, she’s touching my things, the walls, everything in here has this general feel of malaise. My poor plants pretty much disintegrated into dust after she had been here a few days. My house isn’t even that old, but I’ve noticed small cracks forming on the walls, like there’s an issue with the foundation. The wooden stairs, covered in her tarry black footprints when viewed through my camera, have started to rot away. I don’t really have the energy or motivation for home repairs anymore.
My own cough has greatly worsened in the past few days, and it’s a struggle to navigate through my own home. I know what to expect, now, having seen Todd go through this first. She seems to be obsessed with my shoes. She’s started piling them up together.
I’m still not entirely sure what caused her to follow us – if it was because we saw her on camera, or if she just follows whoever she happens to see, and saw me when I wondered through that town.
I wonder where she’ll go when I’m gone.