Good evening, it’s Spooky Boo. Coming to you from the radio waves of Sandcastle, California. Today was certainly beautiful out here on the coast, around 86 degrees and clear but tonight the temp is falling fast and getting ready for the evil ways of Sandcastle to set in. It’s already getting dark as the sun sets over the ocean in beautiful red hues of crimson and firey orange. As I look to the north I can see the helper of the Miller home getting ready for his Mistress and Master to go out into the night to claim their feast so here I sit, boarded up in the lighthouse ready to tell you another creepy story from the depths of the dark internet.
This version of the story has been edited for public consumption. If you would like the unrated version, please visit my Patreon page at https://www.patreon.com/spookybooscarystorytime. Membership begins at $1.00 per month.
Now let’s begin…
Story Number One
Dead Man’s Hand
Written by WilsonDKiller
Recently I learned that Count Dratoc died. The cause of death was suicide. The way he went out was fairly fitting for the man. In death, as he was in life, strange, shocking, and most definitely unintentionally attention-grabbing. Count Dratoc is the nickname of Oskar Nyholm. He produced and sold music under that name. He always said he derived the name from the old legends about vampires. That it felt powerful and right to him. He had a small following of people who were genuinely interested in his stuff. Oskar used to be a friend of mine. We grew up together. He used to be my friend until he tried killing me. As strange as it may sound, I can understand why he did what he did, especially knowing what I know now.
Oskar wasn’t right in the head. He was a cold individual to those who couldn’t break past his walls. He was a strange and dark man. Many would say he found no joy in life and was depressed. I don’t know whether he had suffered from depression, but he found some pleasures in life for sure. He would come off as a person who does not understand and is incapable of humor, however, I’d say that he had a sense of humor. His humor was just very dark, dry, and subtle. He was a peculiar man, but for fifteen years I thought he was just a little strange, maybe even a genius. He was insightful and certainly talented, just misunderstood.
His strange personality manifested itself after he nearly died in a skating accident. He suffered a serious fall, rupturing a few internal organs as a kid, and ended clinically dead for a couple of minutes. After that, something went wrong, something probably broke in his head because his brain didn’t get enough oxygen.
After that accident, Oskar became increasingly isolationist, cold, broody, and somewhat obsessed with death. Specifically corpses. Not in the sense that he wanted to do anything with actual corpses. No dead bodies repulsed and appalled him. He displayed his obsession with corpses in his frequent verbiage relating to the said word. He became extremely nihilistic and would equate people to rotting corpses crawling through their lives. Oskar would frequently use many such euphemisms. The count frequently said he saw most people as corpses strolling about, wasting away. He could tell you who was a corpse and who was not. It was completely arbitrary and senseless to anyone besides him.
For the longest time, I thought it was just the colorful language of a brooding young man. I guess he was more literal in his choice of words.
One of his peculiarities was telling everyone who knew him that there was ice in his veins. He’d also complain he’s cold. This wouldn’t stop until his nagging forced someone to touch him and say he’s warm or something. I always assumed it was part of his humor. Another one of his shticks was saying he can’t feel his pulse. Nobody bothered checking this one though. This frequently resulted in him ranting for hours about how he’s a machine or a miracle of the devil or some other silly thing. It was entirely harmless like I said, so we, his few friends, just followed along with his oddities. Other than being a weird dude, he was a pretty stand-up guy. Oskar held a job at a local music shop. He was almost entirely normal around strangers, and you couldn’t tell he had a thing for covering himself in dirt and proclaiming to be a soldier in the army of the walking dead. He estranged himself from his family, but he loved the freedom of it all, I guess.
All of that started changing when we met Thorstein Ruud, the Outlaw, known so locally for being a man who lived in his car because he could. He was another type of strange. Something you’d call a corporate psychopath. He couldn’t physically hurt a fly, but he was an asshole and was dying to make money. The problem with this guy was that he was an absolute moron. He couldn’t do anything right. I remember in the early nineties he rented a shop, turned it into an entertainment place. He used part of the shop as a small-scale theatre and used the rest to sell music records and movie cassettes. The shop had to be closed down in a short time because the idiot couldn’t manage finances.
Oskar knew this guy was no good from the get-go. He called him a corpse right away. I remember he said he was riddled with maggots sprouting from an empty eye socket in a creepy low pitch. I remember to this day the visual of him placing a hand over his eye and wiggling his fingers while rolling his eyes.
Somehow Ruud convinced the Count they should work together on the Count’s music. I don’t know how or why. The two never seemed to go a single day without arguing. At some point, Ruud thought it was a good idea to promote Count Dratoc as his own project. Oskar found out and nearly lost his shit. He was turning red and blue with rage. His eyes got that creepy, unnerving stare. The stare of a lunatic, it’s a very obvious stare. Looking at the distance, unfocused yet piercing. It sent chills down my spine when he chucked his beer bottle to the floor and then grabbed a piece of broken glass swearing he’d kill Ruud.
To this day, I have no clue about how Ruud got himself in the newspaper. He was worthless, a pathetic scum. Anyway, he mentioned Oskar as the weird dude who inspired his music. Someone somewhere contacted Oskar, who then buried the project as deep as he could in the eyes of the public out of spite. He didn’t care about the money or being famous. It was a hobby for him. He used to hand out records with his music to his closest friends, never accepting money for them. So, he sold himself as this absolute maniac who performs satanic rituals in the woods and practices demonic necromancy and all this other silly shit. Whoever was in charge of that interview was an idiot who took him too seriously, and that caused a local outrage. The project went to shit and as a result, Outlaw made death threats towards Oskar. Over the fucking phone.
He never bothered showing his face again in town. That was the end of that. Granted, Oskar got himself in trouble for his behavior in the interview. The circumstances forced him to admit that the whole thing was nothing more than a promotional joke for his music project. Soon enough, life returned to normal. As normal as my life could be when one of my closest friends was Oskar. The man who could show up at my apartment at 4 am to talk to me about his doomed nihilism, as he called it.
I came home one night from work, and I remember him sitting on the steps at our apartment complex. He was just sitting there, giggling to himself. Nothing unusual for him. I remember his head was facing the floor with his long blond hair covering his face. I placed my hand on his back and greeted him as “King of the beggars, Dratoc.” He just turned his head upwards and giggled.
Staring at me with that insane look on his face again, his eyes were so fucking weird. Something about this whole situation made my skin crawl. I remember how time kind of slowed down as we looked at each other and he just stared at the street behind me while directly looking into my eyes. My heart rose to my throat, and I clearly remember it pounding in my ears.
I just bolted past him and started climbing toward my apartment. Something about him felt wrong, entirely wrong. This wasn’t the usual weirdness of Oskar Nyholm. This was something completely different. I just remember the stairwell being completely dark and silent. I am consumed by thoughts about the strange man sitting below, and I feel this gut-twisting, sharp pain pulsating next to my collarbone. My right arm went numb, and the pain reverberated through my entire body. Shooting little arrows of agony across my shoulder and into my chest. I reached for my hurting shoulder, and I felt a chilly hand beneath mine.
At that moment, my head went blank. Every thought flew out of the window. The primal part of my psyche took over, and I screamed. Only then I noticed an elongated substance protruding from the base of my neck and something warm flowing under my shirt.
He giggled, and my heart sank.
Oksar Nyholm, Count Dratoc, I heard him giggling behind my back.
I turned around, and I saw his hand grasping my shirt. The pain was still bombarding my brain, and the adrenaline was overriding my judgment. I saw his fist flying towards me. Everything turned dark for a quarter of a moment, and my jaw felt sore. The blow refocused my mind. I saw Oskar attempting to punch me again, that sick stare in his eyes, a determined scowl on his mouth. Barely evading his punch, I pushed him with my bad hand. He stumbled a couple of steps back. My whole body was burning with pain, and I resorted to head-butt my assailant as hard as I could. He recoiled backward, nearly falling down the stairs, but was able to grasp the rail. Not even thinking, I kicked him as hard as I could in the chest, sending him down the flight of stairs with sickening thumps.
Those few moments felt like an hour. I didn’t even think about what had just happened. I ran up the stairs to my apartment, locking the door behind me. My body was hurting, my head was ringing, I was shaking and sick. The adrenaline was making me tremble, and I felt my stomach knotting. I ran to the bathroom to throw up. Only after I had thrown up, I noticed the screwdriver still lodged in the base of my neck. The adrenaline rush resumed, and my mind went ballistic with all sorts of insane thoughts. I didn’t feel the pain at all. I didn’t risk pulling out the screwdriver.
I called the police and forced myself to be coherent enough to explain to them what happened. Only after that, I remembered I might’ve crippled Oskar. So many thoughts and emotions swirled in my mind at that moment, ranging from anger to guilt. Even then, when I did not know why he did what he did, I didn’t want him to die or be a cripple. It was so chaotic in my mind. When the cops and medics arrived, I was kneeling over the toilet, vomiting my guts out.
They questioned me, and I ended up in the hospital. The stabbing caused permanent nerve damage to my right arm. I was lucky to be alive, as the screwdriver didn’t hit any important blood vessels. I couldn’t sleep right for a few months. A cocktail of pain and the nightmares riddled with Dratoc’s demonic face haunted me in the dark.
Speaking of Oskar, he wasn’t seriously hurt in his fall. The authorities found six days later, hiding in the forest, covered in blood and dirt, groaning and moaning while he crawled all over the ground. After searching his apartment, the authorities had found the remains of Thorstein Ruud. His corpse was the nastiest thing I’ve ever seen. Stab wounds and lacerations all over. Oskar destroyed his face. It was completely unrecognizable. He left Ruud a pile of rotten meat and broken bones.
Oskar Nyholm would serve ten years in prison, initially sentenced to fifteen. They had let him out early thanks to his exemplary behavior behind the bars. Of course, he apologized for what he did to me. We remained on speaking terms. He claimed in court that his murder of Ruud resulted from a drunken dispute that had turned violent. He blamed the influence of what he called bad alcohol on the assault on me as well. I guess he convinced the judge enough to avoid life in prison with his display of remorse. I doubted it was sincere at first, but now I think he was honestly regretting his actions. He would later tell me he did what he did because he was curious to find out what it felt like to kill a person. A sick thought experiment he devised for himself. Turns out, he enjoyed the experience I provided and decided it was worth it to kill Ruud, just to feel that thrill again and get back at the asshole.
That was also the first time he admitted something wasn’t right in his head. He repeatedly apologized for not being able to control his urge and that I wasn’t an intended target, just a casualty of lost control.
It didn’t help him. I never allowed him to get close again. The guy creeped me out more often than not after that incident. Society forgave him and embraced him. He improved his overall behavior with people and also spent most of his time in prison producing some strange yet beautiful music. Once out of prison, he started volunteering at a psychiatric center, perhaps to help himself.
Sadly, it didn’t pan out as he might’ve intended.
Not too long ago, I scrolled through my emails. In a sea of spam and useless messages, I found an email from Oskar. He emailed this same message to all of his acquaintances. Oskar had never emailed me before. He’d call or text me. This was a first-time thing, so it piqued my curiosity. I opened the email and there was a video. The title was Project-O. “Strange and artistic, how typical of Count Dratoc,” I thought.
Opening the video, I expected something either fucked up or some trippy music video. I didn’t expect to see the face of despair staring at me. Oskar sat in front of his camera, pale and exhausted, completely drained of all life. He looked like a patient of oncology. A completely hollow husk made of skin and bone parodying the man he once was. He was never a big man, but he was not as skinny as he’d been in this video.
Something felt off, a feeling that would only get worse when he started speaking.
He spoke about corpses and pain and suffering and hell and heaven and the longer he spoke, the sicker I felt.
I remember him admitting he did what he did because he saw most people as walking, decaying lumps of flesh, forever locked in their infernal agony. Untold suffering etched into their decomposing expressions.
He spoke about how he couldn’t look at the mirror because a corpse was staring back at him.
About realizing that this world is hell in the form of a nightmare we’re all stuck in. About how he figured out that the only way to wake up is to die.
He said he knew his time had come, that he had turned to decaying monstrosity drowning in its own unimaginable pain. Of how his blood froze in his veins and his heart petrified and turned into a stone. About how he would wake up to the real world, after he blows his brains out.
I just sat there, sickened and confused by this whole spiel of his.
He apologized for the hurt he’d caused throughout the years and urged no one to mourn for him. Saying he will be gone to a better place by the time they found his false remains.
I felt the temperature drop in my room as I watched the video. Everything slowed down and turned kind of dim for the duration of the viewing. I found it hard to breathe as if something was forcing cold and heavy hair into my lungs, making it hard to inhale properly. I had to re-watch the video a few times because of how surreal it all seemed.
Every time I replayed the thing, every single time I re-watched the video, I could feel the cold, hateful touch under my skin. The dead man’s hand was crawling up my chest and clutched my heart, attempting to crush it within its grip.
I spent more than an hour re-watching that video until I could no longer watch it. Only stopping when the urge to vomit surfaced. I only stopped when it all started making sense to me.
Oskar Nyholm was a deeply disturbed man. He must’ve convinced himself everyone around him was an anguished soul trapped inside a rotten carcass deprived of rest because he perceived himself to be dead. He probably saw himself as the thing he claimed to view everyone else as. A tortured soul stuck in an ever-decaying body that is bereft of rest.
I still re-watch the video sometimes, even though it all makes sense. Just to see if the morbid sensation will return, and it always does. I still feel the dead man’s hand reach for my heart. It’s like something anchors Oskar’s lonely spirit to that video file and is still incapable of peaceful rest.
Oskar Nyholm had committed suicide aged 41. Count Dratoc blew his brains out with a shotgun, just as he promised.
May he live forever in the memories of those who knew him. This is the story of Count Dratoc, the strange man who once tried to kill me. He believed me to be a living corpse trapped in eternal agony, unable to escape its own torment. He thought killing me would save me.
May his memory live in the subconsciousness of all, as he does in my nightmares.
Story Number 2
Beauty
A Creepypasta
Most children mix capital and minuscule letters when they start writing at an early age, like putting capital letters where they are not supposed to be. Some also mirror letters vertically, like writing an E with the horizontal lines going left instead of right. I was not unlike other kids, except for the amount of writing. From the age of four until the age of seven, I kept a daily diary of anything I found noteworthy.
I remember filling two pages of A4 sheets the day I started. I had found a puppy in the yard outside our house, an adorable little white and ruby fur ball, and after begging my parents to let me keep it, they agreed. I gave it the sketchy name “Beauty” and, as any other normal four-year-old girl would be, I was ecstatic with glee.
I had told my mom that I didn’t know what to do with all the happy – at least that’s how I remember it – and she had suggested that I write it down. My parents, who were both teachers, had taught me about letters through games and fun, as soon as I could focus on them, and for a four-year-old, I was really good at writing, even though my vocabulary was limited.
I just didn’t find it very entertaining to read or write. I had a short attention span and would always be drawn to something more fun. However, as my mom told me that it would make me remember and feel my happy all my life, I gave it a try. And I loved it.
I found it was extremely fascinating that my own thoughts – as opposed to when I was being told what to write – were printed down on paper forever and ever (at least, that is how I imagined it).
Then, as I mentioned earlier, I stopped writing my diaries at the age of seven. More precisely, I stopped the day Beauty died. I remember my last entry was about how awful I felt right after we had buried her, head smashed in from being struck by a car. Since then, I never felt like writing a diary entry again.
As I remember it, I had found Beauty twitching and bleeding on the deserted road outside our house. I had promised to look after her for a while, but fell asleep on the couch – which was unlike me. When I woke up, it had already happened, and I have been feeling a deep guilt ever since for having failed her.
Not until of the age of twenty-one did I realise that Beauty’s death and my diaries were closely connected. I had always assumed that the shock of losing Beauty had made me quit, but now I’m not convinced.
The day came when I decided to go through my old diaries. I was bored out of my mind and, for the first time, I overruled my reluctance to read them. I guess I was afraid of reliving the sorrow of losing Beauty that always crept in the back of my head every time I thought of my diaries. After a short search in my cramped-up basement space (I lived in a small flat in a building where all residents had a small basement space for storage), I located a medium-sized cardboard box with my old diaries inside it.
After bringing them up into my flat, I sat on my bed and opened the box. I remember I felt a chill run down my spine when I first looked into it. I found nothing I wasn’t expecting, yet still I felt uneasy. Again, I thought it was because I was reminded of the loss of Beauty.
There were seven books of various size and thickness and a small stack of lose paper sheets. I had only gotten my first diary book when my parents realised that writing had caught on, so at first, I had written on loose, A4 paper sheets.
I picked up the small stack of paper and, after reading the first few lines, I was struck by a wave of pleasant memories. I could remember the excitement and extreme glee of having gotten a puppy.
The first few days of my diary were really messy and very disorganised, and I had to concentrate to figure out every other word, but it soon became easily readable and properly dated. I suspect my parents taught me. Still, something was nagging me after the first entry.
I could not put my finger on why, but I had a really irritating feeling that I was missing something important. It was a bit like an itch that you can’t reach. You know it’s there, but there is nothing to do about it to reach it. I tried to ignore it and keep on reading, but the feeling kept me from concentrating.
So, I read the first entry again and the feeling got stronger. The third time I read the entry, now genuinely puzzled, I felt I knew what it was, but still I couldn’t quite locate it. Like when you forget a word, and you know what the word means, but the word itself keeps eluding you.
I started out by explaining that most little children mix up capital and minuscule letters. Why is this relevant? Well, on my seventh read-through, I noted that, even though I had remarkably few capital letter errors, those errors combined spelled two really creepy words:
KILL BEAUTY
I had a chill run through my body and I shivered slightly. Even though I was completely convinced it was a coincidence, it was still really creepy. In order to prove that to my chills, I went through the second entry.
The result was a more uncertain chill. My skeptical mind was still discarding it as remarkable coincidence, but I felt really creeped out. The second entry’s capital errors spelled:
JUST DO IT
In disbelief, I read the third entry through, noting the errors, and my scepticism all but evaporated. It said:
DO IT NOW
Something here was definitely wrong. It sure as Hell was no coincidence. But who could have tampered with my diary? I remember I kept it under my bed when I wasn’t writing, and as I was an only-child, the only people who had access to it apart from me were my parents, and I knew they would never dream of doing something like this. I hardly ever had friends over, and when I did, I was always with them.
Then did someone do it while I slept? That thought sent another chill through my body. My rational mind declined that idea as well, though, as it would make no sense for anyone to creep into my room at night to alter my diary with hidden messages that might never be found. Besides, I noted, I was certain the writing was my own. The only possibility left was almost equally scary as the last. I had to have written it all on my own.
Then, an idea came to me. I don’t really know why I thought of it, although I now have my suspicions, but if the capital letters meant something, maybe the mirrored letters did as well. So, I went back to the first entry and went through it, writing down every mirrored letter on a post-it note. The message wasn’t nearly as scary as the others, but it was equally puzzling. It said:
I WONT
The next entry spelled:
NO
I was now completely captivated by this mystery, and I spent more than ten hours going through most of my diaries. I tried to remember the things I had written about and find some sort of connection between the hidden messages and what I wrote in the diary entries. Although it was more and more about Beauty – more than I’d have thought – there seemed to be no real connection.
However, I found that the hidden messages were all very much alike. What I came to see as the Bad Message – the one from capital letters – commanded me in some way to kill my dog. The Good Message – the one from mirrored letters – refused.
As I got to the last few entries, I felt a sense of dread grow deeper and deeper into my gut. In the second-to-last entry, the Bad Message didn’t surprise me. It said:
KILL IT NOW
But I found not a single mirrored letter. This entry was the first from my entire diary that had no “Good Message”. For some reason, the absence of that scared me more than any other thing I had found in my diaries. With a shivering hand I turned the last page. Tears came to my eyes while I read the entry as I fully recalled the loss and guilt. When I had read it through, I noted that there were no misplaced capitalised letters. But, this time, there were some mirrored.
With a sense of terror manifesting itself in my body, I wrote the letters down one by one, and when I read the single word they spelled, a suppressed memory sprang to life in my mind. I realised that I hadn’t been sleeping on the couch at all the day Beauty had died and I realised that the guilt I had felt ever since her death was justly earned. The last six mirrored figures I found spelled:
HAPPY?
I froze completely. The Good Message had given in. The Bad Message had won and I had killed my own dog!
Frozen terror became overwhelming misery, and I cried for what seemed hours. When I finally had composed myself, and felt that I could control my voice, I called my mother. It rang a few times and then I heard my mother answer it, sleepily: “Hello?” I realised it was past her bedtime.
“Sorry for waking you up mom, but I have to tell you something.” My voice sounded slightly edgy in my own ears. My mom, not sounding sleepy at all any more, said, “What it is sweetie?”
I said, “I think I know who killed Beauty.” There was silence on the line for a few seconds, enough to make it clear she was hesitating.
Then, my mom said, “Yeah.” I was very disappointed in my mom for taking time to remember Beauty. She should remember such a remarkable dog right away, but I tried to hide my disappointment as I said, “Don’t you remember her?”
“Of course I do, dear, I remember your Beauty. Thank goodness it passed.”
I was so shocked at hearing this that I blurted, “How can you say that about our dog?” My voice was oozing with blame.
My mom sighed and said, “Honey… we never had a dog. It was all in your head.” I froze once more, this time in disbelief.
“W… w… what?” I stammered. This couldn’t be true. I remember my parents taking care of Beauty all the time. But then, come to think of it, I couldn’t recall any specific memories of my parents interacting with Beauty in any way.
I was confused and on the verge of tears once more and my mom continued, “You came inside, after playing in the yard one day, and claimed to have a puppy in your arms. Your father and I assumed it was a game and played along.”
She paused to breathe and I kept silent, still trying to understand what I was hearing. Then she said, “After a few days, we started getting worried when you acted more and more like it was really there. The doctor said it wasn’t unusual for kids to have imaginary pets, but you were so intense about it… sometimes I wondered if you actually believed it was there.”
“Go on,” I said, certain there was more to this story than she had told.
She said, “Not on the phone, sweetie.” However, five minutes of near-hysterical pleading made her continue anyway.
“You passed out one day,” she said with a sigh. “As we rushed you to the hospital, you were mumbling unconsciously. I remember the exact words: “Beauty is getting so big.” At the hospital, they found a tumour in your brain. They said it was the largest they’d seen on a child.” Her voice broke and she took a few seconds to compose herself.
“We did everything we could, but nothing worked. The doctors didn’t dare remove the tumour surgically. I don’t think you ever noticed what was going on around you. All you ever spoke of was that dog.
“Somehow you were well enough to stay at home most of the time, and your father and I spent all the time we could with you, afraid to lose you any day.”
“Then, when you had been given a few more weeks to live, your Beauty died. You told us through sobs that it had been run over, and that it was your fault. We comforted you the best we could, trying to give you all our love at once, knowing you’d soon pass away. So we played along and buried your imaginary dog.”
My mother seemed a lot happier as she went on, “We took you to the hospital the next day for your regular check, and your doctor was dumbfounded. There was not a single trace of your tumour. It had miraculously disappeared.”
Thank you for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, please head on over to my website at www.scarystorytime.com and make a comment. You can also make a comment by following me on Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram at spookybooscarystorytime or on twitter at spookyboorhodes.
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That’s all for tonight. I’ll see you in your nightmares.
