Hey Nosleep. My name is Malcolm. I’ve only discovered this subreddit recently, and I feel as though I need to share my story. Or a few.
I live in a town beyond reason. Beyond any aspect of normality, really. Strange stuff goes on here, and that’s not an exaggeration, because as far as I know, it is completely off the map and nestled somewhere deep within Nevada. Society must have forgotten about us, otherwise you’d think men in black suits would be swarming this place at this point. But no. I’ve lived here all my life and will probably stay here until I die. Not like I have a choice anyway.
No one wants to leave, or can. Sometimes I feel like the only sane person here.
Allow me to elaborate. I live in Wickerwood, a small town with a population of 1200-1500 people. It’s enclosed on all sides by 4 mountain ranges, trapping us in a small valley. We are perpetually stuck in the Fall season it seems. Year round the leaves are shades of orange, yellow and red, and any deviation from that is considered weird, which is ironic. Wickerwood is the town of green lawns, abnormally happy neighbors, and existential horrors and oddities. Cool, huh?
I work at a coffee shop near the middle of town and it’s relatively easy work. During my off hours I very loosely follow some of the crazy things that go on here, which is pretty easy, considering there’s something happening almost everyday.
I realize now how cryptic I was being by saying we can’t leave. We can, more or less. People leave all the time, but they always come back. At the far end of town lies a tunnel leading through the mountain range, and into the outside world. There were a few people I knew who left, but a day later they came back, and they came back different.
The first occurrence I know of happened years ago. A week prior to the event, the Kirk family announced their plan to leave and to never come back. We all gave our sad goodbyes and tokens of appreciation for their contribution to our town, waving as we watched their car pass into the tunnel, the darkness lit dimly by their lights. When they returned, their car slowly screeched out from the shadows. They drove down the main road, and everyone stopped what they were doing and watched. Nothing ever came out of that tunnel. They only went in.
I was working my shift at the local coffee shop when I heard audible gasps and the sound of a distressed crowd outside. Mr. and Mrs. Kirk sat in their car, “eyes” straight ahead, fixated on the road. That wasn’t what frightened people so much, though. It was their faces.
They looked like dolls, almost. Skin too smooth to be real, like plastic. Have you ever seen those Barbie or Ken dolls where someone messed up the paint job? An eye or both of them are slightly off center, or the mouth is a little out of place. That’s what they looked like. Mr. Kirk sat there, unmoving, unblinking. His right eye strayed a little too far to the right, and Mrs. Kirk wore a large, fake grin that sat nestled a little too close to her nose. I couldn’t get a solid look at their son, but I could see bandages. They were wrapped around his head, leaving room for one singular eye to peek through. No mouth or nose holes. The family pulled into their driveway, went inside, and never came out.
From then on we’ve only had a few more people try and leave. Each time, the same result. They came back slightly altered, different. They never spoke to anyone, never left their home. I would pass their houses occasionally, and the blinds would be drawn completely. Nothing to see but thick condensation on the glass of their windows. From then on, everyone kind of gave up.
~
Excluding not being able to leave and the doll-people, there’s an unimaginable amount of things that could go wrong and have gone wrong in this town. For example, there was this thing going on for a while, where if someone used a certain metaphor, it would quite literally happen right before their eyes. Last year there was a play being done at the town elementary school, and all the kids had to be rushed to the hospital on account of their broken legs. You can probably guess what was said to them. A friend of mine showed me a video a parent took, and I couldn’t shake the sound of about 10 or 11 bones snapping all at once for about a month.
A similar thing happened when I was on break at work. I was sitting with my co-workers eating lunch, when they said they were so hungry they could eat a horse. Lo and behold, a dead horse popped into existence and slammed onto the table, complete with a fork and steak knife.
Here’s a small list of occurrences in which a metaphor or idiom was taken a little too seriously by some unseen force in Wickerwood:
Mrs. Lowitt became a horrid abomination of a human shaped as a fiddle, which happened after someone told her she was as fit as a fiddle.
Old man Hackett down the street from me grew large ears and resorted to navigating purely by animalistic clicks after he was described as being blind as a bat.
Some guy was found dead in his home from internal brain hemorrhaging after an apple took the place of his left eye. Funny thing is his lover was never found. She was the apple of his eye.
Two dudes from my old highschool became conjoined twins starting at the lower half of their bodies. They were best friends and couldn’t be without each other. One might even say they were joined at the hip.
Everyone stopped talking to Joey down at the auto body shop after deep slashes and gouges would appear on their bodies after he spoke to them. He killed himself after months of no human contact. His words cut deeper than a knife.
A woman and her kids rushed what looked like a giant human sized potato into the emergency room, screaming their heads off. Turned out to be their father. He loved his spot on the couch a little too much apparently.
One of the local volunteers at the animal shelter dropped dead after their heart was replaced with solid gold.
After everyone in town caught on, we avoided metaphors, idioms, similes, anything of the sort for a good while. Old people were treated like they had the plague because it was a common stereotype that they used them the most. It wasn’t until last year that the whole thing kind of died off and everything went back to normal. I’m just glad it didn’t rain often, and if it did, it wasn’t particularly hard. I don’t know if I’d be able to handle seeing all those cats and dogs on the pavement.
~
Last week was pretty weird. It’s probably one of the more disturbing things I’ve seen and experienced that year.
Come Monday, people on Edmund St started complaining about a foul smell. It was murky and sulfuric, like a swamp burning or a bad batch of eggs in an oven. As the week progressed, it was evident the effect it had on the surrounding air. The plants and trees nearby began to wilt and die, people’s pets came up missing. It wasn’t until someone’s kid disappeared that the town began to suspect something foul was going on.
Now, in Wickerwood, we almost never suspected each other. 9 times out of 10, it was something brought on by the town. That’s how we discovered it when we sweeped the streets.
People searched every nook and cranny whilst the cops got to searching houses.
On Edmund St there’s a few unoccupied houses, old suburban homes, still in good condition mind you, that no one’s moved into yet. They sit there empty and collecting dust and no one pays them any mind. Only when the search party was organized was when we found out the source of the smell and missing kid.
Everyone clamored around a house nestled between two two story homes. We all gathered around on the lawn. The story was a cop onto the porch, only to vanish a second later, screams and the sound of bones splintering coming from within the house.
The house itself was worse off than the titans of industrial suburbia that stood on Edmund St. The paint was flaking off, precipitation ‘eeking through the cracks of the wood used to build it. Yellowish clear fluid seeped from the windows and underneath the door, small spirals of a red fluid mixed in. The blinds were drawn completely shut, looking as if something was pushing them against the window. They shifted ever so slightly.
We stood for a solid 5 minutes before anyone gathered the courage to step back up onto the porch. Officer Harper grabbed his shotgun and took one slow footstep after another, reaching a shaky hand towards the doorknob like a scene from a horror movie. He slowly turned it and opened the door.
He was snatched up in an instant, a large tongue-like appendage wrapping around his torso. It nearly squeezed him in half before pulling him into a gaping maw filled with spiraling sharp teeth, like a lamprey. It enveloped the entirety of the doorframe. He went in vertically and struggled against the pink flesh of the house before it gave one last tug. His spine snapped, he bent like a paperclip, and down it’s gullet he went.
The air erupted with gunfire and screaming. The remaining police officers lit the house up with bullet after bullet. A futile effort. That only pissed the thing off.
The house creaked and groaned, a gurgling screech piercing our ears and forcing our hands to our heads. Wood splintered and glass shattered. Veiny pink semi-translucent flesh occupied every space inside of the house. The door slammed open and closed violently, the house’s tongue lashing out and reaching for the nearest living thing. The attic window ahead fractured, and from behind it a large yellow eye boring animalistic daggers into us. The house shook and the air fogged up with that same stink that had been bothering Edmund St since that monday.
Everyone was sent to their homes by the Sheriff. I could still hear the thing’s demonic screaming from my place 4 or 5 streets over.
I didn’t sleep well that night. I drove past the house the next day and it was gone. No trace of the house except for a black, wet and muddy smudge where it once stood. Something tells me they were lucky when clearing it out. I can’t imagine how difficult it would’ve been if the house had a basement.
~
Do you ever get the feeling you’re being watched? Like something has it’s unholy gaze on you and is waiting to strike with hungry teeth and claws?
It was early in the morning and the entirety of Wickerwood was greeted with that very feeling. The forecast was cloudy and the sky threatened to cry. It churned gray and black, and there was a loud boom emanating just above the clouds. I’d hear the occasional scream here and there, the residents waking to our newest anomalous weather.
Splat, splat, splat
My window sounded like someone was slapping a raw steak against it. I drew the blinds and nearly passed out. Just on the other side of the glass were three eyeballs of different colors, floating in place. Their optic nerves were still attached, hanging uselessly below them. They followed my every move, slowly turning in place to meet my position. There was something about these eyes. They held an unseen intelligence. Like there was a motive behind their cold, unfeeling gaze.
More eyes fell from above, some stopping just before their impact with the ground, others exploding into jelly upon contact. The ones that didn’t burst like a balloon floated around aimlessly, peering into windows and following people down the street.
I just closed the blinds and stayed inside all day till the sound of eyeballs meeting concrete died out.
Hours after the eyeball rain passed, I stepped outside. The ground was littered with the corpses of our optical observers. Just below my bedroom window lay 3 of them, deflated, dry, swarming with ants. Good riddance. The street cleaners had fun with this one, that’s for sure.
~
Some parents here try to shield their children from the horrors of this place. They tell them lies and easy explanations for the heinous things that go on. But it was imperative to my parents that they warn me, as I was the ripe age of 6 years old when they sat me down and told me things aren’t as they seem here. That monsters lurk in the shadows, that there are things even mommy and daddy can’t save you from, things no one could explain. From that day forward, I was a little more aware of the things that go on here in Wickerwood. Abby from school hissed at me with a forked tongue after I pinched her to see what would happen; That gargoyle watching over us kids on the roof of the school wasn’t just a concrete statue; The green glowing ooze dripping from the lockers wasn’t just the plumbing; It all began to make sense, and I grew fearful of my surroundings.
That didn’t completely snuff out my childish curiosity, though.
Out past the Western side of the town there’s a forest of white birch and aspen trees. As a child, it was embedded in my head that I was not to venture out there. I heard rumors from my friends in middle school. It was bears, the fear of getting a cold, simple things like that. But I knew better. 10 year old me stood at the edge of the forest, armed with an off-brand swiss army knife, a backpack full of water and snacks, and a burning melting pot of anxiety, fear, and inquisition in my head.
The first half-mile venture was nothing special. Nothing but dead leaves, pale trees, and scraped knees. I trudged along with a walking stick in one hand, and a bag of trail mix in another. I simply could not understand the reason why my parents warned me not to come here. It was nature, fresh air. There was lots to do among the trees. My anxiety faded to nothing more than a dull ache in the back of my emotions. I was even starting to have some fun.
I don’t know why I didn’t stop then and there when the fog rolled in. I passed a threshold where the sun no longer met the Earth, instead I was enveloped in a cold like no other Nevada cold I’ve ever felt. The mist stuck to my skin in droplets and I became clammy and uncomfortable in my own skin. Still, I kept onward.
Soon it was too late to turn back. The fog was so thick I couldn’t see more than 3 or 4 feet in front of me, and the trees towered over me like bleached skeletons. Ahead in the distance I saw what looked like a person. I brandished my utility knife and called out to it, only to be met with silence and creaking wood. The figure swayed ever so slightly, appearing to float in place. I very wearily approached until I could make out what I was seeing.
It was a person, yes. But one that succumbed to the will of the trees.
Before me, anchored to the ground with thick roots, a body floated. How it was floating is unbeknownst to me. The body itself was bloated, blue, and cold. Roots wormed in and out of it’s torso, pulsing with a worm-like intensity. The face itself resembled that of a man. He stared blankly ahead like a mannequin. There was no life behind those eyes, but a shallow breath escaped his lips, piercing the fog with icy air.
As if some god-forsaken cliche was happening in a movie, the fog cleared slightly, and allowed me to see the other victims that had fallen to the trees. Bodies sat suspended in gravity by parasitic roots, all in various stages of decay. Some coughed and sputtered, some reached out with rotting appendages, others were long dead skeletons wrapped in leathery skin and hair.
I can’t even remember running. Roots began snaking toward me and I ran faster than a bullet shot from a gun. Freezing air tore my lungs apart and by the time I reached the edge of the forest once more, I laid in a heap crying and sputtering.
Once I mustered enough courage to get back up and return home, I feared reparations from my parents. But as I stood there, a blabbering mess of snot and tears, they looked at me with remorse painted on their faces. They didn’t yell, they didnt punish me. Just comforted me until I calmed down. I suppose they figured I learned my lesson, and were just glad I was home safe. From then on, every word that came out of their mouths I followed almost religiously.
~
You’re probably starting to get the gist of this place. Things happen here that you do not hear about in the real world. I’ve tried talking about this on other social media, but no one ever listens. They think it’s all a hoax, or that I’m insane. That’s why I turned here.
These are only some of the anomalous and downright terrifying things that happen here. Wickerwood has its fair share of cryptids, legends, ghost stories, and everything in between. Updates may soon come.
Any ideas or opinions about this place would be greatly appreciated. Thank you for reading.