My CreepyPasta Stories

Star Gazer

The shadows never looked right in that house. Clustered behind the sofa or under the rose arbor, slashed across the ceiling by the rotating fan blades (where they would sometimes resemble an arm, a leg, or a woman’s bloated, misshapen silhouette), the shadows seemed often too dark or too big or just too damn wrong.

There was something lurking within those walls, something malevolent, like a benign tumor that still has the potential to corrupt and kill its hosts. Even as a child, I suspected that by acknowledging it I would be inviting it in, and by inviting it in I would be providing it with the sustenance to live and grow. I would be breathing life into its wooden skeleton, its glass eyes, its brick and mortar shell. It wasn’t alive before then, that I was certain of, but I also knew that even if it didn’t have eyes it could see, and it could also know. It knew a lot about me back then, too.

When my parents were still alive, they had never commented on the bizarre occurrences that went on at 19406 Clover Street, but I don’t think they had experienced what I did. They had probably never hesitantly probed into my bathtub drain with their finger, where I would often hear a gurgling, guttural voice come from while I was on the toilet or brushing my teeth, and pulled out a matted, ropey clump of light brown hair. If something had ever breathed down their neck as they walked down the hall, or if they had woken up to that thick, smothering stench of stargazer lilies, wet earth, and decay, they carried that knowledge to the grave.

By the time I moved out, I had left all of that behind me. I didn’t think that I’d ever move back, so the unexplainable occurrences there ceased to be of importance to me, and I dismissed them as the product of a child’s overactive imagination and creaky floorboards or old pipes. “You were dreaming, David,” my mother would say. “You had a nightmare.” And by eighth grade I had thought that was all it was, too. Except on the afternoon of July 21st, as I parked along the long, dirt driveway and looked up at 19406, I felt that familiar stir of unease.

The dream hasn’t ended, I thought as I stared at the neglected flowerbeds and overgrown lawn. It’s still going on. Two years later, and it’s still going on. And now mommy and daddy isn’t here to hear your screams.

The feeling passed over me, subtle and nostalgic and sad, like opening of a carton of your childhood keepsakes and catching that vague, stale odor of chewing gum, molding card board, and dusty memories. I had felt the same way when I had stepped up to the twin caskets and looked down at the faces of my dead parents. And like then, I didn’t want to open that box; I wanted to close the lid and bury it back with my juvenile fears , the pipedreams that I had strived for but was never able to achieve, and with the sad and happy memories of a past I would never be able to return to. I didn’t want to remember.

I was nineteen already, hardly one to balk at shadows and old houses. However, as I stood there my worry deepened into disquiet, even though I knew that the true monsters in this world didn’t lurk within plaster and lath but behind human faces.

“What would you call this, Dave? Victorian?” Emily asked from the front seat.

I didn’t respond to her, because when I had looked at one of the second story windows I saw what I had thought was a woman. The specter’s face had been pressed to the window, her mouth just a dark cut against doughy cheeks. She was looking right at me. Even though I couldn’t see her hair from this angle, I knew at that moment that it would be brown and wispy, tied back in a loose braid. She would be wearing a shapeless, blue dress and wooden clogs, the kind of clogs that made clack clunk clack noises on the-

DON’T THINK ABOUT IT DON’T LOOK DON’T LOOK AT HER SHE CAN’T COME IN IF YOU DON’T

“Dave?”