If you’re triggered by horror stories with babies and the reality of what sometimes happens, even if you don’t believe what I’m about to tell you, I must warn you that this story might trigger you. I used to have a wife and a son: a family. This is the story of how I ended up all alone.
It started on our son’s second birthday. We moved to a house in the middle of a cornfield that used to belong to a farmer who died. The family didn’t want the house, and the farm had been destroyed by fires because of idiots thinking a plant is a good place to put out your cigarette, so there wasn’t a lot of value to the land and the house was pretty cheap too. We weren’t really that interested in farming and would much rather have nature around the house, so we were letting it grow as it pleased, letting the plot be nature’s playground and just kept to ourselves in the house. It all sounded perfect, until it wasn’t.
During that day, on my son’s birthday, everything seemed normal, apart from one or two things that kept feeling off. We started the day by getting ready, as usual. It was a Saturday, so we were going to have the entire family around and went to do some extra shopping early so we could have some extra food for lunch, just in case. We got up, got ready, and I went downstairs. Kissed my wife on her head, which smelled a bit strange that morning, but I ignored it. I stepped into the living room to grab my shirt from the laundry basket, and when I came back two seconds later, my wife was gone. When I called out for her, she responded from upstairs.
I tried to explain it to her, but she just said I was imagining things and that she had been upstairs the entire time getting dressed. I took her word for it and we went through breakfast without incident.
Later, the same thing happened at the supermarket. I was picking a package of pasta up, looked up and saw my wife snuggling our son with her back to the shopping cart, swaying from side to side in a way I hadn’t seen her do before, but I thought maybe it was something new she learnt. She was always trying to find a new way to keep the baby comfortable, so I thought that would be one more. I dropped the pasta into the shopping cart, told her I’d be right back and walked to the aisle adjacent to that one to pick up eggs when my wife turned the corner with two packages of eggs in her hands.
I looked back at our son, confused and scared, and there he was, sitting inside the shopping cart as he should be, by himself. I picked him up and hugged him in an attempt to actually comfort myself rather than him.
We made our way home and the preparations started. You wouldn’t believe the amount of food we had, but then again, half the family was coming! By the end of it, both me and my wife were completely exhausted and our son was napping at any point he could. We put him to bed at around eight pm and stayed up until around eleven pm just talking, watching TV and discussing the shows we were watching. I thought I heard something, somewhere outside the house, at some point, but looked around and couldn’t see anything through the windows, so I just left it.
Before we actually went to bed, my wife went into the bedroom as I checked on our son. I tucked him in, triple checked all the windows to make sure they were locked, and when I came back outside… Where was my wife?
I was pretty sure she had walked into the bedroom, but there was no one there. I closed the windows, locked them and did the same with my office and our spare bedroom. When I called out for my wife, she answered from downstairs. My heart stopped, doubt seeping into my head. Was I going crazy? I could swear I just saw her right here!
I was starting to feel like I just needed to get some sleep, just needed to rest and I would stop seeing things like this. I was trying to do just that, when everything turned to the worst nightmare possible.
During the night, I kept waking up to small noises in the house, like creaks, branches hitting the windows, pipes creaking or our son moving in his crib over the baby monitor. I would end up falling asleep, but I slept for the last time at around two AM.
Again, I woke up with small noises bothering me and had no idea why. I was starting to feel lost and frustrated, especially because my wife seemed to be sleeping fine the entire time. I tried to shake her awake, but she was a heavy sleeper and I didn’t want to make her as tired as me at this point.
I sat up in bed, trying to take deep breaths to invite sleep back in, when I thought I heard something coming from the baby monitor. For a moment I kept my ears perked to be sure, and when I didn’t hear anything else, I decided to go check just in case.
I got up, walked as silently as I could through the house until I got to my son’s bedroom. I put my ear to the door to see if I could hear anything, but it seemed silent. I pushed the door slowly open, and there he was, sleeping, undisturbed. The only one disturbed in the house seemed to be me!
I made my way back to the bedroom and covered myself to the chin to try to snuggle back to sleep, when I heard noise coming from my son’s bedroom. I sat up immediately and kept hearing for five more seconds before I thought I heard a weird voice coming through the baby monitor.
I shot up, waking up my wife, who just started asking what was going on. I looked for the first weapon I could find, which happened to be a small sword letter opener, and rushed to his bedroom faster than I ever remember.
When I opened the bedroom door, I thought I had to be having a hyper-realistic nightmare. My eyes had to be deceiving me or someone had to be pulling some sort of prank on me. What I was seeing was completely impossible.
In front of me, next to his crib, our baby was being held up and contemplated by a person turning their back to me. A person that could not be who they appeared to be.
I heard footsteps coming from my side and looked over to see my wife, who stopped in place and started asking me what was happening. I couldn’t stop my eyes from looking back and forth between the two images. To my side, was my wife with a worried look on her expectant face, looking for answers.
In front of me was my wife, her back turned to me while she held our baby in the air and swung him side to side carefully. I felt like I was in a horror movie, my breath completely stuck inside my throat when whatever this thing was, holding my baby, turned its head towards me and kept its eyes on me for a moment.
That’s when I could tell which one was not my wife. This thing, holding my baby up, had eyes milky white, like it was completely blind, but somehow it still felt like it could see me. Still frozen in place, trying to figure out what was happening, I could see more details: this thing had weird wet skin that seemed stretched too far over its bones. Its hairline was pulled way farther back than my wife’s hair, almost like something tried to dress it in my wife’s skin but they couldn’t pull it over its head far enough, the mouth hanging slightly open with the lips stretched and a smile open way too wide. The limbs seemed strangely long, the arms stretched out almost like a bat’s wings.
It seemed to smile at me slightly, its milky eyes cutting wider across its face, when a scream deafened my left ear. My wife had finally approached me and seen what was going on in the bedroom and couldn’t contain her reaction.
With the scream, I stumbled to the side, and this thing seemed to have been hit in the weak spot. It dropped our baby back into the crib, throwing its hands over its ears and stumbling to the side of the bedroom with a loud, panic-inducing screech and launching itself outside through the window, shattering the glass. I immediately ran over to our son and held him against me, him screaming his lungs out, probably as shocked as me.
I looked out the window and saw this thing making tracks through the cornfield into the distance, disappearing into the far treeline.
We didn’t sleep a wink through the rest of the night and for the next few days I stayed home with my wife and our son to make sure everyone was safe. We called the police and explained everything. I knew they wouldn’t believe us, but at least someone could be informed that something was going on. Something had definitely broken the window and made tracks through the field. I also bought cameras to put all around the outside of the house to make sure we could see it if this thing ever came around again.
After this, for months, everything seemed to go quiet. Thinking back now, I think it was quiet so we could be put at ease.
Eventually, months later, I stopped checking the cameras every five minutes or at all. My wife was less stressed and we were talking about moving away so we could actually feel relaxed without the image of this thing imprinted into our brains every time we heard a tiny noise at night. Relaxing was my biggest mistake until now.
I bought motion detecting cameras, so I would get a notification on my phone every time a bird flew by or a raccoon made its way across the front of the porch with stolen cat food from the closest neighbours in its hands. Eventually, I would look at the feed if I got a notification around the time my wife would usually get home, but that was it. That last day, I got the notification. I looked at the feed and there she was, approaching the house with her set of keys in hand and our son in her arms just picked up from preschool.
I smiled at the feed and went back to work. I had one more hour of work before I could go back home and we had a weekend of fun ahead of us that I couldn’t wait to get to!
I turned my eyes back to the computer screen and got another notification soon after, but assumed it was some animal walking across and just kept working through the rest of the hour.
It wasn’t until I got home that something seemed off. My wife hadn’t picked up my call while I was driving home, but she wouldn’t if she was giving our son a bath, so I didn’t panic. When I stopped the car at our door, though, my heart rate shot up. For a second, I just watched. When I managed to, I slid out of the car, my eyes fixated on our fully open house door, everything inside too quiet for my comfort. Inside, I was wishing that everything was ok and this was just a false alarm.
I walked inside and called around for my wife, but there was no noise inside the house apart from my voice and footsteps. There was no one there and my wife wasn’t picking up her phone.
In a panic, I started checking all the footage, rewinding the feed back an hour to the moment my wife got home to see if she had gone back out without me checking the notifications. What I saw brought me complete panic, tears to my eyes and rage at the same time as a feeling of complete uselessness.
The feed showed a normal outside image, nothing irregular until I could see my wife arrive. A car stopped in front of the door - her friend’s - and she stepped out holding our son, said goodbye and thank you and walked to the door, unlocking it and pushing it open while her friend’s car went out of view. Two minutes went by, the door shut and no movement anywhere, when something caught my eye on one of the picture’s corners. What seemed like my wife’s head, suddenly popped up out of the corn, way too tall to have been her.
Slowly it made its way to the door, this thing’s gigantic limbs finally showing up out of the corn, its head still wearing my wife’s disfigured face making my heart pump so hard that I started feeling sick. As it came closer to the door, it seemed to shrink slightly. Then it climbed onto the porch, approached the camera slowly, the milky eyes completely mismatching the face and a mischievous, malicious smile slashed across its face.
It knocked on the door, and wobbled away out of sight. My horror grew and my eyes widened as I watched this and slowly covered my mouth. My wife showed up at the door and opened it. When nothing showed up, she stepped outside to look around, and when she did, this thing jumped her, wrapped its arms around her and immobilised her completely, pulling her slowly out of the frame. For about 2 minutes, I couldn’t see anything. I had tears rolling down my eyes and I wanted to go outside and call for her, but couldn’t leave the screen at the same time.
When this thing came back, it had taken my wife’s form completely, leaving only the milky eyes, making it look like she was just a blind woman. It stepped up to the porch, smiled at the camera and went inside. Then, the image went completely still for a while, until this thing came back outside holding my son in its now normal arms and turned to where it had dragged my wife before.
That was the last time I saw my family. I contacted the police and showed them the footage. It’s been years and the investigation is still open. I don’t think they even tried to look for them. I’ve led a lot of searches for them around the area, but nothing turned up. All I have now are the memories of them and the footage I refuse to watch again. I have my wife’s voice in some WhatsApp messages and videos of my son on my phone, and I wish that if you ever see anything like this around your house and around your family, don’t try to contact anyone and don’t try to do something you think is smart before you move away. Just go. That’s all I ask!