My name is Mark, and I’m a detective. Not like, on the force or anything, a private eye, like in the movies. It’s kind of the family business. My grandfather was one, and my dad and I grew up in that world, and it was only natural that I go into it too.
It’s not as exciting a job as you would think if you go by Hollywood. It’s mostly sitting in your car for ten hours at a time, waiting to take pictures of cheating spouses to show the spouse who is paying you to prove that they’re being cheated on. It’s kind of a bummer sometimes. People get married, they get cheated on, they get divorced. So often, kids are caught up in the middle of it all.
Now and then something crazy comes your way though. Or something exciting. I want to tell you guys about one of the crazy ones. The craziest. it happened a few years ago and sometimes I still can’t convince myself it was real. I’m not religious, and I don’t believe in the supernatural. At least, I didn’t until Benson Street. Now, I’m not so sure.
A woman got a hold of me in August of 2020. She had lost contact with her sister. She came into my office and spun a pretty crazy story. Her sister lived in a small town in Michigan called Franklin’s Green. My client was named Shelly. She was sixty-two and her sister was a little younger. They were close and spoke almost every day. But for the last month, her sister hadn’t answered her calls. And then Shelly did a little digging and came across a couple of news stories that were a little hard to believe. They said that everyone who lived on Benson Street had gone missing. There were eight houses on the dead-end street, and every person who lived in them had seemingly vanished into thin air.
I mean, I read the stories myself. After Shelly left, I did my digging, and she was right. It was crazy, and I was a little surprised the story hadn’t gotten more attention. I called Shelly back that night and told her I would take her case. I didn’t usually travel that far for a job, but the next morning I packed a few things up and left my office in Cincinnati.
Hours later I arrived in Franklin’s Green. There was a little crappy motel and I checked in and then headed right for Benson Street. It was smack dab in the middle of a little sleepy neighborhood, lower middle class, mostly ranch-style homes. The entrance to Benson Street was completely roped off with yellow police tape stretched between a telephone pole and a stop sign. I parked nearby and decided to canvas the surrounding streets. I knocked on doors, stopped, and chatted with an old man out watering his garden, and stuff like that. No one had much for me. Everyone on Benson Street had simply been there one day and gone the next. No one knew why. The people I spoke with were happy to share their theories with me. The street was full of drug addicts who had all gotten high and wandered off. There was a gas leak that killed everyone in their sleep and the gas company removed the bodies to avoid suspicion. Nothing I was told seemed very likely.
By the time I had spoken with a number of people, the sun had gone down. I debated going back to the motel and starting the next morning, but I thought I would at least check out Shelly’s sister’s house. I grabbed my flashlight from my duffel bag in my trunk and ducked under the yellow tape.
Shelly’s sister was named Mary, and she had been married to a guy named Tom for nearly forty years. They had two children who were grown and lived out of state. Shelly had told me they were worried about their mother and father as well and hadn’t been able to reach them. Nor had Mary and Tom reached out to them.
Mary’s house was third on the left, and I did a slow circle around it, shining my flashlight in the dark. I’m not sure what clues I was looking for, but there were none to find. One thing that took me by surprise a bit was just how big the houses on Benson Street were compared to the rest of the neighborhood.
I made my way back around to the front of the house and went up onto the porch. I tried the doorknob and was surprised to find the house unlocked. I was sure the cops had been through all of the houses on the street, but as I stepped inside I saw no evidence of this. I worked through the ground floor slowly, resisting the urge to turn lights on as I went. I didn’t want to draw any attention to myself, and one of these houses with lights burning in every window would be very noticeable to anyone who drove by Benson Street.
The home was eerie. It really was as if Mary and her husband had simply vanished. There was a half-empty can of Coke on the kitchen island, and dishes that needed to be washed in the sink. A cloud of flies buzzed here and there, eating the food residue that had been waiting to be cleaned away.
A door in the kitchen opened up to a set of stairs leading down. I decided to save the basement for last and went upstairs instead. I worked slowly, just as I had on the ground floor. There were four bedrooms. The master bedroom was the married couple obviously, and another of the bedrooms was a guest room. The third bedroom had been converted into a home office. The laptop on the desk there was dead. I found the charger and plugged it in then went into the fourth bedroom, which had a treadmill and an exercise bike.
I had saved the master bedroom for last, and worked my way through the dresser there, finding nothing but clothes. The closet was another story. There was a shoebox up on the shelf, hidden underneath folded bedsheets and a hand-stitched quilt. I pulled the box down and opened it, surprised to find a knife.
The knife was ornate, the blade curved, and the hilt made of bone, and wrapped in leather. Etchings had been carved into the bone and I unwrapped the leather to better see. I can only describe the etchings as strange runes.
Almost like an alphabet, they were very letter-like but damned if I knew what they meant.
I took pictures of the knife and then replaced it in the box and hid it once again. All that was left was the basement, and I was surprised to realize I had been putting it off, even dreading going down there.
I had no other choice though, and headed down into the kitchen with heavy steps, and then down once more. I swept my light across the open basement. It was unfinished, the walls cement, as well as the floor. Small frosted windows sat near the beams of the floor above. The basement had just been used for storage. I found cardboard boxes filled with Christmas decorations and a small wooden chest filled with important papers like birth certificates and old pay stubs.
Above me, a creak. I froze and turned off my light. A thud, another creak. Someone was walking on the ground floor. I wrestled with what to do, and I could feel my heart thumping wildly in my chest. Did I call out? Admit that I was trespassing? Did I go upstairs and try to sneak out? Did I stay and hope they didn’t come down?
I crept slowly to the foot of the wooden stairs that I had come down. I had left the basement door open and cursed myself for my stupidity. I listened to the footsteps above me. Sweat stung my eyes and I wiped it away. The footsteps came into the kitchen, and I moved away from the bottom of the stairs. I looked for a place to hide and wedged myself in behind a stack of plastic totes along the wall just as I heard footsteps on the stairs. I held my breath. I peeked out, but it was so dark down here I couldn’t see much more than a dark shape. It paused at the foot of the stairs, and then turned and went back up. I waited for what felt like an eternity but was probably only ten minutes. I didn’t hear any movement upstairs.
I left my hiding spot and went to the foot of the stairs. I took them slowly, exited into the kitchen, and then shut the door as quietly as I could. I paused there for a long time, listening. If anyone else was still in the house, they weren’t moving. I hurried to the front door and pulled it open. I stepped out onto the porch and pulled the door shut behind me. I rushed off of the porch and into the middle of the street. I turned and looked at the house, and felt sheer terror as my eyes swept up to one of the windows that looked out into the street from the master bedroom. Someone was standing there, staring right at me. The same dark shadow I had seen in the basement. I turned and ran down the street to my car. I rushed to the motel and went inside my room. The locked door wasn’t enough. I pushed the heavy circular table that served as an eating area in the small room in front of the door too and found myself exhausted. I fell into a restless sleep. I dreamed of a dark shape and of that curved blade.
When I woke the next morning I thought about going to the local police and telling them who I was and who had hired me, but in my experience, most cops don’t take kindly to private detectives, and I was afraid they’d keep me from Benson Street. So I showered, dressed, and headed back over.
I felt a little more comfortable in the daytime. I went back into Mary’s house and looked for evidence of someone else having been there the night before but found none. Then I went back outside and started at the end of the street and tried the front doors as I moved around the cul-de-sac and went up the other side. A lot of doors were locked, but two were unlocked. The houses I could enter were a lot like the ones I had been in the night before. It seemed as if whoever had lived there had just vanished, or up and left without taking anything. In the first house, I found a full set of luggage, and it didn’t seem like the overstuffed closet and drawers full of clothes had been touched. No one had packed for a trip.
In the other house, I found something rather alarming. It sat right out on a bedside table in the master bedroom: a knife exactly like the one I had found in Mary’s home, hidden away. The same bone handle, the same runes carved into it. The same curving blade, sharp as can be. I went back to the middle unlocked house and began to search. It took me a couple of hours, but then I found it, stashed away in a floor vent. An identical knife.
I left quickly and went to my car. I found a little diner and stopped for lunch, and sat at the table with my phone, searching online for any sort of information I could find on the knives. I searched for news about cults in the area and came up with nothing. I had taken pictures of the knives and tried to find anything about the runes, but ran into a dead end there as well.
After lunch, I went back to Benson Street and stood on the sidewalk. I was fairly sure that if I broke into the locked homes I would find knives there as well. I walked slowly past the houses and paused at the end of the street. Past the end of the road were woods, mostly evergreens. A dirty little path cut from the end of the street and through the lawns of the two homes in front of me and to the trees. I started down the path.
It was well-worn and continued well into the woods, curving around trees and overgrown plants. I walked along it for nearly half an hour before I saw it.
The church was old and made of wood, squat and slanted. A spire went up over the front double doors, a strange symbol that resembled an inverted cross made of what look like iron nailed to the front. I went to the building and tried the doors, they opened freely.
Surely the police hadn’t missed this strange building. inside were a few rows of pews and an altar at the back of the large open room. A large leather-bound book with yellowing pages that curled at the corners sat open on the altar next to a silver cup stained red inside. I couldn’t read the book, it was written in the same strange runes that were etched on the handles of the knives. I took pictures of a few pages and hurried back outside. Standing in the church I had felt a growing sense of unease, almost like I was being watched. I thought of the shadowy figure that had been watching me from the window of Mary’s home and shivered.
I went back to Benson Street and rushed to my car. I drove to the safety of my motel and went in and locked the door, barring it once more with the table.
I called Shelly and told her about the church. She hadn’t ever heard her sister or brother-in-law speak of it. I hung up with her and it struck me for the first time that the sisters were named Mary Shelly. One of their parents had a literary sense of humor. I called Mary and Tom’s two children next, one after the other, and asked about their parent’s religious stances. They told me their parents were Catholic, but not practicing. Church hadn’t been a thing in their lives as kids.
I sat on the end of the bed and scrolled through the internet, trying to find the strange inverted cross sigil I had seen on the front of the church. It took hours but eventually, I found it. I clicked on the picture and it took me to an amateur website that seemed to be all about various demons and hellspawn. It was the symbol of something called The Nameless One and it was said he would bring his followers great wealth and power in exchange for sacrifices. I thought immediately of how the homes on Benson Street were much bigger than those nearby. I set my phone aside and shivered. The whole thing was freaking me out. I do not scare easily, but that job I had taken was proving to be a strange one, and I couldn’t get over the feeling that I was messing with something I shouldn’t.
When the sun went down I drove to the local bar, a place called Mel’s. It was busy and I took a stool at the bar and had a beer. Over the course of a few hours, I spoke to a few townspeople about Benson Street. I was truthful with who I was and what I was doing. A lot of people clammed up when I brought up the street. I didn’t ask about the church or the symbol I had seen, but I did ask about the houses, and how they seemed to be so much more expensive.
One old guy gave me something. “Everyone on that street was a weirdo,” he told me. “And we all know it. Wherever they are, it isn’t good.”
Another patron of the bar brought up how people in the area had been going missing regularly for the last few years. Drifters, and homeless folk, no one important, no one who got the police involved very much.
Back at my motel, I called Mary and Tom’s oldest. I asked if they had grown up in the house on Benson Street and he told me no. His parents had bought it a few years ago after Tom had retired a few years early. I thanked him and hung up.
I was asleep when a thump at my door woke me. I went to the peephole and peered out but could see no one. Fear gripped my heart with its icy hand. I went to the window and carefully pulled the blind back at the edge and looked out into the parking lot. A line of four people stood there, right in the middle of the black pavement, staring right at my room. It was dark and I couldn’t quite make out who they were. Man or woman, I couldn’t tell. I had no idea of their age. They wore dark clothing, robes of some sort, with the hoods pulled up. As I watched they turned as a group and walked out of the lot and across the street. I watched them until they faded into the darkness. I didn’t sleep the rest of the night.
The next morning I went back to Benson Street. I was drawn to it, or more specifically, to the church in the woods. I hurried down the path and entered that strange building again. Someone else had been there. The book and cup that had been on the altar were gone. I did a more thorough search of the building and found a small trap door just behind the altar. I lifted the hatch open and shone my flashlight into the hole. A rickety wooden ladder led down ten or so feet to a dirt floor. I took a deep breath and started to climb down.
There was a tunnel, curving away to the right when I got off the ladder and turned around. I kept my light on a crept forward.
It twisted this way and that until it opened up into a large chamber, and I found the people who had lived on Benson Street. They all lay dead on the dirty floor, nude with their arms crossed over their chests. I needed to tell the police.
I turned and came face to face with a man in a hooded robe.
“Intruder!” he screamed at me, and I pushed past him and ran. I knew he was chasing me. I could hear this heavy footsteps right behind me. A chill blew through the tunnel as I ran. Voices burst forth from nowhere, speaking a language I couldn’t understand. I got to the ladder and began to climb. I got to the top and rolled out of the hole and turned and used my foot to slam the door shut. There was no way to latch it. I stood and turned, shocked to find a hundred or more candles had been placed throughout the church, all burning. So too were more robed figures. One came at me as the trap door behind me burst open and my original pursuer came through. I tussled with the new robed figure, he wrapped his arms around me but I shoved him off, into the altar. The candles there shook and then fell. A musty carpet that led from the altar to the front door lit immediately. Soon the room was alive with flame. The robed figures howled and I was forgotten as they attempted to put the fire out. I ran for the door and burst through it and into the woods. It was still morning, the sun hung low in the sky, the light getting cut off by the many trees. I turned and looked at the church. It was burning. No one came out after me. I turned and ran for Benson Street.
I didn’t stop running until I made it to my car. I drove to the motel and checked out and packed up my things. I didn’t call the police until I was an hour away from the town. I told them what I had found and hung up before they could start asking me questions. Then I called Shelly and told her everything I had found. The knives, the church, the robed figures. I could tell she didn’t believe me, and she started to cry and curse me out for not giving her something real. I understood though. I hardly believed the words coming out of my own mouth.
In the end, I didn’t speak with Shelly again. I didn’t go after her for the unpaid balance she owed me. A week or so later, at home, I searched the internet for any sort of news story about the church behind Benson Street, but only found one little article that had been written in the local paper about a fire in the woods there. It didn’t mention the church.
In the three years since then, I’ve seen robed figures a handful of times. Sometimes I don’t trust my own eyes and wonder if I’m hallucinating. I don’t think I am. I think the followers of The Nameless One are keeping an eye on me. They never approach me, they never threaten me. But they are there, right? They are watching?