I want to start by saying that I just have to get this off my chest. I’m hoping that I can erase some of the guilt I feel for not doing anything by posting what I saw.
My mom and I recently moved to a rural area against the Appalachian Mountains. I wasn’t excited about the move. My dad had a midlife crisis and inserted himself into another family a few months ago. My mother felt it was best to get as far away from him as she could and she always had a romantic view of life in the mountains. So off we went.
Last September we found a rental property in a small town in North Carolina. The house was more like a cabin, with a wooden porch that extended across the front and almost entirely overgrown with hydrangeas and azalea bushes. The back porch looked out over a creek that we could hear babbling beyond the edge of the trees. The forest was too thick to see the creek from the top of the hill where the house stood, but the sound was soothing.
The house was old. Names carved into the wood on the porch. Doors that didn’t quite line up with the frames. Floor boards creaked. Cabinets hung open when you tried to close them and the toilet took 35 years to flush. That being said, I LOVED this cabin.
After unpacking over the weekend my mom went to start her new job at the bank in town about 30 minutes away and since I was fresh out of high school and didn’t have a job yet I thought it would be fun to do a little exploring. There was a cellar that was actually about 25 yards from the house. It looked like it had once belonged to a different house that might have been torn down. There was evidence of a foundation that once existed butted up against cellar door.
Flashlight in hand and mission oriented, I opened the cellar door into the musty, earthy scented darkness below. The brick steps led into a chilly basement. The air around me was damp but not in an unpleasant way. Just your typical clay and earth basement type of cellar.
The walls were covered in Mason jars. Pickled everything. God knows how long ago pickled, but there had to be over 200 jars of unlabeled homemade goods lining the walls. A desk sat off to the right side of the room. A few papers on top. A couple boxes of empty jars underneath.
I walked over to the desk to examine the papers but the cursive writing was so faded and elaborate that I could only make out a date at the top. 1909. I thought about the pickled produce and hand to force back the bile that wanted to come up my throat. I opened the desk drawer and found a few more papers and a long narrow book. It was black, or it used to be, and had no writing on the cover or the spine. I opened it. Not sure what I was expecting.
Every page was covered in small drawings labeled as different figures and small fine text describing each drawing. I couldn’t make out the text but I knew some of the drawings. The frontal lobe, occipital lobe, brain stem, small intestine, large intestine, liver, heart, kidney, reproductive organs…it looked like a very very old anatomy book. Not weird at all right? I thought again about the jars of pickled produce and then quickly tried to not think about those jars ever again, so I leaned hard into my flashlight and kept my mind on the task at hand.
I turned the next page in the book and out falls a paper folded into thirds, splashing a small cloud of dust up off the earthen floor. A cold snap shivered up my spine as my hand made contact with the parchment. And a small voice in my head told me it was time to get out of that cellar. Grabbing the paper I hauled ass up the staircase and slammed the door behind me. Blessed daylight enveloped me and I released a breath I didn’t know I had been holding and walked back to the cabin. Sitting on the steps in the sunlight, I unfolded the parchment.
It was a map of the property.
In the middle of the map was a large structure about 6 times larger than the small cabin off to the west which must have been the cabin that mom and I were staying in. The other house must be who mom was renting the cabin from. Off to the east, past the larger structure was a perfect circular clearing in the middle of the forest. In the center of the circle was a word that I could actually make out. “Rites”
I must have been tired that night because I didnt remember falling asleep. Just that I woke up from a blaring light in my eyes. The full moon was out and it’s position in the sky was perfectly centered on my bedroom window. We hadn’t hung up curtains yet and the thing was so bright I honestly thought the sun had come up. When I rolled over, my alarm told me it was 3:22am. My eyes wandered to the map laying on the bedside table just in front of the alarm clock and a sickening feeling rolled over me.
Okay, listen. There is absolutely no good reason for me to have gone out into a full moon night in an area that I know nothing about and I get that! So we can skip the part where you all tell me “omg noooooo what were you thinkinggggggg!?” I wasn’t! I was pulled. The sinking feeling in my stomach that something was wrong was not a feeling that could be reasoned with at that time. And next thing I know, I’m in my pajamas, a jacket, boots, flashlight and map, standing at the forest edge.
So I walked in the direction of the rites circle.
You would think you could hear the sound of cicadas or crickets or frogs. Anything. There was nothing. Not a creature was stirring except for me. An unwelcome yet undeniable drive to continue forward kept my feet moving in the direction I didn’t want to, but needed to go.
After what felt like 30 seconds to an eternity I came to a stop. I hardly remember the walk, and I dont think I even glanced at the map. It was still closed. The light beyond the new tree edge was glowing warm and vibrant. Full of life. A bon fire. I crouched down slowly, trying not to disturb any of the brush around me. Two identical old women; they looked like twins, dancing around the tall fire. Their long white hair dragged in chaotic masses against their backs as they hunched over the fire. Chanting and dancing. Their arthritic hands throwing herbs into the flames and their smiles held missing teeth. Patches of hair were missing from their scalps and skin hung loose from their bare wrinkled and veined bodies. I could smell their decay, a rotten torment in my nose from at least 30 feet away. These women should have been in their graves already.
Then I heard the whimper.
She was difficult to see through the light of the fire but there on the other side was a naked woman laying on the ground. She seemed lethargic, as if drugged, and even through the tree branches, through the dancing women, and through the flames, I would recognize my mother anywhere.
I could do nothing but watch. Stone cold fear stilled me to a statue of myself and I could do nothing but watch. There was no fight or flight. No sense of do or don’t, right or wrong ever entered my 19 year old brain. Nothing but this moment that I could not peel my eyes from, could not believe, and could not escape.
I stared at my helpless mother, bound wrists and ankles to two large branches over a shallow hole dug into the ground. She was crying but they were the tears of exhaustion. Like she had no fight left.
Then without warning one of the old decaying twins took a bone knife down into her chest and slowly dragged it all the way to the pelvic bone. I threw up right then, I don’t know how they didn’t hear me. Maybe because their evil song got louder when the knife struck. I looked back. I had to know what they had planned.
The woman without the knife collapsed suddenly to her hands and knees and crawled towards my mother. She split her stomach open with her hands and sunk her face into my mother’s abdomen. Mouth coming up gasping, hands holding up entrails to her face. The woman who did the cutting threw the knife and dove in just as vigorously. Only pausing to take in air or to fight with the other woman over a piece they had both grabbed at the same time.
My mother twitched helplessly each time they dove in until finally she twitched no more. The sisters kept diving in. My mother never even screamed. I would never know what kind of fight she put up before she was tied down. Knowing my mother it had been a good one. Just not good enough.
I watched. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t cry. My stomach was empty already. I felt like a shell just watching the daily news. I guess you could call that shock. Because I’m not shocked anymore. I’m angry.
Those witches ate my mother and then they threw her body in the fire and kicked the left overs into the hole they dug. As they filled it in they started to grow younger, beautiful, graceful, magnetic…
I want to tell you this because I am still in North Carolina, hiding and living in moms car or a hotel every now and then after an odd job here and there. Im too scared to stay in one place. Or rather, too paranoid. It’s taken me a year to come through the fog of what happened.
But I have the black book. I couldn’t read this writing because it’s no language I have ever seen. I am at a library right now trying to research anything I can find to get rid of these two sister, and keep them from doing this to anyone else.
Do not stay in that cabin! And if you see a woman with long black hair, blue eyes and she talks like she’s from the 1800s, run! Especially if she has a twin. I’m going to find out what these rites can do. And I’m going to end them before the next full moon.
Any information you can give me will help.
I only have 23 days.