CURSED DOLL

The doll was found beside a busy street in Singapore. The Arabic word on the cloth is translated as "bismillah." I think it’s to trap whatever jinn or curse is inside from coming out or following the owner back home. Others speculate it’s a product of black magic.

Stories from twitter revealed that the doll is possessed and has been moving around on its own when the original owner isn’t home. The owner binded the eyes and left it far away from home so it wouldn’t follow her back.

Some say the doll can be heard talking when it’s left alone in a room and is found with its head turned in a different direction. It is said that it spoke in a Malay language and sounds like an adult female.

Original owner found that the only way to get rid of it and make sure it won’t come back is to cover its eyesight. The curse is rumored to have passed on to someone else who found it and untied the cloth unknowingly.

The doll has been missing since. 

Story/images source.

RUDE AWAKENING

The last thing I saw was my alarm clock flashing 12:07 before she pushed her long rotting nails through my chest, her other hand muffling my screams. 

I sat bolt upright, relieved it was only a dream, but as I saw my alarm clock read 12:06, I heard my closet door creak open.

Story source.

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WHY I DIDN'T SHOWER FOR 21 YEARS

I have nightmares where I’m trapped in a shower. The drain is plugged, and the water won’t stop pouring down on me. Water rises to my ankles, to my waist, and then over my head. The shower curtain turns to glass, and my screams turn to gargles. A dark figure presses its face against the glass on the other side, and it watches me. I plead, but it won’t let me out. I swallow water and flail helplessly in my glass coffin.

I wake up gagging.

I know where the nightmare came from - I never have to dig deep. The incident is never far from my subconscious. Finding it is easy.

Getting over it is not.

It was the summer of my 12th birthday when the Hudsons moved in across the street. Three people, one of them a really old woman. She was tiny, frail; skeletal almost. Thin white hair; faded, blue flowery dress - her head hung from her neck and it wobbled as the man pushed her up a makeshift wheelchair ramp into the house. At the time I couldn't figure out if she was alive or dead.

A few minutes later she appeared in an upstairs window, sitting in her wheelchair. She was directly facing my bedroom, and I cautiously peered out from behind my curtains. Her head was upright now, and she stared at me. Just stared, without moving her head an inch.

I closed my drapes.

For days she sat at the window. She watched the cars putter down our suburban road and gazed at the neighborhood kids scurrying through their yards. I never saw anyone else in the room; never saw her move from that wheelchair. At night I’d nervously peek through the crack in my drapes. Her silhouette was still in that window, lights off, staring out into the darkness at my bedroom. I couldn’t tell, but I knew she was watching me.

The stories about her cropped up pretty quick amongst my friends in the neighborhood. That she was a witch. That she was just a doll. That she was actually dead. But I knew she wasn’t dead. Sure, I never saw her move from that window, not once. And I never saw her head turn. But I felt her eyes move as they studied me. I could feel her watching me. All alone in my bedroom, in the middle of the night with my drapes firmly shut, I’d wake up and shudder. Her eyes were on me, I just knew it.

I began sleeping on the floor. The lower I was, the better. Maybe she couldn’t see me if I was on the floor.

I told my parents that the old woman across the street was creeping me out. I pleaded with them to talk to the Hudsons and ask them to move her to a room without a window. They laughed and told me to let her live out her twilight years in peace. She was just watching the street, they said, and that probably made her feel happy and feel younger.

“Are you just going to stick me in a windowless room when I’m an old lady?” my mom laughed. “Remind me to move in with your sister when I’m in a wheelchair!”

A week later there was some commotion at the Hudsons'. I watched from my bedroom window as the man ran out of the house and opened up the double-doors of his van. He jogged inside, and he reappeared minutes later pushing the old woman in her wheelchair down the ramp. She looked frailer than before. She couldn’t have weighed more than 70 pounds. Her head was flung to the side, resting on her right shoulder. Her body jostled in the wheelchair.

But her eyes never left me. Watched me the whole time.

The man picked her up and placed her in the car. He folded the wheelchair and stuffed it in the trunk. He quickly hopped into the driver’s seat, the younger woman pounced into the passenger seat, and the man put his foot to the pedal.

The old woman’s limp head still faced me. It bobbed up and down as the van reversed down the driveway. I studied her face. It was expressionless, emotionless. Her tongue slightly hung from the right side of her mouth. But her eyes were on mine, and they stayed on me.

The van accelerated down the street, and it was gone.

My parents heard the news that afternoon from other neighbors: the old woman’s condition was getting worse, and the Hudsons had taken her to some sort of a home. She wouldn’t be coming back. I went straight to my bedroom, and I looked across the street. I smiled. Her window was finally empty.

The Hudsons didn’t come back the next day. No van. That night I looked out towards the old woman’s window. There was no one there; no wheelchair. But the bedroom light was on. I remember telling my dad I thought it was strange, and he just shrugged and said, “Must be on some sort of timer or something.”

I woke up in the middle of the night and nervously peered out my bedroom window. That bedroom light was still on. It suddenly flicked off, and I ducked below my window frame. I slowly rose and looked out, expecting to see the silhouette of that tiny, skeletal being. I watched for ten minutes, pinching and straining my eyes. The lights quickly flickered on and then off again.

I slept on the floor again, clutching my pillow close.

I had a late baseball practice the next evening. When I got home, my house was empty. My parents were at my little sister’s softball game. I headed to the shower to rinse off.

About three minutes into my shower, I felt cold. The hot steam was escaping the bathroom somehow, which didn’t make sense because I had shut the door. I wiped the shampoo from my eyes, turned my head, and I heard a strange noise that would haunt me in nightmares for years: the metal rings of the shower curtain being dragged across the shower rod. Someone was slowly opening the curtain.

The shampoo stung my eyes, and through the stinging I saw a dark figure behind the curtain. Long, pale, bony fingers gripped the curtain as it slowly opened. I instinctively backed up in the shower, and the curtain opened completely.

There stood the old woman. I must have only looked at her for one, maybe two seconds, but at that moment, time stood still. All these years later I can still draw you a vivid picture of the horrifying image in front of me. Disheveled white hair, crazy in her eyes, bones jutting out from under her stretched skin, stark naked. Blotchy skin, warts all over her body, skinny breasts hanging to her waist. Hair where I didn’t know people could grow hair.

She smiled grotesquely, and I felt the shower tile against my back and the hot water pound my face. In her other hand, the old woman held a letter opener.

“August,” she mumbled. “August, August, August.”

I leaped past her, knocking her tiny body to the floor. I ran downstairs, naked and sopping wet. In my panic I somehow remembered I was nude, and I yanked a pair of shorts out of the hamper in the laundry room, sending the hamper crashing to the floor. I high-tailed it on foot down the street, eventually winding up at my friend’s house.

When the police arrived they found the old woman, crumpled to a heap in the bathroom. The shower was still running. The policemen were all really nice to me, admiring me for my bravery. I told them what she said to me - “August” - and asked if they knew what she could have meant.

“It will be August in a few days,” one of them shrugged. “And you can never fully understand old and crazy, son.”

The Hudsons only came to our street once more to retrieve their stuff. The “For Sale” sign was up in days. My mom told me they couldn’t face the neighbors for what happened. Apparently they had taken the old woman - the man’s mother - to a special home downstate. Somehow, someway, the woman managed to escape the home and caught a bus back to our town. It never quite made sense to me - she was so old, so frail, so helpless. She could barely move those weeks she lived in that house. How had she managed to travel hundreds of miles on her own?

Anyway, you can imagine what this did to me. I didn’t shower for 21 years. I took baths, which I suppose aren’t that different - it’s still a tub, and it involves hot, soapy water. But a shower, with its closed curtain, water peppering the tub floor and steam climbing the walls - you get lost inside your own head in the shower. Thoughts consume you, and it feels so utterly safe. For a few minutes, you are alone from the world. It’s your own private, misty kingdom.

But that’s what makes the shower dangerous - you’re enclosed, vulnerable, naked.

You’re exposed.

I talked to people about it - my parents, a shrink - but mainly I tried to push the incident deep down into places where I couldn’t find it. I didn’t talk about it with anyone since I was a kid - life carried on. Besides the baths, I was pretty normal.

A few months ago, something inside me clicked. I felt the urge to re-examine the incident; it was almost like a voice in my head was telling me to do it. My head wanted closure.

I spent hours online one night, trying to track down any information on the Hudsons and the old woman. I finally found what I was looking for - an obituary for the old woman. She had died four years ago. Somehow that walking skeleton hadn’t checked out for another 15 years. The obituary photo was a black-and-white picture from when she was a young woman - it was a photo of her and her deceased husband on their wedding day.

His name was August.

And he looked exactly like me.

I closed the browser and stared at my computer desktop for ten minutes. It finally made more sense: why she called me August. Why she was obsessed with watching me. Maybe she used to write letters to her husband, and that’s why she was clutching the letter opener that night.

For a small moment, I felt a little better. Things always feel better when they make more sense.

“Honey, is everything okay?” It was my wife.

“I think so,” I said.

I took the first shower I had taken in years that night. I didn’t even jump when the curtain rungs dragged across the shower rod and my wife entered. But as she embraced me under the hot water, one question wouldn’t leave my head:

How come the young woman in that wedding photo looks exactly like my wife?

Story source.

TWO-SENTENCE STORIES

The doctors told the amputee he might experience a phantom limb from time to time. Nobody prepared him for the moments though, when he felt cold fingers brush across his phantom hand. 

I can't move, breathe, speak or hear and it's so dark all the time. If I knew it would be this lonely, I would have been cremated instead. 

I woke up to hear knocking on glass. At first, I though it was the window until I heard it come from the mirror again. 

Yesterday my parents told me I was too old for an imaginary friend and that I had to let her go. They found her body this morning. 

My daughter won't stop crying and screaming in the middle of the night. I visit her grave and ask her to stop, but it doesn't help.

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OLD MACDONALD HAD A FARM

Back in 1994 my brother Josh was working as an on-site technician for a large phone company. His role was twofold: Firstly to set up new lines, and secondly to find the problem with and fix broken landlines.

He was based in a small town, but most of his time was spent catering to farmers in the nearby areas. The problems were usually hard to find but easy to fix. Sometimes Josh had to walk half a mile up and down dusty roads to find where a particular cable was broken – and the repair didn’t even take ten minutes.

One of those calls, in August of 1994, led him to a rather large family-owned farm. A girl called Kasey had called in from a neighbors’ house, saying that the family’s phone was dead. Josh drove out the next day.

I don’t know how it’s done now, but back then Josh told me that phone cables are buried together with other cables, sometimes even together with piping, in hollow tubes of either hard plastic or cement. In areas where that wasn’t possible the cables were usually placed on high poles. But in rural areas where not all houses were connected to the electric grid, it was sometimes more cost effective to lead the wire, covered in a thick plastic coating, simply along a road.

When Josh was called out to a farm those ground-led cables were usually at fault. A machinery drove over the cable, an animal ripped it or maybe some bored kid cut through it. Either way, those jobs kept Josh employed and so he didn’t mind slowly driving along country roads, stopping every few meters to stop potential breaks.

The MacDonald farm was an easy case. Already while on the route to their house Josh spotted the ripped cable. It was a clean cut and the separated ends had been pulled apart for several meters. Josh figures it was likely from a plow or similar device, a simple accident, likely done by the farm owners themselves.

He had all the right tools and Josh fixed the cable break within half an hour. Then he drove to the farm to tell the family the good news and make sure that the problem was fixed.

He arrived at the MacDonald farm around 4pm. The heavy wooden gate was open and so Josh drove his van straight inside to drive up to the house.

When he turned into the gate Josh saw a cow lying on the driveway. He was used to that. He honked the horn to shoo the cow away. Usually that worked but this particular, all-brown cow refused to move.

Josh slowed down, drove closer and tried the horn again – longer, this time. Still the cow didn’t move.

There was no way around the cow, other than to drive into a ditch next to the driveway and Josh didn’t want to risk breaking the car. Finally, just a few steps away from the cow, he stopped and let the motor roar. When the animal still didn’t react Josh carefully and well-aware that a diseased cow might attack him without warning, got out of the car. He grabbed his toolbox from the back, then slowly walked around the car to pass the animal from behind.

Only then, two steps in front of his car, did he notice the puddle of dark brown, dried blood around the animal.

The animal was lying, with its head on the floor and towards the direction that Josh had come from. He saw a large, gaping cut through the brown throat and three long slits through the enlarged stomach.

Josh was on edge, but not seriously worried. Occasionally farmers have to put pregnant cows down when the calf refuses to be born – and to get rid of a cow’s body is not easy and it can take days for the specialist to arrive.

Josh figured the MacDonald family or the veterinarian had tried to save the calf by cutting open the mother’s body, like a cow’s C-section, just without the anesthesia that humans would receive. Likely they killed the mother first, by cutting her throat, then, when the animal sank on the floor, they cut the body open.

From the looks of it, Josh concluded, they hadn’t succeeded. The bulge in the cow’s body was clearly visible; the calf without a doubt still inside. The skin had been placed back into its original position, only the cuts and a small gap between skin flabs was still visible. Josh resisted the urge to look inside the animal’s body.

Holding his nose, Josh walked around the cow and further towards the farm. The driveway was long. To his right was a pasture with several cows, some were standing, but most were lying on the grass, probably chewing the cud. To Josh’s left was a thick corn field that made him feel slightly uneasy.

Josh reached the farmhouse about five minutes later. He called out and rang the doorbell but there was no response. He knocked against the wooden door and called out again. He thought they might be out, trying to organize the removal of the cow’s body in the driveway.

To make sure that they weren’t just not hearing him Josh turned to the right and circled the house. He glanced through the windows while he passed them, first the kitchen, then a living room window, but everything inside seemed calm and dark.

At this point, before he saw it, Josh told me, he began to feel uneasy. There was nothing unusual, except the dead, pregnant cow, but still he felt a tingling in his legs and back, like a warning of bad news.

Then he turned the corner.

Josh only saw the scene for a few seconds, but he says he still remembers it today in vivid detail; like a photograph burned into his brain.

A large dog lay on the back porch. His body was slit open lengthwise and the organs and intestine were pulled out.

Right next to the dog’s body laid the bodies of an older couple. The man’s body was naked, his head separated from the body and placed between his leg. Two large cuts went through his body, one from the throat to the groin and one from left to right through the abdomen. His intestines were pulled out and placed to the left of the body, near the dog.

The woman’s body was dressed, but the clothes were cut open. A deep cut went through her throat and a large sideways cut through her abdomen. She too was gutted. But what Josh remembers the most, the thing he still has nightmares about, are the bloody spots where her breasts should have been. There were two straight cuts, as if someone had carefully sliced the breasts off her body.

Both, the man and the woman’s eyes and mouth were sewn shut with a thick, dark thread. The man’s lips were split in several places, as if he had forcefully opened his mouth, but the thread had been stronger than his lips.

Josh threw his toolbox on the floor and ran.

He turned back around the corner, ran back onto the driveway towards the dead cow.

While running he saw that some of the cows on the pasture were looking at him, following his movement. But most of them were still on the floor. Most of them still hadn’t moved. Around one of them he noticed a large, dark puddle on the grass.

Josh ran so fast that he twice nearly fell over stones or potholes. He stumbled towards the cow, curved to the left around the body and ran around the back of his car to get to the driver’s seat.

Just before he reached the driver’s door Josh stopped dead in his tracks. The cow was still there. But the flap of skin was pushed further open. The bulge was gone. Inside the cow’s abdomen, where Josh had thought was a calf, was now just a large, gaping hole.

Panicked Josh ripped the car door open. He screamed when he felt the thick, brown-red liquid on the door handle. Still he pulled the door open, looked inside the car and jumped on the driver’s seat. He felt a large, squishy ball exploding when his feet pressed on the accelerator.

He looked down to his feet to see what it was – and just in that moment noticed movement in the corn field to his left. He slammed the key in the ignition, turned it, heard the motor howl, threw the car in reverse and hammered his foot through the squishy mass back on the accelerator.

The movement in the corn field came closer. The car moved backwards and swerved; Josh was barely able to avoid driving into the ditch at the side of the driveway. He slowed down to regain control over the car, saw the corn being pushed aside, then pushed again hard on the accelerator.

The car sped backwards, through the wooden gates and back on the country road. Back in the driveway, just when he was out of the driveway and backing onto the road Josh saw a figure emerging out of the cornfield, a few steps away from the cow. He swears the figure looked like a teenage girl with dark hair, covered from head to toes in dried blood.

Then Josh sped off.

Josh walked into the police station with the cow’s heart still stuck around his right foot.

The newspaper articles said that the MacDonalds didn’t have any children. 

Story source.

MY LAST NIGHT BABYSITTING

After much wavering and second guessing, I finally bit the bullet and returned to graduate school last fall. I'm sure several of you know how difficult it is to juggle a rigorous PhD program and a full-time job. I was going to need a small source of income, but wanted something that would allow school to be my first priority. As luck would have it, a good friend of mine knew a family in desperate need of a quality babysitter. Their current sitter had recently graduated high school, and was heading out of state for college. Initially, I felt a little odd accepting work as a babysitter - after all, I was in my mid twenties, a PhD student, and engaged to be married. But hell, the hours were flexible, the money was fantastic, and I could anticipate a great deal of solid study hours after the toddler was sleeping soundly.

To be quite honest, it was smooth sailing from the start. The family was overwhelmingly generous with their money, and their three-year-old daughter, Alison, was quite well behaved, even in all her mischievous, toddler glory. Over the next few months, I found myself up there several times a week, mostly relieving the mother, Renee, in the afternoons so she could run errands and catch a coffee break. I occasionally sat on Saturdays, so the parents could enjoy a date night to the movies. I wasn't especially fond of the weekend night shifts, especially because the family lived in a large home, high up in the mountains, surrounded by acres and acres of trees. During the day, their heavily wooded property was serene and majestic, but once darkness fell, it was eerie in its silence. I tried not to pay attention to the rustling of small, forest animals brushing past bushes, or the sharp snapping of tree branches as the wind went about its nightly weaving. Mostly, I just tinkered around on my laptop, or buried my nose in a textbook until I was relieved to go home.

Everything changed this past February. It was an especially cold Saturday evening, and I was due to babysit around 7 that night. Renee's husband Eric was out of town on business, and she was excited to share a night out with girlfriends. Armed with a backpack of heavy reading, I had my fiance, Marc, drop me off on his way to the gym. The night was mellow; heated up some frozen pizza, drew a bath with an embarrassing amount of bubbles and Elmo toys, and had the kid in bed by 8. I had an exam the following Tuesday, and admittedly had a lot of studying to conquer. My fiance arrived around 9:50, about 10 minutes before I was expecting Renee back home. Right at 10:00, and I mean on the nose, we heard footsteps on the wrap-around deck, and noticed Renee making her way to the front door. I remember finding it funny that I had been concentrating so hard, I hadn't even heard her suburban drive up.

Marc and I exchanged a knowing glance as Renee made her way into the living room where we sat. It appeared she might have had one glass of wine too many that evening, because she had this intoxicating, frozen grin on her face. At first, I chalked it up to booze, but when the grin remained, I started to feel uncomfortable, the way an unknown stranger staring from across a restaurant can make you feel. Renee was usually very chatty, perhaps even a bit ditzy, but tonight, her answers were short, but still polite enough. I began to gather my things, as my fiance continued a game of solitaire on his phone.

Renee sat at the oak dining table, that bizarre and unsettling grin still plastered to her face, and wrote me out a check. There was something painfully uncanny about her movements - they were rigid, forced, almost animatronic. By the time we got down to the drive-way, my fiance and I both had baffled looks on our faces. Renee stood in the window, smiling down on us, waving her hand back and forth. I gave a short nod and wave, keeping my eyes on the gravel. That discomfort wasn't letting go. We walked past Renee's silver suburban, taking note of how absolutely dusty it was. Especially strange for someone that seemed to take her car in for a wash at least once a week. I traced my finger across the passenger door absent mindedly, leaving a light coat of soot on the pad of my index finger. The car was filthy, like it had been through the elements.

"Where the hell did she go tonight? Through a sand storm?" I joked.

"Seriously..." Marc trailed off.

"I'm not the only person who found that whole thing weird, right?" I asked, attempting to keep my voice to a whisper.

"Oh, relax. She was probably just tipsy. Her smile, though...." he said, closing the driver's door.

We began our trek down the winding roads, towards, after a long night of babysitting out in the boonies, what I always liked to call,"sweet, sweet civilization".

The drive from their house to the freeway was dark, lined with redwoods and deer, which I usually quite enjoyed. Tonight, it seemed endless. I had this overwhelming, new desire to be on that highway, surrounded by other cars, amongst other drivers and passengers, heading into the city. We drove for what seemed like too long - something wasn't right. I reached for my phone and glanced at the time - we were usually passing the first gas station by now. I pawed at the handle of my purse, for the first time noticing the bag's weight. Ugh. I had totally forgotten my text book. Reluctant to turn around when we had already been driving for so long, I made amends with the fact that I absolutely needed that text if I had any chance at rocking my exam. Marc let out a groan as he swung the wheel, turning back the way we came. Climbing the hill to Renee's house, I saw that the suburban was no longer in the drive-way. She must had moved it into the garage for the night already. As we made our way to the deck, I saw the burgundy spine of my text on the couch through the sliding glass door. I continued on to the front door and knocked three times - no answer. I knocked again, and then tried the door handle - unlocked, as I usually left it while Renee and her husband were out. We made our way into the house, making sure to keep our footsteps quiet.

"Sorry, it's just me; I forgot my book," I said, trying to keep my voice down. My fiance was a few steps behind me, peeking around the corner.

"Her bedroom door is open, but the lights are off." Marc said, a confused look spreading across his face.

"Renee? I asked, a little louder this time, "Renee, it's me, you still awake?"

Silence.

We walked towards the kitchen, and I noticed the answering machine was blinking - I hadn't noticed it before I had left - there hadn't been any phone calls that night.

I'm not exactly sure what compelled me to push 'play' on that recorder, especially when, for all I knew, Renee and Alison were both asleep, and could be rudely awakened. My finger seemed to hover over that button for a mere second, before I pushed it in, rather aggressively. What I heard on that recording has never, ever left me. The time stamp of the message was 10:14 - we had left the house at 5 after 10.

"Hey sweetie, it's Renee. There is some kind of hold up on the highway here; maybe an accident or road work. I'll probably be about a half hour later than expected. I'm so sorry - help yourself to some dessert while you wait. Hope Alison didn't give you too much grief tonight." Her voice sounded cheery, normal...real.

I looked at Marc; my heart sunk, my eyes flooded with tears.

"A....Alison" I managed to sputter.

Marc disappeared up the staircase to Alison's room, taking steps three at a time. After a painfully long minute, he sauntered down the stairs, much slower than he has ascended them.

"She's fine. Sleeping soundly," Marc said, without emotion.

Marc and I found our way to the living room, where we sat without eye contact or conversation until Renee pulled up the drive way. She seemed exhausted, glad to be home and off the congested road. She chattered on about her evening, wrote me a check with a generous tip, thanked me for my patience, and smiled - the kind of smile that seemed absolutely genuine, and slowly faded when socially appropriate.

We stumbled down to our car in a daze, passing Renee's suburban, which still gleamed from a recent trip to the car wash.

I never had the heart to tell Renee what had happened that evening. I also never found the first check from the grinning woman. I ended up canceling my next two shifts, feigning sickness. I finally e-mailed Renee, telling her that my program was getting especially intense, and that I didn't think it best to continuing sitting for them. She bought the story, and now I'm free...free from the darkness that enveloped the home in the mountains, where I once met a woman who wouldn't stop smiling.

 Story source.