I’ve been wondering over the past few days whether or not I wanted to post on here about the diary I found in the attic of the house my wife and I moved into about a month ago. My wife, Danielle, and I bought the house from an acquaintance, a retired doctor named Dr. Ostermiller. We had met him at an open house, where he had told us he had an extra house he didn’t want any longer and was willing to sell it to us for a better price than we’d find anywhere else. We’d looked at the house the next day, knowing almost immediately that it was perfect – not too big, not too small, perfect for us and the baby we had just started trying for. It was a bit outside of a small town in Minnesota, no neighbors immediately nearby to give us any trouble.
Anyway, I suppose I should start with the diary. Since I found the damn thing while cleaning some stuff out of the attic, this house has become a living hell for me. I call it a diary only loosely – it’s really just the cover of a composition notebook with nearly every page torn out. The pages that remain are less than perfectly intact, but what does remain is just enough that I can make out what was being written in it. The inside front cover has a name scrawled inside – Lissa Michaels. The handwriting was that of a child’s, no more than nine or ten years old. The writing within was shaky and rushed, and the entries that remained were not consecutive.
The first entry, dated April 17th 2006, read as follows:
I’ve started having dreams. Not like dreams I had before. I’ve had nightmares before, things like falling or being chased by a car. But now these nightmares are different. I can hear things whispering at me, things promising to kill me. I feel like they’re in my room when I sleep. I don’t know who or what they are. But I hear them almost twice a week. I don’t think they’re just nightmares anymore. I have to tell Mom and Daddy.
The second entry, dated August 5th, was much more unsettling:
I had the dream again, the bad one. Mom and Daddy still don’t seem to care. They don’t understand! The White is going to get me. It’s going to kill me. It tells me in every dream every night that it wants my hair. Sometimes it licks my face when I sleep, and runs its fingers through my hair when I can’t wake up. When will it finally kill me?
The third, dated October 14th, was even worse.
They eat my hair in my dreams. I feel their slobbery mouths closing around my head and sucking on my hair. The crawling one holds me down with its snaky arms. Sometimes they will start growing hair from their bodies when they eat it. The hair is the same color as mine, blonde. They chew on my body sometimes, too. My arms some nights, my legs others. Mom and Daddy seem concerned that I’m going crazy or something but I can’t help that they want to eat me.
Oh. And sometimes the White and the Crawler are in my room when I wake up. The Crawler runs away through the heater vent when I wake up and the White climbs out the window, leaving ashy footprints and handprints on the ceiling. They leave when I start crying, but then Daddy comes and yells at me to be quiet, and gets even madder if he sees the prints on the ceiling. The White licked my face last night, but his tongue was colder and wetter than usual.
Finally, the last one, dated December 3rd, reads as follows:
Irisface is in every dream now. And every dream is in my room now. I’m not asleep every time either. Sometimes they’re not dreams at all. Irisface stares at me all night with his one eye, that bloodshot one with the blood-soaked iris. The metal thing is still stabbed through his face, and he still bleeds from where it stabs out of his face. The rest of his face is featureless. He’s started to cut my legs when I’m laying there. The one with all the arms and fingers holds me to the bed, so hard that I have bruises on my wrists and ankles. It holds my mouth too so I can’t scream. Irisface cuts my legs with his big knife sword thing, and the others lick my blood off. Sometimes Irisface has to cut the same place several times until the others have had enough. He tries to lick my legs too, but he doesn’t have a mouth so the blood just gets all over his face.
I’ve shown Mom and Daddy the cuts on my legs and the bruises, but they don’t care. They don’t seem to care about anything anymore. But they especially don’t care about me.
These four entries were the only ones that I could manage to decipher through the shredded paper. Other than that I could only find scraps still holding onto the spine of the notebook that would only have two or three words on them, but they had most of the same sort of things – I saw the words hair, White, dream, and blood a lot later in the diary.
Initially, when I first found the diary, it just pissed me off. My first thought was that this was all a girl crying out to her uncaring, bastard parents. I’d heard of psychotic disorders manifesting in children, such as Childhood Onset Schizophrenia, and I had this pegged as something like that. I assumed the parents were the type that just couldn’t handle the social stigma of having a “crazy daughter” and practically locked her in her room to avoid the situation altogether and save their reputations. Disgusting human beings.
I didn’t tell Danielle about the diary. I didn’t want her to have to be upset by it like I was. That, and the stuff written in it is rather unsettling. Danielle scares pretty easily sometimes and I didn’t want her losing sleep over this new house.
That’s how I felt at first, two months ago when I found the diary. But everything has changed the past couple of nights. It started with a dream – one of those dreams where you don’t really see anything, you just hear them. Voices, most of them just a whisper. The whispers were just on the side of inhuman, nearly normal but somehow scratchy and oddly high-pitched, like they were talking through a whistle. I couldn’t make out many of the words they said, but they were definitely threatening me. This was the first dream.
I’ve only had one other dream, but it was enough to get me to post here. I was hearing those same voices, this time loud and invading; I could feel the breath against my ear while my body instinctively tried to awaken, but couldn’t. They said simple words over and over, but I could make some of them out. Kill, soak, eat, hair, eyes, legs. Finally, I awoke after what seemed like an eternal struggle, facing the wall of my room. I immediately turned to face my wife, only to find a white mass of flesh above her. The thing had a normal sized torso and a nearly proportional head, but its arms and legs were each at least four feet long, hanging from the ceiling. But what truly horrified me was the thing’s dislocated jaw, and Danielle’s hair hanging from its mouth. When I turned, the white being regurgitated the hair back onto Danielle’s face and turned to me, facing me with purely white eyes. It suddenly hissed, the sound reverberating throughout the house…
And then I actually awoke. I hadn’t truly awoken the first time, the dream had simply continued. I awoke facing Danielle, and she was fine. Nothing wrong with her hair, nothing wrong with anything. I gave her a gentle kiss on her cheek before turning and attempting to sleep once more, but found myself restless the rest of the night. One thought seemed to bring me to perfect consciousness every time it re-entered my mind – the girl that wrote the diary mentioned that her hair was platinum blonde. Danielle was blonde as well.
This dream had occurred only two nights ago. I’ve been utterly paranoid ever since. I try to reason it out logically; I say that the dreams were products of reading the diary. My subconscious simply is replaying the creepier parts of the diary… that’s all. But somehow I can’t seem to get the thought out of my head that there is something in this house I should truly fear. I still haven’t talked to Danielle about any of this. I really don’t want to make both of us paranoid. Hopefully, this will all go away, and I can continue on with normal life. I just don’t want to bear this weight alone any longer.
I’ve come to decide that the thing I saw eating Danielle’s hair, the white, spindly, long-limbed freak was the White, the beast that Lissa had dreaded so much in the first couple of diary entries. It had been the first one she had seen, the one that had been so fixed on her hair. The more I think about all of this, the more everything seems to add up – and the more terrified I get.
I should say that I work as a freelance graphic designer, and I work from home. So I spent the entire day at this house, and nothing worth reporting happened all day.
However, last night was another rough night. Yet another nightmare haunted my sleep. This time, the crawling one that Lissa described made an appearance. It was more nightmarish than the White, in my opinion. The thing had an emaciated torso about the size of a young teenager’s, and a head with a face that was cut up like it had been smashing its head into a boxcutter. But what truly made it terrifying was its limbs – where its arms and legs were supposed to be were four thick, long snake-like tails which it used to crawl along the floor on all-fours. It made a sound like a scream smothered by a pillow nearly every couple of seconds. The dream was inside of my room again.
The Crawler crept into the room and onto my bed, constricting my limbs as the White entered the room, climbing on the ceiling through my bedroom doorway. The White moved slowly, like a sloth, yet stalked like a tiger. It left gray, sooty footprints behind it when it walked, slowly coming over the bed. I fought to break free from the Crawler’s grasp, but it was nowhere near budging. The White reached down and ran its tongue over my left cheek, its mouth cold and wet. I groaned as I tried to break free once again from the Crawler’s grasp.
The White moved over, above Danielle, and its jaw dislocated. It lowered its freakishly largemouth to Danielle’s crown, sucking her hair into its throat. It seemed to choke a little as it devoured her hair, but it didn’t let up any. In fact, it sucked harder, lifting Danielle’s head from the pillow. Slowly, her forehead disappeared into the lips of the White as her shoulders were lifted from the bed. She was laying on her stomach, and her back seemed to arch backward unnaturally as she was lifted. Her eyes disappeared into the thing’s mouth.
Then I awoke suddenly, facing the wall of our room. I was perfectly alert, and I felt as though I had heard a noise, a scream. I strained my ears as I sat up in the bed. My eyes were attracted to a movement. In the corner of the room, opposite the door, where the room’s heater vent was. The darkest corner of the room, blocked from light from the living room lamp. I swear I saw it – a snake-like tail.
“Baby?” Danielle’s voice cut through the silence, making me jump nearly off the bed. “What’s wrong?” She laid her hand on my back.
“Oh… Nothing,” I spoke. “Just a little nightmare. Sorry to wake you, Danny.” I kissed Danielle’s forehead.
She giggled a little. “It’s okay, Austin. I’ve never seen you jump like that. Must’ve been a bad one.”
I faked a small laugh. “Yeah, not so good.”
I laid my arm around Danny’s waist as she fell back asleep, but I rested very little once again. I couldn’t shake the vision of Danielle’s head being sucked into the White’s giant mouth.
I tried to play it off that everything was okay this morning before Danielle went to work. I laughed and acted cheerful. She made a comment about me looking tired, and the nightmare really getting to me. She asked if I was okay; I told her I was. I drove the conversation to different topics while we ate breakfast, and afterward she left for work with no suspicion that something was wrong.
After she left I had a bit of a breakdown. There was nothing that I could do, I just sat in my living room and shivered, fighting back tears. I read the diary again, and everything that I’m experiencing seems to coincide perfectly with what Lissa describes on the tattered pages. The logical side of me, the side telling me this is all paranoia and my mind playing tricks on me, is beginning to lose. I’m starting to believe there are malefic beings in this house.
I still don’t want to tell Danielle. She is my whole world, and I cannot find the words to express how much I don’t want her to have to bear this weight I am. Even if I’m miserable, that doesn’t mean she has to be.
I’ve decided that I’m going to call Dr. Ostermiller later. Maybe he will have some answers about all of this. I will keep updating if I learn more, or if more things happen at the house.
