Alice told me that, like most Tulane students, she woke up that morning thirsty and hung over. So, she dragged herself out of bed and made her way down to the shared kitchen of the large, craftsman-style house in which she was renting a room. Alice poured herself a glass of water from a filtered pitcher in the fridge and reflexively moved to the sink while downing the water in three long gulps.
As Alice set the empty glass in the sink, her gaze drifted to the window above it. She spotted her roommate Sarah standing at the edge of the small patch of woods bordering the back of their house. She was smiling and waving Alice over, beckoning her to come outside. Sarah was dressed oddly though. She appeared to have on a short cotton robe and nothing else. Not exactly the ideal clothing for a hike. But to a groggy Alice, Sarah’s strange attire barely even registered.
Fuck that, was the most coherent thought currently running through her hungover brain. The last thing Alice felt like doing at that moment was going outside. But then her other roommate Lonna emerged from the treeline to stand beside Sarah and she also started to wave Alice over. Alice replied with an adamant shake of her head but their gesturing persisted.
Even looking at them surrounded by all that morning sunlight was giving her a headache though, so Alice retrieved her phone from the waistband of her pajama pants and called Sarah. As she heard the line connect, Alice turned back to the window and said, “What?”
Sarah sounded confused as she replied, “Um… you called me, crazy lady.”
Alice, who was still not entirely awake, briefly pulled the phone from her ear to check the time before asking, “Don’t you both have class right now?”
“Just got out.”
“Well, you and Lonny enjoy your frolic. I’m gonna pass.”
Sarah sounded even more confused as she said, “Lonna’s not with me. She has another class at eleven.”
“Not with you? She’s standing a foo-” Something dawned on Alice just then, as she was glaring at Sarah through the window, her free hand angrily gesturing at Lonna directly beside her. Alice lowered her hand and, in a muted tone that was barely audible, she said, “How did you even answer? And why aren’t your lips moving?”
“Why aren’t my what WHAT?”
She heard Sarah say this and watched as her doppelganger outside just went on smiling and beckoning Alice to join them. Fear began to set in like an icy finger tracing a line down the center of Alice’s back, sending a paralytic shockwave reverberating throughout her body. Alice had made the mistake of locking eyes with the girl who wasn’t Sarah and now she couldn’t move and she couldn’t look away.
The girl who wasn’t Lonna disappeared back into the treeline and what was probably only moments later but felt like an eternity, she reemerged gripping the arm of a new girl who had her head tilted forward so that her hair hung down in front of her face, obscuring it from view. The girl who wasn’t Sarah took hold of the new girl’s other arm and she and the girl who wasn’t Lonna started guiding her toward the house.
Alice was wide awake now but she could barely hear the real Sarah shouting her name from the phone pressed to her ear. Everything felt like it was happening underwater. As they neared the window, the new girl finally tilted her head back and the girl on either side of her both reached out a hand to part the hair obscuring her face. Alice knew what she was going to see next even before she saw it, by a simple process of elimination.
“You’d think that might make seeing it easier,” she lamented to me later. But when they parted the new girl’s hair to reveal Alice’s own face smiling back at her… “Let’s just say that knowing and seeing are two very different things.”
Alice was vaguely aware of the fact that she had begun to weep. She could feel the hot tears streaming down her face but she couldn’t lift her hand to wipe them away. The girl who wasn’t her was right outside the window now, her face… Alice’s face… was inches from the glass. Her grinning lips suddenly parted, revealing a black void where the inner workings of her mouth should have been.
There were no teeth or gums or throat or tongue in there. Just a vacant, impossible darkness. Alice told me she could remember staring into this darkness and then suddenly, it was all she could see. But this is where I come in, so I should probably take a second to explain who I am and what it is I do…
My name is Joel, I’m a New Orleans native, and I make a large portion of my living giving French Quarter ghost tours. Not for nothing, but I’m pretty good at it too. It helps that I love the work. How could I NOT? The hours agree with me, I’m always meeting new people, and I get to drink on the job. If I could, I would spend the rest of my life telling ghost stories to tourists. But of course, that’s not all I do.
See, when I was first getting my tour guide business off the ground, I needed a way to stand out in what was (and still is) a rather saturated market. So, I decided to advertise myself as a “paranormal P.I. and French Quarter tour guide”. I’ll spare you the cheesier details but basically I used to (and still do) stage the tours as if they were cases I had been hired to solve. The gimmick was a big hit but it had the unintended consequence of occasionally attracting people looking to hire an actual legitimate paranormal detective.
Probably not surprising to hear that those are a lot rarer than tour guides. And, as a young upstart business owner, I could only be offered considerable sums of money from desperate people so many times before I finally decided, “Fuck it. If they wanna pay a consultation fee, the least I could do is hear them out.”
And if you think that means all I did was pocket the fee, listen to their problem, and then quote them some insanely inflated day-rate for my actual services…
Well, yeah. Obviously, that was the plan. But as it turned out, I had a real knack for the whole paranormal detective thing. Sure, as with any specialized occupation, there was an initial learning curve. It didn’t take long for me to get the hang of it though and rather quickly I started producing real results. To be completely honest, I had been raised with an advantage that made me uniquely suited to the job. But that, as nerds say, is a story for another time.
For our purposes, all you need to know is that I had been working both ends of my advertised occupation going on 12 years the night Alice showed up at my office, which was a tiny space on the first floor of an ancient French Quarter mansion that had been refurbished into storefronts on the bottom and apartments up top. We called the main room of our storefront “the lobby” to sound classy and the glorified walk-in closet at the back that was barely wider than the desk which housed it acted as my office proper. That’s where Alice was when I finished my last tour of the night and entered the lobby to have my assistant Jeanie greet me with a grin as she said, “Prospective client waiting.”
Of course, the whole paranormal detective thing also attracted its fair share of crazies. By this point though, I had an excellent system for filtering them out. And by that, I mean I had Jeanie. So, if Alice made it past her, I knew there was a good chance she could actually use my help. Which is why my shoulders reflexively slumped and I replied, “Shit.”
Trust me. After 12 years, you’d be kind of over it too. Plus, it was already the end of a long night. But the girl paid her consultation fee, so I sucked it up and heard what Alice had to say. She told me what I just told you and I discovered that once again, Jeanie’s instincts had been right.
“Next thing I know, my roommate Sarah-the real one-is there and she’s screaming for me to close my eyes but I-I couldn’t. I couldn’t see and I still couldn’t move anything, even my eyelids. Whatever it was out there…”
“Wood nymphs,” I interjected, my mouth half full of pizza (Alice had popped by unannounced during what was normally my dinner time, so you can stop judging me.) I hadn’t meant to interrupt her; it was more of a reflex. But Alice seemed grateful, borderline delighted, by my faux pas. She immediately asked me to repeat myself and by the time I finished swallowing, she had already pulled out her phone and her thumb was hovering over the screen.
“Wood nymphs. Sure sounds like ‘em anyway.”
“W-O-O-D-N…” Alice said in a questioning tone.
“Y-M-P-H. I thought Tulane was a good school?”
Alice didn’t reply to my attempt at witty banter. I’m pretty sure she didn’t hear anything after “H”. She immediately became engrossed in scanning through search results, so I gave her another moment and then finally forced a cough. Alice locked her screen and set her phone in her lap, looking embarrassed.
“Sorry…”
Remembering the consultation fee, I smiled and gave her a dismissive wave as I replied, “Not a problem. Go on, finish your story.”
“Right, so…”
Alice wore the telltale expression of someone drawing a complete blank, so I said, “You couldn’t see and you couldn’t move but you could hear Sally…”
“I could hear Sarah screaming my name but not from my phone. She had made it home by then and was there in the kitchen with me and she covered my eyes with her hand and that finally snapped me out of it. We ran out of there and hid in my room until our other roommate Lonna got home and she got us high and that was when Sarah said that she had meant to tell me when I moved in but basically, if I ever saw her or Lonny standing out in the woods behind the house, not to look at them because it won’t be them.”
“Wait… So, your roommates already knew about the nymphs?” I asked with an incredulous tenor that had been impossible to suppress.
“I guess? I was too freaked out and high to ask any follow-up questions. Plus, you know how hard it is to find affordable housing in this city and I mean, the whole thing felt like a dream. By the next day, I was convinced I HAD dreamed it… But then it happened again. I knew to look away this time but it still scared the shit out of me and of course I was home alone again. Only this time, when I tried calling Sarah and Lonny, their phones kept going to voicemail. That was three days ago and neither one has been home since. It’s like they just… vanished.”
Alice began to look genuinely unnerved as she recounted all of this to me, so I tried to distract her by asking, “And you said the house is uptown?”
Alice swallowed and then nodded as she replied, “The Garden District.”
“I know the neighborhood. Didn’t know there were any patches of woods around there.”
“Instead of individual backyards, the homes on our block form what they call a micropark. It’s actually really nice. There’s a jogging path and a rock-climbing wall.”
“Uh-huh. So…” I said and clapped my hands together in a finite gesture. “There’s a real simple solution to your problem.”
Alice looked relieved as she replied, “Oh, thank god.”
“Don’t ever go back to that house.”
“What?! I HAVE to. I live there.”
I leaned forward and tried my best not to sound like a condescending dad as I said, “Listen to me very carefully, Alice. Your roommates are almost certainly dead. Unless you want to end up the same way, you will never step foot inside that house again. Live in your car if you have to. I promise it’s a better alternative to whatever the dryads have planned for you.”
“Dryads?”
“Another term for wood nymphs.”
“And what ARE wood nymphs?”
“A race of all-female fairies who reside exclusively in forests and reproduce using oak trees.”
Alice looked equal parts baffled and disgusted by my answer. Her tone was almost irate as she said, “How do they do THAT?!”
“Trust me. You don’t wanna know. And you definitely don’t want to be living near any.”
Alice took several moments to process this and then finally she asked, “Why do they look like us? Like my roommates and me?”
I shook my head and thought about how best to phrase my reply. “They don’t really. What you saw was a… like a psychic projection. They were trying to lure you outside, so they showed you people they thought you would trust.”
“They thought I’d trust ME?”
“You’re trying to apply human logic to something that has never been human. You don’t try to reason with a wild animal… You just run.”
I could see some part of Alice still wanted to argue this point but instead of pressing the issue, she simply muttered, “What about all my stuff?”
“There are moving services you can hire to pack your things for you and deliver them wherever. You don’t even need to be there when they do the packing. I can recommend a guy who won’t rip you off.”
Alice seemed to remember something and suddenly sounded on the verge of panic as she said, “But…”
I groaned in frustration and then took a breath to try and level out my tone as I replied, “What?”
“My dog is still there.”
I really thought this was going to be an easy one too. I sighed and shook my head. Even opened my mouth, fully prepared to protest but all I managed to say was, “We go now and we make it quick. I mean like ten minutes max. And you’re paying me for a full day.”
“Deal!”
As soon as I saw the house where Alice was renting a room, I knew it was a trap. Especially for what she told me she was paying in rent. Even the shittier houses in this neighborhood went for about half a million and this was by no means one of the shittier houses. And yet, I still let this next part happen anyway because like Alice said, “Knowing and seeing are two very different things.”
I was feeling anxious even before we reached the front door and could hear her dog whimpering on the other side. Alice unlocked the door and quickly switched on a light before crouching to greet an elated Border Collie.
“Aw, my poor buddy was stuck here all alone all night! I’m so sorry. I was getting someone to help us. Yes, I was.” Alice glanced back at me and said, “Joel, this is Hairy Styles. The love of my life. Hairy, this is Joel… He a’ight.”
“Pleased to meet you,” I said, greeting Hairy with a wave as I followed Alice inside and began to survey the foyer. “Remember that this needs to be fast. Just the essentials. Dawn is in a couple hours and we don’t wanna be anywhere near this place by then.”
“Why?”
“Because that’s when they’ll come for you. Wood nymphs can only move around in the daylight.”
“Oh, so they’re like… reverse vampires?”
“No, hemogoblins are reverse vampires.”
“Hemogoblins? What’s a hemogoblin?”
“Sorry if ‘reverse vampire’ isn’t a clear enough description but we really need to focus.”
Hairy and I escorted Alice upstairs to her bedroom, where she quickly packed what she needed. When Alice was done, she gave the room one last cursory scan before turning and forcing a smile which only caused the tears that had been welling in her eyes to finally spill over as she said, “I’m ready.”
We all headed back downstairs and Alice started to round up Hairy’s leash and other necessities. As I followed her into the kitchen to grab his food, Alice suddenly halted and Hairy began to growl. I followed the dog’s gaze to a door at the back of the kitchen which appeared to lead out to the micropark. A pale guy in his 20s was standing there, at the sectioned window built into the door’s upper half.
“There’s a guy at your back door,” I said, stating the obvious.
“That’s my ex, Ryan,” Alice replied, her tone a mix of shock and confusion. I noted Ryan’s off-center posture and lifeless unfocused gaze and it suddenly hit me what had happened here:
Alice had found this room-for-rent after a tumultuous breakup with Ryan. Things had ended on such bad terms that Alice had made a point of not telling Ryan where she was moving. She had probably blocked his number and all his socials too, so he had no way of contacting her. But Ryan, who apparently never met a hint he was capable of taking, had somehow managed to figure out that Alice was living here at Casa De La Ninfa.
Ryan must have arrived earlier today to confront Alice but he also wasn’t the type to simply walk up to her front door and knock. No, Ryan was a real class-act and intentionally showed up when he knew Alice wouldn’t be home so he could scope the place out first, peer in a few windows and check for any signs of a new man in her life. Unfortunately for poor creepy Ryan, he didn’t make it that far.
As he was heading around to the back windows, Ryan probably spotted Alice standing at the edge of the small patch of trees just behind the house. She was wearing only a short silk robe and she was waving Ryan over and she was SMILING at him. Ryan tried to recall the last time he had elicited a genuine smile from Alice but the nymphs descended on him long before he could remember the answer.
The thing now using Ryan’s slack, lifeless face to peer in at us through the backdoor was what we in the biz called a “skinwalker”, which is a catchall term for any external entity inhabiting a reanimated corpse. Naturally, solutions vary as to how you eliminate them but in this instance, I had come prepared.
“I’m gonna let him in,” I said, as I moved to stand beside the backdoor.
“The fuck you are!”
I held up a hand and pleaded to Alice with my eyes. “Just trust me. I promise I won’t let him touch you. But he IS going to chase you.”
“There’s something wrong with him,” Alice replied, ignoring me. She had finally noticed Ryan’s gaunt appearance, judging from her panicked tone.
“He’s dead,” I said and Alice shot me a desperate look that I was unfortunately very familiar with, but we didn’t have time for her to lose it right now. “I know. It’s a lot. Whole range of emotions, I’m sure. But you really need to pay attention. When I open this door, you need to run away. He is going to chase you but I promise I won’t let him catch you. Okay?”
The skinwalker had pushed Ryan’s face right up to the glass now and his vacant eyes appeared to be slowly scanning the kitchen. A horrified Alice was just standing there watching him, so again I asked, “Okay?”
“Okay,” Alice finally replied with a quick nod of her head, her eyes still fixed on her dead ex.
“Okay,” I repeated and then placed my hand on the doorknob. “Run.”
Alice turned to do as instructed just as I yanked open the backdoor and the skinwalker entered the kitchen with an unnatural burst of speed. Fast enough that he lumbered right past me and I was able to jab the stun baton directly into the small of his back, hitting the base of his spine and sending 150,000 volts coursing through Ryan’s nervous system, causing most of his major muscle groups to seize up.
To an actual person, this would have been an extremely painful experience but since the skinwalker couldn’t feel shit, it just stood there twitching with its limbs awkwardly frozen in place. I retrieved the flare-gun from my waistband and then gave Ryan’s spine another prolonged shock to buy myself a few more seconds as I circled around to the front of him.
By this point, I guess Alice’s curiosity had won out over her fear because she poked her head back through the doorway just in time to watch me jam the barrel of the flare-gun into her ex boyfriend’s open mouth. I squeezed the trigger and a sulfur-scented burst of red light turned Ryan’s head into a human jack-o-lantern.
See, signal flares burn very hot and wood nymphs are extremely flammable. It took only a matter of moments for the whitehot flare to bore a hole through the back of Ryan’s throat and ignite the dryad currently coiled around his spine like it was made out of flash-paper. I realized Alice was standing there just as Ryan’s back began to emit smoke. Just enough time for me to shout, “Don’t look!”
But sadly not enough time for Alice to actually do so before something resembling a large flaming mandrake root tore its way out of Ryan’s asshole and landed coiled in a writhing mass on the kitchen floor.
“What did you do?!”
I started to turn back to comfort Alice when I realized it hadn’t been her who shouted that but rather her roommate Sarah. She had entered the kitchen behind Alice and was now standing there looking pissed. I opened my mouth to attempt to explain the horrific tableau she had just witnessed (though I’m STILL not sure how exactly I would have done that) when I felt a sudden stabbing pain in my left buttcheek.
I reflexively spun back around to find Alice’s other roommate Lonna standing directly behind me and holding a hand behind her back. She smiled and waved at me with her visible hand as she said, “Hi! I’m Lonna.”
“Did you just stab me in the bu-”
My question was abruptly cutoff as a section of the kitchen floor suddenly leapt up to smack me across the face. When I woke up a little over an hour later to find myself still staring at this same section of tiled floor, I realized I had simply fallen over. I assumed Lonna had injected me with something to knock me out and apparently, she had done the same to Alice. I could see her sprawled out beside me on the kitchen floor and quietly snoring. I couldn’t see Sarah or Lonna at first but judging from the sound of their voices, they were both standing facing the backdoor’s window and in the midst of a heated discussion.
“I mean, so what? What’s the difference if we let them use the prick she brought here to impregnate her?”
“Because! We haven’t VETTED the prick she brought here. Alice and her scorned ex go missing? Abduction resulting in murder-suicide. That makes sense. But we don’t know who this guy is. We have no idea what kind of heat his disappearance will bring.”
“Well, he fried our only other option and we’re gonna have to kill them both either way… I say we might as well give it a shot.”
Sarah suddenly gasped. There was a hollow thud as she tapped a finger against the backdoor’s sectioned window and said, “Look! They’re waking up.”
“Fuck you, I’m not looking at those things.”
“Don’t be such a chicken. Just don’t make direct eye-contact. How hard is that? Now, quick. Before they do the-AAAHHHH!”
Clearly, neither of these girls had been expecting me to have an almost superhuman tolerance to barbiturates (byproduct of a lifetime battle with chronic night terrors) because they had left both the flare gun and my stun-baton laying right there beside me. Also, Lonna looked rather surprised when she turned to find me electrocuting her buddy and aiming my freshly-reloaded flare gun at her face.
For some quick context; these demented bitches were planning on feeding me to wood nymphs and then letting my reanimated corpse do unspeakable things to Alice. Presumably so they could harvest the resulting newborn dryad’s afterbirth, because fun fact: wood nymph placenta is a catalyst in a bunch of dark rituals. Sarah and Lonna were likely witches who were using the stuff to keep themselves looking young.
I did some digging afterward and found photos of them dated as far back as the 1950s, so they had been at this for a while and were also likely the ones who led Ryan to the house. For (at least) the past 70-something years, they had been preying on vulnerable young women fleeing abusive relationships and desperate to find affordable housing, all so they could use them to farm fairy afterbirth.
So, please don’t feel too bad when I then tell you I fired that flare gun at Lonna’s face without even a moment of hesitation. The blindingly bright flare tore a chard gouge into the center of her cheek before bouncing off and becoming lodged in her hair. Lonna let out an ear-splitting scream as she sprinted away in a blind panic, feeding the flames which had already begun to engulf her head.
I returned my attention to Sarah and was pleasantly surprised to find her still standing frozen at the backdoor with her wide unblinking eyes fixed on something just outside its sectioned window. The sun had risen while I was unconscious and the wood nymphs, sensing blood in the water, had begun to emerge from the micropark one-by-one until almost a dozen vaguely female shaped blurs were now crowding around the backdoor. At least, that’s how they appeared to me because I knew better than to tempt fate by looking directly at them.
Unfortunately for Sarah, when being electrocuted, one of the human body’s many reflexive responses is the eyes open wide. It hadn’t been an intended result (I wish I was that clever on my feet) but when I shocked Sarah with my baton, she suddenly found herself forced to make direct eye-contact with one of the approaching nymphs and was now paralyzed by its gaze. I had already turned and sprinted over to Alice when I heard the backdoor open and the sound of Sarah being dragged outside.
But even then, I didn’t risk looking back. I just hoisted Alice’s unconscious body over my shoulder fireman-style and booked it out of the kitchen. I could still hear Lonna screaming from somewhere on the first floor and the fire engulfing her had started to spread. As I carried Alice into the now smoke filled foyer to find several curtains on fire, I was suddenly joined by Hairy Styles who came trotting down the stairs with a very concerned look on his face. Thankfully, the path to the front door was still clear and I was able to get all three of us out safely.
The house burned down. As far as I know, no remains were found inside but oddly enough, a completely unrelated fire destroyed most of the micropark later that night. Arson was suspected in the second fire because investigators found traces of accelerant all over the place. Luckily, the brilliant and undoubtedly well-hung individual who started that blaze took precautions to ensure it wouldn’t spread to any of the surrounding homes.
To be honest, this wasn’t even one of my weirder cases. But I’ve been wanting to document my favorites for a while now and figured I should probably start with a simple, run-of-the-mill “occult placenta farm” story to help ease you in before I tell you about some of the REALLY crazy shit.