I spent a day and a night in jail once and a ghost broke me out. At least I think it was a ghost.
I had been present at the scene of two murders where both victims had been killed by having their necks broken. It was due to this fact alone that Detective Redd arrested me. I don’t blame him I suppose. If I were him I’d consider me the primary suspect as well.
But I didn’t do it. It was done by a spectre. This thing descended down from the trees and snapped a guy’s neck right in front of me.
What’s worse is that I’d seen things like this before and got diagnosed for talking about it. That was a long bumpy road for me and I learned well to not expect anyone to believe something so outlandish. They had to conclude I was having hallucinations. Their sense of personal safety and foundational security depended on it. Some things a human will defend to the death and their false reality is one of them.
Detective Redd had to tell another prisoner to shut up when he perp walked me to my cell. It was a big bulky guy with one eye looking off to the side. He had dark hair in a crew cut and some tribal looking tattoos. He kept shouting that he sees me and that he had something for me. Something I lost.
I didn’t have much to do in my cell so I started to think back to see if there was anything I did lose. Not that I believed the nut but just in case. The only thing I could think of was from years earlier before any of this had started.
My father had died when I was 10 from a gas leak in our house. The house was locked all day while I was at school and I had a key because I usually got home before either of my parents. But one day when I got home I noticed my Father’s car in the driveway already, which happened once in a while. I tried the door and found it locked. I figured my Dad had locked it for some reason when he came home so I went to get my key and found it missing.
I went to a neighbor’s house to call my mom when Dad didn’t respond to 10 or 15 minutes of my banging and ringing the bell. The windows were all locked from the inside as well so I couldn’t crawl through one of those. When my mom got there and we finally got the door open we smelled the gas. I held my breath and ran through the house to find my pop dead on the couch.
I never did find that key. Not at home. Not at school. Not on the bus.
Right when I had finished thinking that, the guy with the crooked eye piped up saying “You got it boss” over and over. Could he have read my mind?
They let me eat in the cafeteria with the other inmates even though I wasn’t eighteen yet. Something about trying me as an adult. “Side Eye” as I had begun calling him to myself was there and kept staring at me.
As I took my tray back to find a seat he intentionally bumped into me as if trying to spill my food. With everything else going on this was the last thing I needed.
Shortly after lights out all the snoring began. The place was dimly lit from exit signs above the doors. Even with the noise it was still somewhat quiet. That’s when I heard shuffling feet on the tile floor. It sounded like someone was out of their cell.
It seemed to be getting closer to my cell and was coming from Side Eye’s direction. Could he have been out?
I stretched out my neck a little to see if I could get a look without having to get up from my bed, but I could only see one cell’s length down the corridor and whoever it was wasn’t that close yet. The sound was like someone dragging their feet while they walked. As I listened to try to verify to myself that that’s what it was, it stopped. Then I saw something. Just at the very far end of my field of view down the corridor there was a foot. Just sitting there unmoving. I couldn’t see the leg or any body. Just the foot. It was bare and white. It looked old and wrinkled. I could make out veins and liver spots. It sure didn’t look like the kind of foot that Side Eye would have.
In fact, it looked like the foot of the ghost that I’d seen kill already. I don’t quite know how to describe the kind of fear that came over me but it brought with it another feeling which was absolute dread.
I stared at that foot for what seemed like an eternity until I realized that it knew I could see it and it stopped right there for that reason - to stretch out the length of time I’d be lying there in terror.
As if in response to my thinking that - right at that moment - the sound of a cell door opening broke the tension. Side Eye let out a low chuckle. It was his cell door. The next sound was that of my door opening. No one had touched it, yet it creaked open all on it’s own. I sat up in bed knowing I had to run. Side Eye was meant to come into my cell and do god knows what. I quickly lunged my head outward and back to get a look down the corridor. There was no spectre and the foot and whoever it was attached to was not there.
But I could see Side Eye’s cell door open and a black mass through the dark inside that I assume was his body moving slowly as if getting up from his bed. He was coming.
I bolted through the door in a flash and ran down the corridor in the other direction. The door at the end of the hallway wasn’t locked. I glanced back before opening it and Side Eye was now out of his cell. He started sprinting towards me. I ran through two more sets of cells as fast as I could, the whole time hearing his bare feet slapping the floor behind me.
Finally I came to the nightwatch desk where Sargent Ellory was stationed. He looked up in surprise as I came in. I didn’t even slow down. As I ran past him and out through the swinging double doors I shouted to him that the cell doors opened and I was being chased. I glanced back again as the double doors closed and saw Side Eye also slip past Ellory who was standing at that point.
I found an emergency exit to the right which had warning signs on it indicating an alarm would sound if the door was opened. Fine with me, I needed cops right then so I slammed through the door and indeed the alarm did sound.
I ran out onto the grass with Side Eye in pursuit. I heard a cop yell “stop” behind us so I pulled a hard unexpected left turn and put my hands in the air to surrender. Side Eye stopped for a second and turned towards me and then tackled me.
I was on my back when he lifted his clasped hands over his head as if to strike a blow to my face. Then a ‘pop pop pop’. He fell over. The cops started running towards us. There was blood, but Side Eye was laughing. He reached over to me and put something in my shirt pocket. I retrieved it as he collapsed. It was the key to my house when I was ten. If found on my person it would look like I had been hiding it and hanging on to it all these years. They would think that I had killed my father.
So I ran. The cops were busy attending to Side Eye so I had a good head start. The place was minimum security so I got out fairly easily. I headed across a field next to the jail with a cop in pursuit and more soon to be on the way. At some point there would be bloodhounds so I ran up a small creek hoping the water would throw them off the trail. After a minute I got out of the creek and climbed a small embankment on the other side of which was the city dump where I hid out for several days.
I stole some food, a jacket, and boots from the dump’s only building. It must have belonged to a worker. I was thinking of what to do next when it dawned on me that the spectre wasn’t just setting me up to look like I had killed my father, the spectre was my father. His ghost had blamed me for his death and was out for revenge from beyond the grave.
https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/16hcgls/this_haunted_life_part_one/
https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/16k4r9c/this_haunted_life_part_two/