Nosleep is closing to the public for a few days, apparently. That gives me hope. Maybe the reason why is that others have finally caught on to what’s really going on here.
I’m sorry, I don’t know where to start with this. How to introduce myself, how to start a story, I’ve never been good with any of that. To put it frankly, I’ve never really been particularly good at anything. You could say I’m a failure at life. I’m a high school senior that has no friends, no girlfriend, and doesn’t have a single clue what he wants to do for graduation. I was never good at sports or art or writing or anything like that. The only thing I really enjoy in my spare time is reading, and that’s what first brought me here to read about the horrific experiences of others.
To put it simply, I loved scrolling through this subreddit. At first, I never really gave any thought to the posts I read, but in time, I started thinking long and hard about every single one I would read. I started to understand them more than I ever did, and I fully realized what Nosleep is. Nosleep is a chronicle of dark events and nightmares. It’s full of warnings, written accounts from those of us who have witnessed the unspeakable and desperately want to warn the world before it happens to them as well. I’ve devoted most of my free time to proving that, to hunting down proof and records of the events we read about. But I never expected that proof to find me first.
Throughout most of my high school life, I’ve spent most of my free time hunting down the stories behind the posts of Nosleep. See, we all know about the horrifically real origins of all the experiences we post, but there are so many skeptics on the outside who don’t, and I figured that if I could find evidence that definitively proved just a few of the posts on Nosleep were true, people would start taking us seriously. So I devoted my time to scouring the internet for missing persons cases, for police reports about murders, anything I could tie to one of the stories on here. So far, evidence was few and hard to come by. I found a few bits and pieces here, fragments of news stories and unexplained deaths there, but there wasn’t much objective, concrete evidence to go on. I was starting to accept that people on the outside, they would never believe because they didn’t want to believe. They didn’t want their eyes to be opened like ours have been.
But everything changed on my first day of Thanksgiving break. It was around ten in the morning, and I was scrolling through Reddit on my phone. I had just finished checking my gaming subreddits, and just switched over to Nosleep. Like most of my subreddits, I tend to sort by new, and the first post that I saw when I logged on was one titled Ben Doesn’t Believe. by a u/Korikomo. That kind of caught my eye because my name is Ben as well and the title has so little information, so I clicked on the link. This is what the post said, copied word for word from screenshots I took:
“Ben doesn’t believe. He’s living in blissful ignorance as he fools himself and fools others. He likes to pretend that his boring, monotonous existence is all that there is. Ben doesn’t want to believe that there’s something else, something out there that’s more than him. He doesn’t want to believe in God. He doesn’t want to believe in demons. But believing or not believing doesn’t make a difference to the truth, it only means that you’re either in acceptance or denial.
“Ben lives in Cleveland, Ohio, and he’s failed in every single way possible. He tries to bury his emptiness by immersing himself in fiction, in books, in games, in shows, but even that’s not helping anymore. He doesn’t want to believe anything. He doesn’t want to believe that every day is another day closer to his inevitable death, unless he changes his mind and starts to believe.
“Ben won’t believe this now, as he reads these paragraphs. He won’t believe when it comes for him. He won’t believe until it’s too late. Because that’s what Ben does, he wastes his opportunities.”
Something about that post unnerved me more than anything else I read that day. Maybe because of how short it was or because of the odd style in which it was written, void of almost any details. Maybe it was because of my how my own name was Ben and that I lived in Cleveland too, and that it was a pretty freaky coincidence. But that was all it was. A weird coincidence. I mean, it couldn’t possibly be about me. Who would want to post about me? I’m perfectly normal and perfectly sane. I didn’t even think about the whole incident until two days later.
I was scrolling through Reddit again, this time late at night when I couldn’t sleep. I guess that’s ironic, looking at r/nosleep when I could get no sleep. I had been reading stories for almost half an hour and at that point, I was skimming through titles looking for anything that caught my eye. That’s when I saw it, a post from three hours ago titled Ben Lost His Chance. At first I thought it was a sequel to the other weird one I read a few days back, but this post was written by a u/3462937black8 . Weird username, but I was curious. I clicked the link.
“Why is Ben still awake? It’s almost midnight.” were the first lines, and I froze. It was almost midnight my time. My name was Ben. And after that last post… was this really somehow about me? I shrugged it off. Coincidence was all it was. Strange, freaky, really improbable coincidence. I kept reading.
“Ben is still awake because he missed his chance. He read the truth, and he ignored it. He didn’t believe, and now, there’s nothing left for him. He’s lying awake in a dark room in his four bedroom house, the one at the end of that long, empty street. He’s reading this by the dim light of his phone that’s only at 17% power, but he doesn’t care. He doesn’t care about anything anymore, do you, Ben?”
I dropped my phone and rushed over to the lightswitch, filling my room with blinding yellow light with one flick of the hand. There was no one in my room, despite whatever my sudden irrational fear was telling me. I looked out the window, but the street was deserted. Just like that post said.
I lived in a two floor, four bedroom house in a neighborhood that’s still under construction. As of right now, ours is the only house on the street, so it’s mostly empty. And I was lying on my bed, scrolling through my phone, unaware that my battery had dropped down to 17%. Everything that post had said was true for me. Someone, somehow, was watching me and posting about me in a place devoted to the paranormal. What the hell did that mean?
I gingerly picked up my phone again, having seen that there was still one paragraph left in the “story”. At this point, I was pretty sure it was some kind of sick joke. Someone from school, maybe. Or maybe it was my older brother, who was also home on break, playing a prank on me. Maybe even it was some of the online friends I had, the ones that had first told me about Nosleep and discussed the stories and their implications long into the nights. Either way, someone was messing with me and I wasn’t very fucking happy about it. I read the last paragraph.
“Ben is starting to wonder now if he has this all wrong. How would anyone know things like that? How would they know that the pajamas he’s wearing right now are red, or that his favorite drink is iced tea? Or how would some stranger know that he blames himself for Sienna’s death? How would they know about that stache that he’s hidden underneath that loose floorboard? How would someone on the internet know about his crush on Grace? How would they, Benjamin Kona?”
I suddenly switched my phone off and threw it across the room in a burst of anger. This was going too far. Whoever was playing this practical joke, using my real name was one step too far. And exposing those things online… was just wrong. But with a start, I suddenly realized the gravity of those words. No one from school knew about my crush on Grace. And no one, not even my family, knew about Sienna. She had been one of my closest friends, someone I had met online, and she had killed herself in my freshman year. For the last three years, I held myself responsible for her death because I hadn’t been home the day it happened, and she had tried to call me that day. How would someone know about that? Why would someone know about that?
Or more importantly, why would someone or something post about me here? I couldn’t understand it. What was to gain? What was the point of all of it? And who, or what, the hell was doing all this to me?
I fell asleep that night thinking over and over about that post. When I woke up, the first thing I did was log onto Reddit so I could report the post and message the mods about it. I felt a sinking feeling in my stomach when I searched for it and found that the post had been deleted. And not just the post, but the first one from two days before was gone too. As were the accounts u/Korikomo and u/3462937black8. They had all been deleted without a trace, and I was left with nothing. I still sent a message to the mods, but what could I say? That I thought some crazy cyber-stalker was posting random things about me on a subreddit meant for paranormal experiences? Sure, I had copied the text of the posts by screenshot the night before, but if the accounts were already gone, they couldn’t do anything about it.
Needless to say, I didn’t much enjoy that Thanksgiving. I felt like my privacy had been violated horribly.The entire next two days, I kept looking over my shoulder and out the windows. Even after my brother left to go back to college, I never caught a glimpse of anything unusual. But someone, somehow, had found out things about me. I almost said something to my brother about it, but I knew he’d just laugh at me. He was someone who refused to see the truth about the sides of the world that were hard to believe, and so I kept quiet in my growing fear. Needless to say, I didn’t log onto Reddit for a few days.
When I logged back on, I wasn’t surprised to see that my message to this subreddit’s mods hadn’t been answered. After the last post, I almost didn’t check the feed here. I was scared that I’d find even worse, but a part of me was still being skeptical. After all, the posts and users had been deleted, right? So I took a deep breath, and flipped the feed from “Hot” to “New”.
I froze in my chair as the page refreshed, displaying the first four post titles, all from different accounts: Ben is a Coward., Ben Still Doesn’t Believe., It’s coming for Ben., and the last one, Ben, you’re too late. Don’t run. Don’t hide. My mouth went dry, and my mind went blank. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t think straight. I’ve never had one before, but I’m pretty sure I was in the middle of a panic attack.
I was starting to get the sinking feeling that this wasn’t some stalker or person trying to prank me. I had the horrible realization that the evidence I’d been looking for all those years was happening to me in that very moment.
When I was finally able to snap myself back into reality, I ran downstairs and checked the doors. All were locked securely, and the garage was closed, but I noticed my dad’s car was gone. He probably was working the early shift today. Going back to my room, I felt a little less scared when I saw my mom in the kitchen making breakfast. Someone was just trying to get to me. Or something was trying to get to me. The posts are never, ever wrong, and if someone was posting things about me, then it had to be true. What that meant terrified me more than anything.
I had just gotten back into my room when my phone pinged with a notification. I pulled it up, and in the back of my mind, I knew that this was very, very wrong. I had gotten a notification from Reddit, that a “u/23981170red66 has made a new post to r/nosleep!” I had never enabled notifications for Reddit. I never subscribed to any user, let alone one I’d never heard of before. But for some reason, I felt like I couldn’t ignore this. I might finally have had my evidence right in front of me. My finger tapped the “open” button before I even knew what I was doing. no more warnings was the title. This is what was in the post:
“Ben thought he could escape by staying offline. He thought he could escape if he didn’t read, because he knows that if he reads, he’ll believe. And now it’s far too late to believe. He’s been running too long, and has been too distracted by his meaningless existence. The truth is staring Ben in the face, but he can’t see it. Just like he never realized that his father never came from his late shift at work last night, at the Kohl’s in Westgate Plaza where he works as a store manager.”
As I read that last sentence, I felt the panic stir in my stomach and rise up, catching in my throat and stopping my breathing. Had my dad not come back yet? Was that why he wasn’t home? I wanted to just dismiss the idea as foolish, as a joke, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t run from this like I ran from everything else. The information that these posts had contained, the details about me, about Sienna, about where my dad worked… I was starting to realize this was something far worse than a joke or even a stalker’s posts. I didn’t want to read any more of the post, but I couldn’t tear my eyes away.
“If you hadn’t been so busy hiding from the truth, Ben, you might have realized soon enough to save him. How does it feel, knowing that you slept soundly, curled up peacefully in that thick red blanket of yours, as your father was ripped to bloody pieces and discarded in a ditch by the side of a road? How does it feel, knowing that you were as blind to the truth of your father’s last breaths as you were blind to the truth of the posts you scrolled past? It’s too late for you. There will be no more warnings. Do you believe now? Will you believe, when you hear the truth when it calls?”
I felt my hand go numb and my phone fell out of my fingers as I finished reading the last few words of that post. My mind was running in a million different directions at once, and I felt waves of every emotion from panic to fear to anger to sorrow to disbelief to shock wash over me. I had no time to process the horror that I just read, though. Only seconds later, I heard the ringing of our home phone downstairs.
Will you believe, when you hear the truth when it calls?
And just like that, everything clicked into place with a surge of nausea and sheer terror. I scrambled off my bed and lept down the stairs, trying to reach the phone before my mom picked up. I knew what was coming. I couldn’t let her hear it first, I couldn’t make her go through that.
“Hello, Kona household,” I heard her say as I was halfway down the stairs, and I knew I was too late. When I sprinted into the kitchen moments later, the look of twisted shock on her face told me everything I needed to know. I felt my legs give way as I sank down to the floor, and I could feel the hot tears pouring down my cheeks as everything caught up to me. This was my fault. This was all my fault.
It was a policeman on the phone, calling to let my mom know that they had found a dead man lying in a ditch by Interstate 90, and it was bad. They needed my mom to come down to identify the body, or more accurately, what they could find left of it. She told me all this as she hung up hastily, her voice sounding hollow from the shock, but I just nodded numbly. I knew it was him. My father was dead, just like that post said. It had told me the truth, and I didn’t see it.
It was a few minutes after my mom left that I remembered a post I had read on the sub a week ago, something that I read and commented on, then forgot about. It was an account about a creature that prayed on the weak and the tired, those who worked the night shifts. In the post, the creature would rip its victims to pieces and leave them by the side of the road after eating its fill. I had read that post and went about my day without even thinking that it could actually affect me in any way. But now, my dad was dead in the exact same way. And in that moment, it all clicked into place, the horrible, twisted truth of r/nosleep.
Nosleep isn’t just a place for sharing our experiences with the paranormal and the horrific. It’s a fucking feeding ground.
Everything here, every creature, every death, every account, can be used by them. Have you ever wondered why so many of us escape our brushes with death and things that, by all accounts, should have killed us? It’s because they want us to live. They want someone to write about it, to post it out there, so the creatures can feed even more. I don’t know if they live off of our fear or if they literally live off of us, but the creatures of Nosleep live because we immortalize them on the internet forever. Every survivor writes out their transcript and sends it out for the world to see, but they also reveal their account to the mods. Have you ever wondered why this group of shadowy chaperones hold such strict rules and regulations for Nosleep? It’s because they’re the culprits too. They mold the accounts of others into the perfect format to cause fear, and then they go and erase all the evidence that they can find. That’s why I could never find a shred of proof. It was all erased on purpose.
And somehow, something was trying to warn me about that. Maybe it was one of the mods who got tired of leading the readers to their deaths, I don’t know. All I know is that if I listened to their warnings, my father would still be alive.
I managed to pull myself up off the floor and shake myself out of my grief and self pity, at least momentarily. I made my way upstairs to my room and grabbed my car keys, set on driving my car out to meet mom, when my phone chimed a notification again. I froze, and looked down at the face up screen that was still on the floor. It was another notification from Reddit.
“Hello, u/23981170red7 has made a new post to r/nosleep!”
I felt my mouth go dry as I bent down to pick up the phone with shaky hands. I tapped on the notification, but the post title brought the flood of terror washing back over me.
It’s already in Ben’s house. He’s too late.
I could feel my heartbeat racing as I opened the post quickly, but there was no post to greet me. There was only one word.
“Hide.”
I’ve been up here in my room with the door locked, hiding in the closet for almost two hours now. After the first hour, I heard the front door open, followed by my mom calling out for me. I frantically tried to dial her phone to warn her, but before I could, I heard her ear-splitting scream tear through the silence of the house. Then there were no more sounds, and when I tried her phone, no one picked up.
I started typing this right after, desperately trying to get my own warning out in time before whatever killed my parents finds me too. Maybe I’m just playing into his hands. Maybe it wants me to write about it so that it can grow stronger with every pair of eyes that reads this transcript. But I have to try. I have to try to get this warning out in time.
Stay away from r/nosleep. Everything you read about here can come for you at any time, any place, any day. I don’t think every story is used by them to get to us, but the possibility is out there. The creature that killed my family is one of them, and I don’t know how many more are out there that the mods are helping. If you think something from the posts here are following you, don’t ignore it. And whatever you do, don’t ever fall asleep. Stay awake. Stay alert.
They’re out there. They’ve always been out there. And they’ve always known we’ve been watching them.