So, first thing I want to give you guys a bit of background. I am a 22 year old Vietnamese girl, I have a normal life since I was born, my family is a normal middle class one, never been into anything occult or shady that I know of. I live in a populated area in Ho Chi Minh City and I have never seen anything out of the ordinary… that is, until yesterday.
As many of you guys know, 2023 has just come, about 5 days into 2023 now, but we’re still not done celebrating as there’s still a Lunar New Year coming up. It’s around this time that my family want to clean the whole house to let out all of the bad energy and “embrace” the new year. So. it started when my mom woke me up at 7:00AM to clean, I was given the task of the attic, since both my parents have bad ankle problems and my brother was out for school.
So I had breakfast, a few nagging here and there from my mom at me for being so young but so lazy at the same time. I didn’t mind them very much since I know they come from a place of love, also, this activity always happens every year, so I just don’t mind it very much. My house is a normal 3 story house, my family used to have relatives who lived here for some times until they’re more financially stable to move out, so now the 3rd floor is currently rented by my university friend. He has gone back to his hometown for Lunar New Year with his family since we’re all done with our semester. His room is right next to the attic entrance.
The attic is quite dusty and dark, with quite many boxes of books and family albums, old stuffs from my deceased grandparents that my dad doesn’t want to throw out. I have to clean up the attic, find stuffs from last year that are either too broken to be repaired/out of use and then clean up the mess on the 3rd floor after I’m done dusting. I put on my earplugs and began to dust the whole place, when I was done, I looked through the box that wrote 2022 on it (my family keep track of these things, basically it’s just a pile of trash that my parents didn’t want to throw but have no knowledge on how to fix them so they just pile it like “hoarders” on those American shows, and use this opportunity each year to tell me to clean their mess). As I was sifting through the trash piles, my eyes stumbled on what seemed like the old family computer set, with the keyboard, monitor,… everything. I got hit with a wind of nostalgia, all my memories of Grand Theft Auto San Andreas, long lost dead anime online forums, nights of playing Java games with my brother, Yahoo Messenger… if you were born in the 2000’s in Vietnam then you might be very familiar with what I just described. After what felt like a good 5 minutes of reminiscing, I suddenly remembered that I can ask my mom if I can sell this old hunk of junk away for some snacks money, to my surprise, both my mom and dad were super chill about it and agreed to let me sell it away.
It took me around 1 hour to move it to my room on the second floor, I tried to clear my desk to plug it in, because still working computer and monitor can make more money. To my surprise, the old junk did work! The nostalgic Windows 2000 music hit my eardrums, and my old Admin account with the stupid picture of me and brother are still there. I decided to retrieve back every old thing on the computer, like one last goodbye before sending a piece of my childhood away. Then, I saw the desktop screen with the scenery picture of Hanoi that my mom loved, and to add more to my surprise. I saw the old Yahoo Messenger icon! Yahoo Messenger was a big thing in Vietnam during the 2000’s - early 2010’s, it was a thing for middle schooler, high schooler, hell, literally every young person to have a Yahoo Messenger account. It was announced dead back in 2018.
Excitedly, I clicked on the application without thinking much, then strangely, it connected! I could see the log in screen and everything, as if it was never dead to begin with. I decided to experiment, I looked through my old diary to find the memo of my old account information, I thought it would be funny to show old chat logs of me and my friends again. As I hit that log in button, I was left speechless at the working site. My friends are online! I was scrubbing my eyes to double check if I was hallucinating. No. It’s fucking real and working. Then, a friend of mine texted me. I didn’t think of grabbing my phone to ask everyone, I just straight up chatted on Yahoo, thinking the site had a revival when I was cleaning or sleeping. (note: I translated our chat logs so everyone reading this will understand.)
“Hey, so you just joined the party huh?”
“holy shit, did something happen when i was asleep? did they revive yahoo?”
She took a while to type, then she replied.
“Yes”
“Why are you cursing?”
That’s a bit weird, she used to be keen with no cursing when she was young but with college, she became a potty mouth. I figured this was a joke, she wanted to re-enact like we were 6th graders.
“sorry”. I replied.
“did you do the homework miss hoa gave us?”, she asked, she was really into this act, I thought.
“no, but what will that old broad do anyway? let’s rebel!”, I giggled while typing because we both hated miss H when we were in 6th grade.
Then, she took another while.
“I think we should kill her.”
“I’ve been thinking about it since the day I saw her.”
“Okay, that is… a little too far into this whole shtick”. I thought to myself. I was thinking of a way to respond to this joke in a way that’s not too harsh but still funny enough to end this whole gimmick. Then, she bombarded me with texts. I will list some of the weirdest ones for you guys.
“I know there is a little hole the size of a dog in her kitchen that face the back alley”
“I want to hammer her head like meat”
“Please go, please, esaelp, kill her, llik rhe”
“Tonight is a perfect time for manhunt”
Then, a bombardment of laughing stickers, it was constantly sent with the speed of light, filling up my ears to the point that I was nauseous, I took off my earplugs but the horrible laughter still echoes throughout, filled up the whole room with distorted sounds that I thought was from hell. I crawled to my bed in pure shock from horror to text my friend to stop. Then, it stopped.
I thought to myself that she saw my message and decided to stop this creepy ass, completely out of time, cruel joke. As I gathered enough strength to walk back to my desk, I received the last message from the account.
“Fine”, then I was blocked, completely flabbergasted from what just happened. When I checked my phone, she blocked me on every other social medias, even my phone number too.
Whether she somehow got the personality of a method actor, or the complete insanity to actually become a killer… both seemed out of reach to me. I talked with my other friends to ask them if they have gotten into the same joke, that’s when I realized two things. First, no one seemed to have any memory of talking to her since elementary school, even the one that went to the same college as her (or so I remember). Second, no one has heard of anything about a “Yahoo Revival”.
A sudden chill ran through my neck to my spine, I looked at my seemingly normal computer, and its screen still updating messages and the people online. I was too stunned to even reply back to my friends, as if something was pushing my mental to use this computer. I went on to look for Miss Hoa’s account.
Strangely enough, I was friends with Miss Hoa on Yahoo. I might be a cringy kid back then, but I completely had a hatred for the education system back then, when I was having trouble and no one tried to help, how could I even talk for hours with a teacher? I scrolled the chat logs, what makes it even weirder was that I talked to her about literally everything. And she was acting like my mom, the compliments, the soothing, the “maternal” talks that were borderline grooming and pedophilic gagged me to my throat. I could never imagine or even fathom the idea of some sick fuck that wanted or even thought of doing this, it was way out of my imagination that someone could plan this whole thing out.
I went to the bathroom to vomit, and I was too scared to go back to my room, so I stayed in the living room for the whole afternoon, it seemed like my soul has left my body and I was just an empty husk, staring at the TV with no purpose. After 3 grueling hours of staring and my parents asking me non-stop about what happened, I decided to walk back to my room and throw this whole shit out. That was way more than enough, after that, I’m gonna go to a monastery and get myself a fucking exorcism.
I hesitantly opened my room, it’s January in southern Vietnam, so it should be warm enough for a t-shirt and shorts, but the moment I walked into my room, it was dreadfully cold, the type of cold that I have never experienced before, the type of cold that wanted to suck out every warmth I have in my body. The monitor was still up and running, lighting up my desk, I looked at it and was spooked with a new message, this time, it was from Miss Hoa.
“why have you been so silent”
“i know you’re seeing this”
“you have been away for too long dear”
“are you keeping any secret from mommy”
“you are making mommy very sad”
“i am sad sad sad sad sad”
“ sad sad sad sad sad”
“ sad sad sad sad sad sad sad sad sad sad”
“there is someone in my house”
I was frozen to my seat, I had no courage or strength left in me to close the damn app, I was on the verge of tears. my whole body felt like it was undergone some type of Medieval torture. I sat looking at the chat bubble stopping at the last message to what felt like an eternity. Then, another chat bubble showed up from an anonymous account.
It attached a blurry picture from what seemed like it was taken from a desktop camera in the dark, it was pitch black so I couldn’t see anything. Then, another picture came, this time, it was dimly lit but I still couldn’t see jack shit. Then, the pictures of the same dark room kept coming every one minute, until I realized what seemed like a red tint coming from the flash. I tried my very best to block out the possibility of what I’ve already known, this time, the horror was too much and I started whimpering, then, after 10 minutes or so, I saw a horribly disfigured finger lying on a pool of blood, as if someone was violently cracking every possible bone of it barehanded. And then came the image of my “friend” holding the mutilated finger and smiling at the camera, her eyes were devoid of any life, her smile was grinned upward to her cheekbones, revealing what seemed like flesh meat the middle of her teeth cracks and the rotted gum with oozing pus, then came the pictures of her holding a mallet, and then the last one was just pure red filling up the whole picture. At this point, the fear was more than enough to activate every neuron in my brain, I was overflowed with adrenaline, I didn’t even bother to unplug the computer, I ran straight out, crying out every possible liquid in my body.
My mom, dad and brother came running to me, I couldn’t stop crying and stuttering something about that computer. My brother went into my room to check it out, to his amusement, he laughed out loud, saying I was crying over “looking at the computer”. My mom and dad walked me into my room to check, the computer…strangely did not even have Yahoo on, it was just a normal desktop screen. I was able to center myself, I think my mom and dad said something about keeping it because it’s still working, I did not hear any of that. I yanked out every cord, told my brother to help me carry them downstairs to sell it. I was adamant that I must get this computer out of my house or else I will leave the house and never come back. My parents shrugged it off, thinking I was throwing a fit because I wanted some extra money, and told me to sell if if that’s what I wanted.
My brother hopped on the motorbike and drove me holding the monitor and the computer, he was constantly picking on me about the crying fit I threw earlier like the asshole he is, but I kept silent because I’m still trying to stop shaking and try to forget that horrific scene I just saw and that horrible smile. My brother just kept talking and I was busy trying to think how to not think, we didn’t realize that there was another bike that drove next to us, next thing I know, the computer was snatched off my hand, and the monitor fell on the ground, shattered by a car that drove right on it. My brother wanted to chase after them, but I told him to stop. I just wanted this nightmare to end. It took some reasonings and none of them really satisfied my brother, but there was no way for us to go after the muggers, so we went home. I lied to my parents that I sold it for 1 million (I had to bribe my brother so he would keep his mouth shut about all this). That night was the first night I slept with my brother since I was 7. I was having nightmares throughout the whole night.
I woke up to the news of a relative that found miss Hoa dead in her room this morning, according to my friend who was her neighbor, she was decapitated, and her head was smashed into a chunk of meat, no one could even make out which body part was which. I couldn’t muster a word. My dad took us to go to my grandparents house this afternoon. When I was in the passenger seat looking at the city and the crowd, I saw a rugged, skinny man driving a worn down Honda Cub, that red helmet was to no surprise, looked just like behind him was a little girl with pigtails in uniform of my old secondary school. The little girl then turned pale and her jaw started to fall off as she started shaking her head uncontrollably, then they disappear into the traffic.
I guess that computer has found its next victim.