When was the last time you felt truly scared? I’m talking about that frozen in place type of reaction where your face and your butt cheeks tense up at the same time. That type of fear where your feet feel like they’re encased in concrete, but your stomach is hovering over you like a twisted halo. What we saw that afternoon in Mumble House was a fright so surreal that I still wear my halo to this day, ten years later…
We were a group of young teens with a common thirst for thrills. Horror fanatics. The type of kids you’d see doodling Jason Vorhees on their 5-subject notebooks. Halloween wasn’t just one night a year for us, it was every day and in varying degrees. We were the kids who were wearing out tapes in our VHS players from repeated watch-throughs. Ask any of us how many times we’d watched A Nightmare Before Christmas and you’d see our eyes roll back in our heads, grasping at a number without limit.
Every day after school we’d scour the internet for the most convincing supernatural videos we could find. Anything that could produce that addictive jolt on the receiving end of a jump-scare, or a slow and shaky camera panning over something unnatural and wrong, That was the shit we lived for. We were on every supernatural blog we could find, to the point where we had each member of our 5-person crew dedicated to one branch of the supernatural:
Addy was our ghost/poltergeist/specter specialist. Anything related to haunted houses, ghostly appearances, apparitions, she was on the pulse. Or I guess lack thereof.
Destiny was our cryptozoologist. That’s your Bigfoots, your Jersey Devils, your Loch Ness, basically any creature feature. Her bedroom was a mess of yarn-addled pictures connecting and tracking of all sorts of terrifying yet still somewhat natural beasties.
Bartholomew handled what I would consider to be some of the scariest content available. He was a master of the macabre, specifically the horrors that belonged not to monsters, but to men. Your Bundy’s, Dahmer’s, and Gacy types. Bart also got to flex the title of Iron Stomach, seemingly unphased by crime scene photos that would cause grown men to dry heave.
Desmond was our go-to Occultist. Which was incredibly ironic as his father was the leader of our small town’s local parish. Fortunately, his deep-seated religious upbringing gave him access to the church library, and with it all the old texts on anything demon related.
Lastly, we come to me, a relatively quiet farm boy who had a passion for folk horror. All your classic tall tales like Hansel and Gretel, The Wicker Man, Krampus; basically anything tied to mythology and folklore. I grew up with access to a huge library and not a lot to do in terms of entertainment at the farm. By the time I was 12 years old I had a near unnecessary knowledge of myths and monsters from all over the world.
It was a Thursday afternoon, shortly after school ended and we all retired to our homes to jump into MSN Messenger and start sending links and ideas back and forth. The five of us had been workshopping the idea of starting a YouTube channel and hitting up some nearby supernatural hot spots in our area but living in a small farm town, hours from the nearest city, there wasn’t really anything worth checking out. The most important thing for us was authenticity. We were well aware of many fakers out there, setting up practical effects and even using the very primitive level of CGI at the time (the early 2000s meant that good effects were locked behind a minimum price tag of a few thousand dollars) to fake some near-believable spooks. Of course, we knew the telltale signs of what to watch out for.
Most of our time sending videos back and forth was used to analyze the scariest and most popular videos frame by frame to expose the fakes. In our eyes, we had a responsibility to the rest of the more gullible believers. Someone had to be vigilant against what was fake so that when something irrefutable finally surfaced, there was a standard by which we could prove or disprove a video. To this day, the Mumble House video still runs on repeat in my head despite it being scrubbed from the internet entirely.
“You guys are going to absolutely PISS yourselves with this one,” Desmond’s signature excitement blinked through my computer monitor.
“Before I link it though, I need to add some context because I’m literally still shaking. My dad slid some mail under my door after he got home today. Got my “cursed coin” from The National Inquirer finally! So that was a nice surprise.”
“Interestingly enough though, I got a personal letter as well. No return address, red sharpie for my address, terrible handwriting. Even LOOKING at it gives me the creeps. Can’t believe pops didn’t open it himself. Must have been too concentrated on his sermon for mass this weekend. I’m thankful he didn’t because you guys are NOT going to believe this. All the letter had was a handwritten link to a website, all numbers and letters, and when I typed it into my address bar it took me to a video link and a timer.”
“I just watched it, twice, and the hairs on my neck are still on end. Destiny, you’re going to have a heyday with this one”
Immediately after his last message he sent the link. The timer on the webpage blinked like every cheesy action movie’s bomb timer. Red font on a black background flashed 40:23, ticking down by the second with every other flash. I dimmed the lights in my room until I was in total darkness (thanks, blackout curtains) and readied myself for something spooky.
The video starts out with an approach down an overgrown road. Birch and poplar trees nearly blot out the sun as the camera approaches the only discernable structure; a two-story house with only one window. Despite the incredible amount of overgrowth around the house, the structure itself looked like it was in good condition. The sky-blue paint on the siding looked almost inviting, but in spite of the calming choice of color, you could tell this house had an aura to it.
The cameraman advances towards the front door where there’s a pull-chain attached to the doorframe. Odd, considering houses around here usually either have a doorbell or what Bart used to call a “goth-knocker”, those giant steel horseshoe-shaped chunks of metal on a hinge that you can slam down against the door for a hilariously rude sounding announcement of your presence.
The cameraman goes to reach for the pull chain but before his gloved hand can reach it, the audio turns to alarmingly loud static as he falls backward from the door and the camera points skyward for 28 seconds, the static thrumming up and down in volume and slowly fading as he starts to pick himself up.
After a shuffle to his feet, the camera pans over to the single window – a rather large window 4 feet wide and 6 feet tall. The type of window shape you’d attribute to a church’s stained-glass aesthetic, although instead of bright colors and shapes this window looked like it was spraypainted black from the inside. Or at least it appeared that way until something porcelain white zipped across the width of the window from right to left, towards the front door.
The cameraman falls backwards once again, the corners of the lens of his camera cracking and splintering, rendering the rest of the footage slightly blocked as he stands back up onto his feet. The rest of the video is where the skepticism ramps up 100%.
The static returns, but beneath the crisp crackling of the audio you can hear a low mumbling. I would say “human” mumbling but the Indiscernible vowels and consonants run together far faster than any mouth I’ve ever encountered could speak. Barely louder than the static itself the mumbles peak and then stop suddenly, just before the camera pans up towards the roof.
Something so black its contours and features don’t even show on the surprisingly high-resolution video rolls off the roof and falls towards the cameraman. He shrieks an ear-piercing scream that seems to last an eternity until the (boulder?) collides with him. The next 15 seconds of the video are etched into my mind as clear as day as if I were there watching…
The camera, upon the collision of the roof boulder-type-thing, lands serendipitously on its bottom a few feet back from the crumpled twitching body of the cameraman. Just out of focus on the far left of the camera’s screen this blackened mass starts to roll towards the door. No static this time, the indiscernible mumbling starts again, almost blowing out the speakers on my desk. I fumble to turn the volume down, knocking over my mouse and knee-jerking my legs into the keyboard tray of my desk so hard my entire setup jumps with me, my eyes glued to the screen the entire time. The front door to the house opens about a meter and then what I can only describe as a cane with a rug attached to it, bent in two spots like knuckles, hooks onto the jeans of the man and pulls his body into the house within a second – a distance we estimate to be 6 feet from the door (how it could pull an average size man so far so fast, we don’t know), as it slams shut and the video cuts to black. For a single second, an address flashes up on the screen: Township Road 442, Old Cedar Crest, mile marker 10. I audibly gulped, my stomach officially in my throat, and braced myself for a second watch through as my Messenger notifications dinged softly in the background, miles away from my mind.
Old Cedar Crest was not only close to our town, but within biking distance from my place. Tomorrow we ride out with our own cameras to see what’s really going on here.
There was a feeling beyond electricity in the air. The five of us had watched the Mystery Video as many times in a row as we could before the link expired. Mostly to try and debunk what we could, but also as a sort of preparation for the trip out today. We met up in the library an hour before class to discuss our plan for after school.
“There’s no way that video is real ”. The words stuck to Desmond’s mouth in between bites of his granola bar. “I analyzed as much as I could, frame by frame, and it’d be easy enough to fake the face that zoomed past the window. The “limb” that grabbed the cameraman could easily have been slapped together in a garage with some canes, pieces of rug, and staples. I’m not buying it.”
“Yeah, well what about how fast that body got pulled through the door? That man was easily 180 lbs”, Destiny replied in the synchronicity of her eyes rolling. “I’m no expert on animatronics or anything like that, but unless they had some sort of pulley system rigged up… I don’t see how you can move anything that heavy so fast with such a skinny-looking implement. As fake as that cane-leg-thingy looked, it was definitely too flimsy to hold weight, sure. Still can’t figure that one out, but otherwise, this all feels like something fake.”
“You guys DO realize this is EXACTLY how kids like us end up on the back of a milk carton, right?”
Leave it to Bart to point out the best way to get kidnapped and murdered, but he was definitely right, I thought to myself.
If I’m being honest, there’s literally nothing short of locking us all away in a bunker and sealing it off with concrete that could keep us away from that house. Sleep the night prior was hard enough for all of us. We finished our meeting with sunken eyes and eager hearts as we got ready to plod through the monotony of the school day. Once classes were done, our day truly started.
We met at my place, my parents always worked late so we had the whole house to ourselves to prepare for the trek out to Old Cedar Crest. It would be an hour on our bikes to get there and luckily the school year was almost done so we had daylight until 10 pm this late into June. Plenty of time to get there, get a good look at the place, and get back home before the streetlights came on. Otherwise, we’d all be grounded, and that’s not how I wanted to spend my summer. We gathered our gear, got on our bikes, and silently started pedaling toward our destination. To this day I wish I would have just stayed home.
It was 6 pm when we arrived at the overgrown road from the video. Although the woods were dense with trees, we all had watched the video so many times that we knew we were in the right place. Poplar and birch trees stood silently over us, emaciated sentinels on guard and standing watch over a place we never should have come to. Eerily enough, there were no birds or wildlife to be seen. Normally a trip down here would have us cross paths with the odd deer, almost guaranteed to see a crow or woodpecker. This part of the woods, however, was a vacuum it seemed.
We walked our bikes down the road, eager to use the anticipation of it all as a way of steeling ourselves for the adventure ahead.
“Did anyone let anyone else know where we were going to be?” Destiny’s voice pierced the veil of silence and seemed even to startle herself.
Addy spoke next: “I left a note with my brother and a $5 bill to keep quiet about it but come pick us up if we’re not back by sundown”. That was good enough a gesture to quiet the uneasy vibe of us potentially being tossed into a van and sold for parts, so we trekked on.
We hit the front yard of the house within 5 minutes. The sky-blue paint almost calming despite the general disarray the lawn was in. It was everything we saw, and even more what we expected once we got a few minutes to take everything in. Despite the silence of the woods, the sun cast shadows of branches and trunks that seemed to almost close their grip over the lonely two-story house. Between the shadows of the trees, burnt orange beams of light brought warmth to what we would soon find out was a cold and horrid place.
I peeked into the strange church-type window first, tapping on the glass without hesitation. I was nervous, sure, but someone had to take the first step to getting us in there. Nobody said it, but we were all low-key terrified. Even if we didn’t find anything particularly supernatural there was still the thrill of exploring an abandoned house. Sure, the entire thing felt like a trap. At the very least we expected someone was fucking with us. None of us knew that we were just flies, beating our wings too close to the spider’s web.
“Lights on, phasers set to stun” Bart joked, making a bzzzzzzt sound with his stupid mouth. We all rolled our eyes, but Bart knew that we all needed a quick laugh.
I reached for the handle of the front door and as I grasped the brass knob, I felt a quick surge of cold. Unable to tell if it was just because my hands were nervously hot or sweaty, I didn’t dwell on the idea – I just turned it and used my foot to slowly edge the door open while I waited for something to happen.
The smell was the first thing to hit me. Some sort of cross between hot, wet meat and old (sweaty?) paper towels. I gagged so hard that Addy yelped in terror, the poor girl. Judging by the look on her face she must have thought I saw something, but my eyes were soft-welded shut by the hot air and the smell until I heard her react to my gagging.
“Jesus Christ, it smells the way Desmond’s grandpa LOOKS in here”, I chortled. Trying desperately to lighten the mood so that someone, anyone else, would approach the doorway with me. “I need lights, guys. I can’t see shit.”
The place was pitch black, despite the sun still shining behind us on the horizon, waiting to tuck itself in for the night.
*click*click*click*click*
Four crappy orange-lensed Canadian Tire flashlights snapped on behind me, their dim lights on my feet like a gown. I turned mine on, cleared my throat, gulped some fresh air, and then took my first step into the abyss.
Ahead of me was a living room. One overturned couch to the left, barricading a stairway to the second floor. To my left, bits and pieces of what I imagine were a table and chairs lay smashed and piled in the corner. Straight ahead, a hallway that seemed to go deeper than the outside dimensions of the house would suggest. Like, WAY deeper. So deep I couldn’t see the end.
“I need some light down this hall guys”, I barely stammered. The whole place felt off. Not just because it was dark and spooky, and we all were expecting someone to jump from a corner with a Halloween mask on. Maybe it was the stink. Or maybe it was our imaginations, but this place seemed to be warping and distorting. It was almost as if each corner of the room was breathing, pulsating, writhing in anticipation; a black and horrid stomach ready to digest us whole.
“FUCK!”
The words flew out of Destiny’s mouth fast, but not as fast as the shadow that darted across the infinite hallway. “What was that!?”, she shrieked in a pitch I didn’t even realize the human ear could register.
The door slammed shut behind us.
Panic ensued as everyone converged into the back corner of the room, behind the rubble of the table and chairs. The sound of feet shuffling over feet, each bump into another met with screams in unison.
“Calm down, everyone! Lights on each other. Let’s make sure everyone is standing up and accounted for!”, Desmond shouted.
Dim orange beams met with pale white faces, mouths agape, and shoulders tremoring. Everyone was here, but nobody was ready. Before we could collect ourselves and investigate where the shadow passed over to, we heard It.
THUNK
GRRRNNNNNN
THUNK
GRRRRRRRN
Was someone moving the couch? We all must have shared the same thought because we all turned our lights over at the same time. And that’s when we saw it…
Remember the “boulder” from the video? Well, it was so much more than that.
The boulder was there, sure, but what we thought was some sort of rock was more of a hairy torso. And attached to it….8 long appendages. Given the arachnid nature of whatever this thing was, I would be inclined to call them legs, but they seemed to phase in and out of themselves like smoke. One second, they were there; wet, hairy, glistening, trembling. The next, they were simply tendrils of smoke. Or at least that’s how they appeared. I hardly remember. By the time one of our lights hit its face…. Well, that’s what I remember the most. The porcelain white thing we saw whiz by the window in the video… It was its face.
Etched into my memory like bullet holes in a backroad stop sign is the horrible visage of that creature’s head. As spiderlike as its body was, so too was its face. But instead of 8-12 eyes and a gaping mouth, this thing had its features all backward.
At the bottom of its head was one gigantic eye, milky silver with a brown pupil, dripping with saliva or some other sort of disgusting viscous fluid. And then I saw what was where its eyes would be. 8 holes sunk into its skull. Pulsating and warping, vibrating around the circumference of its head. I gazed into its orifices, mesmerized in fear, frozen in place. Then, the sound started.
At first, it was a low hum. It reminded me of the throat singing you hear of some Tibetan monks doing in chant. As it rose in pitch, protrusions started flapping from the holes. Vulgar, flopping, and wet fluid movements of what I can only describe as tongues started a rhythmic descent and ascension from the skull. The pitch kept rising as the hum turned into that blasted MUMBLING! 8 mouths in unison, each a different pitch, the tongues flopping and throwing thick spittle across the pearlescent face of that horrid beast. All of us, unable to move, unsure of whether it was fear or the haunting song of death approaching. As the mumbling increased in volume, the tongues became longer. What were once short, stubby chunks of meat were now 2-foot-long tendrils. They converged into a point and then began aiming around the room, flickering nervously as if it had just awoken. And then …. directed straight at the group.
We screamed in concert, each wailing like a banshee, unable to do anything but shriek our throats into a bloody pulp as the thing stretched tall and ominously - as if challenging us. It was only then that I realized everyone had moved in front of me in the panic of its initial emergence, and my friends were all between me and it.
Even more terrifying than when the mumbling started, it stopped immediately. The silence, a wet towel over our faces, waterboarding us with insanity.
FWIP
FWIP
FWIP
FWIP
4 lights went out in front of me. No more screams from my friends. Just…gurgling
I dropped my light. Fuck.
As I grabbed it, purely through reflex alone, I lost sight of the creature and the light went out. Fumbling at my feet I kicked the handle and reached for it.
Pure white pain rang out in my hand as I gripped what felt like a million red hot needles and the sensation cut so deep I felt it in my scalp. My hand had grasped its leg.
The beast shrieked a roar that pierced the darkness and dropped me onto my ass – and onto the flashlight. I fumbled for the switch and the *click* of it was met with a horror I will never forget.
From the two front tendrils on each side of the body of this horrific arachnid, a friend hung. Pierced through the throat, the hairy, smoky appendages peeking through the exposed esophageal tissue. Each of them vibrating and seizing in pain. Although it wasn’t pain… Desmond, Abby, Bart, Destiny; they all had grins, their eyes rolling back and forth in their heads……moaning…..
The beast then slowly started backing towards the hallway, facing me the entire time. Wearing my friends like sock puppets, taunting me, inviting me, calling to me as they disappeared into the infinite darkness of the hallway….
I woke up in my room, crumpled on the floor, soaked in my own piss. The doors won’t open. My windows neither, choked in a darkness that the dim blue light from my computer monitor pierces, the only source of light here. Flashing on my computer, one message:
SEND THEM THE ADDRESS. COMPLETE THE LOOP. ONLY THEN CAN YOU COME BACK AND FREE THEM
I’ve been here for a week according to my watch, trapped here with only the internet, a red pen, and a letter. No sun, no phone, no parents, no hope. I feel no thirst, no hunger. I know I’m being kept alive and the only way to stop this is to do what it says. Only now do I notice the mail flap on my bedroom door, a feature that was never there before.
As I insert the letter, my bedroom door opens to the clearing in front of the house. Blue ethereal light dotted with black and silver peaks and twists where the skyline would be. I feel the cold bite of a wind, but instead of the howling comforting sound you would expect – only the screams of my companions grace the trees around the house.
Through the window, I see the creature. Its face is mine, and I scream until the darkness pulls me in and the mumbling starts again.