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Good evening, it’s Spooky Boo from Sandcastle. Tonight I have for you three very spooky tales from the creepypasta library. Get my spooky stories on my website or sign up for commercial free Patreon at scarystorytime.com.
Now, let’s begin.
Story Number One
Across the Moors
by William F. Harvey
It really was most unfortunate. Peggy had a temperature of nearly a hundred, and a pain in her side, and Mrs. Workington Bancroft knew that it was appendicitis. But there was no one whom she could send for the doctor.
James had gone with the jaunting-car to meet her husband who had at last managed to get away for a week’s shooting. Adolph, she had sent to the Evershams, only half an hour before, with a note for Lady Eva. The cook could not manage to walk, even if dinner could be served without her. Kate, as usual, was not to be trusted. There remained Miss Craig.
“Of course, you must see that Peggy is really ill,” said she, as the governess came into the room, in answer to her summons. “The difficulty is, that there is absolutely no one whom I can send for the doctor.” Mrs. Workington Bancroft paused; she was always willing that those beneath her should have the privilege of offering the services which it was her right to command.
“So, perhaps, Miss Craig,” she went on, “you would not mind walking over to Tebbits’ Farm. I hear there is a Liverpool doctor staying there. Of course I know nothing about him, but we must take the risk, and I expect he’ll be only too glad to be earning something during his holiday. It’s nearly four miles, I know, and I’d never dream of asking you if it was not that I dread appendicitis so.”
“Very well,” said Miss Craig, “I suppose I must go; but I don’t know the way.”
“Oh you can’t miss it,” said Mrs. Workington Bancroft, in her anxiety temporarily forgiving the obvious unwillingness of her governess’ consent.
“You follow the road across the moor for two miles, until you come to Redman’s Cross. You turn to the left there, and follow a rough path that leads through a larch plantation. And Tebbits’ farm lies just below you in the valley.”
“And take Pontiff with you,” she added, as the girl left the room. “There’s absolutely nothing to be afraid of, but I expect you’ll feel happier with the dog.”
“Well, miss,” said the cook, when Miss Craig went into the kitchen to get her boots, which had been drying by the fire; “of course she knows best, but I don’t think it’s right after all that’s happened for the mistress to send you across the moors on a night like this. It’s not as if the doctor could do anything for Miss Margaret if you do bring him. Every child is like that once in a while. He’ll only say put her to bed, and she’s there already.”
“I don’t see what there is to be afraid of, cook,” said Miss Craig as she laced her boots, “unless you believe in ghosts.”
“I’m not so sure about that. Anyhow I don’t like sleeping in a bed where the sheets are too short for you to pull them over your head. But don’t you be frightened, Miss. It’s my belief that their bark is worse than their bite.”
But though Miss Craig amused herself for some minutes by trying to imagine the bark of a ghost (a thing altogether different from the classical ghostly bark), she did not feel entirely at her ease.
She was naturally nervous, and living as she did in the hinterland of the servants’ hall, she had heard vague details of true stories that were only myths in the drawing-room.
The very name of Redman’s Cross sent a shiver through her; it must have been the place where that horrid murder was committed. She had forgotten the tale, though she remembered the name.
Her first disaster came soon enough.
Pontiff, who was naturally slow-witted, took more than five minutes to find out that it was only the governess he was escorting, but once the discovery had been made, he promptly turned tail, paying not the slightest heed to Miss Craig’s feeble whistle. And then, to add to her discomfort, the rain came, not in heavy drops, but driving in sheets of thin spray that blotted out what few landmarks there were upon the moor.
They were very kind at Tebbits’ farm. The doctor had gone back to Liverpool the day before, but Mrs. Tebbit gave her hot milk and turf cakes, and offered her reluctant son to show Miss Craig a shorter path on to the moor, that avoided the larch wood.
He was a monosyllabic youth, but his presence was cheering, and she felt the night doubly black when he left her at the last gate.
She trudged on wearily. Her thoughts had already gone back to the almost exhausted theme of the bark of ghosts, when she heard steps on the road behind her that were at least material. Next minute the figure of a man appeared: Miss Craig was relieved to see that the stranger was a clergyman. He raised his hat. “I believe we are both going in the same direction,” he said.
“Perhaps I may have the pleasure of escorting you.” She thanked him. “It is rather weird at night,” she went on, “and what with all the tales of ghosts and bogies that one hears from the country people, I’ve ended by being half afraid myself.”
“I can understand your nervousness,” he said, “especially on a night like this. I used at one time to feel the same, for my work often meant lonely walks across the moor to farms which were only reached by rough tracks difficult enough to find even in the daytime.”
“And you never saw anything to frighten you—nothing immaterial I mean?”
“I can’t really say that I did, but I had an experience eleven years ago which served as the turning point in my life, and since you seem to be now in much the same state of mind as I was then in, I will tell it you.
“The time of year was late September. I had been over to Westondale to see an old woman who was dying, and then, just as I was about to start on my way home, word came to me of another of my parishioners who had been suddenly taken ill only that morning. It was after seven when at last I started. A farmer saw me on my way, turning back when I reached the moor road.
“The sunset the previous evening had been one of the most lovely I ever remember seeing. The whole vault of heaven had been scattered with flakes of white cloud, tipped with rosy pink like the strewn petals of a full-blown rose.
“But that night all was changed. The sky was an absolutely dull slate colour, except in one corner of the west where a thin rift showed the last saffron tint of the sullen sunset. As I walked, stiff and footsore, my spirits sank. It must have been the marked contrast between the two evenings, the one so lovely, so full of promise (the corn was still out in the fields spoiling for fine weather), the other so gloomy, so sad with all the dead weight of autumn and winter days to come. And then added to this sense of heavy depression came another different feeling which I surprised myself by recognising as fear.
“I did not know why I was afraid.
“The moors lay on either side of me, unbroken except for a straggling line of turf shooting butts, that stood within a stone’s-throw of the road.
“The only sound I had heard for the last half hour was the cry of the startled grouse—Go back, go back, go back. But yet the feeling of fear was there, affecting a low centre of my brain through some little used physical channel.
“I buttoned my coat closer, and tried to divert my thoughts by thinking of next Sunday’s sermon.
“I had chosen to preach on Job. There is much in the old-fashioned notion of the book, apart from all the subtleties of the higher criticism, that appeals to country people; the loss of herds and crops, the break up of the family. I would not have dared to speak, had not I too been a farmer; my own glebe land had been flooded three weeks before, and I suppose I stood to lose as much as any man in the parish. As I walked along the road repeating to myself the first chapter of the book, I stopped at the twelfth verse.
“‘And the Lord said unto Satan: Behold all that he hath is in thy power’. . .
“The thought of the bad harvest (and that is an awful thought in these valleys) vanished. I seemed to gaze into an ocean of infinite darkness.
“I had often used, with the Sunday glibness of the tired priest, whose duty it is to preach three sermons in one day, the old simile of the chess board. God and the Devil were the players: and we were helping one side or the other. But until that night I had not thought of the possibility of my being only a pawn in the game, that God might throw away that the game might be won.
“I had reached the place where we are now, I remember it by that rough stone water-trough, when a man suddenly jumped up from the roadside. He had been seated on a heap of broken road metal.
‘Which way are you going, guv’ner?’ he said.
“I knew from the way he spoke that the man was a stranger. There are many at this time of the year who come up from the south, tramping northwards with the ripening corn. I told him my destination.
“‘We’ll go along together,’ he replied.
“It was too dark to see much of the man’s face, but what little I made out was coarse and brutal.
“Then he began the half-menacing whine I knew so well—he had tramped miles that day, he had had no food since breakfast, and that was only a crust.
‘Give us a copper, he said, ‘it’s only for a night’s lodging.’
“He was whittling away with a big clasp knife at an ash stake he had taken from some hedge.”
The clergyman broke off.
“Are those the lights of your house?” he said. “We are nearer than I expected, but I shall have time to finish my story. I think I will, for you can run home in a couple of minutes, and I don’t want you to be frightened when you are out on the moors again.
“As the man talked he seemed to have stepped out of the very background of my thoughts, his sordid tale, with the sad lies that hid a far sadder truth.
“He asked me the time.
“It was five minutes to nine. As I replaced my watch I glanced at his face. His teeth were clenched, and there was something in the gleam of his eyes that told me at once his purpose.
“Have you ever known how long a second is? For a third of a second I stood there facing him, filled with an overwhelming pity for myself and him; and then without a word of warning he was upon me. I felt nothing. A flash of lightning ran down my spine, I heard the dull crash of the ash stake, and then a very gentle patter like the sound of a far-distant stream. For a minute I lay in perfect happiness watching the lights of the house as they increased in number until the whole heaven shone with twinkling lamps.
“I could not have had a more painless death.”
Miss Craig looked up. The man was gone; she was alone on the moor.
She ran to the house, her teeth chattering, ran to the solid shadow that crossed and recrossed the kitchen blind.
As she entered the hall, the clock on the stairs struck the hour. It was nine o’clock.
Story Number Two
Wriggling Trees
by William See
When I was a kid, we had these unreachable, giant pine trees sitting down a long embankment behind my house. I say they were ‘unreachable’ only because my parents would repeatedly warn me not to approach the hill to get a closer look. It’s not like it was a particularly steep hill looking back, but to my child sensibilities, there was still an element of danger to the approach, especially because mom and dad told me no without much elaboration. Obviously, I could’ve been seriously hurt if I lost my footing, but I rarely had any reason to visit that area unless I was taking the trash out to the small gravel path where we kept our garbage bins.
There’s a rather unpleasant association I have with that old place now. I’ve since moved out, being in my thirties, but every now and then I try to run my brain back to that age where things seemed just ‘off’. You know what I mean? That thing where as a kid, you’re dead certain about the little things coinciding with each other, but because it was so long ago, there’s no way to empirically prove it. There were a lot of little things that contributed to that unpleasantness, but the primary element was the trees.
I don’t have any specific memories from that house by now, but I do remember the pines. I remember looking at them from my bedroom window at night, elevated just slightly above ground floor so I was more so on a second floor. I could see down the embankment, so that the forest below was just barely able to peek out. I’d see the trees swaying in the night breeze, black giants contrasting against a dark blue sky. I’d fixate on two specific trees, ones that were slightly less taller than the rest of their siblings. Maybe it was my kid brain overthinking, maybe it was the effect of staring for too long at shadows with nebulous outlines. But in my mind’s eye I could see them swaying in the opposite directions of the other trees, often asynchronously. Sometimes they’d stand completely still even during turbulent storms. It didn’t make much sense to me but in a small way, my kid mind rationalized it as myself simply not understanding all the complexities of wind physics and nature working in tandem. But the excuses of not understanding would rapidly give way to doubt; after all, if I didn’t understand why they do what they do, would that not justify my delusion?
And in my head, for some insane reason, I felt like they were watching me as they danced sleepily. In the same way a kid peeks out from barely open crescent eyes to fool their parents, but in a patently obvious way that might make the parents aware the kid was awake. Almost like an inside joke, I suppose. They were watching me. They were pretending to not be alive, to simply be trees in the only way a tree can be. But they knew I was watching, and that’s why they danced the way they did when it was only me awake at ten pm, a time I should’ve been long asleep by. In my perception, they could only know I was awake if they saw me open the blinders, so I’d push my iris as closely as possible to the tiny little gap where the blinder string pushed through, so that there was no perceivable way for them to know I was watching them back. But perception is in itself a curse of sorts. All you have to do is be aware of something for it to be in your radius of knowledge. And in that sense, it becomes aware of YOU in return.
It only went downhill after my blinders became damaged from my repeated and more frantically curious observations. Due to my bending them to look out the window, either while watching my dad come home from work or the former nighttime ritual, one blinder eventually bent far enough it snapped off. So now my window had, in itself, a doorway for the unsettling trees to progress into my room and my mind. And once this came to pass, more and more strange things began to occur both inside the house and around the property.
One event involved my study of the grass leading up the hill where the trash cans lay. I noticed swirling patterns that prior had not been there, a sort of snaking motion that led away from the forest below. It was so obvious a change it was impossible not to notice, but still, I had no way to confirm since I had no way to compare the prior texture. No evidence, no proof. The trees continued their motions even on spring days where the world desired to stand still with eyes closed to the sun. A certain dampness began to settle into the foundations of my home – another small thing to overlook as a child, due to my parents motioning to not concern myself. But nights spent listening through the walls informed me that the house’s stability was becoming an issue. The ground beneath was apparently built on less-than-stable material when we’d first moved in, and now years later, we were beginning to see a very gradual but inevitable shift towards the hillside. We would have to move out within a year or two.
Another night, something awful clawed its way out of my imagination. Our house was small, more of a tube with three sections – the living room where the entrance lay, a kitchen with some space for the table, a hallway with stairs leading to the basement, and then my room at the very end. My bed was positioned in such a way that I could basically look all the way down to the living room, oftentimes with the door open for some bizarre reason I’ll never understand. Ambient lighting from outside was minimal in the area we lived in, so as a result, the living room was often pitch black past the portal. And I would stare into this area sometimes, remembering what my mom told me about staring at something too long without thinking. Idle eyes, and all that. Many times I’d begin to see movement, the silhouette of a man silently making his way towards me as I lay there paralyzed until closing my eyes. Of course, he never got any closer, but I could very well see his bulky figure assuredly stepping through the portal to reach my room. My being aware of him was enough to bring him to life. But this one night was different. I heard the house creaking and settling in the breeze of the landscape. Something was worming its way in.
And again, I watched and waited for the shadow man to make his approach. He took a lot longer to appear this time, and when he did, the stress of my recent overthinking began to stretch the apparition to its logical extremes.
He was misshapen this time. Lopsided like the fist of a god pressed him into a clay putty nonsense shape. Instead of the obviously shimmering, hallucinatory outline I’d become familiar with, he was lined with squirming, wriggling lines. Black enough to have no discernable details, but material enough to display the sheen of some shiny, hairy, perhaps viscous material. It watched me for what felt like eons that night before stumbling out of view. I saw his bulbous head peak back into the door frame for a second, showing some tenuous understanding of the mutual observation that was taking place. And as my heart froze into a block of ice, the shadow man melted into little black worms and scurried into the darkness.
After we moved out prematurely due to a prominent black mold issue, the years passed in a faded blur. As with all childhood nightmares, the details I felt were “real” enough to ask my parents about were dismissed with notions of “Oh, that didn’t happen.” Or “You probably just imagined it, you always had an active mind, kiddo.” It would have to suffice until recently, after memories of the incident drove my curiosity to its breaking point. As an adult, you have the power to strip your nightmares bare, and as an accomplished writer, I desired to farm some inspiration for future works.
I found the old address and drove out to it one afternoon. The ambiguously rural cul-de-sac was still there, untainted by time or the pale blue noon sun. Still green and luscious as the day we left. And unsurprisingly, the house was gone. The foundation had long since been paved over with cement and overgrown with various weeds and sticker brush. It was amazing seeing just how tiny that little shithole was, but I was also grateful we’d had it at all.
Feeling myself tense up, I crept towards the fabled hill I’d never before had access to. By my own authority I strode to the edge and gazed across the forest top, and trailed my way down to where those two trees once stood.
It defies all logic, what I saw down there. The way I’d heard my parents describing the structural decay definitely implied that the house would be a crumpled mess by the time we left. Even a child could be sure of it. And yet, down where the nightmare trees of my childhood stood waving in anticipation for my return, there was my house. Nestled between them like some strange face resting chin down at the tree line entrance. It looked pretty much the same, just positioned downward at about 30 to 40 meters on the incline which was not as steep as I remembered, so that I could see a bit of the roof as well. In fact, I was acutely aware of just how close the trees were and I felt my gut sink. The hollow windows blinked back at me.
I stood there for ages as a gentle breeze began to settle in, feeling a lot like how I felt during those sleepless nights when the shadow man tried creeping into my room. Except this time when I closed my eyes, it didn’t go away. The house, the trees, the strangely snaking grass path, it was all still there and very real. And even worse, as I stared out into the wyrd knoll that lay at the bottom of the hill, I realized that much of it stood out in startling contrast to its surroundings. The trees, my house, and even a patch of the sky behind the tree line were somehow more saturated, more fuzzy than the objects and space adjacent. I can’t describe it well enough – it was like someone had painted a blurry image of that scene OVER my own vision along where I was looking. I bobbed my head frantically, trying to discern what exactly was the change taking place.
I stepped down the hill, inching closer to the playfully teasing trees. And then my house began to wave back, shimmying like a tree. The clouds in the sky above the tree line squirmed in place, their white puffs turning inward into centipedal spirals. And as I inspected closer and closer, it was with dawning horror that I recognized the shape of the thing I was looking at in my fragmented understanding of reality. The trees, the house, the ground, and even the sky were all made with that same wriggling, teasing, malignant shape the shadow man had turned into that one night ages ago. Like an infection, a growth, it had spread to its surroundings in a two dimensional facsimile of the area I’d grown to know. Maybe it was my perception that fed it, or maybe it had been feeding on something else. Maybe we had escaped just in time. As I came within ten feet – a gut-churning distance knowing what I know now – I tried to peek past the tree line, desperate to dispel my feverish delusions with one last feeble attempt.
Beyond the spot where the visual aberration ended, was a wall of writhing parasites extending into the forest some unknown distance back. Black, vile little creatures that changed color the closer to the vantage point perspective they came. They perfectly mimicked every point of color, every leafy detail, every brick and every panel of the house, even the flat blue color of the sky and the white of the clouds many meters high.
This whole location was just a giant parasitic mimic, with the two original trees as the focal point. They knew I was there, and that’s why they stood waiting and watching for as long as they did. They waited for me to come back so that I could continue feeding them with attention. I left not too long after, my stomach tied into knots as I avoided the rearview mirror.
Even now in the safety of my apartment, I never tend to stare for very long at any given spot for too long. No moving shadows hold my attention, no ambiguous shapes on the horizon give me intrigue. All I desire is to quell the worming sensation that occasionally erupts from my brain, lest it grow into a writhing alien that consumes my vision and dreams.
