I (40 Female) am a single mother of 3 children, Naomi (14, Female), Porter (19, Male) and my oldest son Nathan (23 Male). My husband died from an overdose in 2013 and I have been trying my hardest to support my family, I was fired from my retail job back in February of 2016 for pocketing money from the cashier and I was caught after a coworker who had seen me told my boss and he checked the security cameras and had confirmed it. Little did I know the same day would take a dark turn from there as I got a call from my son Porter while I was driving my way home which when I picked up my phone, I heard police sirens in the background and a lot of crying from what sounded like my daughter Naomi. He had told me that Nathan had disappeared after Porter had heard a loud thud from Nathan’s room and his phone went straight to voice mail when he called him. I called Nathan to confirm his suspicion that his phone had in fact went to voice mail. My heart was racing as I was driving home with a terrible snowstorm in my point of view. About 7 minutes later, I arrive home to see Naomi and Porter both next to each other. Naomi was crying uncontrollably as porter was trying to make her stop crying as hard as she was.
I talked to the police about it, and they had told me that they would update me if they had any lead on the case but for a while, they had told me nothing, about 1 hour later an active shooting and kidnapping alert was issued near my home and it made me more anxious. About a day later, the kidnapper and shooter were arrested, and all the victims were identified and put back into custody, but my son was not one of the victims as I never got a call about him from the local police station and when I asked them, they had told me they had not gotten new information on him.
For a while I was deeply depressed, I could not land a job that would cover enough money for bills and to support my children and it was just over all hell for my collapsing family. Fast forward to around 2019 and I was getting back on my feet, I had a new husband to help support my family and pay the bills when I was unable to and I had gotten a job after searching for a while and life was starting to look up, that was until covid struck, I had to work at home and my kids were temporarily put on virtual learning and it was definitely hard to manage the family during 2020 through mid 2021.
2022 was a year that really fucked with me mentally. I had seen Nathan in places as if he had grown and nothing ever happened, but as soon as I would look away, he would disappear. It was keeping me up at night for a while, so eventually I took therapy for around 4 months as there was nothing else I could have done, but more throughout the year up until late 2022 I would see Nathan, but he would do something new each time, sometimes he would talk to someone, sometimes he would be reading something or looking at something. One day though, Nathan walked up to me but he looked like a poor mimic of him, and he was slowly deteriorating as he was approaching me, but the thing I will never forget is what he had said to me. “I am sorry” he said to me as he was flaking away. It was a hallucination of some sort, but a really real lucid feeling one, it was too real for me. I told my husband about this, he had told me that he was really worried for my mental health and that I need to seek therapy again.
I took therapy again, it helped but it was not enough, I still felt as if he was out there, then yesterday happened. The police contacted me and said they had found Nathan. I was shocked, he was still alive, it was so much for me to process. I head over to the station to see where he was, but the person they had thought was my son was nearly a terrible copy of him, it looked nothing like him, he did not even look human, my daughter even told me this and she was too scared to interact with him. I had let my gullibility get the best of me however and I let him come home with us, that would turn out to be a terrible mistake. Later in the day, I was watching TV and heard him from his room, it sounded like faint screams at first so I was worried, but as soon as I entered his room, my heart dropped, and I could not believe my eyes.
That thing was not him, remember how I said earlier in my hallucination that he was deteriorating? Well, this was nearly the same thing, it was peeling off layer by layer but now there was blood bleeding from everywhere and it looked like his limbs were growing rapidly and he was getting skinnier. His voice got more distorted to, as if someone had reversed his speech and he was screaming what sounded like gibberish. Around the 7th layer of skin, it looked completely empty, nothing like I had ever seen before, it was tall and void like and was way too skinny to be a normal person, this was not my son. Not too long after, it had looked like he was growing vines around the room from his feet, I did not want to enter the room, in fact I was pretty much paralyzed, he glanced over to see me, he had no mouth but was still able to talk, and he said the same thing I had heard in my hallucination, but this time it sounded like its voice was like a broken record as it repeated randomly and the voice was hard to kind of tell what it was saying.
I call the police, they arrive and investigate the room, but the entity had left with its only trace being the skin that had peeled off. I am writing this in fear of it coming back and hurting my family or much worse. My husband is terrified with all of this, and the kids are extremely fear full of what they had just been through, and I can’t say this more than enough, but I am also just as fearful of what could happen next.