It has been many years now. When I was a small boy, I remember eerie nights in the house where we lived in the backwoods. Tales are always spun about terrifying creatures, abandoned haunted shacks, and frightening sounds that may be encountered in such out-of-the-way places. While the setting for my dwelling at the time of my early childhood was not a shack nor was it even all that creepy looking. However, my sibling and I both encountered very odd and sometimes terrifying events at this newly constructed brick house in the deep woods. The strange face that I would see materialize on the ceiling of my room at night caused me to demand that I fall asleep with the light on night after night. That smiling face with the two tiny white dots for eyes that resembled Hobgoblin from a Spider-Man comic. At that young age, it didn’t matter much. It looked like The Devil himself. There was also the day that I was playing alone in my room in the dead middle of daylight. Imagine the horror a young boy in the first grade seeing a pale faced, dark-haired head manifest over his bed and stare in his direction with hollowed out eyes. .
The nightmares were the worst of all. Granted, neither my sibling nor I experienced them every night, but once every so often was more than enough. Even now as I am well into adulthood I remember the night when I dreamt of my mother calling me to the kitchen table. The kitchen was located directly across the hall from my bedroom and her chair was situated so that her back was facing the doorway of my room. I walked to the doorway and across the hall to where she was sitting. I announced myself to be greeted by what is probably the most ghoulish thing I have ever seen. Half of my mother’s face was gone. Her head was hollowed out and I could see the back of her skull with no brains, blood, or any signs of what supposed to be located inside a normal human being’s head. Only one of her eyes remained and it was whiter than the driven snow as she opened her mangled mouth to reveal crooked, sharp teeth to let out a terrifying half-scream, half howl before I shot up in my bed and began to cry.
My brother got the worst of the nightmares, though. To this day, I am unsure if he was experiencing some form of night terrors or if these terrifying tales that haunted our minds while we slept were by-products of whatever entity existed at the same time as us on that land just in a different plane of existence. He would awaken terrified once or sometimes twice a week in a state of total unawareness. This is absolutely indicative of night terrors but sufferers of of this typically don’t remember what caused their horror.
My brother did…
He whispered to me of nightmares consisting of ships that had screaming faces for sails; morbid visions of himself rolling on his side over sand or grass before the surface changed to nails, glass, and other sharp objects that would shred him to pieces before standing and being able to see his own mutilated body and face; and many other twisted dreams that I can no longer recall. I know that he recalls them to this day. Strange that after we moved from that house he no longer suffered from these persistent, hellish bouts…
It isn’t over. Saving the best for last and the even better for later…
To this day my brother and I still discuss that one chilling encounter that was shared (in a sense) by both of us in that abode located in that tiny unknown town that sat on that old dirt road. That one thing that convinced us both that something was absolutely…off…about that place. Why? Well, we didn’t discuss what I am about to tell you until after we moved out of that house. I suppose that we both chalked it up to a nightmare. Oddly, it was a nightmare that we both had about the same entity–an entity that we came to refer to as “Ol’ Paperface”.