Good evening, It’s Spooky Boo Rhodes from Sandcastle, California ready to tell you the cursed tales of the internet. We love curses here in Sandcastle so much. If you’ve kept up with the Horrors of Sandcastle podcast you’d know that a curse caused a zombie outbreak at one time. There are may more curses to come, but for now enjoy the curses from the internet. If you would like to hear most about the curses coming up in Sandcastle, follow my podcast the Horrors of Sandcastle at the website www.sandcastlehorror.com.
First, I’d like to thank the listeners and Patreon members including madjoe, PA Nightmares, Ivy Iverson, John Newby, Patrick, and 933TheVolt.com. If you would like to know how to support the show, visit my website at www.scarystorytime.com/support where you can buy t-shirts, join Patreon for a commercial free podcast, get a miniature figurine and even a pillow.
Now let’s begin…
A Curse Cast Once, Turns Seven Time
by
Dthdsguise
My name is Drew, I‘m 18 years old, six feet tall, a damn good swimmer, and I live in a small city in Louisiana. I’m not afraid to give out my information like this because it won’t matter after tonight. I was always a little different from other children when I was growing up. Teachers always seemed wary of me, even paranoid. They’d avoid prolonged discussion with me, and often snapped at me for asking questions. I got in trouble a lot more for things other children would do too, but nobody cared when they did them. No, it was just me. As the years passed, I think the other kids started to see the difference between us as well.
One-by-one, the children I played with stopped wanting to be around me. They’d purposefully exclude me from games at recess or from groups during class work. My mother used to tell me that it was because of my eyes. She said that, traditionally, people with bright-green eyes (like me) were thought to be witches. We’d laugh about that one a lot. She even suggested, more than once, that I be the Wicked Witch of the West for Halloween. I’d laugh it all off, because, it just didn’t bother me that much. It didn’t really start to bother me until I started to see the differences myself. When I got to middle-school things changed drastically. The other kids started to get violent towards me, and the teachers wouldn’t do anything to stop them.
It almost became the norm for me to skip P.E. because the other guys in my class would all gang up on me. Now, I’m no wimp. I can defend myself, even against multiple assailants. My dad was an ex-Navy SEAL, so I could take care of myself in a fight, but, no amount of training can help you when it‘s 25 on 1 against you.. It was stay away from class, or go to the hospital. One day, I got caught ducking out of class and wasn’t able to get away. I had to go through P.E. I guess the boys had been saving up their aggression for me, cause it was especially bad that day.
One of the older boys in my class ran up behind me and kicked me in the backs of my knees. Another grabbed me as I fell, picked me up, and threw me to the ground. Then, they all started kicking me, stomping on me, throwing shit at me, anything to hurt me as much as possible. When I’d try to scramble to my feet, one of them would just pick me up and slam me back down. When it was finally over, I’d managed to stave off some of the worst blows they threw at me, but it was still pretty bad. I had a few cracked ribs and a broken tail-bone, not to mention bruises everywhere.
Of course, there I was, sitting across from the principal, in his office, explaining what happened, with two other boys sitting beside me. I pointed to my black eye and how I was having trouble breathing. They said I was a racist, and that was the end of it. We all get detention, and the attacks became more frequent, because “Nobody likes a snitch.” It was the night after that incident, however, that things really changed for me. I was looking in the mirror at my black eye when something caught my attention. It was the glimmer of my eye, hidden under the baggy, swollen flesh around it. There it was, bright-green. I stared into the mirror and my eyes looked back at me. Everything else around me swirled and swam away, and only I and my reflection were left, with those green eyes. I had never really looked at myself before, what normal person just stares at themselves in the mirror, right? Had I always looked like this?
It seemed like lines had been drawn into my face from years of agony. Wrinkles in my skin looked as if I had never smiled, not even once, in my entire life. I started to cry. The salty tears welled up in the sore and swollen skin and it burned like hell. I closed my eyes, as if closing them would keep the tears in. Then I heard it. I heard someone call my name. They just said it. “Drew” I looked up, but I was alone. I swore that someone standing right next to me had said my name. I had heard it so clearly. “Here Drew.” I heard it again. I looked into the mirror, but all I saw was my own reflection.
I looked into my eyes again. “There…” The voice, I realized, was my own. “Why are you crying?” Was I talking to myself, or was this all in my head? I couldn’t tell, because all I could see was those two, green eyes in the mirror. ‘Tunnel Vision’ I think they call it. “They did this to you. You never hurt any of them, never deserved any of this!” It was true. I had thought this many times, but what was the point of such thoughts? I couldn’t change anything at this point. I’d just have to wait it out, right? “No, you‘re better than them. If God cursed you, then spit on his creation.” What? What was I saying? What did that even mean? “If witches have green-eyes, then maybe we can put a curse on them.” This was crazy.
There’s no such thing as magic. No such thing as curses. Oh, how wrong I was. As I left the bathroom, I could still hear the echoing of the voice from the mirror. “A curse cast once, turns seven times.” I can’t describe to you my fear at that moment. I tried my best to let that memory go. Tried my best to forget about that night, but it was no use. After that, I’d find myself, sometimes, when I was alone, talking to myself, and then that voice would answer. Long conversations with someone who wasn’t me, but was me at the same time, would drag on for hours almost, and I wouldn’t even realize it. It was only a couple of times at first, but it became more and more frequent. Soon, I wouldn’t even notice whole conversations going on. The line between myself and… whatever that thing was blurred.
The walls got fuzzier and fuzzier, until there were times I couldn’t even tell the difference. I’d lay in my bed at night, I think of the people who’d hurt me, shunned me, and I’d laugh. Then, I’d start sobbing. Laughter turned to sobbing turned to homicidal anger, then, back to laughter. I was falling apart. That’s when it really started. It seemed like just mere coincidences at first. My “best friend,” a girl I’d known since I was little, and who’d always be the first to get me in trouble for a good laugh, was diagnosed with epilepsy. She had a seizure in the middle of class one day, right after she’d threatened to give a poem I’d written to one of the teachers. It had some ’graphic’ imagery in it, and I would have surely gotten in trouble for a lot less. A boy I’d always had troubles with (he used to be a friend, but was always willing to side against me if it kept him in good graces with our classmates) his parents disowned him, and then divorced. It would come out a year later that his mother had molested both him and his older brother. He eventually committed suicide. I laughed for days at these things at first. Karma sure was a bitch.
I laughed and laughed and it only got better from there. Everyone who’d ever hurt me, everyone who’d ever crossed me, got what they deserved. Teachers lost their jobs, kids lives were torn to pieces irreparably. It seemed like a dream come true. After a few years, things seemed to quiet down. Tempers evened out, as they often do when you get out of middle-school, and people I used to hate became better people. I forgot about the voice, and the “curse.” Something else started though. I started to see things. Things that just weren’t there! A light appeared outside my window one night, and shined into my room. I called my dad in to look at it, but he said there wasn’t any light outside my window. I pointed straight at it and said “There, right there! See it?” He looked out and told me that it was just a street lamp down the road, but, it wasn’t! I knew it wasn’t. Someone, or something was looking in my window, watching me! I started to catch glimpses of things looking at me from around corners, but they’d disappear when I’d turn to look at them.
They were following me. My paranoia got worse and worse over the years. I wouldn’t let anyone touch my phone or my computer, because I knew they would go through my messages. I didn’t have anything to hide, nothing of value to take, but I knew there was something that they wanted, and I wasn’t about to let them just take it. My brother did amateur boxing. He was actually the state champ at one point. He always looked out for me when I was little. On the night of one of his biggest fights, the fight that was supposed to start his pro carrier, I came to watch him fight. He hooked me up with a some sweet ring-side seats for me an my friends. I was so excited that I went hoarse from cheering for him when they announced him entering the ring. Halfway through the second round, his opponent landed a solid shot on his shoulder, shattering the joint. My brother was never able to fight again. It was then, that I remembered the voice, and the curses it had visited on the people around me. But, why would it hurt my brother? He’d always looked out for me, always helped me when I needed it.
No, it was just a bad accident was all… No, it wasn’t. One-by-one, my friends all fell to the curse that surrounded me: My new best friend, my real best friend, every girl he ever dated, dumped him. One moment they were in love, ready to take their vows, the next, they wanted nothing to do with him. One girl, who he really felt a connection with, who he really wanted to make it work with, got pregnant, but the child wasn’t his. She had cheated on him multiple times, and, while there was a chance it might have been his, she told him even if it was, she didn’t want him around and she was going to put the child up for adoption. How fucked up is that? My other friends? One’s parents divorced and now hate each other. Another father abandoned their family. There was one… someone very special to me.
This girl was my first real relationship. I loved her so much and wanted to marry her, wanted to settle down, have kids. She and I shared something very special. But, nothing was meant to last for me. Her parents became abusive. They’d get roaring drunk, and her father would come smashing into her room, tearing the whole place to pieces, screaming about what a worthless slut she was and how she wasn’t even fit to be called human. Her mother would yell at her about her grades if they dropped below an A. She would call me at night, sobbing until she couldn’t even speak anymore.
I did all I could for her, but, I guess it wasn’t enough. After our high school graduation, she committed suicide. She… she slit her wrists one night as she laid in the bath tub and bled to death. After I found out, I ran to the mirror, screaming, begging to know why this had happened. Why were the ones I loved hurting so much? Thinking back now, I understood. Two months ago, my mother died. There was no cause. The doctors were baffled, but I know. It was slow. For three, long months, I watch as she wasted away in a hospital bed. Her skin turned yellow and death crept its spidery hands up her arms and legs like black vines. That was six… “A curse cast once, turns seven times.” Just one more left, one more life has to end because of my curse.
The Curse of the Ninth
by
Trycksterr
Peter Taylor stared at the scrap paper on his coffee-stained desk, as he attempted to keep his shaking hand, which equipped a nearly-depleted pen, steady. His left hand rested uneasily on the desktop, tapping the drum rhythm of the song he was trying to write. He didn’t feel like writing any more cheap, superficial rubbish this time, and instead tried coming up with deep, subtle and metaphorical lyrics. So far he had come up with one verse, in which he introduces the protagonist of the story depicted in the song.
The protagonist was a down on his luck musician, who was neither extraordinarily good with an instrument, nor was his voice of notable range. Wanting nothing more than to become a famous artist, the protagonist summoned the devil and closed a deal with him – he would indeed become a great musician, but at a great price.
Peter sighed as his inspiration had completely dried out, and promptly stood up, shoving his chair backward to the wall of the small cabin he had retired himself to. He had to be alone for a while; it was then that he was at his most creative. There was no one to judge him when he wrote a terrible song or sang a false note – even though he rarely did – or when he succumbed to what must have been his greatest flaw.
Peter swept the sweat off his brow as he grabbed a blotter, dipped it into a glass filled with some sort of liquid solution, put the blotter onto his tongue and closed his eyes. He walked to the living room and plumped down into a dark blue, cushioned sofa, and lowered the needle of his gramophone onto the LP where he had left off. Peter rocked out to the Doors’ “The End”, singing along and jumping around the room for a full nine minutes until the song’s climax, upon which he sat himself back down into the sofa and felt himself sink away into it.
Peter saw flashes of a childhood trip to the beach, and himself as a child diving into the sea as he felt like he was sinking further and further into the couch. He felt his conscience be reduced to his flashbacks while the real world faded away into the fabric of the sofa. As Peter listened to Jim Morrison repeat the word “fuck” countless times, a sudden surge of inspiration overcame him, and he pushed himself upright from the chair, and ran towards his desk again, awkwardly stumbling along the way.
The lyrics flew from his mind to his pen and then to his paper, and before he knew it, Peter had finished his last song. He threw the pen across the room and allowed himself to slip from the chair and fall to the ground. He watched the roof change into a starry sky, and before he knew it his field of vision had transcended the universe and he witnessed something truly divine and indescribable. Tears rolled down his face onto the carpeted floor, and he was overcome with a sudden fit of incessant laughter.
The song had meanwhile come to an end, as did the LP, but Peter was too comfortable where he was to notice. What he did notice, however, was that another song suddenly started playing – it was the first track from a fairly new album he had brought along with him to the cabin: “Sympathy For The Devil”, by the Rolling Stones. He loved the song, and it had partly inspired him to write the song he’d just finished, but the issue was simply that he hadn’t put the track on himself.
Peter’s field of view was again minimized to the shallow sight of the cabin’s roof as he was pulled back into reality by the illogicalness of the situation. He had not invited or allowed anyone into the cabin, and no one knew that he owned the cabin, which was in the middle of the woods as well.
Peter rolled over and pushed himself upright, and saw a handsome, suited man stand next to the gramophone and look at him. A smile appeared on the suited man’s face, while panic overtook Peter’s.
“I hope you don’t mind me putting this one on. I’ve always liked it. Makes me feel… you know, proud.”
The suited man started walking around the couch, slowly making his way to where Peter was standing.
“Why are you here?” he asked, trying to sound tough but failing miserably at covering up his immense fear.
“Did you forget, Peter? You’ve published nine albums so far. Please, do tell me why you just wrote another song regardless of our deal.”
“I was never going to bring out a tenth album. I… I just wanted to write another song.”
The suited man was getting ever so close.
“I do have to say, you did make the most of it after all. Remind me, when do you become twenty-seven again?”
“June sixth.”
“Ah, just a few more months then? Now, do you remember what we agreed upon?”
“It ends at twenty-seven, and I can only publish nine albums.”
The suited man now stood in front of him and was visibly angered by Peter’s last remark.
“No more than nine!” he shouted with a voice that sounded eerily inhuman, “I thought I made myself very clear when I said you were allowed to make nine albums, and no more!”
“I swear I wasn’t planning on making another one! I just wanted to write one more song!”
“It ends at twenty-seven, or it ends after nine. You broke our agreement, and now you shall suffer the consequences of it prematurely.”
Peter’s pleas for forgiveness were ignored, and the suited man put his hand on Peter’s forehead, whose eyes turned black and his voice turned mute.
The suited man was then suddenly gone, and Peter’s eyes were normal again, but he remained silent. He walked outside for a minute and returned with a jerrycan filled with gasoline, which he spilled all over the cabin. After walking around the small house and covering a big part of it with gasoline, Peter emptied the remainders in the jerrycan onto the couch. He threw the empty container aside and sat down into the soaked sofa.
Peter took a cigarette from the chest pocket of his jacket and lit it. After taking a few puffs, he lowered his hand onto the handrail and dropped the cigarette onto the oil-soaked carpet.
Curse of the Funeral Flowers
by
Shaherrrb
The story I am about to tell you is something I’ve only shared with a few people through my entire life.
My house was built in the 1860s, the exact date we’re not entirely sure. A woman named Heather Gladshire was the owner. A civil war widow, she received a $100 check from the U.S. Government to build the house, which stayed in her family line up until the people we bought it from.
The house is one of the oldest in our town. At the end of our backyard is a tall concrete wall, smothered with ivy. Back in the late 1800’s, that wall was part of a massive greenhouse. Another home at the end of our street was the town’s funeral home. Heather Gladshire’s greenhouse was the source of flowers for all our town’s events. Flowers for weddings, flowers for ceremonies, and flowers for funerals. Lilys, Orchids, and the most unique, the Black Carnation. The petals are shimmering black, fading to a deep purple as they swirl outward with white tips. It’s one of the most stunning flowers I had ever seen, and certainly not native to our climate.
We bought the house from a pool builder. He had torn down the greenhouse and built a huge in-ground pool. When we bought it, there were beautiful black carnations growing all around the pool. Strangely however, they wouldn’t grow any farther than the concrete wall that surrounded the pool.
“I’m not really sure where they came from,” he told us, “when I built the pool, they just started growing around it.” They didn’t grow anywhere else in town naturally. Though a bit morbid to think about, these mysterious funeral flowers were beautiful and my sister and I loved picking and saving them.
My mother, who is an avid antique dealer, was naturally fascinated with the history of the home and neighborhood when we moved in. After researching our home, we learned that a Revolutionary War ship captain named Steven Stow cared for 54 smallpox-infected war prisoners in our home, before dying from the disease himself. When a person passed away, their body was carried to the funeral home at the end of the street, bearing a bouquet of flowers from Heather’s greenhouse.
But I digress – as a child, whenever I got sick, my sister would buy me a stuffed animal to make me feel better. I would wake up during a nap and see a stuffed Snoopy or Pikachu lying next to me, with a black carnation flower on top. I always assumed she was being cute and picked a fresh one for me.
One day when I had the flu, I asked her to come in and help me shut my windows.
“Where did you get the carnation Michael?” she asked me.
“You picked it for me, didn’t you?” I asked.
She shook her head and replied, “They haven’t grown in our yard for years sweetheart.”
I thought about it briefly and realized she was right, and she knew I couldn’t have gotten them anywhere else. When we asked our parents, they both claimed the same happened to them. All these years, they thought it was my sister being cute, leaving flowers for everyone to make us feel better. It was just like her to do such a thing, and seeing that she hardly ever gets sick, she never experienced it. It was the strangest thing. Still, we were skeptical of her denial, maybe she didn’t want us to know it was her. But then things got freakier.
It began one day my Aunt had caught pneumonia. When we went to visit her, she spotted a black carnation growing in her yard, which hadn’t been there earlier that day. It was the first time we had ever seen one grow outside of our home, and it certainly wasn’t the last. Over the years, when a friend or family member became ill, we would often find a black carnation growing somewhere on their property. It came to us that we must have inherited some sort of stigma from living here. They followed us more and more, so we began calling it the Curse of the Black Carnation. Although it seemed harmless, it wasn’t something we were thrilled about. We don’t normally tell people about it either. It’s almost embarrassing to explain sometimes. People might think we’re crazy.
Now, nothing else odd would happen in or around our house. No ghosts or eerie sounds, knocks on doors, flying posters, random laughter, none of that. So we just kind of pretended the curse wasn’t there, hoping maybe it would go away.
It didn’t.
One day, the aroma of the flowers suddenly filled the house. The smell was overwhelming, as if someone smashed a bottle of perfume right underneath our noses. Later that night, we got a call that my Uncle’s illness took a turn for the worse, and he wasn’t going to live very long. A few months after, the same scent filled our home just a day before my great grandfather passed away. About two years later, when my sister moved off to college, she claimed her entire dorm wreaked of the flowers the night a girl in her hall accidentally overdosed. And about four years ago, while my parents were on vacation in Antigua, my mother said the aroma filled their cabin during the day she learned her closest friend was terminally ill. He passed away that weekend, before they even got back. This odd mark of black carnations became a sign to us that someone very close was going to die. There was no telling who, where they would be, when it would happen, or how; just an ominous smell that would warn us a week, a day, or just an hour before it happened
As we all got older, the flowers would stop appearing. The deadly scent was the only indication the curse still existed. For years they didn’t grow in our yard. We didn’t see them when we were sick, and they stopped following us to friends and families homes. We thought we beat the curse.
That all changed about three years ago, when my father decided to fill in our pool. It was huge, and nobody used it. Wasting time and money taking care of it eventually led us to hate it, so he and I ripped out the concrete and paid a guy to fill it in with dirt. That left us with a giant strip of soil and no grass. But not even a week later, thousands of lilies, orchids, roses and black carnations began to grow, blooming at a miraculous speed. It was a stunning sight, yet none of them crossed the concrete wall or lines that marked the sides of the greenhouse. The variety of flowers flourished that summer. The following winter was a record warm for New England, and they continued to grow and bloom through the winter months.
In the spring, when flowers typically begin to to bloom, the mystical garden suddenly began to die. After a week of rain, flowers and grass was growing everywhere, and every last one of our mysterious flowers were dead. It was the strangest thing really, both disappointing and eerie. With our deadly track record of the flower’s scent, we were terrified it was an ominous sign of something terrible to come, but nothing out of the ordinary happened. That came as a big relief. At the same time, it began to confuse us even more. I began wondering if the curse was trying to make us go crazy, screwing with our heads, surprising us with incidents like this.
One day last year, my boyfriend was helping me move a couch into my room on the second floor. He lost his balance and fell over the railing, head first. He fell unconscious immediately. His head had split open and he was bleeding everywhere. I tried talking to him but he wouldn’t respond. As the overwhelming scent of the flower began to fill the room, I freaked out and dialed 911. It seemed as if the smell got stronger at every passing minute, and every minute felt like an hour. Finally the ambulance arrived and rushed him off to the hospital. He was in critical condition. I followed the ambulance to the hospital. I began to cry as the tainted smell of flowers overcame me. The smell followed me, convincing me that he wasn’t going to live. I sat in the hospital, staring at my knees crying. I was so upset that I didn’t even notice the smell anymore – or the fact that it had completely vanished.
After what seemed like eternity, a nurse came in to tell me that he was okay, and I could visit him. He was sleeping when I got in the room, so I pulled a chair up to the bed and slept the rest of the night with him.
I woke up in the morning to the fresh scent of, you guessed it, flowers. My boyfriend was still sleeping. I looked up and saw a beautiful bouquet of assorted flowers from the hospital florist on the table. Different kinds too, some of them I didn’t even recognize. There was no card. When I got up and asked the nurse about them, she said she hadn’t even seen anyone enter the room with them. When I went back into the room, I took a look through the bouquet, and among all the roses, gladiolus, daffodils and tulips, was one black carnation. That was the last time I ever saw one.
