As we know they were originally planning a trilogy which never happened and probably never will. What story lines would you have liked to see play out ? What do you think they had planned out?
Honestly we have no idea what that would have looked like though here’s my version
Days Gone 2
Fast forward a few years. The map remains the same but expanded upon to the south west. I’d think deacon would remain the protagonist, seeing as the fans took quite liking to him.
Deacon has embraced his leadership skills and leads a host of bikers clearing out caves or something. Boozer among them. We see Deacon at his happiest here among a band of brothers & friends, as it was before the shit
With the Colonel dead in the west, warlords & the survivors that follow them emerge left & right in new parts of the map. Kouri among them. Some of these camps very well equipped, almost resembling current day technology & lifestyles. Many of them occupy large towns & cities, fortifying every inch and living lavishly. Their personalities range from readers to brutes, psychopaths and philosophers. Despite the fact they’re all proud men, a fragile peace holds. However with the zombies becoming less prevalent, they begin to look for new enemies. If the player attacks one of their patrols or encampments, they’ll become hostile like in Skyrim or something.
Anyways, we are going to see tucker die in a slave uprising at some point and replaced by a democracy. That guy with the cowboy hat is going to get tarred and feathered or something. Lisa too is going to come into play. I think she’s going to be a psychopath regardless Deacon will keep trying to help her, tho she’s too far gone and we see a parallel to Skizzo & Iron Mike.
At one point Deacon comes across Nero slaughtering a camp. They gotta eat brains to not spazz out or some shit. Price to pay for being a super zombie. Some plot twist ensues like the Colonel knew about the nero super mutants hence why he would attack em but he didn’t tell anyone so panic wouldn’t ensue.
One warlord raids another, he retaliates & before you know it all hell breaks loose and you a free for all breaks out. Deacons camp is caught in the middle of it.
Humanity fights amongst itself. Tragedy ensues. It is a bloody battle, humanity is brought to a low. Spiked heads, disembodies corpses & slaughter scenes become a common sight. For every low, a new low follows. Babes are torn from their mothers breast and spiked upon bayonets for fun. Savagery rules unchecked. Fields filled with flayed men on sticks can be found. Cruelty becomes the norm. Zombies become a means for torture and depravity. The lands are brazen with ash & the people weary. Deacons own motorbike host are ambushed and slaughtered within the chaos, their heads mounted outside lost lake , Boozer among them.
The fighting leaves Deacons settlement as a pile of rubble, but deacon is persistent in his revenge and for every man of his killed, he spikes 10 of theirs. His fury follow all those who have any association to the murder of his band of bikers. Even those who’s only crime is being related to the perpetrators are not spared. Deacon is a cold, bitter man.
Deacon then finds out that lost lake is Nero’s next target. Maybe obrian followed him. He plans to relocate
The game ends with Sarah dying, maybe to Lisa or a daughter, son, mother or brother of one of deacons victims.
Days Gone 3
Game starts off and Deacon is mad with grief. He brutally kills lisa or whoever killed Sarah. But their infant child needs him and eventually he somewhat pulls himself back together though he’s bitter, angry and violent
He remains a shell of his former self, cold and distant. The warlords are weakened from warring with one another and are helpless when their dominions are getting engulfed by swarms of Nero soldiers who plan to rid the world of man. Only the few will be spared, to be raised as farm animals for food.
The third game would be the finale so there would need to be a big war. The remaining warlords will band together to defeat Nero, Kouri among them, though at this point they are all a fraction of what they used to be. Their cities ash & rubble. Nero will arrive with the largest horde the game has ever seen. Thousands strong, wiping out every sign of life they come across. Thousands die as every position gets overrun.
Deacon and the other leaders manage organize a retreat with those strong enough to relocate and go to hot springs for their last stand. With tucker gone, it is thriving and remains the last untouched encampment.
When Nero reaches the walls of paradise springs, Fighting ensues. The siege of Hot Springs has begun. Cope dies with a smile on his face fighting government scum. Obrian feels bad and sacrifices himself for humanity by betraying Nero. Maybe deacon drops an atomic bomb on their headquarters, who knows. Or maybe everyone just relaxes a bit and coexists
In the end deacon learns to move on from Sarah, grieve healthily, and honor her memory through being a good father to their child. The game ends with flash forward scene and Hot springs is now a thriving town. The final scene shows Deacon and his kid riding motorcycles where him & boozer used to go. Or maybe it ends with an old Deacon telling his grandkids stories about the fallen legends of Iron mike, Sarah, Boozer, and how they saved the world
There’d definitely be a ton more plots, characters and locations & so on. Doubt this even encompasses a fraction of what it could have been.
Sucks we’ll never even have a clue

Now I'm moving on to the 90s girl group TLC. I will be analyzing all of their songs from their debut in 1991 all the way to the last album that they recorded with Lisa "Left Eye" Lopes before her passing in 2002.
Neighties

• Their albumless singles
  • Word to the Badd!! w/ Jermaine Jackson - 1991 (late 80s/early 90s cusp); this is kind of a stretch but Left Eye was a co-writer of this song and T-Boz has vocals in this song
• Ooooooohhh... On the TLC Tip album singles - largely a Neighties album
  • Ain't 2 Proud 2 Beg - 1991 (early 90s)
  • Baby-Baby-Baby - 1992 (late 80s/early 90s cusp)
  • What About Your Friends - 1992 (early 90s)

Not distinctly Neighties or Core 90s (a.k.a. "Live 91")

• Ooooooohhh... On the TLC Tip album singles - largely a Neighties album
  • Neighties leaning
    • Hat 2 da Back - 1992 (early 90s)
  • Core 90s leaning
    • None
• Poetic Justice (soundtrack) singles
  • Neighties leaning
    • Get It Up - 1993 (early 90s)
  • Core 90s leaning
    • None

Core 90s

• CrazySexyCool album singles - a Core 90s album
  • Creep - 1994 (early/mid 90s cusp)
  • Red Light Special - 1994 (early/mid 90s cusp)
  • Waterfalls - 1995 (mid 90s)
  • Diggin' On You - 1995 (mid 90s)

Not distinctly Core 90s or Y2K (a.k.a. "Live 97")

• 3D album singles - a Y2K cusp album
  • Core 90s leaning
    • None
  • Y2K leaning
    • Damaged - 2003 (late 90s); sounds very outdated for '03

Y2K Era

• FanMail album singles - a Y2K album leaning late 90s
  • No Scrubs - 1999 (late 90s)
  • Unpretty - 1999 (late 90s)
  • Dear Lie - 1999 (Y2K cusp)
• Their albumless singles
  • What It Ain't (Ghetto Enuff) w/ Goodie Mob - 2000 (Y2K cusp)
• 3D album singles - a Y2K cusp album
  • Hands Up - 2002 (Y2K cusp); the music video is also very Y2K

Not distinctly Y2K or McBling (a.k.a. "2K1")

• 3D album singles - a Y2K cusp album
  • Y2K leaning
    • Girl Talk - 2002 (early 2000s)
  • McBling leaning
    • None

TLC were arguably the most quintessential 90s girl group there was. Their sound was largely stuck in the 90s, with the exception of "Girl Talk", which sounded pretty early 2000s.

This is the second half of my list for Oklahoma's execution roster. As mentioned in the first part, I broke it in half to comply with reddit's character limitations. For the link to part 1, please click here.
The currently executed 124 offenders, cases 63-124:
63. Robert Knighton (~1960s-2003, lethal injection): In 1973, after being released from a 1968 armed robbery conviction, Knighton went on his first major crime spree. He stabbed and strangled several men and women during many robberies and home invasions. The only victim that was killed, 32 year old Coffier Day, was shot dead while Knighton was arguing with him in his home. Coffier's father, 53 year old Claude, was also injured in the shooting. Knighton's first crime spree ended when he kidnapped a married couple and their 6 year old daughter. They escaped when the wife and mother of the family attacked Knighton with a knife to protect her husband and daughter. The family then notified the police of their abduction. Knighton managed to secure a 30 year manslaughter conviction and a 10 year armed robbery conviction with a plea deal, and was released to a halfway house in 1989. There, he began dating a female addict and befriended a teenage boy. The trio embarked on a nationwide robbery spree together. In Missouri, they shot and killed 59 year old Frank Merrifield and his 40 year old stepson Roy Donahue while robbing their home, and stole guns and money from them. In Oklahoma, the trio fatally shot a couple, 64 year old Virginia and 62 year old Richard Denney, while carjacking them. Their rampage ended when a woman in Texas grow suspicious of them circling a neighborhood. Knighton had a long history of theft convictions dating back to his childhood, and joined the Aryan Brotherhood in prison. Behind bars, he frequently attacked black and Native American inmates out of racial hatred for them.
64. Kenneth Charm (1993-2003, lethal injection): Charm and his teenage cousin lured a family friend, 14 year old Brandy Hill, into their car. They raped Hill and tried strangling her with a towel. When that failed, the cousins bludgeoned her to death with a sledgehammer.
65. Lewis Gilbert II (1994-2003, lethal injection): Gilbert and his teenage accomplice committed at least 4 robbery murders in Missouri, Ohio, and Oklahoma, but he was executed for the killing of 37 year old Roxanne Ruddell. They ambushed and kidnapped Ruddell while she was fishing alone. She was robbed of $3 and her truck, tied to a tree, and shot to death. The pair also fatally shot Ruth Loader, a 79 year old Ohioan woman, while abducting her from her residence, and gunned down a Missouri couple, 86 year old William and 76 year old Flossie Brewer, in their home. Gilbert was also sentenced to death for the Brewer murders by the state of Missouri, but was incarcerated in Oklahoma State Penitentiary’s death row.
66. Robert Duckett (~1980s-2003, lethal injection): After breaking out of prison, Duckett was picked up hitchhiking by John Howard, a 53 year old store owner. Howard agreed to let Duckett stay with him until he could find a job. The pair soon had a failing out, and Duckett was evicted by his host. He retaliated by tying Howard up with wire and then beating him to death with a fireplace poker. Duckett made off with his car after he switched the license plates, and took several bank bags from his store. He had a long violent criminal history, which included several incidents of assault and robbery. One of the incidents involved the beating of an 83 year old man. Allegedly, Duckett was previously gang-raped by other inmates, and suffered from PTSD from the incident. His attorneys claimed that Howard’s sexual advances trigged those memories, and he was killed as a result of Duckett lashing out at them. However, the prosecution shot the argument down, citing that the murder happened after Duckett was evicted from the apartment.
67. Bryan Toles (1993-2003, lethal injection): Toles and his two accomplices forced themselves into the home of the Franceschi family, and shot and killed the family patriarch, 39 year old Juan, in a struggle. Juan's son, 15 year old Lonnie, was also murdered "execution style" out of fear that he could identify Toles and his accomplices. The only survivor of the attack was Norma, Juan's wife and Lonnie's mother, who escaped by hiding in her older daughter's bedroom.
68. Jackie Willingham (1994-2003, lethal injection): Willingham was a door to door salesman selling perfume in an office building. One women, 62 year old Jayne Van Wey, he tried to solicit rejected him despite his repeated offers. Angered by her "rude behavior", Willingham attacked Van Wey when they had a chance encounter near the building's restroom. He dragged Van Wey out of a stall after following her inside, slammed her head against the bathroom wall several times, and kicked her head. Reportedly, Van Wey choked to death on her own blood.
69. Harold McElmurry III (1999-2003, lethal injection): While under the influence of meth, McElmurry and his wife Vicki broke into a home that a WW2 veteran, 80 year old Robert Pendley, shared with his wife, 75 year old Rosa. Robert and Rosa were both quickly subdued and physically restrained by the couple. McElmurry clubbed Robert to death with a pipe in front of Rosa, who was forced to watch by Vicki. Vicki then held Rosa down as McElmurry stabbed her several times with scissors. After killing the Pendleys, the McElmurrys fled with $70 in cash, a pair of guns, and the victims' car. A few days after the murders, they were captured by border agents while trying to cross into Mexico.
70. Tyrone Darks (~1990s-2004, lethal injection): Darks rammed his ex wife, 26 year old Sherry Goodlow, off the road as she was driving with their 2 year old son. After Goodlow crashed, Darks pulled their son out of the wreckage, shot her to death, and then drove away with him. Just before she succumbed to her injuries, Goodlow managed to call and notify the police about her son’s abduction. The police confronted and arrested Darks at his home, and they found the boy unharmed in their search. Darks and Goodlow’s former marriage was marred with violence, and he was arrested on numerous occasions for assaulting her. On death row, Darks was involved in a scheme to defraud a foundation for 9/11 survivors.
71. Norman Cleary (~1980s-2004, lethal injection): While burglarizing an upper class home with an accomplice, Cleary shot and killed a housekeeper, 44 year old Wanda Neafus, and took her purse and a cane that her employers purchased from the Smithsonian Institution. Cleary had a long criminal history and was previously convicted of beating an 87 year old woman in her home.
72. David Brown (~1983-2004, lethal injection): For several years, Brown violently harassed his ex wife and her family. In one incident, Brown abducted his ex wife and 11 of her customers from a beauty saloon she owned, and held them hostage until he surrendered to police. He was able to leave custody on bond and went into hiding. A few years after the hostage crisis incident, Brown broke into his ex wife's family home and gunned down her father, 47 year old Eldon McGuire.
73. Hung Thanh Le (1992-2004, lethal injection): Le crept into the apartment of another Vietnamese refugee, 34 year old Hai Nguyen, and found him watching TV on the couch. He struck Nguyen from behind with a weightlifting bar, and continued stabbing him with a meat cleaver when he screamed his wife for help. Nguyen's wife phoned the police, and Le fled with the couple's safety deposit box that contained $36,000 and their wedding ring.
74. Robert Bryan (1993-2004, lethal injection): Bryan shot and killed his estranged aunt, 69 year old Mildred, dumped her body on his parents' property, and forged a $1,800 check to himself under her name.
75. Windel Workman (~1980s(?)-2004, lethal injection): Workman beat his girlfriend's daughter, 2 year old Amanda Holman, to death while babysitting her in their home. His ex wives reported that he had a history of child abuse and often violently spanked their children during their marriages.
76. Jimmie Slaughter (1991-2005, lethal injection): Fearing that she was going to tell his wife of their affair, Slaughter stabbed and shot his ex girlfriend, 29 year old Melody Wuertz, and their daughter, 1 year old Jessica. According to court documents, Slaughter mutilated both of their bodies, and he carved an "R" on Melody's stomach. He tried pinning the murders on a black man, but the investigators and the courts dismissed his allegations.
77. George Miller Jr. (1994-2005, lethal injection): During the robbery of a hotel, Miller attacked the auditor, 25 year old Kent Dodd, with a hedge shear and paint cans, and took $122 from the register. Dodd was severely beaten, had muriatic acid shoved down his throat, and was left to die. Just before he died of his injuries, Dodd gave a description of his attacker to the police that matched Miller. A massive amount of circumstantial evidence, such as wearing shoes that resembled the bloodstained footprints next to Dodd's body, a microscopic drop of blood found on his shoes that was tentatively linked to Dodd, his wife's testimony of his unaccounted absence from their home during the murder, and what appeared to be Dodd writing Miller's alias that he knew him by in his own blood, convicted him. Miller’s friends also reported that he was broke and begging them for money a day before the murder, and his wife mentioned him giving her the same amount of money that was stolen from the robbery a day after it happened.
78. Michael Pennington (1991-2005, lethal injection): Pennington shot and killed a clerk, 20 year old Bradley Grooms, while trying to rob a 7-eleven grocery store. He left empty handed when the register failed to open.
79. Kenneth Turrentine (1994-2005, lethal injection): Under the belief that they were stealing money from him for drugs, Turrentine shot and killed his sister, 48 year old Avon Stevenson, and his girlfriend, 39 year old Anita Richardson, during confrontations in their homes. He also gunned down Anita's two children, 22 year old Tina Pennington and 13 year old Martise.
80. Richard Thornburg Jr. (1996-2006, lethal injection): A month after he was shot by an unknown assailant, Thornburg and his accomplices sought revenge by abducting 5 men that he thought was responsible from a trailer. Three of the hostages, 51 year old James Poteet, 39 year old Tery Sheppard, and 24 year old Kieth Smith, were gunned down on the spot, and Thornberg forced the fourth to shoot the fifth with the threat of killing him if he didn’t comply. They then burned down the trailer with the wounded fifth victim still trapped inside, but he managed to escape with his life. Despite being forced to put all the blame on himself in exchange for being spared, the fourth hostage still went forward to the police.
81. John Boltz (1984-2006, lethal injection): To spite his estranged wife following an argument, Boltz attacked her son, 23 year old Doug Kirby, with a knife. Kirby was stabbed a total of 11 times, and he received several fatal wounds to his chest, stomach, and neck.
82. Eric Patton (1994-2006, lethal injection): Patton forced his way into the home of 56 year old Charlene Kauer after she refused his pleading for money. After dragging her around the house as he searched for valuables, Patton stabbed Kauer several times with many different blades objects at hand such as scissors, barbecue forks, and kitchen knifes. Although he confessed to the murder, Patton blamed it on alleged demonic possession and his cocaine addiction.
83. James Malicoat (1997-2006, lethal injection): Malicoat slammed Tessa Leadford, his 13 month old daughter, against a dresser. After she died from the beating, he tucked her into bed, and waited until his daughter's mother returned from work to take her to the hospital. The doctors found that Leadford had been dead for several hours at the time of her arrival, and discovered several injuries such as broken ribs, bite marks, abdominal bleeding, and facial bruising on her body. By his own account, he had abused Leadford on a daily basis. For her role in enabling her boyfriend's treatment of their daughter, Leadford's mother was convicted of first degree murder and given a life sentence.
84. Corey Hamilton (1992-2007, lethal injection): During the robbery of a restaurant, Hamilton shot and killed 4 employees, 26 year old Sandy Lara, 24 year old Stephen Williams, 19 year old Ted Kindley, and 17 year old Joseph Gooch, and made off with $2,000.
85. Jimmy Bland (~1975-2007, lethal injection): Bland shot his boss, 62 year old Doyle Rains, in the head over an argument regarding a borrowed car and dumped the body in a creek. He was previously convicted of killing a soldier, Raymond Prentice (age unknown), and abducting the man's wife and son at the age of 19. Bland served a 20 out of 60 year sentence, and murdered Rains a year after he was released.
86. Frank Welch (~1987-2008, lethal injection): In 1987, Welch attacked 28 year old Jo Cooper, who was 4 months pregnant with her second child, in her home. She was tied up with leather straps, raped and violated with plastic toys, and strangled to death. Cooper’s body was found laying near her infant son by her husband. Another woman, 32 year old Debra Stevens, was also bound, raped, and strangled to death in her home in a near identical fashion a few months later. Although both murders went unsolved for several years, Welch abducted and raped a woman in 1994, and he received a 45 year sentence for it. His DNA samples was collected and filed after his abduction conviction, and linked to both Cooper and Stevens’ murders in a 1997 test.
87. Terry Short (1995-2008, lethal injection): In an attempt to kill his ex girlfriend, Short blew up her apartment complex with a firebomb. She and her family managed to escape, but the blast killed Ken Yamamoto, a 22 year old Japanese exchange student. Yamamoto had no connections to the targeted ex girlfriend's family beyond him having the misfortune of residing in the same apartment.
88. Jessie Cummings Jr. (1991-2009, lethal injection): Cummings was a polygamist that had married and lived with two wives. Under his orders, Cummings’ wives shot and killed his estranged half sister, 46 year old Judy Mayo, and kidnapped her daughter, 11 year old Melissa. He bound his niece to his bed with handcuffs to be raped, and stabbed her to death.
89. Darwin Brown (1995-2009, lethal injection): While robbing a grocery store with three accomplices (including Billy Alverson and Michael Wilson), Brown tied up the clerk, 30 year old Richard Yost, with handcuffs, and then bludgeoned him death with a metal baseball bat. The killing was caught by security cameras, and the footage was used by the prosecution to secure the convictions of Brown and his accomplices.
90. Donald Gilson (1995-2009, lethal injection): Gilson routinely physically abused his live in girlfriend's 5 children (who were all between the ages of 8 and 12 years old). The youngest, 8 year old Shane Coffman, was beaten to death with a board for defecating on the living room carpet. He and his girlfriend then hid the body by stuffing it in a freezer. The body was kept inside it for 6 months until it was discovered by a sheriff's deputy investigating the family's abuse allegations. Gilson's girlfriend was spared the death penalty with a plea deal, and given a life sentence without the possibility of parole for her part in her son's abuse and murder.
91. Michael DeLozier (1995-2009, lethal injection): While camping with his friends, DeLozier ambushed another pair of campers, 60 year old Orville Bullard and 54 year old Paul Morgan, and shot them to death. They stole Morgan and Bullard's generator, pick up truck, and other camping gear. To cover up their tracks, DeLozier and his friends set their victims' campsite on fire, and severely burned the bodies.
92. Julius Young (1993-2010, lethal injection): For breaking off their relationship, Young beat his ex girlfriend, 20 year old Joyland Morgan and her 6 year old son Kewan, to death with a baseball bat in their apartment.
93. Donald Wackerly II (1996-2010, lethal injection): Wackerly and his wife ambushed and gunned down Pan Sayakhoummane, a 51 year old Laotian immigrant, while he was fishing in the Arkansas River. After he placed Sayakhoummane's body in the man’s own truck, he pushed into a river, and stole his fishing gear. A few months after the murder, Wackerly’s wife turned him in to the police.
94. John Duty (~1970s-2010, lethal injection): Duty was given a life sentence for abducting, raping, and non fatally shooting a female store clerk during a robbery. While incarcerated, he tricked a fellow inmate, 22 year old Curtis Wise Jr. into allowing himself to be tied up as a part of a hostage ruse, and then strangled him to death with shoelaces. At the time of his murder, Wise was serving a conviction for burglary and contributing to the delinquency of minors. Duty's execution caused some controversy for the use of pentobarbital, a drug more commonly utilized by veterinarians to euthanize pets.
95. Billy Alverson (1995-2011, lethal injection): Alverson assisted the above mentioned Darwin Brown and Micheal Wilson in the beating death of Richard Yost while robbing a convenience store.
96. Jeffrey Matthews (1994-2011, lethal injection): Matthews and his accomplice shot and killed his great uncle, 77 year old Otis Short, while robbing the man's home. In the robbery, they stole Short's truck, his .32 calibre pistol, and $500. The pair also slit the throat of Short's wife, but she survived her injuries.
97. Gary Welch (~1993-2011, lethal injection): During a fight over a drug shipment, Welch and his partner stabbed another dealer, 32 year old Robert Hardcastle, to death with broken glass bottles. He was previously convicted of battery with a deadly weapon, and was off on probation at the time of Hardcastle's murder.
98. Timothy Stemple (1996-2012, lethal injection): Stemple conspired with his girlfriend to murder his wife, 30 year old Trisha, for her life insurance policy. With the help of his girlfriend's 16 year old nephew or cousin [sources vary], Stemple beat Trisha with a baseball bat, and rammed her to death with his truck.
99. Michael Selsor (~1975-2012, lethal injection): Selsor and his accomplice went on a crime spree and robbed several convenience stores. During their robberies, the pair shot and killed two clerks, 55 year old Clayton Chandler and 20 year old Ina Morris, and injured two others in shooting and stabbing attacks.
100. Michael Hooper (~1992-2012, lethal injection): Hooper kidnapped his ex girlfriend, 23 year old Cynthia Jarman, and her children, 5 year old Timothy and 3 year old Tonya, from her boyfriend's residence. He shot all three of them dead, and buried the bodies in a rancher's field. According to court documents, Hooper was hyper-violent towards Cynthia in their year long relationship.
101. Garry Allen (1986-2012, lethal injection): Allen shot and killed his fiancee, 24 year old Lawanna Titsworth, during an argument at a day care she worked at. He fought with the responding officers trying to arrest him in an attempt to provoke a "suicide by cop" outcome. Despite the officers' best efforts to avoid harming him, Allen lost his eye from an accidental discharge. Due to claims of him having schizophrenia, Allen's execution was a source of controversy.
102. George Ochoa (~1993-2012, lethal injection): A Southside Locos gang member, Ochoa and another hoodlum shot and killed a couple, 38 year old Francisco Morales and 35 year old Maria Yanez, while burglarizing their home. The murders were witnessed by the couple's 14 year old and 10 year old children and stepchildren, who then phoned the police after the shooters' departure.
103. Steven Thacker (~1980s-2012, lethal injection): Thacker kidnapped 25 year old Laci Hill during a botched robbery of her home, and took her to a remote cabin to be raped. She was then strangled and stabbed to death. He fled to Missouri, fatally stabbed 24 year old Forrest Boyd while carjacking him, and used his car to hide out in Tennessee. After the stolen car broke down, Thacker called a tow truck to pick him up. When the driver, 52 year old Ray Patterson, found that he was using a stolen credit card, Thacker stabbed him to death as well. As a teenager, Thacker committed several acts of auto thefts and burglaries. He also engaged in inappropriate relationships with underaged girls, and was released from a Florida prison after serving time for a bad check conviction months before his murders.
104. James DeRosa (2000-2013, lethal injection): DeRosa and his accomplice tricked a couple, 73 year old Curtis and 70 year old Gloria Plummer, that he worked for on their ranch, into letting them inside their house. After they stabbed the Plummers and slit their throats, DeRosa and his accomplice stole $73 and drove away with their truck.
105. Brian Davis (2001-2013, lethal injection): Davis went searching for his girlfriend and their daughter when he found them missing from their home, and called his girlfriend's mother, 56 year old Josephine Sanford, about their whereabouts. Sanford dropped by the couple's residence after failing to find her daughter and granddaughter. At her arrival, she was raped, beaten, and stabbed to death by Davis. He then left the body in the house, drove off with Sanford’s van, and injured himself in a car accident. As Davis was high while driving, he was arrested for being under the influence. The detaining officers weren’t aware of the murder until Davis’ girlfriend returned to the home later that night, and called 911 after finding her mother’s corpse.
106. Anthony Banks (~1978-2013, lethal injection): In 1978, while robbing a grocery store, Banks shot and killed a clerk, 22 year old David Fremin. A year later, he abducted Sun Travis, a 24 year old South Korean immigrant, from a parking lot. He then sexually assaulted Travis in his car and shot her in the head. Although he was captured and convicted for Fremin's murder, Travis' killing went unsolved until a 1997 DNA test. Banks was originally sentenced to death for Fremin's murder, but it was lifted in favor of a life sentence. He was condemned for a second time after his conviction for Travis' murder.
107. Ronald Lott (~1980s-2013, lethal injection): A sexual predator of elderly women, Lott broke into the homes of 93 year old Zelma Cutler and 83 year old Anna Fowler after cutting off their power. They were tied up with cloth, anally penetrated, beaten, and suffocated to death with pillowcases. The case attracted controversy when another man was erroneously condemned for the murders, and he spent 11 years on death row until a 1997 DNA test linked the murders to Lott. At the time of the discovery, Lott was serving time for two rape convictions.
108. Johnny Black (~1984-2013, lethal injection): Black, two of his brothers, and two other men went looking for a man they feuded with for a fight. While they were crusing on the road, the group encountered a rancher, 54 year old Bill Pogue, and mistook him for their target due to them driving similar vehicles. They forced Poque off the road, pulled him out of his car, and stabbed him a total of 10 times. Pogue's son in law was also dragged out and attacked, but he managed to escape with his life. Black was previously convicted of manslaughter for shooting 49 year old Cecil Martin dead in an argument.
109. Michael Wilson (1995-2014, lethal injection): Wilson was the third participant in the above mentioned beating death of Richard Yost to be executed.
110. Kenneth Hogan (1988-2014, lethal injection): Hogan stabbed 21 year old Lisa Stanley to death while she was babysitting his children. According to autopsy reports, she was stabbed at least 25 times. Stanley had previously accused him of sexual misconduct, and prosecutors believed that she was killed during an argument over the allegations.
111. Clayton Lockett (~1992-2014, lethal injection): Lockett, his cousin, and another accomplice kidnapped 23 year old Bobby Bornt, 18 year old Summer Hair, and Bornt's 9 month son after burglarizing a home. After tying them up with duct tape, they forced their captives to lure a friend, 19 year old Stephanie Neiman, with a phone call. Neiman was also bound and initially survived getting shot multiple times. Out of frustration, Lockett buried her alive, and she succumbed to a combination of suffocation and her injuries. Lockett and his accomplices also gang-raped Hair and beat Bornt, but spared them on the forced condition of their silence. His execution was controversial, as Lockett convulsed for 45 minutes after being injected, and then died from a heart attack. He also had a long criminal history, and was first arrested for burglary as a teenager.
112. Charles Warner (1997-2015, lethal injection): Warner raped his girlfriend's daughter, 11 month old Adriana Waller, and shook her to death. His execution sparked outcry, as the wrong fatal drug was administered by mistake, and Warner complained of "burning pain" as he was being injected. With the botched executions of Lockett and Warner back to back, the state of Oklahoma delayed further executions until 2021.
113. John Grant (~1970s-2021, lethal injection): While serving a 130 year sentence for armed robbery, Grant stabbed a prison cafeteria worker, 58 year old Gay Carter, to death. He had a long criminal history dating back to the ag e of 11, had several previous convictions of theft and armed robbery, and frequently fought with and assaulted other inmates behind bars. Due to reports of "adverse reactions" to the lethal drugs, Grant's execution was scrutinized by a number of national media outlets.
114. Bigler Stouffer II (1985-2021, lethal injection): Stouffer shot and killed his ex girlfriend, 35 year old Linda Reaves, in her boyfriend's home for breaking up with him. Reaves' boyfriend was also seriously injured in the shooting.
115. Donald Grant (2001-2022, lethal injection): During a robbery of a hotel, Grant fatally shot, stabbed, and bludgeoned two employees, 43 year old Felicia Smith and 29 year old Brenda McElyea, and ran off with $1,500. He spent $200 of the stolen on paying for his girlfriend's bail.
116. Gilbert Postelle (~1998-2022, lethal injection): Postelle’s father was badly injured in a motorcycle accident, and they suspected that 57 year old James Anderson, 56 year old Terry Smith, 49 year old Donnie Swindler, and 26 year old Amy Wright were deliberately involved. Out a desire for vengeance, he recruited Postelle, his other son, and another man to kill them. All four victims were fatally gunned down in what was described as a “blitz attack” on their trailer. He was an addict and had several arrests for drug possession and manufacturing dating back to the age of 12.
117. James Coddington (1997-2022, lethal injection): After robbing a grocery store, Coddington went to the home of a friend and co worker, 73 year old Albert Hale, to ask for money. When Hale turned him down, Coddington retaliated by beating him with a claw hammer. Coddington stole $525 and went on to rob 5 more grocery stores. Hale was left alone with his injures for nearly an entire day until he was discovered by his son, and died in the hospital a day later.
118. Benjamin Cole Sr. (2002-2022, lethal injection): Out of anger that her crying interrupted his Nintendo game, Cole beat his daughter from his second wife, 9 month old Brianna, to death. He was previously convicted of abusing his son from a different marriage in California.
119. Richard Fairchild (1996-2023, lethal injection): Fairchild got into a fight with his girlfriend’s 17 year old daughter after making drunken sexual passes at her, and was enraged that she left with a cab driver. He took his anger out on the girl’s younger brother, 3 year old Adam Broomhall, and scalded him with a wall heater. He then repeatedly hit the boy, threw him against a table, and fatally hemorrhaged his head. Bromhall received over 26 blows during the beating.
120. Scott Eizember (2003-2023, lethal injection): Eizember snuck into his ex girlfriend's house to lie in wait for her. However, her roommates, 76 year old A.J. Cantrell and his 70 year old wife Patsy, arrived home earlier then she did. He shot and beat them both to death and then fled the scene.
121. Jemaine Cannon (1995-2023, lethal injection): Cannon was put in prison for assaulting an unidentified woman. He managed to escape and stabbed his girlfriend, 20 year old Sharonda Clark, to death in her apartment.
122. Anthony Sanchez (1996-2023, lethal injection): Sanchez kidnapped 21 year old Jewell Busken from her apartment complex, and then raped and shot her to death. He amassed a following from the anti death penalty movement for claiming that his father was responsible, but such notions were debunked following a 2023 DNA test that concluded Sanchez’s guilt.
123. Phillip Hancock (~1982-2023, lethal injection): In 1982, Hancock shot a drug dealer, 27 year old Charles Warren, dead in a dispute over stolen jewelry and was given a manslaughter conviction for it. He was released after serving a 2 year term. About 17 years later, he shot and killed 58 year old James Lynch III and 37 year old Robert Jett Jr. in a drug house. Despite an eyewitness account describing Lynch and Jett begging for their lives, the case attracted scrutiny when Hancock's attorneys claimed that the shootings were done in self defense.
124. Michael Smith (~2002-2024, lethal injection): A member of the Oak Grove Posse gang, Smith was responsible for two separate fatal shootings on the same day. In one of his murders, he killed Sharath Pulluru, a 24 year old Indian immigrant that worked as a clerk, while robbing a gas station. The other murder occurred when he tried to confront a gang member that he thought was a police informant in his apartment, and gunned down the target’s mother, 40 year old Janet Miller-Moore, when she refused to give away her son’s location. Smith was also given a life sentence for delivering a gun to a shooter that carried out another gang killing.

I'm from a relatively small town on the border of Myanmar and China. Lush green mountains surround us on all sides and most people have lived their whole life here. I always saw it as a peaceful farming town, one of thousands like it all over China.
Nothing really special about it looking from the outside in but those who lived here long enough hear whispers of a ghost town.
It doesn't exist on any map, and goes by many names, Hei Shi, Gui Dong, and of course Hei An. Legends say its a town full of cannibals that pick off anyone who gets too close, some say its just an endless field of graves that never lets you leave, and others say its home to the gates to Hell.
They could all be real or all could be fake. Very few people are willing to talk about it but I know one thing.
Hei An exists.
A few years ago I started a job working with the newly built railway station. We have one high speed rail that connects us to the rest of the country and it only has a few stops a day. My job is just making sure people don't wander off where they aren’t supposed to go but one day I was asked to work the night shift next week.
The person who worked the night shift before recently retired and they haven't found anyone to replace him yet. Probably due to not looking if i'm honest. We aren't a large city but people still need work, and this job is pretty cushy.
At the time, I had no reservations about taking up the night shift as it's basically playing your phone and making sure no one breaks in or so I thought.
I arrived for my normal shift around 8 in the morning. It was pretty empty minus a handful of people. A teller who sold the tickets, a younger female coworker who works the metal detector. Lets call her Sandy, and a few passengers waiting on the last train. Some of them seemed familiar but I can't say I know them.
"Hey Sandy, anyone give you any trouble?" I asked half joking
"Same old same old."
"How many chickens did they try to snuck aboard today?"
"Too many," she said, putting her hands to her temples.
For those who aren't familiar with the railway system, certain things aren't allowed to be carried on to the train. Some obvious stuff like knives, explosives, chemicals, and live animals. Though people tend to overlook the live animal part.
To be honest the chickens are probably less troublesome than most children..But rules are rules.
The first thirty minutes of my shift were uneventful till I saw this scruffy guy with a thin leather jacket and a small travel suitcase approach the security desk.
I didn't see him when I walked in and before I could see what he wanted, he swerved and went to the center of the station.
He stared up at the list of departures. A large electronic board over the entrance to the platform where people can see to check for updates. He stood there for several minutes, eyes never looking away from the board.
"Can I help you sir ?" I asked him.
no response.
I stood there a moment before waving my hand in front of his face.
He didn't react.
It was like he was in a trance. I wasn't sure what to do, if this was some kinda stroke or a mentally ill individual?
I put my hand on his shoulder.
Then he started screaming. His face beet red as I stepped back.
"Sir? Sir?! Calm down!".
He didn't even look at me as he tried to rip out one of the chairs bolted to the ground. His screams were incoherent and his movements frantic.
I looked over at Sandy who was on the phone with the police.
"Sir! Sir! Calm down so I can help you."
His blood red eyes looked at made, and he whispered one word
"Hei An"
before bolting and jumping the turnstile out onto the train platform.
"Sir?!" I went out to follow him but he vanished. He wasn't on the tracks, we only had two of them. No train had arrived, it's possible he ran off into the mountains that surrounded the station but he would have to run faster than the train for me not to see where he went.
"Is he gone?" Sandy asked me as I came in.
"I don't see him anywhere"
Sandy went back to talking to the police, and basically what they said was that due to the attack on the Kunming station a few years ago, they advised us to evacuate do to the possibility of a planted bomb and abandoned luggage.
We did just that.
For three days no trains stopped by our local station. They did a sweep of the building, the nearby tracks, woods, and found nothing. The luggage left behind, from what I heard, was just clothes and other normal things.
That kinda makes sense as it was able to get through the scanner but I also wouldn't be surprised if some details were left out. He was definitely mentally unsound, and I even told the state police that.
One weird thing that got me suspicious is when I mentioned he said HeiAn they turned to look at each other like they heard that before. I might be looking at things too deeply, one case in a billion and it just happened here. A not mentally sound individual spooked even more out of his mind by a local ghost story.
Nothing I needed to worry about. Nothing I get paid to worry about.
Things went on as normal and eventually I was scheduled for the night shift.
When I say no one was there, I mean no one. The front door wasn't locked and all the lights were on. The list of departures was empty so it was made since no one was waiting but at least someone who works here can stay so I can come and lock up. Hesh. The younger generation.
I locked up and made my rounds, patrolled around the platform and nothing. It all looked pretty normal lit only by flashlight on a cold windy night. Deep down I felt a sense of uncertainty, maybe even a hint of dread.
Toughing it out and quickly returning inside to see that it was just as empty as before.
A few hours passed and I started to feel at ease. I was just being silly, even if that guy came back. He Is just a man and I'm behind a locked door with a direct line to the police.
I chuckled at myself, I'm a grown man. I can handle myself.
As I told myself those very words the lights flickered. I was in near total darkness for just seconds but the ease I once felt washed away.
When the lights came back on I noticed an arrangement of flowers at the security desk. I walked a few steps forward and swore I heard for a brief moment the echoing laughter of children behind me.
No one was there.
The flowers were still sitting on the desk with a message attached. The message was in Mandarin for obvious reasons, but it was basically a love note addressed to someone I will call Lisa. I don't know any Lisa, and nobody who works here has that name.
The lights flickered three times before turning off completely. My flashlight refuses to turn on leaving me with only the dim moonlight coming through station windows.
Dead silence till a familiar click sounds. The bulletin board of departures and arrivals came back to life with only one city listed in bright red
HeiAn.
The board began to glitch and the words darted across the screen and broke apart. I just stared at it clutching the bouquet in my hands.
The sliding doors to the platform opened by themselves as a distorted voice came over the PA. I couldn't really understand what it said but I heard it. The sounds of the train pulling into the station.
I wasn't sure if I was just losing my mind or stuck in a nightmare I can't wake up from.
The front door slammed open and through the murky darkness I saw several shadowy figures by the door. They poured in one by one like they were waiting in line.
I stood frozen as I watched them shuffle by as if they were undisturbed by my presence. They looked like rotting corpses up close with tattered clothes and blank white eyes.
Almost didn't notice the hand on my shoulder.
I didn't look back. His grip tighten and a deep voice said
"Ticket?"
"huh?"
"Ticket, sir. Where's your ticket?"
I turned to face him. He looked almost normal, a young man in an old train station uniform. His skin was a pale white and his eyes unblinking as he waited for my response.
"I...I don't have a ticket"
His smile stared to waver as he asked "You don't have a ticket?"
"Yeah, I just work here..."
His eyes filled with rage as the skin around his eyes, once smooth, had dozens of crows feet and wrinkles.
"WHY ARE YOU EVER HERE?!" His voice boomed throughout the station.
"I..I work..."
He cut me off "Security!".
From over the door but one, giant jet black dogs with bloodshot eyes came out and snarled. A blood red liquid dripping from their mouths.
"We don't like dead weight here," the man said.
Before I could say anything he whistled and the hounds went loose trembling the walking corpses in their way.
I booked for the only exit. The train platform with the black as night bullet train. It has red stained windows and went on forever in both directions. The doors were open but I ran down the platform hoping to lose these hounds in the mountains.
One hound stood between me and the end of the platform staring me down as the rest ran closer and closer from behind me.
"Train now leaving for..." followed by a ding sound as the door to my right started to close.
I throw my hand in the door to hold it open just enough to squeeze my fat self through without being ripped to shreds. The door quickly slid on the hound's mouth.
The whispering sound it made almost made me feel sorry for it as it fell off from the train.
The train car was filled with empty seats and It was indistinguishable from a normal one. Except, the door leading to the car had a cartoonishly large lock and chain wrapped around it.
"Clearly not going that way" I murmured to myself.
Luckily, the.door to the previous car was wide open.
Peering my head through only to see nothing but another empty car but the door on the opposite side was open.
Slowly walking down the aisle like tip toeing over egg shells. I expected the worse but I found nothing.
one idea managed to creep into my mind.
"Is it endless?"
No... No. I couldn't panic if I start to panic, everything will get worse.
I took a seat as I clutched the bouquet in my hands.
One deep breath, two deep breaths, and three deep breaths as I listened to the shuffling of the train.
I pulled out my cell phone but it wouldn't turn on, neither would my radio. Panic creeped on the edges of my mind but I pushed it back.
Someone must be controlling the train. I couldn't decide if finding the person was suicide or not considering what happened at the station but waiting for whatever happens at HeiAn didn't sound much better.
I tried to get up from my seat but something was pulling at my arm.
the train was engulfed in darkness as a hand came over my mouth.
Struggling was no use as I felt like a fly trapped in a web. A whispering murmur played in my ear.
"sssshhhh".
I stopped and saw red glowing eyes from the window. one pair of eyes quickly became two, four, and then dozens in every window.
"Don't look at them" I heard in a whispering voice.
The windows started to flex with their high pitch shrieks and wails. Sounds that left a scar on my conscience. Sometimes when I close my eyes I still see their piercing red eyes and their shrieks echoing in my head.
When it finally stopped I didn't notice. I heard nothing but them and saw nothing but total darkness clamping around me. Felt like death, maybe even worse than that.
"When did the lights come on?" I asked over a mumbling murmur.
A hand grabbed mine, firmly squeezing. "They are gone now."
"Gone" I repeated as the world around me started to lose its haze.
Sitting in the sit right next to mine was a woman in her early 20s. Incredibly pale, and almost paper thin.
"What were those things?"
Her eyes drifted down from my face to my chest.
"Those are lovely flowers," she said.
"Thanks, but what the hell are those, The HellHounds?"
She looked back up at my face "HellHounds?"
"HellHounds, like demon dogs, dogs from Hell..."
she nodded but her eyes fell back down to the flowers. "Where did you get such lovely flowers?"
"They aren't mine."I said while giving her the bouquet with the card.
She started reading silently to herself. I got to stretch my legs and peer down the empty corridor. Nothing but seemingly endless trains cars.
Looking back at the woman from before I saw that she was crying.
"Are you all.." she sprung up out of her sit and ducked under my arm running down the corridor. She said something through the tears that I didn't hear.
"..Wait" I called out, chasing the only somewhat sane person who knew anything about this place. No matter how fast I ran, the distance between us only lengthened. a few feet away quickly became dozens till she was outta my view completely. Almost like she dropped under the horizon all at once. I ran and ran but never caught up exhausting myself till I sat on a new row of sits.
Panting, and completely out of breath. "the only person that seemed... to know anything about anything gone into the wind"
The train cars disappeared off into the horizon. It was pitch black outside and I couldn't see even a couple of inches in front of my face like I was swallowed into a void.
Those train cars are truly endless, my watch is stuck at 2：13 AM so, I don't know how many hours I walked. I might as well just stand in place. Dehydration would probably kill me in 2 or 3 days if this goes on. I would rather take my chances jumping from a 400 kph train than to die like that. Quick and painless, though my mom always said I was stubborn and that quality of ours kept me going.
All the train car lights started to flicker as the train slowed to complete halt. Taking my chances I tried to pull open the train door but it didn't budge. I was so focused on opening the door that I didn't realize the lights were.off till a pair of red glowing eyes peered back at me.
A loud frenzy of screeches followed as hundreds of red eyes peered through the window. I was too afraid to breathe, let alone move.
The sound of cracking glass echoed from behind me.
"Shit"
They burst through flooding into the room and I never ran faster.
I felt their breath on my neck and their claws at my heels. Never looked back a single time but saw thousands trying to break the windows I ran past. And then my worst fear. A dead end.
"What, how?" It's like the end of a train car just appeared in front of me.
They were at every window and quickly swarming down the passage.
No escape.
I turned around.
These things, I saw them but I can't really describe them. My eyes didn't understand what they were looking at.
Readying my fists as a blinding light lit up the entirety of the train car. I couldn't see anything but I heard them wrath in pain with the clattering of their feet scurrying off.
When my eyes readjusted it was as if they vanished into thin air. All the broken windows were good as new, and no broken glass. The only proof they were here at all was a nasty gnash on my arm. Must have gotten me when I wasn't looking, but at least it wasn't my throat.
I wandered.forward till a hand gripped my shoulder.
"Are you okay?"
When I saw the women.from before I had a mix of spiraling relief,and anger
"Your arm?" she asked
She banadged me up as we sat together in silence. I had a million questions but I couldn't ask them, I guess it was the shock.of what I just went through.
"All done"
I pulled my arm back examining the bandages.
"You're really good at this," I told her.
”I should be, I'm a nurse"
"A train nurse?"
"Certified and everything" she replied, not hearing my dumb question.
I looked at her, really looked at her. Flowers clutched in her hands and not a speck of dirt or wrinkle on her clothes. She looked like she had just left home and got on the train just a few moments ago.
"How long have you been on this train?"
She looked back at me as if she was lost in thought. A few seconds passed before she leaned back and sat forward.
"Do you have a working phone or anything?"
She didn't answer.
"Hey, I just realized I don't know your name. Mine is Tobey. You?"
Her face lit up as she looked at me. "My name is Lisa"
"Well, Lisa...Something about this train isn't right, Lisa. I think we better find a way off but I need your help to do that."
"Okay", she says as the scent of flowers hit my nose.
"Lisa? Like the name on the card?"
"Yeah my boyfriend sent this to me, I guess he really does care. Thank you for delivering them, I was so...Like lost before."
"umm..Yeah no problem. Now we need..."
A familiar ringing sound echoed throughout the room.
"Next stop: Hei An"
At this point I forgot this train ever had an original destination at all. Wasn't sure to stay on the train or risk getting off into what could possibly be Hell on Earth.
Lisa's face was one of muted dread. "Should we hide?"
Hide? I thought. The only place I could think to hide is under the seats and no way am I fitting in 6 inches of space in the most obvious spot ever.
"Where?"
"Anywhere."
I refrained myself from any sarcastic retort as the train speed indicator began to descend.
I ducked behind the row of seats in front of me and Lisa soon crouched beside me. I almost told her maybe she should hide.behind a different row but having another person next to me give me comfort. Probably a false comfort.
The speed of the train dropped and dropped till leveling off at 70 kmh. Everything was silent, even the rustling of the train was barely a whisper. My heart didn't dare beat too loudly.
The silence was soon broken by a slapping sound from the train cars ahead of ours. I couldn't quite place it till Lisa said "Is that footsteps?"
They became louder and louder.till they were almost deafening then it just stopped.
A voice boomed from the front of the car.
"Tobey, it's your stop."
"How did he know my name?" I thought I tried to peek between the seats.
"Tobey, Tobey, Tobey... It's your time to go." smacking the top of a seat with a baton. "You've been marked, and they're waiting."
What's he talking about? Whatever, it was. I bet I rather not find out and with him checking every aisle we did the only thing we could.
Run.
Lisa was the first to burst into a full sprint right behind me. I heard him grumble but I couldn't make any of it out.
We ran and I kept checking behind but he wasn't chasing. Distance just gave comfort. A false comfort.
Lisa screamed and my head snapped back to look ahead. He was standing in the doorway in front of us.
"You can't run away"
The slamming of the door behind us cemented that fact.
"Who are you?" I asked.
He took a few menacing steps forward "The conductor, and my job is too remove the vermin like you"
A few moments of silence "Then talk us home, no way we are going to HeiAn."
His covered his eyes before slamming his heavy baton into the seat several times
"You can't go back!"
He took a few steps forward and he swung at us just missing my head.
Before I knew it his hand gripped around my wrist dragging me closer to the open door. No matter how I struggled he didn't slow down.
Lisa sprung up and kicked him in the back of his knee causing him to let go of both himself and his baton while falling out of the train car.
Lisa extended a hand while another hand gripped around the door frame. Without a second to spare, I bashed the conductor’s head in with his own baton dropping him out of the quickly closing door. He ran alongside the train pounding on the door but it was futile and then he was gone.
Not knowing what to do next and exhausted I took a seat and looked over at Lisa. Her exhausted face lost quickly to my blurring vision.
Everything went dark.
The chirping of birds stirred me awake and my eyes opened to the blue cloud patchy skies.
“Where am I?” I said as I stood up. I was alone and a few dozen feet from the tracks surrounded by empty fields.
With the warmth of sunlight on my skin “I made it back.”
Editor’s note:
I did some research and found out that there was a body found on the tracks on the opposite side of the country. A woman clutching a bouquet of flowers, her name was Lisa Chen.
The article was dated 2021.
I don’t know what to make of this. I couldn’t find any other article and my head has been hurting all day since I got home.
If you can share anything you find about her, I appreciate it and thank you all for hearing me out. I've been feeling tired all day, it's probably nothing but I’m gonna go to the doctor’s tomorrow.

It boggles my mind that there’s still ppl sending this waist of oxygen $$. Even tho it’s a few dollars here and there it made me do a lot of thinking. So hear me out. What if its like the movie saw. What if the ppl that are actually sending her money not from the kindness of their hearts but to watch her slowly get worse in real time. Even Hellen Keller would have seen right through to Lisa, so why are there ppl being kind to her, praising her, tell her she looks so good even though she’s lost so much weight she looks like a walking corpse, while sending her money as she demands it from them. Like there’s no one that stupid! Maybe it’s a sick game to them to watch her downfall. The whole day she’s been talking about how important tomorrow is an everyone and they’re moms knows she’s not going to use the money on court clothes yet she still got the cash. It may have taken her all day, a lot of fake tears and a lot of demands and entitlement yet she still got the dam money! If ppl really did care for this druggy then they wouldn’t send her money and treat her like she’s the modern day mother Theresa. They would want to save her not enable her. Maybe they wanted her to be able to get her 💊💊 so that she bombs out at court tomorrow. Listen I could be totally wrong and I could be just analyzing this case bc it legit boggles my mind but what I’m witnessing makes no sense to me. Idk what do u guys think???

My grandfather sat in his rocking chair, holding his body rigid like that of a corpse. His eyes looked like those of an old dog. His lips constantly chattered and his fingers trembled with the Parkinson’s that was eating him away like a cancer. We both knew he didn’t have long left. He looked at me with his strange, yellow eyes and gave a weak grin.
“Elias, I think I should tell you the story of my childhood,” my grandfather said, a single tear rolling down his cheek. “I will tell you of what happened to me when I was only 13-years-old, when I was sent to Auschwitz with my father by my side.” This is the story he told me, unbelievable as it is. Though my grandfather has been dead for years now, his story still stays with me to this day as an unbearable burden on my heart.
***
I still remember the moment we arrived at the camp like it was yesterday. We were exhausted and starving. We had been on the cold cattle cars for five days and five nights, and we were given no food or water that entire time. Many of the sick and old died on the way. We moved their corpses to the corner of the car and my father said Kaddish over their corpses. It was the first time I saw the light of life extinguished from the eyes of so many in so short a time, but it would be far from the last.
Finally, long after the night had come, the doors to our cattle cars slid open. Pale, starving creatures in striped black-and-white rags stood around SS soldiers in black, spotless uniforms. They grinned as the Death’s Head insignia and sharp lightning bolt runes gleamed bright silver.
The SS men all had vicious German shepherds who lunged at the frightened prisoners, gnashing and snapping at the air. I saw more than a few people get bit by the vicious dogs. They had deep bite wounds and chunks torn out of their flesh, and we all learned to avoid the dogs and the SS men as much as possible after that.
***
In the dark night, we were formed into lines. Old women held the hands of their small grandchildren, and sons tried to stay with their fathers. We moved forward. Up ahead, I saw a man in a black SS uniform whistling a tune from Wagner. I would later realize that this man was Dr. Mengele.
I tried to stay with my father, but the surging crowds pulled us apart. I didn’t know it at that moment, but I would never see my father again.
If I had known, would I have acted differently? Would I have told him how much I loved him? I’ll never know, but his ashes rose up into the air later that night, and I saw it from the freezing barracks in that place of shadows.
Someone behind me whispered in my ear, “Boy, how old are you?”
“Thirteen,” I said, turning to look at the strange figure, a starving man in a striped uniform. The man shook his head.
“No, you’re sixteen. When you get up there, remember that. You’re not thirteen, you’re sixteen,” the man insisted. He was part of the prison Kommando that helped the SS with translating the many languages that streamed into the camp and also helped them organize the prisoners for slave labor or death.
I would never see that starving man again, but I followed his advice. As I got up to Dr. Mengele, he stopped whistling for just a couple seconds. The black, cloudless sky hung heavy above us, the clouds of smoke rising up from the crematoria with the smell of burning hair and searing flesh.
Dr. Mengele gave me a fatherly smile, but in his eyes, there was something as cold as frozen steel, hiding just under the surface. I could see it, I could feel it in the air, I could almost smell it radiating off of his skin. It sent ice water racing through my veins.
“Hello, son,” he said in a warm voice as he gave a faint smile, though his eyes didn’t smile, and as I think back on it, neither did his mouth. “What’s your age?”
“Sixteen,” I said confidently, looking him straight in the eye.
“Any physical deformities? Any illness?” he asked, the faint half-smile like a statue of Buddha still plastered across his lips. I shook my head.
“No, sir,” I said. He nodded and pointed to the right. I didn’t know if this was a good thing or a bad thing. I saw, to my growing horror, that most of the prisoners were going to the left, including all the elderly, all the children, anyone with disabilities and anyone who looked too frail or emaciated. In all, about 90% of the line went to the left, and about 10% went to the right.
Those who went to the left wouldn’t live out the hour. They would be stripped naked, beaten and bludgeoned to force as many people into the gas chamber as possible, then the heavy metal door would be sealed. The Zyklon B pellets would be dropped into a vat of sulfuric acid, and the vents would turn on, whirring like hornets, breathing their deadly poison into the concrete tomb.
The screams in the chamber often went on for over twenty minutes. The corpses would be intertwined in pyramids, their arms and legs caught together like rats in a rat king. The cyanide gas prevented their lips and fingernails from turning blue, and made the corpses look pink, almost healthy- except for their frozen, terrified death masks and sightless eyes.
***
In 1944, while I was at Auschwitz-Birkenau, I was coming back late from a work detail in the nearby concrete factory with some other inmates. We passed through the freezing winds and whipping snow that bit like an icepick into our bodies. There were open-air pits that belched black smoke into the air constantly. What a world we lived in, where the graveyards rose into the sky and the blackness of space descended on those below. That was the night when my faith in God finally died forever.
As I would learn later, the SS had a recent shortage of Zyklon B, the cyanide pellets used to exterminate masses of human beings and turn them into ashes and fetid, reeking smoke. The advances of the Red Army had caused issues with delivering it. And a transport of children had just come into the camp.
The SS men and the Kapos loaded these children, most of whom were no older than seven or eight, onto the beds of two dump trucks, beating them with truncheons and kicking and punching them. When the crying, bloody children were finally all settled in on the back of the dump trucks, they had drivers back them up towards the inferno of burning bodies. I watched, horrified, as they slowly angled the beds downwards.
The children began sliding out with horrible, wretched screams. They fell into the pit of fire. I watched their hair burn, their skin blacken and sizzle, the drops of fat melt and drip off their shrieking lips. Some of them tried to crawl out, but the black-clad SS men went around with long sticks and pushed the half-dead, writhing children back into the scorching flames. My grandson, I tell you truthfully that this is what I saw with my own eyes, heard with my own ears, when I was only thirteen-years-old.
The screams of the burning children went on for fifteen or twenty minutes. It felt like, at that moment, we stood in the center of the universe. God had died, He had murdered eternity and left us alone in this endless pit of suffering and death. There was no justice, I knew, and if God was real at all, then He was either evil or insane. The faraway stars of cold white light seemed to turn and look down on us, all of us, the living and the dead alike. The wind whipped past us, screaming with the voices of the damned.
Sometimes, late at night, I think I still hear those children screaming as their bodies burned and blackened. Is it any wonder, then, that I almost never sleep, and when I do, I wake up shrieking as mountains of pale, burning corpses flash across my mind?
***
One day, during selection, I saw Dr. Mengele again. He looked me up and down and wrote something on a clipboard. Later that day, I was told by the Kapo that I would be moved to the medical ward.
“The medical ward?” I asked, confused. “Why? I’m not sick.”
“The Doctor requests your presence,” the Kapo said sarcastically, giving me a little bow. He was a fat man with a face like a bulldog and red hands like a butcher. He loved to beat and rob the prisoners under him. “Move, scum. Doubletime. Get your ass to the medical barracks.” I didn’t need to be told twice. I quickly scurried away, constantly glancing back to make sure no blows from his fat hands would rain down on my head.
I wound my way through the bare, wooden barracks that acted as our homes, the homes for walking skeletons of men whose bodies were frozen and dying. Within these barracks, we were often packed so tightly together on the hard, wooden planks that one man couldn’t turn around in the night without every other man in the row having to move.
But when the freezing winter cold blew in and we only had thin blankets and our black-and-white striped rags, the body heat from the others kept us from freezing to death- at least some of the time. Corpses were taken out of the barracks every morning, prisoners who died from the cold, from hunger, from dysentery or disease, from beatings and murders and suicides. It was like a constant stream of death, a waterfall of oblivion crashing forward. The corpses came, but the fire ate them all greedily and exhaled only fetid black smoke in response.
I walked into the medical barracks. Sat on a chair, waiting, I saw my friend from the work Kommando, Moshe. His dark, serious eyes stared through me, as if he didn’t see me. He had a straight nose and high cheekbones on his aristocratic face, though he now looked as pale and starved as I did myself, no more than a bag of bones wrapped in skin and clad in rags.
“Eliezer,” Moshe said, suddenly realizing I was there. “Were you chosen for this, too?” I nodded grimly, not knowing what he was referring to, but feeling in my heart it was nothing good. Nothing good ever came from this camp, after all. Nothing but reeking smoke and ashes came from it. Nothing but the hurricane of souls whipped away in the currents of the Zyklon B came from it.
“Do you know why we are here?” I asked, fidgeting and nervous. I glanced around, seeing a clean, well-stocked medical room beyond with a surgical table in the middle. There were bunks in the back of the medical barracks where the lucky ones would live. We even got increased rations of sawdust bread and watery soup.
“Dr. Mengele wants us,” Moshe said simply, and his eyes looked through me again. His mind seemed to drift off, far away from this world of suffering.
***
My emaciated body was such a heavy thing. It felt like the weight of the entire universe was contained within that body. I despised that body, that starving, sickly thing that followed me like a shadow. I wanted to be free of it, to see the highest reality without a body, to see truth without this constant suffering and agony, the constant hunger and cold and beatings and the stench of death.
But it wasn’t to be. Dr. Mengele walked into the barracks a few minutes later, surrounded by female nurses clad in white. He looked at me and Moshe. His cold blue eyes sparkled with intelligence.
He always kept his black SS uniform perfectly cleaned and ironed. It gave an impression that some black knight from a lost tale of the Dark Ages had just wandered in. He held a clipboard in his hand. He glanced down at it, frowning. Then he spoke in clipped German.
“A-9971 and A-8991, you are hereby required to participate in a medical experiment that will test the effects of certain drugs on the body. We do this under the authority of the Greater German Reich and our Reichsfuhrer-SS Himmler. You will stay here in the medical barracks until the experiment has ended,” Dr. Mengele said. As soon as he was done, he walked briskly over to the dark room with the surgical table. He came back out with two syringes filled with some black fluid that shone with glittering rainbows. He came up to me first.
“A-9971, your arm,” Dr. Mengele demanded. I stretched out my arm. He applied a tourniquet. When the vein throbbed like a fat worm, he plunged the needle inside and pressed down on the plunger.
I felt something like lava ripping its way through my body as my breath caught in my throat. I thought I was choking and dying. My heart beat so fast in my chest that I feared it must explode. Dr. Mengele walked over to Moshe as my vision turned white. I groaned, my teeth chattering, and then I fell forward onto the wooden floor.
I must have lost consciousness, because when I awoke, it was night in the medical barracks. I found myself laying on a bunk. A small serving of sawdust bread and thin, watery soup was laid down next to me. Still sleeping, I saw the form of Moshe, his face as pale as a skull.
“Moshe?” I whispered, trying to push myself to my feet. My head throbbed. I looked down at my arm, seeing a spreading patch of blackened necrotic tissue spreading from the injection site. It almost looked like shiny scales were spreading across my skin. I looked down at Moshe’s arm and saw the same dark patches there. “Wake up, Moshe, please. I need you. I need someone. I can’t do this alone.”
But in my heart, I knew that we were all born alone and we all died alone. Moshe couldn’t help me with anything. Even God couldn’t help me here. He didn’t listen to our prayers or hear the Kaddish read for the dead. He had turned his face away from us, and every dying heart there felt that great emptiness as the life was extinguished from their eyes.
I shook Moshe gently, not wanting to scare him. His eyes flew open. He looked up at me, and I saw with horror that something was wrong. His eyes had become slitted and yellow, like the eyes of a serpent. He hissed at me. A thin stream of frothy blood bubbled from his throat as he gurgled, pushing himself up like a zombie.
“What’s happened to you?” I asked in panic, backpedaling away from the transformed Moshe. He looked like a rabid animal, his eyes gleaming with insanity. He came at me, and his teeth looked longer, sharper, more predatory. They looked like fangs.
He leapt off the bunk, soaring through the air towards me. As he gnashed his teeth, I frantically tried to push him away. His jaw snapped together with a crack like a bullwhip. He lunged forward and his bleached-white face came down. I felt the skin on my face tear with a pain like fire spreading through my head. He bit down on my cheek and ripped upwards, leaving a mutilated flap of skin hanging there.
I felt something hot and poisonous coursing through my bloodstream, but unlike Moshe, I had not gone insane. I felt my teeth lengthening, though, and my eyes abruptly adjusted to the dark. I could see every mote of dust floating through the air, see every spatter of my blood on the swept wooden floors.
A hiss tore its way out of my throat. My arm lunged forward, as if with a mind of its own. Sharp claws ripped their way out of the ends of my fingers as I threw Moshe off of me.
He ran out into the night, hissing and wailing, his forked tongue flicking out between his bloody lips. A few moments later, I heard SS men yelling at the nearby perimeter and then guns started firing. The banshee wail from Moshe grew louder, and the SS men screamed, their voices filled with panic and terror.
I staggered out of the medical barracks, seeing Moshe clawing and biting at the black-clad form of an SS man. Two others lay dead next to him, their throats torn out, the mutilated flesh sliced wide open.
Moshe leapt off of the dying SS man and loped towards the electrified fence. In horror and astonishment, I watched him swipe at it with his claws. It gave a loud pop of electricity and I saw a flash of blue light, but the black scales that now covered almost all of Moshe’s skin only seemed to glow brighter, gleaming like obsidian. Moshe remained unaffected. He ripped a hole in the fence as it continued sizzling, leapt over the razor wire and disappeared into the dark forests of Poland beyond.
After a long moment staring at the bodies of the SS men, I ran forwards toward freedom as well, following the trail of Moshe. I still had my mind, however. Whatever poison Dr. Mengele had given us hadn’t affected me like it had affected Moshe.
But still, I noticed I was healing faster. The deep gash on my cheek stopped bleeding within minutes, and a layer of thin, black scales started to cover the wound.
Over the next few weeks, I made my way to Switzerland, where I spent the rest of the war. But I heard rumors in the forests of Poland that there was a strange creature attacking isolated farms and houses. A creature with slitted eyes like a serpent’s and black scales covering his deformed, twisted body.
***
My grandfather stopped speaking suddenly, looking up at me with glazed eyes.
“Do you believe it, Elias?” he asked. “Do you believe what I’ve told you?” I nodded. He pulled up his sleeves, and there, on his arms, I saw black scales covering his skin all the way to the wrists.

I remember when I first heard the rhyme as a child. It terrified me. To me, the Crooked Man was some sort of boogeyman with freakishly long arms and legs that were twisted and broken in horrifying ways. I still have the rhyme memorized. It repeats in my brain like a skipping record.
“There was a Crooked Man, and he walked a crooked mile,
He found a crooked sixpence against a crooked stile;
He bought a crooked cat which caught a crooked mouse,
And they all lived together in a little crooked house.”
My brother Benton, who loved to torture me as a child, ended up adding his own parts to the rhyme over time. The extra parts he added did nothing to console me or end my nightmares of this twisted boogeyman who always seemed to slink through the shadows. I remember the rhyme Benton told me by heart to this day.
“The Crooked Man watches you.
His eyes are black, his lips are blue.
The crooked man twists and crawls.
He uses his crooked blade to kill.
And when the curtain of night falls,
He comes to get his thrill.”
***
So I found it strange when, a few weeks ago, I was sitting with a couple of my friends drinking and the subject of the Crooked Man came up again. They were rambling about shootings and serial killers and other fairly interesting subjects that I knew almost nothing about. But my friend Iris knew everything about such morbid subjects.
She was a small drink of water, no more than five feet, with platinum blonde hair and green eyes like a cat. She was extremely attractive with high cheekbones and a small nose and chin. She always talked extremely fast and made violent slashing gestures with her hands. Sometimes I wondered if she had a secret amphetamine habit I didn’t know about.
“But did you hear about the murders in Union?” Iris asked, glancing over at her boyfriend, Ben. Ben was the opposite of Iris- tall and nerdy with thick, black-rimmed glasses and a low whisper of a voice.
“I just heard that some kids went missing,” Ben murmured. I shrugged.
“I don’t watch TV,” I said. “The news is all bullshit anyway. They only show you the bad stuff. After all, no one wants to hear about new breakthroughs in fusion technology or discoveries in particle physics. Instead, people just want to watch others get murdered, robbed and beaten, so that they can feel that at least someone else has it worse than them. That’s all the news is, really: a form of schadenfreude, the joy people get from seeing others’ misfortune and suffering. Our entire media industry is built on a foundation of schadenfreude.” I took a long sip from my beer, a Harpoon that tasted like pure raspberries. Iris rolled her eyes.
“While probably true, I don’t care,” she said, turning her green eyes on me. “Don’t you want to know what happened to the kids?”
“I do,” Ben said, leaning forward. “Was it something… supernatural?” Iris gave a sardonic laugh at that. Ben sat back, offended.
“What’s so funny? I heard there was weird stuff going on around that factory. In fact, I heard they used to manufacture some dye there for clocks and stuff, right? So all these people went to work, painting watches and clocks and whatever else they told them to paint. It was this special green dye that would glow in the dark. The factory was staffed by mostly women, and I heard they used to lick their paintbrushes to form them into points. They figured this stuff was just regular paint that glowed in the dark.” I leaned back, interested. Ben started talking faster, getting more animated.
“So what happened?” I asked, my curiosity piqued.
“Well, the workers started getting cancer and dying in huge numbers,” Ben continued as the kitchen lights sparkled off his glasses. “One woman even had her entire jaw rot off. Others had pieces of their faces falling off. So it turns out, they were using radioactive isotopes to make the paint glow! And these women were just licking the paintbrushes and touching the paint…”
“Holy shit,” I whispered, horrified.
“They called them the Radium girls,” Ben said. “That factory killed hundreds and hundreds of people. That’s why a lot of people think it’s haunted. People claim they see ghosts and weird shit around it. And that’s not all. The case gets even weirder when you look at workers’ families.
“It seems a lot of their kids went missing, too. The cops never found any of them. The entire time the factory was operational, and even after it shutdown, the families of the workers kept having strange things happen- children disappearing from their bedrooms in the middle of the night, strange murders and unexplained suicides that kept killing off healthy, normal people all over town.”
“So, anyways,” Iris continued, looking slightly annoyed at the interruption, “the kids that went into that abandoned factory were all found… torn apart. Their limbs were all amputated and crooked.” She leaned forward, using her spooky campfire voice. “And the limbs were long. Freakishly long, as if they had just grown overnight to inhuman lengths before they got lopped off. But they never found the heads or the torsos. All they found was ten legs and ten arms.”
“And no one knows what happened?” I asked. She shook her head.
“Officially, no. The police and media said it was some sort of serial killer, of course. But there wasn’t a shred of evidence anywhere. It was like a ghost had done it. Where the limbs were piled up in the basement, there was no evidence that anyone had been there in months, no footsteps or microscopic evidence of any presence. But the story doesn’t end there. Because there were six teenagers that went into that building, and one of them was found alive three months later, wandering, covered in blood and scratches, mostly naked and totally insane. One of my friends is an EMT and she said that the kid would not stop talking about the Crooked Man taking his friends and keeping him prisoner in some other world.”
At the mention of those words, the Crooked Man, a chill went down my spine. My heart felt like ice.
“What’d you say? What did the kid say?” I asked anxiously. Suddenly the room felt very hot, and the alcohol was not sitting well in my stomach.
“He said he got kidnapped by someone called the Crooked Man,” Iris repeated, taking a long sip from her wine. “According to the kid, it was some sort of fucking monster, apparently. I think his mind must have just snapped. He was probably kidnapped and held in the basement of some serial killer for three goddamned months. Who knows what he saw and experienced? People make up all sorts of crazy shit when they’re traumatized.”
My hand was shaking so badly that I had to put my bottle down on the table. For some reason, my mind kept flashing back to my sister, Emilia, who had been kidnapped from her room in the middle of the night when my brother Benton and I were little. She had never been found. We had never gotten a ransom note or found a body. It was as if Emilia had simply disappeared, vanished from the surface of the planet in an instant.
“I think some of that stuff is real,” Ben said. “People have been talking about cryptids and ghosts for thousands of years across countless different and unrelated cultures. What are the chances that all of them are just hallucinations or delusions?”
I didn’t know, but I thought I might know someone who might.
***
My brother Benton was a long-term drug addict living in a flophouse. I went to see him the next morning. He opened the door with a glazed, half-aware expression. Scars covered his arms and legs. He looked like a walking skeleton. His eyes shone like the last bit of water at the bottom of a dying well.
“Jack,” he said, surprised, appearing to wake up slightly. “What are you doing here?”
“I need to talk to you,” I said, pushing past him into the one-bedroom place he called home. A cockroach skittered across the wall. As he closed the door, I saw bites from bedbugs all over his body. Benton turned, spreading out his hands.
“Well, what is it, little brother? You know I’m all ears.”
“You remember that rhyme you used to scare me with when we were little?” I asked. “That rhyme you made up about the Crooked Man?” He seemed to go a shade paler.
“I didn’t make anything up,” he said. “That rhyme came from Grandma. She told it to dad when he was little, before she died.”
“Grandma?” I asked, startled. Our grandmother had died of cancer when she was extremely young, in her late 20s. “Did you hear about the murders over in Union? The survivor was talking about the Crooked Man.”
“That’s pretty freaking weird, man,” he said. “Especially considering what happened to Grandma and Emilia, you know.” He sat down on the threadbare mattress, laying back and sighing.
“Why is it weird?” I asked.
“Because, you know, that’s where Grandma used to work. At that factory in Union. Didn’t Dad ever tell you?” I shook my head, feeling sick.
“So Grandma was one of the radium girls?” I said. My brother shrugged his thin shoulders, the stained T-shirt clinging tight to his frail body.
“I don’t know what that is, but whatever she was doing there, it killed her.”
“But what does that have to do with Emilia?” I asked, my heart pounding at the mention of our long-lost little sister. He shook his head in wonder.
“You don’t remember? You were older than me when it happened. Before she went missing, she kept talking about the same thing, saying weird stuff about some ‘Crooked Man’. Don’t you remember what happened the night she went missing?” I thought back, but it all seemed like a blur. I remembered flashing police sirens and my parents screaming. I had tried to block it out, but apparently Benton hadn’t been able to. That night must be like a fresh wound on his mind all the time.
“No, I just remembered… screaming, and police…” I whispered, my voice trailing off into nothing. Benton leaned forward on the bed, looking sick.
“We both saw it,” he said. “The Crooked Man. That thing she was talking about. It was real. We saw it in her room that night- when it took her.” I shook my head, refusing to look at him. Feeling sick, I walked toward the door without looking back. “Where are you going?”
“I’m going home,” I said. “I can’t deal with this shit right now.” But that night, I would find out that the long-lost nightmare from my childhood was not nearly as buried in the past as I thought.
***
I was laying in my dark bedroom, reading the local news on my phone, when I saw an article that disturbed me greatly. I sat up, looking out the window into the cloudless night. The sky hung overhead like a black hole, colorless and empty. Fear radiated through my heart as I glanced back down at the screen and started reading.
“Sole survivor of serial killer commits suicide,” the article read in garish black-and-white letters. “Michael Galentino, 18, was found dead in a psychiatric facility early this morning. In February, Michael Galentino and five others entered a local abandoned building. Friends who knew them stated that they often explored abandoned structures as part of an ‘urban exploration’ group. But this would not be a normal night for the group. They all disappeared, and within 24 hours, police and search teams had been dispatched to look for the missing teenagers…”
The house was silent. I read the rest of the article with bated breath, my eyes wide. Some of the details I already knew, but others, such as the radioactive isotopes found on the dismembered limbs of the victims, I did not. I wondered about that. The police claimed that, after finding this strange clue, they had sent a team to inspect the abandoned factory with Geiger counters and look for signs of radioactivity. Perhaps the radium, which had a notoriously long half-life, had accumulated on the surfaces over the decades. But they said the radioactivity within the building was all within acceptable levels. It was just another bizarre piece of a puzzle that no one could solve.
The house was deathly silent. I could hear my own heart beating a runaway rhythm in my ears. A rising sense of anxiety was filling me, but I didn’t know why. It felt like some sort of pressure had changed all around me, as if the first wave of a massive blizzard had just blown into the room.
I heard a creaking from across the dark room. At the same time, I felt a sting on my arm. I looked down, seeing a bedbug crawling across my skin, a small red welt rising in its wake.
“Fuck!” I swore, grabbing it between my fingers and slicing it between my nails. Crimson spurted from its swollen body as if it were a tiny balloon. It exploded, staining my fingers red with my own blood.
“I should’ve never gone to see my brother. Goddamned bedbugs,” I muttered to myself. I hoped that was the only one. If I had picked up some extra travelers at the flophouse, I knew they would spread throughout the entire house within days.
The creaking came again, louder this time, almost insistent. I glanced across the curtain of shadows that hung thick and black in the room, seeing the dark silhouette of my closet door swinging open. I could only stare, open-mouthed. A long moment passed, and then I heard breathing. It came out, ragged and slow with long pauses, like the choking of a murder victim.
Slowly, I raised my phone’s dim light, shining it across the room. On the closet door, I saw four inhumanly long, crooked fingers. They shone pale like the skin of a corpse. They twitched, then started rhythmically tapping on the door. And then I heard it, that rhyme, that horrible, gurgling rhyme. It came echoing out from the door in that same choked voice, like a forgotten wound from long ago.
“The Crooked Man watches you.
His eyes are black, his lips are blue…”
It felt like I was in some sort of nightmare, but I knew from the sweat dripping down my forehead and the sensation of cloth sheets against my skin that this was all too real. Even a couple months later, I still remember that sensation of dread, the first of many terrors that this night would bring.
I looked around for a weapon. All I found was a letter opener sitting next to some mail on the nearby nightstand. I grabbed it, a flimsy piece of metal in my shaking hands. I was afraid to move, afraid to call out or do anything, out of fear it might shatter the stillness and cause that ineffable horror to come oozing out. I knew I didn’t want to see what was hiding behind that door.
I looked at the open window. I was on the second floor. I was afraid to even breathe too loudly at that moment. With the letter opener in my hand, I tried to silently slide myself across the mattress to the window only a few feet away.
The bedframe groaned softly as I shifted my weight. The breathing from the closet stopped abruptly. I heard the door creaking open, the floorboards shifting. Heavy steps started in the darkness, heading towards me. As I pushed myself off the bed, I glanced back and saw something twisted loping across the room on crooked legs.
It was the Crooked Man, the nightmare from my childhood. He towered over me with a tophat that nearly scraped the ceiling. His lidless eyes were pure darkness, as black as death. They contrasted heavily with his bone-white skin. His lips and fingernails were a suffocating, cyanotic blue, like the lips of a murder victim.
He stood up tall. The bones in his freakishly long legs cracked as the many strange joints of his enormous limbs bent in ways no human limb should bend. His fingers were strange and misshapen, each a foot long. They ended in sharp points of bone that poked out through the dead, white skin. He wore a black suit on his tall, emaciated frame. He moved towards me like flashing static, seeming to disappear and reappear closer and closer in every moment.
In panic and terror, I dived headfirst toward the open window, hearing the gurgling breathing of the Crooked Man only a few feet behind me. I felt slashing talons of bone rip across my back, a burning pain and a feeling of blood soaking my shirt. Then I was flying out the window and falling headfirst towards the grass and bushes below.
***
Time seemed to slow down as the ground rushed up to meet me. The wind whipped past my ears like the currents of a tornado. Instinctively, I tried to curl into a ball. As I smashed into the first of the bushes under my window, I rolled to try to put the brunt of the impact on my right shoulder.
The thin branches of the bush crumpled under me like wet cardboard. I felt sharp sticks stabbing into my skin, opening up new slices and cuts to mix with the deep gashes on my back.
I hit the dirt hard, a sudden pain radiating through my back. A jarring sensation crashed through my body. I rolled as I hit the ground, smacking my head into the lawn. The world spun around me and went dark.
Suddenly, I was somewhere else.
***
I found myself standing in a dark factory, surrounded by debris. Broken glass covered the floor, twinkling like fireflies under the light of the distant streetlights outside. Strange graffiti covered the concrete walls all around me.
“DON’T LOOK BEHIND YOU,” one of the tags read in slashing red letters. Underneath it, someone had spraypainted pure black eyes over a massive grinning mouth full of crooked black teeth.
“Destroy it with fire! SAVE your soul,” another one read in small, blue letters. I ran my hands over my face, wondering if I was dreaming. This all felt so real. I could feel the gentle breeze blowing through the broken windows on my skin, hear the rhythmic chirping of crickets outside.
I heard soft sobbing behind me. I remembered the first graffiti tag I had seen and a sense of panic gripped my heart. I did not want to look back.
“Fuck,” I swore under my breath, trembling as I turned. But I didn’t find some eldritch monstrosity with obsidian teeth and black, lidless eyes waiting there. Instead, I found a woman. She was crying, her back turned to me. She wore a black funeral gown that looked ancient and decayed. With a trembling heart, I took a step forward, wondering if I would regret this.
“Hello?” I called out. She spun, her eyes widening. In front of me stood a pretty blonde woman in her mid-twenties, one that I immediately recognized. For I saw many of my own features reflected in that panicked face: the high cheekbones, the large chin, even the waviness of her hair.
“Grandma,” I whispered, looking around in wonder. “What is this? Am I dead?” She shook her head, her eyes still wet and red. She took a deep, shuddering breath and gave a faint smile.
“Jack,” she said in a soft, melodic voice. “I’m so happy to see you. I’ve been watching you. I’ve been so proud of you. Even though we never met, I want you to know that. I wished I could have lived longer, could have met you. If only I hadn’t been murdered by that thing…” She spat the last word with hatred and fear oozing from her voice.
“I thought you died of cancer, Grandma?” I asked. “What do you mean, he killed you?” She shook like a leaf in the wind, refusing to meet my gaze.
“Everyone in that place was touched by something evil,” she murmured, putting her face in her hands. Her voice quavered like a frightened little girl’s. “The sickness radiated from that thing. It followed us like a cancer, made us weak, and then took our breath away. After the long torture was finished, he came to strangle me. He didn’t just kill me, Jack. He murdered my sister and brother, too. I saw it.” Her head ratcheted up, looking behind me all of a sudden. Her eyes widened in terror.
“You need to kill it, Jack,” she whispered grimly. “He’s woken up again after all these years, and he’s starving. The Crooked Man must feed, and feed he will if you don’t stop him. You need to come to the factory and end it. Otherwise, he will keep on killing. The Crooked Man will never stop hunting you. He will kill you and everyone you love.”
“How?” I asked, afraid to look back as the disturbing sounds grew closer and closer. Grandma backpedaled quickly, as if the demons of Hell were approaching. “How? How do I end it?”
I heard a horrible, choked breathing behind me, then the world faded.
***
I woke up suddenly on the lawn, my head pounding. It didn’t seem like much time had passed. I must have knocked myself out. I raised my fingers to my forehead. My fingers came away slick with blood.
For a long moment, I lay there, hyperventilating and looking up at the cloudless abyss of a sky. My body felt bruised and battered, and I wasn’t even sure if I could walk.
Then I saw a pale, hairless visage peeking over the edge of the windowsill with eyes as dark as night. Its face split into a grin with a crack, making a sound like ripping plastic. The bone-white mask of dead skin looked at me with a feverish intensity, a kind of psychopathic hunger that radiated from every pore of his body. With horror, I saw the Crooked Man’s teeth were as black as his eyes, gleaming like polished jetstone.
A rush of adrenaline pushed me up from the ground. I realized I was tremendously lucky, that I had been laying there with my keys still in my pocket and my cell phone in hand, fully dressed except for the fact I was wearing slippers. I sprinted across the lawn towards my car. I heard the Crooked Man scream out after me.
“You’ll be with Grandmother soon, Jackie boy,” he hissed in his gurgling voice. “No one escapes. No one.”
***
I flew down the highway in my car, the phone in my trembling hand. Looking down at it, I called Iris right away. She answered groggily.
“Hello?” she said.
“Jesus, Iris, it’s after me,” I said frantically. “Something’s happening. I got attacked in my own bedroom!”
“Did you call the cops?” she asked, seeming to wake up instantly. I looked down at the clock in the center console, seeing it was already past midnight.
“It wasn’t a person. I saw something. I think it was the same thing that took those teenagers, and now it’s after me. Are you guys home?” There was a long pause on the other end. I heard whispering in the background.
“Yeah… sure, come over,” she said. I knew Ben was somewhat of a gun nut, and had a nice little collection at the house. I would feel much safer if I made it there. And if I had them on my side, that would be all the better.
***
Ben and Iris lived in the middle of a back road surrounded by forests. The dark trees loomed overhead like priests with their heads bowed. The light from their front porch streamed into the creeping shadows as I pulled into their driveway. The sound of the car idling seemed far too loud in this place where the woods closed in all around me. I didn’t know what was hiding in those trees. I immediately shut it off.
Ben was a veteran who knew much more about combat and guns than I did. His collection was also somewhat impressive- an Armalite AR-15, a Judge, a 12-gauge Benelli, two crappy little .22s, a .45 Ruger, a Nosler 21 and a 10-gauge Mossberg. I had gone out shooting with him and Iris quite a few times. I would feel much safer once I was inside.
The cloudless black sky hung overhead like the lid of a coffin. Their little two-story place with the wraparound porch looked quaint, almost like a little rural cabin.
I stumbled out of the car. I’m sure I was quite a sight, battered and covered in clotting gashes and cuts, my eyes wide and panicked. I constantly looked around, checking my back. Every time I did, I expected to see something there, something close by with blue lips like a corpse and deformed, twisting bones.
I had nearly gotten to the front of the house when I saw, through the narrow sidelights at top of the door, the face of the Crooked Man. Standing only feet away, I heard faint gurgling of his diseased breathing even through the wall.
His hairless face was split into a grin like a death’s head, his lidless eyes bulging and excited. He raised his misshapen fingers to the window and gave me a little wave, opening and closing his fingers slowly. Then he turned and disappeared deeper into the house.
***
I immediately tried opening the door, to yell to Iris and Ben to watch out, but the door was locked. I called Iris. Each ring seemed to take an eternity. Finally, she answered.
“Hello? What, are you here?” she asked.
“Iris! Get the fuck out of the house! You and Ben aren’t alone in there! There’s a man coming in your direction right now!” I screamed, panicked. “Jump out the window if you have to! It’s coming!”
“What?” she said, sounding alarmed and confused. “Are you being serious?” I heard soft murmuring in the background.
“Tell Ben to grab a gun right now!” I started to say, but a high-pitched scream carried through the phone and the house at that moment.
“Iris? Iris! Answer me!” I said. The call immediately went dead.
From inside, I heard the first of the gunshots.
***
At that point, I decided to run back to my car. I needed to get inside and help them. A small voice in the back of my mind asked me what I could possibly do, however. If an AR-15 or a lead slug from a 12-gauge couldn’t stop the Crooked Man, then what could? At that moment, I wished fervently that Grandma would have told me.
I grabbed a tire iron from the back of my trunk and sprinted back toward the front of the house. They had large windows leading into the kitchen from their wraparound porch. Without hesitation, I drew the tire iron back and smashed it. The tinkling of glass seemed explosively loud. I realized that the gunshots and screaming had stopped.
At that moment, something pale came scurrying around the side of the building. I jumped, but I looked over and realized it was Iris, dressed in a white hoodie and white pants. Her pale face was contorted with mortal terror. To my horror, I realized hundreds of small drops spattered her clothes, covering her face and body like crimson raindrops. She had the .45 Ruger in her hands, and she was limping.
“Where’s Ben?” I cried. She shook her head.
“I jumped out the bedroom window… he was behind me,” she said. Suddenly, there was another explosion of glass from behind the house. Something heavy thudded hard against the ground. We heard wretched wailing follow it. Looking at each other with horrified eyes, we both turned and ran towards the noise.
We found Ben laying on the lawn. The right side of his neck was nearly severed. Bright-red streams of blood spurted from the mutilated flesh. His back looked broken as well. He laid there like a hornet smashed under someone’s boot. With dilated eyes, he looked from me to Iris. Terror and agony oozed from his eyes. He opened his mouth to say something, but only a frothy puddle of blood came up.
Then his eyes turned away, looking straight up into the cloudless black void of a sky. The last exhalation came, the death gasp that bubbled and stretched out until I thought it might never end. He died staring into that abyss, that eternity from which no one returns.
The Crooked Man murdered my family. Now he has awoken again [part 2] : nosleep (reddit.com)

Hey everybody! Wanna say a few words about anything you saw this week? Drop it right here. Will probably miss next week so make it count!
Abigail (2024) Thoroughly entertaining “you-kidnapped-the-wrong-child-vampire” romp from the team that brought us Ready or Not and the more recent Scream entries. (theater)
Lisa Frankenstein (2024) A teenage loner turns goth-cool overnight when a reanimated corpse starts living in her bedroom closet. The age and time frame (late 80s teen) matches me perfect and I liked some of the jokes, and most of the cast, but it still left me a little flat. PG13 usually isn’t my bag. (The ‘cock)
Infested aka Vermines (2023) A lot of buzz around this French debut spider feature from Sébastien Vanicek, who has been chosen to lead the next in the Evil Dead franchise. What I thought was missing was a sense of humor, which is pretty much a requirement in ED pics. But the action sequenses were good, so I remain optimistic. Overall a disappointment for me. (SHUDDER)
Symptoms (1974) Angela Pleasence invites a friend to stay at her secluded home in the woods, and we find she's a bit more disturbed than she lets on in José Ramón Larraz's slow paced, but well worth it psychological thriller. The last half hour is great. (YouTube)
The Last House on the Beach aka La Settima Donna (1978) A nun and a group of teenage girls are rehearsing a play in a secluded home when they become terrorized by three vicious, fugitive bankrobbers . With Florinda Bolkan and Ray Lovelock. Very mean spirited. J&B – yes (DVD)
Naked Violence (1969) Drunk high school hoodlums rape and murder their schoolteacher and a detective believes there's an even more sinister plot behind it. More sinister than that? Very talky, but good and some action near the end. With Nieves Navarro and from the director of Slaughter Hotel. (AmPrime)
Blood Feast (1963) Former smut director Herschell Gordon Lewis cements his legend by making the first ever gore film. Young girls get the tongues ripped, scalps sliced, eyes gouged and more in blood red color. The plot is about a caterer making an Egyptian cannibal feast to resurrect a dead goddess. Come for the gore, stay for the ridiculous dialog. (Blu ray)
The Last Drive in with Joe Bob Briggs: Season 6 Week 3
The Autopsy of Jane Doe (2016) A small town father-son mortician team are about to close for the night when the sheriff brings in the body of a young attractive female, with no outward signs of trauma and asks for the autopsy as soon as possible. The dissection brings more questions than answers, and as the night progresses some unexplainable occurrences begin to take place. Effective use of a song made famous by the Flintstones. Scary stuff and an obvious movie of the year candidate. Nudity...yes, but dead! Recommended. (SHUDDER)
Third time watch for me of this wonderful movie. Writers and a producer were special guests, and JBB and Darcy laid down witch facts and torture methods.

The fine folks of Faerun have these silly debates about who the most beautiful woman is in the Realms. Some silly goose might suggest Shadowheart, Gale might argue it's Mystra, but even though there's near-infinite opinions, the REAL beauty is Orin.
Look at that misted-over grey skin. Those lovely eyes, empty like the depths of the Nine Hells. That hair, the color of piss her million victims shed into their pants as her knife came down-down-down. That lovely twitch she does with her neck when shapeshifting with the intend to kill 'em all and let Bhaal sort them out later.
Other, lesser, women exercise in the gym for three hours a day to stay pretty. This lovely woman makes stabbing motions with her right hand for SIX HOURS A DAY. I submit to you that slaughtering plebs is the best exercise in the Realms.
The ignorant ask you if you want a lover or a fighter. But this gal will kill you in your sleep, and your corpse will hang in the likeness of Bhaal's own Mona Lisa.
We need to ignore the lesser women and cast our votes for the only woman that matters. Our very own, beloved Orin.

“Anybody any good at what they do, that’s what they are, right? You gotta jack, I gotta tussle.”

Molly Millions

Molly Millions is a street samurai, a heavily augmented woman willing to perform almost any kind of job for money and the sheer thrill of it. Throughout her time wandering the cities of Earth, Molly has taken up or been forced into a whole variety of odd jobs, from protecting a data courier from a yakuza assassin, to helping to hack into an AI on a space station, to being blackmailed into helping with the abduction of a world famous Sim star. Molly is described as a woman with short dark hair and black leather, as well as mirrored shades enclosing her eyes. She is noted to be truly happiest when she is in a life or death struggle, and will not hesitate to kill an enemy (and depending on who that enemy is, she might enjoy hurting them in the process). That said she's not without a more caring side, even it's buried all of the metal.
Index

• Johnny Mnemonic: A short story and her first appearance
  
• Neuromancer: Takes place an undisclosed number of years after Johnny Mnemonic
  
• Mona Lisa Overdrive: Takes place about fifteen years after Neuromancer.
  
  • Note that for most of the book Molly goes by the alias of Sally Shears, but it's explicitly the same person

Fletchette Pistol

General

• Gun
  
  • Can fire at 20 rounds a second
    
    • Gun can be dialed to single shot and full auto
  • A shot from the gun makes no more sound than a cigarette lighter
    
  • Can be kept in her jacket pocket, with the person traveling with her not even realizing she had been carrying it
    
• Darts
  
  • Darts are implied to move at supersonic speed
  • Darts are microscopic and capable of drilling through a person's eye
  • Able to switch between different magazines for different types of darts
  • Has a type of fletchette that detonates immediately if it strikes something hard, or after ten seconds if it strikes something soft (such as a person's body)

Explosive Rounds

• A single dart kills a man and produces a large blood splatter with a shot to the throat, causing the man's body to fall back on and collapse a steel catwalk suffering metal fatigue (though it had been noted how rickity and fragile this catwalk was)
  
• A single shot removes most of a man's middle finger and sends shards of rock flying past Case despite him being about 10 meters away
  
• Stuns a man by detonating a fletchette 18 centimeters from his skull
  
• Erases a man's face with a cloud of microscopic explosions, before he can stab Case
  
• Creates three quick explosions
  
• A series of explosive rounds to the head and torso leave no remains of a corpse
  

Poison Rounds

• Puts a dart through Ashpool's eye, killing him almost immediatly beyond the ability of a resurrection crew to save him, with the dart being described as shellfish toxin
  
• Knocks out Pophyre in seconds with a single dart, despite Porphyre being noted as a very large and strong man.
  
  • She however states he'd wake up soon, and a few minutes later assumes he's already awake, albeit unable to move for about 15 minutes
• Drugs Riviera with a toxin-fletchette
  
• States she has a dart that can give a person cancer several months after being shot
  

Augmentations

Finger Blades

• General
  
  • Has a steel blade hidden under each of her finger nails, described as double edged, four centimeter blades
  • Has a fair amount of control over how much they move
• On Humans
  
  • Slices a man's tendon on his arm with a single finger
  • Kills a man off page, covering her hands in blood
  • Potentially removes a man's eyes
  • Implied to have badly torn up both a woman and a man
• Other
  
  • Slices the lapel off a jacket without even rumpling the fabric
  • Spears a slab of herring with her index finger
  • Slices through a plastic sheet
  • Cuts right through her polycarbon suit

Eyes:

• Molly has mirrored lenses surgically inlayed over her eyes made of low temp isotropic carbons
  
  • Case notes that the lenses do nothing to block sunlight, with him speculating that her built in amps might compensate automatically
• Has microchannel image-amps that let her see in the dark by converting photons into a pulse of electrons, with the switch for it being in her teeth
  
  • Lets her see up an extremely long and dark stairwell
  • Clearly sees the actions of a man even after his flashlight is turned off
  • Drives a hovercraft through a combat zone without any lights on
• Has a readout chip on her optic nerve to display the time directly on to said nerve in her left peripheral field
  
  • Others can hack the display to show her text messages, even more complex messages

Misc

• Had her nervous system jacked to increase her reflexes
  
• Has a broadcast rig implanted that allows Case in the matrix to see out of her eyes and experiences all of her senses (though the connection is only one way)
  
  • Has a scrambler attached that partially distorts her vision
  • Case also feels any pain she experiences
  • This works even if she's unconcious
• Used to have a cut-out-chip that let others program her body to do whatever they wanted while she had no conscious memory of it, though her other implants interfered with it somewhat
  
• Her tear ducts are rerouted to her mouth, forcing her to spit instead of cry
  

Physicals

Strength

• Sends a man flying through a cheap door and into the opposite wall, with it being implied she threw him
  
• Causes a man to double over with a blow to the solar plexus, and then knocks him out by slamming his head against a wall
  
• Kicks a small display unit into a wall
  
• Disables a thief with a kick to the knee, causing him to collapse
  

Speed

• Reactions
  
  • Case watching the world through her eyes compares it to a tape played at half speed. She throws a grenade before a diving man can break the water, turns to fire several rounds into Ashpool, and then turns the gun towards 3Jane just as the grenade detonates
  • Dodges a monomolecular wire from an assassin. Said assassin could slice a man in three before anyone could react (or any blood could spill), and dodge a point blank blast from a hidden 12 gauge shotgun
  • Casually dodges a swipe from a man, cuts his tendon, and steels an item from his grip without anyone realizing
  • Lowers her gun before Case has time to realize that what he's seeing is a recording
  • Dodges through traffic, pulling Kumiko out of the way of a car and kicking it as it goes by
• Movement
  
  • Her finger moves like a blur to slice a man's jacket
  • Crosses a room in three strides and quickly grabs Mona
  • Kicks a thief and steals the bag he's holding before he can hit the ground
  • Case is shocked by how fast she can move, with her cutting through a plastic sheet and moving through it before he could even process that it had been cut
  • Has Case at her mercy before he can process it, with him feeling like she had attacked him before he had even gotten her door open
  • Goes down a rope like a squirrel, barely even seeming to touch it

Durability

• Has her leg broken in a fight against three security guards that breaks a fiberglass shockstave, and continues on with the mission
  
• Hit by a neural disruptor that causes her to lose all control of herself and slam her head against a door. This knocks the wind out of her, but she slowly gets up soon after
  
• Has a glass slammed hard into her left lens while she's already in bad shape, smashing one of said lenses. This knocks her unconscious, but she has no concussion or permanent damage
  
• Survived an opponent splitting her torso open during a prize fight, leaving a huge scare along her chest
  

Combat Skill

• Maneuvers around a shifting floor while engaging an assassin, resulting in him cutting his own hand off with his own weapon. Though she later states her win was more luck than anything
  
• Takes out a security guard off screen who was wielding nunchucks, with someone describing her as cutting them
  
• Takes on and defeats three security guards at once, though has her leg broken in the process. Case assumes that they had been killed
  
• Subdues Peter Riviera, despite him creating powerful illusions with his implants to throw off attackers, with her stating she had him in her sights the moment he stepped out of the door
  
• Tells Riviera she can hurt him really badly without killing him, and would enjoy doing so
  
• Acted as a prize fighter in the augmented featherweight division for several bloody matches
  
• Disables a thief with a kick to the knee and pivots to retrieve the bag he stole before he can hit the ground, with Kimiko comparing her to a boxer
  
• Mona observes that while Molly isn't that strong, she knows exactly how to throw weight around
  

Other Equipment

Polycarbon Suit

• Possesses a polycarbon suit that is capable of changing its coloration to camouflage with whatever is around it
  
• A man uses the same type of suit seemingly vanishes against a wall
  
• The arms and knees of the suit change to match the girders she's suspended against
  
• Camouflages herself against a steel wall
  
• Camouflages itself with the ground even after she cuts it off her body
  
• [Limit] These types of suits are unable to fully handle overly complex imagery behind them
  

Other Weapons and Armor

• Throws a grenade described as a core of high explosives surrounded by 10 meters of brittle steel wire
  
• Wears a pullover Case suspects is bulletproof
  
• Wears what Mona suspects is armor (though Mona is admittedly not the most reliable narrator due to not understanding much)
  

Chemicals

• Injects herself with endorphins to counteract the pain of a broken leg, with Case noting she could walk on bloody stumps with enough of them in her system
  
• Places a derm on a man's neck to keep him unconcious
  
• Poisons Riviera's drugs with a chemical that causes conditions like Parkinsons, causing him to lose all control of his muscles
  

Misc

• Has various pieces of equipment to secure a room
  
• Uses a blackbox to hack into an elevator
  
• Carries around several lockpicks, and uses one pick open an old door without even looking
  
• Covers Angie's seatbelt in a kind of green plastic to keep her in place
  

Misc

Physical

• Described as having the body of a gymnast
  
• When passing through a crowd it seems like she's constantly about to collide with someone, only for them to melt out of the way at the last moment
  
• Even while injured and packing a bag, doesn't make any wasted motions
  

Skills

• Implied to have performed the surgery on Johnny to change his face
  
• Able to fieldstrip her fletchette pistol without even having to look at it
  
• Intimidates multiple cab drivers
  
• Does something to Prior to cause him a lot of pain and make him give up information
  
• Bypasses the console of a helicopter to allow her to fly it
  
• Negotiates with AI to erase her past in exchange for getting Angie Mitchell together with the Aleph
  

Other

• Purposefully travels in an extremely confusing way through London in order to ensure she isn't followed, just because she enjoys doing so
  
• Has several different identities and passports
  

"Wanna be my fucking self for a change"

I remember when I first heard the rhyme as a child. It terrified me. To me, the Crooked Man was some sort of boogeyman with freakishly long arms and legs that were twisted and broken in horrifying ways. I still have the rhyme memorized. It repeats in my brain like a skipping record.
“There was a Crooked Man, and he walked a crooked mile,
He found a crooked sixpence against a crooked stile;
He bought a crooked cat which caught a crooked mouse,
And they all lived together in a little crooked house.”
My brother Benton, who loved to torture me as a child, ended up adding his own parts to the rhyme over time. The extra parts he added did nothing to console me or end my nightmares of this twisted boogeyman who always seemed to slink through the shadows. I remember the rhyme Benton told me by heart to this day.
“The Crooked Man watches you.
His eyes are black, his lips are blue.
The crooked man twists and crawls.
He uses his crooked blade to kill.
And when the curtain of night falls,
He comes to get his thrill.”
***
So I found it strange when, a few weeks ago, I was sitting with a couple of my friends drinking and the subject of the Crooked Man came up again. They were rambling about shootings and serial killers and other fairly interesting subjects that I knew almost nothing about. But my friend Iris knew everything about such morbid subjects.
She was a small drink of water, no more than five feet, with platinum blonde hair and green eyes like a cat. She was extremely attractive with high cheekbones and a small nose and chin. She always talked extremely fast and made violent slashing gestures with her hands. Sometimes I wondered if she had a secret amphetamine habit I didn’t know about.
“But did you hear about the murders in Union?” Iris asked, glancing over at her boyfriend, Ben. Ben was the opposite of Iris- tall and nerdy with thick, black-rimmed glasses and a low whisper of a voice.
“I just heard that some kids went missing,” Ben murmured. I shrugged.
“I don’t watch TV,” I said. “The news is all bullshit anyway. They only show you the bad stuff. After all, no one wants to hear about new breakthroughs in fusion technology or discoveries in particle physics. Instead, people just want to watch others get murdered, robbed and beaten, so that they can feel that at least someone else has it worse than them. That’s all the news is, really: a form of schadenfreude, the joy people get from seeing others’ misfortune and suffering. Our entire media industry is built on a foundation of schadenfreude.” I took a long sip from my beer, a Harpoon that tasted like pure raspberries. Iris rolled her eyes.
“While probably true, I don’t care,” she said, turning her green eyes on me. “Don’t you want to know what happened to the kids?”
“I do,” Ben said, leaning forward. “Was it something… supernatural?” Iris gave a sardonic laugh at that. Ben sat back, offended.
“What’s so funny? I heard there was weird stuff going on around that factory. In fact, I heard they used to manufacture some dye there for clocks and stuff, right? So all these people went to work, painting watches and clocks and whatever else they told them to paint. It was this special green dye that would glow in the dark. The factory was staffed by mostly women, and I heard they used to lick their paintbrushes to form them into points. They figured this stuff was just regular paint that glowed in the dark.” I leaned back, interested. Ben started talking faster, getting more animated.
“So what happened?” I asked, my curiosity piqued.
“Well, the workers started getting cancer and dying in huge numbers,” Ben continued as the kitchen lights sparkled off his glasses. “One woman even had her entire jaw rot off. Others had pieces of their faces falling off. So it turns out, they were using radioactive isotopes to make the paint glow! And these women were just licking the paintbrushes and touching the paint…”
“Holy shit,” I whispered, horrified.
“They called them the Radium girls,” Ben said. “That factory killed hundreds and hundreds of people. That’s why a lot of people think it’s haunted. People claim they see ghosts and weird shit around it. And that’s not all. The case gets even weirder when you look at workers’ families.
“It seems a lot of their kids went missing, too. The cops never found any of them. The entire time the factory was operational, and even after it shutdown, the families of the workers kept having strange things happen- children disappearing from their bedrooms in the middle of the night, strange murders and unexplained suicides that kept killing off healthy, normal people all over town.”
“So, anyways,” Iris continued, looking slightly annoyed at the interruption, “the kids that went into that abandoned factory were all found… torn apart. Their limbs were all amputated and crooked.” She leaned forward, using her spooky campfire voice. “And the limbs were long. Freakishly long, as if they had just grown overnight to inhuman lengths before they got lopped off. But they never found the heads or the torsos. All they found was ten legs and ten arms.”
“And no one knows what happened?” I asked. She shook her head.
“Officially, no. The police and media said it was some sort of serial killer, of course. But there wasn’t a shred of evidence anywhere. It was like a ghost had done it. Where the limbs were piled up in the basement, there was no evidence that anyone had been there in months, no footsteps or microscopic evidence of any presence. But the story doesn’t end there. Because there were six teenagers that went into that building, and one of them was found alive three months later, wandering, covered in blood and scratches, mostly naked and totally insane. One of my friends is an EMT and she said that the kid would not stop talking about the Crooked Man taking his friends and keeping him prisoner in some other world.”
At the mention of those words, the Crooked Man, a chill went down my spine. My heart felt like ice.
“What’d you say? What did the kid say?” I asked anxiously. Suddenly the room felt very hot, and the alcohol was not sitting well in my stomach.
“He said he got kidnapped by someone called the Crooked Man,” Iris repeated, taking a long sip from her wine. “According to the kid, it was some sort of fucking monster, apparently. I think his mind must have just snapped. He was probably kidnapped and held in the basement of some serial killer for three goddamned months. Who knows what he saw and experienced? People make up all sorts of crazy shit when they’re traumatized.”
My hand was shaking so badly that I had to put my bottle down on the table. For some reason, my mind kept flashing back to my sister, Emilia, who had been kidnapped from her room in the middle of the night when my brother Benton and I were little. She had never been found. We had never gotten a ransom note or found a body. It was as if Emilia had simply disappeared, vanished from the surface of the planet in an instant.
“I think some of that stuff is real,” Ben said. “People have been talking about cryptids and ghosts for thousands of years across countless different and unrelated cultures. What are the chances that all of them are just hallucinations or delusions?”
I didn’t know, but I thought I might know someone who might.
***
My brother Benton was a long-term drug addict living in a flophouse. I went to see him the next morning. He opened the door with a glazed, half-aware expression. Scars covered his arms and legs. He looked like a walking skeleton. His eyes shone like the last bit of water at the bottom of a dying well.
“Jack,” he said, surprised, appearing to wake up slightly. “What are you doing here?”
“I need to talk to you,” I said, pushing past him into the one-bedroom place he called home. A cockroach skittered across the wall. As he closed the door, I saw bites from bedbugs all over his body. Benton turned, spreading out his hands.
“Well, what is it, little brother? You know I’m all ears.”
“You remember that rhyme you used to scare me with when we were little?” I asked. “That rhyme you made up about the Crooked Man?” He seemed to go a shade paler.
“I didn’t make anything up,” he said. “That rhyme came from Grandma. She told it to dad when he was little, before she died.”
“Grandma?” I asked, startled. Our grandmother had died of cancer when she was extremely young, in her late 20s. “Did you hear about the murders over in Union? The survivor was talking about the Crooked Man.”
“That’s pretty freaking weird, man,” he said. “Especially considering what happened to Grandma and Emilia, you know.” He sat down on the threadbare mattress, laying back and sighing.
“Why is it weird?” I asked.
“Because, you know, that’s where Grandma used to work. At that factory in Union. Didn’t Dad ever tell you?” I shook my head, feeling sick.
“So Grandma was one of the radium girls?” I said. My brother shrugged his thin shoulders, the stained T-shirt clinging tight to his frail body.
“I don’t know what that is, but whatever she was doing there, it killed her.”
“But what does that have to do with Emilia?” I asked, my heart pounding at the mention of our long-lost little sister. He shook his head in wonder.
“You don’t remember? You were older than me when it happened. Before she went missing, she kept talking about the same thing, saying weird stuff about some ‘Crooked Man’. Don’t you remember what happened the night she went missing?” I thought back, but it all seemed like a blur. I remembered flashing police sirens and my parents screaming. I had tried to block it out, but apparently Benton hadn’t been able to. That night must be like a fresh wound on his mind all the time.
“No, I just remembered… screaming, and police…” I whispered, my voice trailing off into nothing. Benton leaned forward on the bed, looking sick.
“We both saw it,” he said. “The Crooked Man. That thing she was talking about. It was real. We saw it in her room that night- when it took her.” I shook my head, refusing to look at him. Feeling sick, I walked toward the door without looking back. “Where are you going?”
“I’m going home,” I said. “I can’t deal with this shit right now.” But that night, I would find out that the long-lost nightmare from my childhood was not nearly as buried in the past as I thought.
***
I was laying in my dark bedroom, reading the local news on my phone, when I saw an article that disturbed me greatly. I sat up, looking out the window into the cloudless night. The sky hung overhead like a black hole, colorless and empty. Fear radiated through my heart as I glanced back down at the screen and started reading.
“Sole survivor of serial killer commits suicide,” the article read in garish black-and-white letters. “Michael Galentino, 18, was found dead in a psychiatric facility early this morning. In February, Michael Galentino and five others entered a local abandoned building. Friends who knew them stated that they often explored abandoned structures as part of an ‘urban exploration’ group. But this would not be a normal night for the group. They all disappeared, and within 24 hours, police and search teams had been dispatched to look for the missing teenagers…”
The house was silent. I read the rest of the article with bated breath, my eyes wide. Some of the details I already knew, but others, such as the radioactive isotopes found on the dismembered limbs of the victims, I did not. I wondered about that. The police claimed that, after finding this strange clue, they had sent a team to inspect the abandoned factory with Geiger counters and look for signs of radioactivity. Perhaps the radium, which had a notoriously long half-life, had accumulated on the surfaces over the decades. But they said the radioactivity within the building was all within acceptable levels. It was just another bizarre piece of a puzzle that no one could solve.
The house was deathly silent. I could hear my own heart beating a runaway rhythm in my ears. A rising sense of anxiety was filling me, but I didn’t know why. It felt like some sort of pressure had changed all around me, as if the first wave of a massive blizzard had just blown into the room.
I heard a creaking from across the dark room. At the same time, I felt a sting on my arm. I looked down, seeing a bedbug crawling across my skin, a small red welt rising in its wake.
“Fuck!” I swore, grabbing it between my fingers and slicing it between my nails. Crimson spurted from its swollen body as if it were a tiny balloon. It exploded, staining my fingers red with my own blood.
“I should’ve never gone to see my brother. Goddamned bedbugs,” I muttered to myself. I hoped that was the only one. If I had picked up some extra travelers at the flophouse, I knew they would spread throughout the entire house within days.
The creaking came again, louder this time, almost insistent. I glanced across the curtain of shadows that hung thick and black in the room, seeing the dark silhouette of my closet door swinging open. I could only stare, open-mouthed. A long moment passed, and then I heard breathing. It came out, ragged and slow with long pauses, like the choking of a murder victim.
Slowly, I raised my phone’s dim light, shining it across the room. On the closet door, I saw four inhumanly long, crooked fingers. They shone pale like the skin of a corpse. They twitched, then started rhythmically tapping on the door. And then I heard it, that rhyme, that horrible, gurgling rhyme. It came echoing out from the door in that same choked voice, like a forgotten wound from long ago.
“The Crooked Man watches you.
His eyes are black, his lips are blue…”
It felt like I was in some sort of nightmare, but I knew from the sweat dripping down my forehead and the sensation of cloth sheets against my skin that this was all too real. Even a couple months later, I still remember that sensation of dread, the first of many terrors that this night would bring.
I looked around for a weapon. All I found was a letter opener sitting next to some mail on the nearby nightstand. I grabbed it, a flimsy piece of metal in my shaking hands. I was afraid to move, afraid to call out or do anything, out of fear it might shatter the stillness and cause that ineffable horror to come oozing out. I knew I didn’t want to see what was hiding behind that door.
I looked at the open window. I was on the second floor. I was afraid to even breathe too loudly at that moment. With the letter opener in my hand, I tried to silently slide myself across the mattress to the window only a few feet away.
The bedframe groaned softly as I shifted my weight. The breathing from the closet stopped abruptly. I heard the door creaking open, the floorboards shifting. Heavy steps started in the darkness, heading towards me. As I pushed myself off the bed, I glanced back and saw something twisted loping across the room on crooked legs.
It was the Crooked Man, the nightmare from my childhood. He towered over me with a tophat that nearly scraped the ceiling. His lidless eyes were pure darkness, as black as death. They contrasted heavily with his bone-white skin. His lips and fingernails were a suffocating, cyanotic blue, like the lips of a murder victim.
He stood up tall. The bones in his freakishly long legs cracked as the many strange joints of his enormous limbs bent in ways no human limb should bend. His fingers were strange and misshapen, each a foot long. They ended in sharp points of bone that poked out through the dead, white skin. He wore a black suit on his tall, emaciated frame. He moved towards me like flashing static, seeming to disappear and reappear closer and closer in every moment.
In panic and terror, I dived headfirst toward the open window, hearing the gurgling breathing of the Crooked Man only a few feet behind me. I felt slashing talons of bone rip across my back, a burning pain and a feeling of blood soaking my shirt. Then I was flying out the window and falling headfirst towards the grass and bushes below.
***
Time seemed to slow down as the ground rushed up to meet me. The wind whipped past my ears like the currents of a tornado. Instinctively, I tried to curl into a ball. As I smashed into the first of the bushes under my window, I rolled to try to put the brunt of the impact on my right shoulder.
The thin branches of the bush crumpled under me like wet cardboard. I felt sharp sticks stabbing into my skin, opening up new slices and cuts to mix with the deep gashes on my back.
I hit the dirt hard, a sudden pain radiating through my back. A jarring sensation crashed through my body. I rolled as I hit the ground, smacking my head into the lawn. The world spun around me and went dark.
Suddenly, I was somewhere else.
***
I found myself standing in a dark factory, surrounded by debris. Broken glass covered the floor, twinkling like fireflies under the light of the distant streetlights outside. Strange graffiti covered the concrete walls all around me.
“DON’T LOOK BEHIND YOU,” one of the tags read in slashing red letters. Underneath it, someone had spraypainted pure black eyes over a massive grinning mouth full of crooked black teeth.
“Destroy it with fire! SAVE your soul,” another one read in small, blue letters. I ran my hands over my face, wondering if I was dreaming. This all felt so real. I could feel the gentle breeze blowing through the broken windows on my skin, hear the rhythmic chirping of crickets outside.
I heard soft sobbing behind me. I remembered the first graffiti tag I had seen and a sense of panic gripped my heart. I did not want to look back.
“Fuck,” I swore under my breath, trembling as I turned. But I didn’t find some eldritch monstrosity with obsidian teeth and black, lidless eyes waiting there. Instead, I found a woman. She was crying, her back turned to me. She wore a black funeral gown that looked ancient and decayed. With a trembling heart, I took a step forward, wondering if I would regret this.
“Hello?” I called out. She spun, her eyes widening. In front of me stood a pretty blonde woman in her mid-twenties, one that I immediately recognized. For I saw many of my own features reflected in that panicked face: the high cheekbones, the large chin, even the waviness of her hair.
“Grandma,” I whispered, looking around in wonder. “What is this? Am I dead?” She shook her head, her eyes still wet and red. She took a deep, shuddering breath and gave a faint smile.
“Jack,” she said in a soft, melodic voice. “I’m so happy to see you. I’ve been watching you. I’ve been so proud of you. Even though we never met, I want you to know that. I wished I could have lived longer, could have met you. If only I hadn’t been murdered by that thing…” She spat the last word with hatred and fear oozing from her voice.
“I thought you died of cancer, Grandma?” I asked. “What do you mean, he killed you?” She shook like a leaf in the wind, refusing to meet my gaze.
“Everyone in that place was touched by something evil,” she murmured, putting her face in her hands. Her voice quavered like a frightened little girl’s. “The sickness radiated from that thing. It followed us like a cancer, made us weak, and then took our breath away. After the long torture was finished, he came to strangle me. He didn’t just kill me, Jack. He murdered my sister and brother, too. I saw it.” Her head ratcheted up, looking behind me all of a sudden. Her eyes widened in terror.
“You need to kill it, Jack,” she whispered grimly. “He’s woken up again after all these years, and he’s starving. The Crooked Man must feed, and feed he will if you don’t stop him. You need to come to the factory and end it. Otherwise, he will keep on killing. The Crooked Man will never stop hunting you. He will kill you and everyone you love.”
“How?” I asked, afraid to look back as the disturbing sounds grew closer and closer. Grandma backpedaled quickly, as if the demons of Hell were approaching. “How? How do I end it?”
I heard a horrible, choked breathing behind me, then the world faded.
***
I woke up suddenly on the lawn, my head pounding. It didn’t seem like much time had passed. I must have knocked myself out. I raised my fingers to my forehead. My fingers came away slick with blood.
For a long moment, I lay there, hyperventilating and looking up at the cloudless abyss of a sky. My body felt bruised and battered, and I wasn’t even sure if I could walk.
Then I saw a pale, hairless visage peeking over the edge of the windowsill with eyes as dark as night. Its face split into a grin with a crack, making a sound like ripping plastic. The bone-white mask of dead skin looked at me with a feverish intensity, a kind of psychopathic hunger that radiated from every pore of his body. With horror, I saw the Crooked Man’s teeth were as black as his eyes, gleaming like polished jetstone.
A rush of adrenaline pushed me up from the ground. I realized I was tremendously lucky, that I had been laying there with my keys still in my pocket and my cell phone in hand, fully dressed except for the fact I was wearing slippers. I sprinted across the lawn towards my car. I heard the Crooked Man scream out after me.
“You’ll be with Grandmother soon, Jackie boy,” he hissed in his gurgling voice. “No one escapes. No one.”
***
I flew down the highway in my car, the phone in my trembling hand. Looking down at it, I called Iris right away. She answered groggily.
“Hello?” she said.
“Jesus, Iris, it’s after me,” I said frantically. “Something’s happening. I got attacked in my own bedroom!”
“Did you call the cops?” she asked, seeming to wake up instantly. I looked down at the clock in the center console, seeing it was already past midnight.
“It wasn’t a person. I saw something. I think it was the same thing that took those teenagers, and now it’s after me. Are you guys home?” There was a long pause on the other end. I heard whispering in the background.
“Yeah… sure, come over,” she said. I knew Ben was somewhat of a gun nut, and had a nice little collection at the house. I would feel much safer if I made it there. And if I had them on my side, that would be all the better.
***
Ben and Iris lived in the middle of a back road surrounded by forests. The dark trees loomed overhead like priests with their heads bowed. The light from their front porch streamed into the creeping shadows as I pulled into their driveway. The sound of the car idling seemed far too loud in this place where the woods closed in all around me. I didn’t know what was hiding in those trees. I immediately shut it off.
Ben was a veteran who knew much more about combat and guns than I did. His collection was also somewhat impressive- an Armalite AR-15, a Judge, a 12-gauge Benelli, two crappy little .22s, a .45 Ruger, a Nosler 21 and a 10-gauge Mossberg. I had gone out shooting with him and Iris quite a few times. I would feel much safer once I was inside.
The cloudless black sky hung overhead like the lid of a coffin. Their little two-story place with the wraparound porch looked quaint, almost like a little rural cabin.
I stumbled out of the car. I’m sure I was quite a sight, battered and covered in clotting gashes and cuts, my eyes wide and panicked. I constantly looked around, checking my back. Every time I did, I expected to see something there, something close by with blue lips like a corpse and deformed, twisting bones.
I had nearly gotten to the front of the house when I saw, through the narrow sidelights at top of the door, the face of the Crooked Man. Standing only feet away, I heard faint gurgling of his diseased breathing even through the wall.
His hairless face was split into a grin like a death’s head, his lidless eyes bulging and excited. He raised his misshapen fingers to the window and gave me a little wave, opening and closing his fingers slowly. Then he turned and disappeared deeper into the house.
***
I immediately tried opening the door, to yell to Iris and Ben to watch out, but the door was locked. I called Iris. Each ring seemed to take an eternity. Finally, she answered.
“Hello? What, are you here?” she asked.
“Iris! Get the fuck out of the house! You and Ben aren’t alone in there! There’s a man coming in your direction right now!” I screamed, panicked. “Jump out the window if you have to! It’s coming!”
“What?” she said, sounding alarmed and confused. “Are you being serious?” I heard soft murmuring in the background.
“Tell Ben to grab a gun right now!” I started to say, but a high-pitched scream carried through the phone and the house at that moment.
“Iris? Iris! Answer me!” I said. The call immediately went dead.
From inside, I heard the first of the gunshots.
***
At that point, I decided to run back to my car. I needed to get inside and help them. A small voice in the back of my mind asked me what I could possibly do, however. If an AR-15 or a lead slug from a 12-gauge couldn’t stop the Crooked Man, then what could? At that moment, I wished fervently that Grandma would have told me.
I grabbed a tire iron from the back of my trunk and sprinted back toward the front of the house. They had large windows leading into the kitchen from their wraparound porch. Without hesitation, I drew the tire iron back and smashed it. The tinkling of glass seemed explosively loud. I realized that the gunshots and screaming had stopped.
At that moment, something pale came scurrying around the side of the building. I jumped, but I looked over and realized it was Iris, dressed in a white hoodie and white pants. Her pale face was contorted with mortal terror. To my horror, I realized hundreds of small drops spattered her clothes, covering her face and body like crimson raindrops. She had the .45 Ruger in her hands, and she was limping.
“Where’s Ben?” I cried. She shook her head.
“I jumped out the bedroom window… he was behind me,” she said. Suddenly, there was another explosion of glass from behind the house. Something heavy thudded hard against the ground. We heard wretched wailing follow it. Looking at each other with horrified eyes, we both turned and ran towards the noise.
We found Ben laying on the lawn. The right side of his neck was nearly severed. Bright-red streams of blood spurted from the mutilated flesh. His back looked broken as well. He laid there like a hornet smashed under someone’s boot. With dilated eyes, he looked from me to Iris. Terror and agony oozed from his eyes. He opened his mouth to say something, but only a frothy puddle of blood came up.
Then his eyes turned away, looking straight up into the cloudless black void of a sky. The last exhalation came, the death gasp that bubbled and stretched out until I thought it might never end. He died staring into that abyss, that eternity from which no one returns.
The Crooked Man murdered my family. Now he has awoken again [part 2] : mrcreeps (reddit.com)

​
I remember when I first heard the rhyme as a child. It terrified me. To me, the Crooked Man was some sort of boogeyman with freakishly long arms and legs that were twisted and broken in horrifying ways. I still have the rhyme memorized. It repeats in my brain like a skipping record.
“There was a Crooked Man, and he walked a crooked mile,
He found a crooked sixpence against a crooked stile;
He bought a crooked cat which caught a crooked mouse,
And they all lived together in a little crooked house.”
My brother Benton, who loved to torture me as a child, ended up adding his own parts to the rhyme over time. The extra parts he added did nothing to console me or end my nightmares of this twisted boogeyman who always seemed to slink through the shadows. I remember the rhyme Benton told me by heart to this day.
“The Crooked Man watches you.
His eyes are black, his lips are blue.
The crooked man twists and crawls.
He uses his crooked blade to kill.
And when the curtain of night falls,
He comes to get his thrill.”
***
So I found it strange when, a few weeks ago, I was sitting with a couple of my friends drinking and the subject of the Crooked Man came up again. They were rambling about shootings and serial killers and other fairly interesting subjects that I knew almost nothing about. But my friend Iris knew everything about such morbid subjects.
She was a small drink of water, no more than five feet, with platinum blonde hair and green eyes like a cat. She was extremely attractive with high cheekbones and a small nose and chin. She always talked extremely fast and made violent slashing gestures with her hands. Sometimes I wondered if she had a secret amphetamine habit I didn’t know about.
“But did you hear about the murders in Union?” Iris asked, glancing over at her boyfriend, Ben. Ben was the opposite of Iris- tall and nerdy with thick, black-rimmed glasses and a low whisper of a voice.
“I just heard that some kids went missing,” Ben murmured. I shrugged.
“I don’t watch TV,” I said. “The news is all bullshit anyway. They only show you the bad stuff. After all, no one wants to hear about new breakthroughs in fusion technology or discoveries in particle physics. Instead, people just want to watch others get murdered, robbed and beaten, so that they can feel that at least someone else has it worse than them. That’s all the news is, really: a form of schadenfreude, the joy people get from seeing others’ misfortune and suffering. Our entire media industry is built on a foundation of schadenfreude.” I took a long sip from my beer, a Harpoon that tasted like pure raspberries. Iris rolled her eyes.
“While probably true, I don’t care,” she said, turning her green eyes on me. “Don’t you want to know what happened to the kids?”
“I do,” Ben said, leaning forward. “Was it something… supernatural?” Iris gave a sardonic laugh at that. Ben sat back, offended.
“What’s so funny? I heard there was weird stuff going on around that factory. In fact, I heard they used to manufacture some dye there for clocks and stuff, right? So all these people went to work, painting watches and clocks and whatever else they told them to paint. It was this special green dye that would glow in the dark. The factory was staffed by mostly women, and I heard they used to lick their paintbrushes to form them into points. They figured this stuff was just regular paint that glowed in the dark.” I leaned back, interested. Ben started talking faster, getting more animated.
“So what happened?” I asked, my curiosity piqued.
“Well, the workers started getting cancer and dying in huge numbers,” Ben continued as the kitchen lights sparkled off his glasses. “One woman even had her entire jaw rot off. Others had pieces of their faces falling off. So it turns out, they were using radioactive isotopes to make the paint glow! And these women were just licking the paintbrushes and touching the paint…”
“Holy shit,” I whispered, horrified.
“They called them the Radium girls,” Ben said. “That factory killed hundreds and hundreds of people. That’s why a lot of people think it’s haunted. People claim they see ghosts and weird shit around it. And that’s not all. The case gets even weirder when you look at workers’ families.
“It seems a lot of their kids went missing, too. The cops never found any of them. The entire time the factory was operational, and even after it shutdown, the families of the workers kept having strange things happen- children disappearing from their bedrooms in the middle of the night, strange murders and unexplained suicides that kept killing off healthy, normal people all over town.”
“So, anyways,” Iris continued, looking slightly annoyed at the interruption, “the kids that went into that abandoned factory were all found… torn apart. Their limbs were all amputated and crooked.” She leaned forward, using her spooky campfire voice. “And the limbs were long. Freakishly long, as if they had just grown overnight to inhuman lengths before they got lopped off. But they never found the heads or the torsos. All they found was ten legs and ten arms.”
“And no one knows what happened?” I asked. She shook her head.
“Officially, no. The police and media said it was some sort of serial killer, of course. But there wasn’t a shred of evidence anywhere. It was like a ghost had done it. Where the limbs were piled up in the basement, there was no evidence that anyone had been there in months, no footsteps or microscopic evidence of any presence. But the story doesn’t end there. Because there were six teenagers that went into that building, and one of them was found alive three months later, wandering, covered in blood and scratches, mostly naked and totally insane. One of my friends is an EMT and she said that the kid would not stop talking about the Crooked Man taking his friends and keeping him prisoner in some other world.”
At the mention of those words, the Crooked Man, a chill went down my spine. My heart felt like ice.
“What’d you say? What did the kid say?” I asked anxiously. Suddenly the room felt very hot, and the alcohol was not sitting well in my stomach.
“He said he got kidnapped by someone called the Crooked Man,” Iris repeated, taking a long sip from her wine. “According to the kid, it was some sort of fucking monster, apparently. I think his mind must have just snapped. He was probably kidnapped and held in the basement of some serial killer for three goddamned months. Who knows what he saw and experienced? People make up all sorts of crazy shit when they’re traumatized.”
My hand was shaking so badly that I had to put my bottle down on the table. For some reason, my mind kept flashing back to my sister, Emilia, who had been kidnapped from her room in the middle of the night when my brother Benton and I were little. She had never been found. We had never gotten a ransom note or found a body. It was as if Emilia had simply disappeared, vanished from the surface of the planet in an instant.
“I think some of that stuff is real,” Ben said. “People have been talking about cryptids and ghosts for thousands of years across countless different and unrelated cultures. What are the chances that all of them are just hallucinations or delusions?”
I didn’t know, but I thought I might know someone who might.
***
My brother Benton was a long-term drug addict living in a flophouse. I went to see him the next morning. He opened the door with a glazed, half-aware expression. Scars covered his arms and legs. He looked like a walking skeleton. His eyes shone like the last bit of water at the bottom of a dying well.
“Jack,” he said, surprised, appearing to wake up slightly. “What are you doing here?”
“I need to talk to you,” I said, pushing past him into the one-bedroom place he called home. A cockroach skittered across the wall. As he closed the door, I saw bites from bedbugs all over his body. Benton turned, spreading out his hands.
“Well, what is it, little brother? You know I’m all ears.”
“You remember that rhyme you used to scare me with when we were little?” I asked. “That rhyme you made up about the Crooked Man?” He seemed to go a shade paler.
“I didn’t make anything up,” he said. “That rhyme came from Grandma. She told it to dad when he was little, before she died.”
“Grandma?” I asked, startled. Our grandmother had died of cancer when she was extremely young, in her late 20s. “Did you hear about the murders over in Union? The survivor was talking about the Crooked Man.”
“That’s pretty freaking weird, man,” he said. “Especially considering what happened to Grandma and Emilia, you know.” He sat down on the threadbare mattress, laying back and sighing.
“Why is it weird?” I asked.
“Because, you know, that’s where Grandma used to work. At that factory in Union. Didn’t Dad ever tell you?” I shook my head, feeling sick.
“So Grandma was one of the radium girls?” I said. My brother shrugged his thin shoulders, the stained T-shirt clinging tight to his frail body.
“I don’t know what that is, but whatever she was doing there, it killed her.”
“But what does that have to do with Emilia?” I asked, my heart pounding at the mention of our long-lost little sister. He shook his head in wonder.
“You don’t remember? You were older than me when it happened. Before she went missing, she kept talking about the same thing, saying weird stuff about some ‘Crooked Man’. Don’t you remember what happened the night she went missing?” I thought back, but it all seemed like a blur. I remembered flashing police sirens and my parents screaming. I had tried to block it out, but apparently Benton hadn’t been able to. That night must be like a fresh wound on his mind all the time.
“No, I just remembered… screaming, and police…” I whispered, my voice trailing off into nothing. Benton leaned forward on the bed, looking sick.
“We both saw it,” he said. “The Crooked Man. That thing she was talking about. It was real. We saw it in her room that night- when it took her.” I shook my head, refusing to look at him. Feeling sick, I walked toward the door without looking back. “Where are you going?”
“I’m going home,” I said. “I can’t deal with this shit right now.” But that night, I would find out that the long-lost nightmare from my childhood was not nearly as buried in the past as I thought.
***
I was laying in my dark bedroom, reading the local news on my phone, when I saw an article that disturbed me greatly. I sat up, looking out the window into the cloudless night. The sky hung overhead like a black hole, colorless and empty. Fear radiated through my heart as I glanced back down at the screen and started reading.
“Sole survivor of serial killer commits suicide,” the article read in garish black-and-white letters. “Michael Galentino, 18, was found dead in a psychiatric facility early this morning. In February, Michael Galentino and five others entered a local abandoned building. Friends who knew them stated that they often explored abandoned structures as part of an ‘urban exploration’ group. But this would not be a normal night for the group. They all disappeared, and within 24 hours, police and search teams had been dispatched to look for the missing teenagers…”
The house was silent. I read the rest of the article with bated breath, my eyes wide. Some of the details I already knew, but others, such as the radioactive isotopes found on the dismembered limbs of the victims, I did not. I wondered about that. The police claimed that, after finding this strange clue, they had sent a team to inspect the abandoned factory with Geiger counters and look for signs of radioactivity. Perhaps the radium, which had a notoriously long half-life, had accumulated on the surfaces over the decades. But they said the radioactivity within the building was all within acceptable levels. It was just another bizarre piece of a puzzle that no one could solve.
The house was deathly silent. I could hear my own heart beating a runaway rhythm in my ears. A rising sense of anxiety was filling me, but I didn’t know why. It felt like some sort of pressure had changed all around me, as if the first wave of a massive blizzard had just blown into the room.
I heard a creaking from across the dark room. At the same time, I felt a sting on my arm. I looked down, seeing a bedbug crawling across my skin, a small red welt rising in its wake.
“Fuck!” I swore, grabbing it between my fingers and slicing it between my nails. Crimson spurted from its swollen body as if it were a tiny balloon. It exploded, staining my fingers red with my own blood.
“I should’ve never gone to see my brother. Goddamned bedbugs,” I muttered to myself. I hoped that was the only one. If I had picked up some extra travelers at the flophouse, I knew they would spread throughout the entire house within days.
The creaking came again, louder this time, almost insistent. I glanced across the curtain of shadows that hung thick and black in the room, seeing the dark silhouette of my closet door swinging open. I could only stare, open-mouthed. A long moment passed, and then I heard breathing. It came out, ragged and slow with long pauses, like the choking of a murder victim.
Slowly, I raised my phone’s dim light, shining it across the room. On the closet door, I saw four inhumanly long, crooked fingers. They shone pale like the skin of a corpse. They twitched, then started rhythmically tapping on the door. And then I heard it, that rhyme, that horrible, gurgling rhyme. It came echoing out from the door in that same choked voice, like a forgotten wound from long ago.
“The Crooked Man watches you.
His eyes are black, his lips are blue…”
It felt like I was in some sort of nightmare, but I knew from the sweat dripping down my forehead and the sensation of cloth sheets against my skin that this was all too real. Even a couple months later, I still remember that sensation of dread, the first of many terrors that this night would bring.
I looked around for a weapon. All I found was a letter opener sitting next to some mail on the nearby nightstand. I grabbed it, a flimsy piece of metal in my shaking hands. I was afraid to move, afraid to call out or do anything, out of fear it might shatter the stillness and cause that ineffable horror to come oozing out. I knew I didn’t want to see what was hiding behind that door.
I looked at the open window. I was on the second floor. I was afraid to even breathe too loudly at that moment. With the letter opener in my hand, I tried to silently slide myself across the mattress to the window only a few feet away.
The bedframe groaned softly as I shifted my weight. The breathing from the closet stopped abruptly. I heard the door creaking open, the floorboards shifting. Heavy steps started in the darkness, heading towards me. As I pushed myself off the bed, I glanced back and saw something twisted loping across the room on crooked legs.
It was the Crooked Man, the nightmare from my childhood. He towered over me with a tophat that nearly scraped the ceiling. His lidless eyes were pure darkness, as black as death. They contrasted heavily with his bone-white skin. His lips and fingernails were a suffocating, cyanotic blue, like the lips of a murder victim.
He stood up tall. The bones in his freakishly long legs cracked as the many strange joints of his enormous limbs bent in ways no human limb should bend. His fingers were strange and misshapen, each a foot long. They ended in sharp points of bone that poked out through the dead, white skin. He wore a black suit on his tall, emaciated frame. He moved towards me like flashing static, seeming to disappear and reappear closer and closer in every moment.
In panic and terror, I dived headfirst toward the open window, hearing the gurgling breathing of the Crooked Man only a few feet behind me. I felt slashing talons of bone rip across my back, a burning pain and a feeling of blood soaking my shirt. Then I was flying out the window and falling headfirst towards the grass and bushes below.
***
Time seemed to slow down as the ground rushed up to meet me. The wind whipped past my ears like the currents of a tornado. Instinctively, I tried to curl into a ball. As I smashed into the first of the bushes under my window, I rolled to try to put the brunt of the impact on my right shoulder.
The thin branches of the bush crumpled under me like wet cardboard. I felt sharp sticks stabbing into my skin, opening up new slices and cuts to mix with the deep gashes on my back.
I hit the dirt hard, a sudden pain radiating through my back. A jarring sensation crashed through my body. I rolled as I hit the ground, smacking my head into the lawn. The world spun around me and went dark.
Suddenly, I was somewhere else.
***
I found myself standing in a dark factory, surrounded by debris. Broken glass covered the floor, twinkling like fireflies under the light of the distant streetlights outside. Strange graffiti covered the concrete walls all around me.
“DON’T LOOK BEHIND YOU,” one of the tags read in slashing red letters. Underneath it, someone had spraypainted pure black eyes over a massive grinning mouth full of crooked black teeth.
“Destroy it with fire! SAVE your soul,” another one read in small, blue letters. I ran my hands over my face, wondering if I was dreaming. This all felt so real. I could feel the gentle breeze blowing through the broken windows on my skin, hear the rhythmic chirping of crickets outside.
I heard soft sobbing behind me. I remembered the first graffiti tag I had seen and a sense of panic gripped my heart. I did not want to look back.
“Fuck,” I swore under my breath, trembling as I turned. But I didn’t find some eldritch monstrosity with obsidian teeth and black, lidless eyes waiting there. Instead, I found a woman. She was crying, her back turned to me. She wore a black funeral gown that looked ancient and decayed. With a trembling heart, I took a step forward, wondering if I would regret this.
“Hello?” I called out. She spun, her eyes widening. In front of me stood a pretty blonde woman in her mid-twenties, one that I immediately recognized. For I saw many of my own features reflected in that panicked face: the high cheekbones, the large chin, even the waviness of her hair.
“Grandma,” I whispered, looking around in wonder. “What is this? Am I dead?” She shook her head, her eyes still wet and red. She took a deep, shuddering breath and gave a faint smile.
“Jack,” she said in a soft, melodic voice. “I’m so happy to see you. I’ve been watching you. I’ve been so proud of you. Even though we never met, I want you to know that. I wished I could have lived longer, could have met you. If only I hadn’t been murdered by that thing…” She spat the last word with hatred and fear oozing from her voice.
“I thought you died of cancer, Grandma?” I asked. “What do you mean, he killed you?” She shook like a leaf in the wind, refusing to meet my gaze.
“Everyone in that place was touched by something evil,” she murmured, putting her face in her hands. Her voice quavered like a frightened little girl’s. “The sickness radiated from that thing. It followed us like a cancer, made us weak, and then took our breath away. After the long torture was finished, he came to strangle me. He didn’t just kill me, Jack. He murdered my sister and brother, too. I saw it.” Her head ratcheted up, looking behind me all of a sudden. Her eyes widened in terror.
“You need to kill it, Jack,” she whispered grimly. “He’s woken up again after all these years, and he’s starving. The Crooked Man must feed, and feed he will if you don’t stop him. You need to come to the factory and end it. Otherwise, he will keep on killing. The Crooked Man will never stop hunting you. He will kill you and everyone you love.”
“How?” I asked, afraid to look back as the disturbing sounds grew closer and closer. Grandma backpedaled quickly, as if the demons of Hell were approaching. “How? How do I end it?”
I heard a horrible, choked breathing behind me, then the world faded.
***
I woke up suddenly on the lawn, my head pounding. It didn’t seem like much time had passed. I must have knocked myself out. I raised my fingers to my forehead. My fingers came away slick with blood.
For a long moment, I lay there, hyperventilating and looking up at the cloudless abyss of a sky. My body felt bruised and battered, and I wasn’t even sure if I could walk.
Then I saw a pale, hairless visage peeking over the edge of the windowsill with eyes as dark as night. Its face split into a grin with a crack, making a sound like ripping plastic. The bone-white mask of dead skin looked at me with a feverish intensity, a kind of psychopathic hunger that radiated from every pore of his body. With horror, I saw the Crooked Man’s teeth were as black as his eyes, gleaming like polished jetstone.
A rush of adrenaline pushed me up from the ground. I realized I was tremendously lucky, that I had been laying there with my keys still in my pocket and my cell phone in hand, fully dressed except for the fact I was wearing slippers. I sprinted across the lawn towards my car. I heard the Crooked Man scream out after me.
“You’ll be with Grandmother soon, Jackie boy,” he hissed in his gurgling voice. “No one escapes. No one.”
***
I flew down the highway in my car, the phone in my trembling hand. Looking down at it, I called Iris right away. She answered groggily.
“Hello?” she said.
“Jesus, Iris, it’s after me,” I said frantically. “Something’s happening. I got attacked in my own bedroom!”
“Did you call the cops?” she asked, seeming to wake up instantly. I looked down at the clock in the center console, seeing it was already past midnight.
“It wasn’t a person. I saw something. I think it was the same thing that took those teenagers, and now it’s after me. Are you guys home?” There was a long pause on the other end. I heard whispering in the background.
“Yeah… sure, come over,” she said. I knew Ben was somewhat of a gun nut, and had a nice little collection at the house. I would feel much safer if I made it there. And if I had them on my side, that would be all the better.
***
Ben and Iris lived in the middle of a back road surrounded by forests. The dark trees loomed overhead like priests with their heads bowed. The light from their front porch streamed into the creeping shadows as I pulled into their driveway. The sound of the car idling seemed far too loud in this place where the woods closed in all around me. I didn’t know what was hiding in those trees. I immediately shut it off.
Ben was a veteran who knew much more about combat and guns than I did. His collection was also somewhat impressive- an Armalite AR-15, a Judge, a 12-gauge Benelli, two crappy little .22s, a .45 Ruger, a Nosler 21 and a 10-gauge Mossberg. I had gone out shooting with him and Iris quite a few times. I would feel much safer once I was inside.
The cloudless black sky hung overhead like the lid of a coffin. Their little two-story place with the wraparound porch looked quaint, almost like a little rural cabin.
I stumbled out of the car. I’m sure I was quite a sight, battered and covered in clotting gashes and cuts, my eyes wide and panicked. I constantly looked around, checking my back. Every time I did, I expected to see something there, something close by with blue lips like a corpse and deformed, twisting bones.
I had nearly gotten to the front of the house when I saw, through the narrow sidelights at top of the door, the face of the Crooked Man. Standing only feet away, I heard faint gurgling of his diseased breathing even through the wall.
His hairless face was split into a grin like a death’s head, his lidless eyes bulging and excited. He raised his misshapen fingers to the window and gave me a little wave, opening and closing his fingers slowly. Then he turned and disappeared deeper into the house.
***
I immediately tried opening the door, to yell to Iris and Ben to watch out, but the door was locked. I called Iris. Each ring seemed to take an eternity. Finally, she answered.
“Hello? What, are you here?” she asked.
“Iris! Get the fuck out of the house! You and Ben aren’t alone in there! There’s a man coming in your direction right now!” I screamed, panicked. “Jump out the window if you have to! It’s coming!”
“What?” she said, sounding alarmed and confused. “Are you being serious?” I heard soft murmuring in the background.
“Tell Ben to grab a gun right now!” I started to say, but a high-pitched scream carried through the phone and the house at that moment.
“Iris? Iris! Answer me!” I said. The call immediately went dead.
From inside, I heard the first of the gunshots.
***
At that point, I decided to run back to my car. I needed to get inside and help them. A small voice in the back of my mind asked me what I could possibly do, however. If an AR-15 or a lead slug from a 12-gauge couldn’t stop the Crooked Man, then what could? At that moment, I wished fervently that Grandma would have told me.
I grabbed a tire iron from the back of my trunk and sprinted back toward the front of the house. They had large windows leading into the kitchen from their wraparound porch. Without hesitation, I drew the tire iron back and smashed it. The tinkling of glass seemed explosively loud. I realized that the gunshots and screaming had stopped.
At that moment, something pale came scurrying around the side of the building. I jumped, but I looked over and realized it was Iris, dressed in a white hoodie and white pants. Her pale face was contorted with mortal terror. To my horror, I realized hundreds of small drops spattered her clothes, covering her face and body like crimson raindrops. She had the .45 Ruger in her hands, and she was limping.
“Where’s Ben?” I cried. She shook her head.
“I jumped out the bedroom window… he was behind me,” she said. Suddenly, there was another explosion of glass from behind the house. Something heavy thudded hard against the ground. We heard wretched wailing follow it. Looking at each other with horrified eyes, we both turned and ran towards the noise.
We found Ben laying on the lawn. The right side of his neck was nearly severed. Bright-red streams of blood spurted from the mutilated flesh. His back looked broken as well. He laid there like a hornet smashed under someone’s boot. With dilated eyes, he looked from me to Iris. Terror and agony oozed from his eyes. He opened his mouth to say something, but only a frothy puddle of blood came up.
Then his eyes turned away, looking straight up into the cloudless black void of a sky. The last exhalation came, the death gasp that bubbled and stretched out until I thought it might never end. He died staring into that abyss, that eternity from which no one returns.
The Crooked Man murdered my family. Now he has awoken again [part 2] : mrcreeps (reddit.com)

I remember when I first heard the rhyme as a child. It terrified me. To me, the Crooked Man was some sort of boogeyman with freakishly long arms and legs that were twisted and broken in horrifying ways. I still have the rhyme memorized. It repeats in my brain like a skipping record.
“There was a Crooked Man, and he walked a crooked mile,
He found a crooked sixpence against a crooked stile;
He bought a crooked cat which caught a crooked mouse,
And they all lived together in a little crooked house.”
My brother Benton, who loved to torture me as a child, ended up adding his own parts to the rhyme over time. The extra parts he added did nothing to console me or end my nightmares of this twisted boogeyman who always seemed to slink through the shadows. I remember the rhyme Benton told me by heart to this day.
“The Crooked Man watches you.
His eyes are black, his lips are blue.
The crooked man twists and crawls.
He uses his crooked blade to kill.
And when the curtain of night falls,
He comes to get his thrill.”
***
So I found it strange when, a few weeks ago, I was sitting with a couple of my friends drinking and the subject of the Crooked Man came up again. They were rambling about shootings and serial killers and other fairly interesting subjects that I knew almost nothing about. But my friend Iris knew everything about such morbid subjects.
She was a small drink of water, no more than five feet, with platinum blonde hair and green eyes like a cat. She was extremely attractive with high cheekbones and a small nose and chin. She always talked extremely fast and made violent slashing gestures with her hands. Sometimes I wondered if she had a secret amphetamine habit I didn’t know about.
“But did you hear about the murders in Union?” Iris asked, glancing over at her boyfriend, Ben. Ben was the opposite of Iris- tall and nerdy with thick, black-rimmed glasses and a low whisper of a voice.
“I just heard that some kids went missing,” Ben murmured. I shrugged.
“I don’t watch TV,” I said. “The news is all bullshit anyway. They only show you the bad stuff. After all, no one wants to hear about new breakthroughs in fusion technology or discoveries in particle physics. Instead, people just want to watch others get murdered, robbed and beaten, so that they can feel that at least someone else has it worse than them. That’s all the news is, really: a form of schadenfreude, the joy people get from seeing others’ misfortune and suffering. Our entire media industry is built on a foundation of schadenfreude.” I took a long sip from my beer, a Harpoon that tasted like pure raspberries. Iris rolled her eyes.
“While probably true, I don’t care,” she said, turning her green eyes on me. “Don’t you want to know what happened to the kids?”
“I do,” Ben said, leaning forward. “Was it something… supernatural?” Iris gave a sardonic laugh at that. Ben sat back, offended.
“What’s so funny? I heard there was weird stuff going on around that factory. In fact, I heard they used to manufacture some dye there for clocks and stuff, right? So all these people went to work, painting watches and clocks and whatever else they told them to paint. It was this special green dye that would glow in the dark. The factory was staffed by mostly women, and I heard they used to lick their paintbrushes to form them into points. They figured this stuff was just regular paint that glowed in the dark.” I leaned back, interested. Ben started talking faster, getting more animated.
“So what happened?” I asked, my curiosity piqued.
“Well, the workers started getting cancer and dying in huge numbers,” Ben continued as the kitchen lights sparkled off his glasses. “One woman even had her entire jaw rot off. Others had pieces of their faces falling off. So it turns out, they were using radioactive isotopes to make the paint glow! And these women were just licking the paintbrushes and touching the paint…”
“Holy shit,” I whispered, horrified.
“They called them the Radium girls,” Ben said. “That factory killed hundreds and hundreds of people. That’s why a lot of people think it’s haunted. People claim they see ghosts and weird shit around it. And that’s not all. The case gets even weirder when you look at workers’ families.
“It seems a lot of their kids went missing, too. The cops never found any of them. The entire time the factory was operational, and even after it shutdown, the families of the workers kept having strange things happen- children disappearing from their bedrooms in the middle of the night, strange murders and unexplained suicides that kept killing off healthy, normal people all over town.”
“So, anyways,” Iris continued, looking slightly annoyed at the interruption, “the kids that went into that abandoned factory were all found… torn apart. Their limbs were all amputated and crooked.” She leaned forward, using her spooky campfire voice. “And the limbs were long. Freakishly long, as if they had just grown overnight to inhuman lengths before they got lopped off. But they never found the heads or the torsos. All they found was ten legs and ten arms.”
“And no one knows what happened?” I asked. She shook her head.
“Officially, no. The police and media said it was some sort of serial killer, of course. But there wasn’t a shred of evidence anywhere. It was like a ghost had done it. Where the limbs were piled up in the basement, there was no evidence that anyone had been there in months, no footsteps or microscopic evidence of any presence. But the story doesn’t end there. Because there were six teenagers that went into that building, and one of them was found alive three months later, wandering, covered in blood and scratches, mostly naked and totally insane. One of my friends is an EMT and she said that the kid would not stop talking about the Crooked Man taking his friends and keeping him prisoner in some other world.”
At the mention of those words, the Crooked Man, a chill went down my spine. My heart felt like ice.
“What’d you say? What did the kid say?” I asked anxiously. Suddenly the room felt very hot, and the alcohol was not sitting well in my stomach.
“He said he got kidnapped by someone called the Crooked Man,” Iris repeated, taking a long sip from her wine. “According to the kid, it was some sort of fucking monster, apparently. I think his mind must have just snapped. He was probably kidnapped and held in the basement of some serial killer for three goddamned months. Who knows what he saw and experienced? People make up all sorts of crazy shit when they’re traumatized.”
My hand was shaking so badly that I had to put my bottle down on the table. For some reason, my mind kept flashing back to my sister, Emilia, who had been kidnapped from her room in the middle of the night when my brother Benton and I were little. She had never been found. We had never gotten a ransom note or found a body. It was as if Emilia had simply disappeared, vanished from the surface of the planet in an instant.
“I think some of that stuff is real,” Ben said. “People have been talking about cryptids and ghosts for thousands of years across countless different and unrelated cultures. What are the chances that all of them are just hallucinations or delusions?”
I didn’t know, but I thought I might know someone who might.
***
My brother Benton was a long-term drug addict living in a flophouse. I went to see him the next morning. He opened the door with a glazed, half-aware expression. Scars covered his arms and legs. He looked like a walking skeleton. His eyes shone like the last bit of water at the bottom of a dying well.
“Jack,” he said, surprised, appearing to wake up slightly. “What are you doing here?”
“I need to talk to you,” I said, pushing past him into the one-bedroom place he called home. A cockroach skittered across the wall. As he closed the door, I saw bites from bedbugs all over his body. Benton turned, spreading out his hands.
“Well, what is it, little brother? You know I’m all ears.”
“You remember that rhyme you used to scare me with when we were little?” I asked. “That rhyme you made up about the Crooked Man?” He seemed to go a shade paler.
“I didn’t make anything up,” he said. “That rhyme came from Grandma. She told it to dad when he was little, before she died.”
“Grandma?” I asked, startled. Our grandmother had died of cancer when she was extremely young, in her late 20s. “Did you hear about the murders over in Union? The survivor was talking about the Crooked Man.”
“That’s pretty freaking weird, man,” he said. “Especially considering what happened to Grandma and Emilia, you know.” He sat down on the threadbare mattress, laying back and sighing.
“Why is it weird?” I asked.
“Because, you know, that’s where Grandma used to work. At that factory in Union. Didn’t Dad ever tell you?” I shook my head, feeling sick.
“So Grandma was one of the radium girls?” I said. My brother shrugged his thin shoulders, the stained T-shirt clinging tight to his frail body.
“I don’t know what that is, but whatever she was doing there, it killed her.”
“But what does that have to do with Emilia?” I asked, my heart pounding at the mention of our long-lost little sister. He shook his head in wonder.
“You don’t remember? You were older than me when it happened. Before she went missing, she kept talking about the same thing, saying weird stuff about some ‘Crooked Man’. Don’t you remember what happened the night she went missing?” I thought back, but it all seemed like a blur. I remembered flashing police sirens and my parents screaming. I had tried to block it out, but apparently Benton hadn’t been able to. That night must be like a fresh wound on his mind all the time.
“No, I just remembered… screaming, and police…” I whispered, my voice trailing off into nothing. Benton leaned forward on the bed, looking sick.
“We both saw it,” he said. “The Crooked Man. That thing she was talking about. It was real. We saw it in her room that night- when it took her.” I shook my head, refusing to look at him. Feeling sick, I walked toward the door without looking back. “Where are you going?”
“I’m going home,” I said. “I can’t deal with this shit right now.” But that night, I would find out that the long-lost nightmare from my childhood was not nearly as buried in the past as I thought.
***
I was laying in my dark bedroom, reading the local news on my phone, when I saw an article that disturbed me greatly. I sat up, looking out the window into the cloudless night. The sky hung overhead like a black hole, colorless and empty. Fear radiated through my heart as I glanced back down at the screen and started reading.
“Sole survivor of serial killer commits suicide,” the article read in garish black-and-white letters. “Michael Galentino, 18, was found dead in a psychiatric facility early this morning. In February, Michael Galentino and five others entered a local abandoned building. Friends who knew them stated that they often explored abandoned structures as part of an ‘urban exploration’ group. But this would not be a normal night for the group. They all disappeared, and within 24 hours, police and search teams had been dispatched to look for the missing teenagers…”
The house was silent. I read the rest of the article with bated breath, my eyes wide. Some of the details I already knew, but others, such as the radioactive isotopes found on the dismembered limbs of the victims, I did not. I wondered about that. The police claimed that, after finding this strange clue, they had sent a team to inspect the abandoned factory with Geiger counters and look for signs of radioactivity. Perhaps the radium, which had a notoriously long half-life, had accumulated on the surfaces over the decades. But they said the radioactivity within the building was all within acceptable levels. It was just another bizarre piece of a puzzle that no one could solve.
The house was deathly silent. I could hear my own heart beating a runaway rhythm in my ears. A rising sense of anxiety was filling me, but I didn’t know why. It felt like some sort of pressure had changed all around me, as if the first wave of a massive blizzard had just blown into the room.
I heard a creaking from across the dark room. At the same time, I felt a sting on my arm. I looked down, seeing a bedbug crawling across my skin, a small red welt rising in its wake.
“Fuck!” I swore, grabbing it between my fingers and slicing it between my nails. Crimson spurted from its swollen body as if it were a tiny balloon. It exploded, staining my fingers red with my own blood.
“I should’ve never gone to see my brother. Goddamned bedbugs,” I muttered to myself. I hoped that was the only one. If I had picked up some extra travelers at the flophouse, I knew they would spread throughout the entire house within days.
The creaking came again, louder this time, almost insistent. I glanced across the curtain of shadows that hung thick and black in the room, seeing the dark silhouette of my closet door swinging open. I could only stare, open-mouthed. A long moment passed, and then I heard breathing. It came out, ragged and slow with long pauses, like the choking of a murder victim.
Slowly, I raised my phone’s dim light, shining it across the room. On the closet door, I saw four inhumanly long, crooked fingers. They shone pale like the skin of a corpse. They twitched, then started rhythmically tapping on the door. And then I heard it, that rhyme, that horrible, gurgling rhyme. It came echoing out from the door in that same choked voice, like a forgotten wound from long ago.
“The Crooked Man watches you.
His eyes are black, his lips are blue…”
It felt like I was in some sort of nightmare, but I knew from the sweat dripping down my forehead and the sensation of cloth sheets against my skin that this was all too real. Even a couple months later, I still remember that sensation of dread, the first of many terrors that this night would bring.
I looked around for a weapon. All I found was a letter opener sitting next to some mail on the nearby nightstand. I grabbed it, a flimsy piece of metal in my shaking hands. I was afraid to move, afraid to call out or do anything, out of fear it might shatter the stillness and cause that ineffable horror to come oozing out. I knew I didn’t want to see what was hiding behind that door.
I looked at the open window. I was on the second floor. I was afraid to even breathe too loudly at that moment. With the letter opener in my hand, I tried to silently slide myself across the mattress to the window only a few feet away.
The bedframe groaned softly as I shifted my weight. The breathing from the closet stopped abruptly. I heard the door creaking open, the floorboards shifting. Heavy steps started in the darkness, heading towards me. As I pushed myself off the bed, I glanced back and saw something twisted loping across the room on crooked legs.
It was the Crooked Man, the nightmare from my childhood. He towered over me with a tophat that nearly scraped the ceiling. His lidless eyes were pure darkness, as black as death. They contrasted heavily with his bone-white skin. His lips and fingernails were a suffocating, cyanotic blue, like the lips of a murder victim.
He stood up tall. The bones in his freakishly long legs cracked as the many strange joints of his enormous limbs bent in ways no human limb should bend. His fingers were strange and misshapen, each a foot long. They ended in sharp points of bone that poked out through the dead, white skin. He wore a black suit on his tall, emaciated frame. He moved towards me like flashing static, seeming to disappear and reappear closer and closer in every moment.
In panic and terror, I dived headfirst toward the open window, hearing the gurgling breathing of the Crooked Man only a few feet behind me. I felt slashing talons of bone rip across my back, a burning pain and a feeling of blood soaking my shirt. Then I was flying out the window and falling headfirst towards the grass and bushes below.
***
Time seemed to slow down as the ground rushed up to meet me. The wind whipped past my ears like the currents of a tornado. Instinctively, I tried to curl into a ball. As I smashed into the first of the bushes under my window, I rolled to try to put the brunt of the impact on my right shoulder.
The thin branches of the bush crumpled under me like wet cardboard. I felt sharp sticks stabbing into my skin, opening up new slices and cuts to mix with the deep gashes on my back.
I hit the dirt hard, a sudden pain radiating through my back. A jarring sensation crashed through my body. I rolled as I hit the ground, smacking my head into the lawn. The world spun around me and went dark.
Suddenly, I was somewhere else.
***
I found myself standing in a dark factory, surrounded by debris. Broken glass covered the floor, twinkling like fireflies under the light of the distant streetlights outside. Strange graffiti covered the concrete walls all around me.
“DON’T LOOK BEHIND YOU,” one of the tags read in slashing red letters. Underneath it, someone had spraypainted pure black eyes over a massive grinning mouth full of crooked black teeth.
“Destroy it with fire! SAVE your soul,” another one read in small, blue letters. I ran my hands over my face, wondering if I was dreaming. This all felt so real. I could feel the gentle breeze blowing through the broken windows on my skin, hear the rhythmic chirping of crickets outside.
I heard soft sobbing behind me. I remembered the first graffiti tag I had seen and a sense of panic gripped my heart. I did not want to look back.
“Fuck,” I swore under my breath, trembling as I turned. But I didn’t find some eldritch monstrosity with obsidian teeth and black, lidless eyes waiting there. Instead, I found a woman. She was crying, her back turned to me. She wore a black funeral gown that looked ancient and decayed. With a trembling heart, I took a step forward, wondering if I would regret this.
“Hello?” I called out. She spun, her eyes widening. In front of me stood a pretty blonde woman in her mid-twenties, one that I immediately recognized. For I saw many of my own features reflected in that panicked face: the high cheekbones, the large chin, even the waviness of her hair.
“Grandma,” I whispered, looking around in wonder. “What is this? Am I dead?” She shook her head, her eyes still wet and red. She took a deep, shuddering breath and gave a faint smile.
“Jack,” she said in a soft, melodic voice. “I’m so happy to see you. I’ve been watching you. I’ve been so proud of you. Even though we never met, I want you to know that. I wished I could have lived longer, could have met you. If only I hadn’t been murdered by that thing…” She spat the last word with hatred and fear oozing from her voice.
“I thought you died of cancer, Grandma?” I asked. “What do you mean, he killed you?” She shook like a leaf in the wind, refusing to meet my gaze.
“Everyone in that place was touched by something evil,” she murmured, putting her face in her hands. Her voice quavered like a frightened little girl’s. “The sickness radiated from that thing. It followed us like a cancer, made us weak, and then took our breath away. After the long torture was finished, he came to strangle me. He didn’t just kill me, Jack. He murdered my sister and brother, too. I saw it.” Her head ratcheted up, looking behind me all of a sudden. Her eyes widened in terror.
“You need to kill it, Jack,” she whispered grimly. “He’s woken up again after all these years, and he’s starving. The Crooked Man must feed, and feed he will if you don’t stop him. You need to come to the factory and end it. Otherwise, he will keep on killing. The Crooked Man will never stop hunting you. He will kill you and everyone you love.”
“How?” I asked, afraid to look back as the disturbing sounds grew closer and closer. Grandma backpedaled quickly, as if the demons of Hell were approaching. “How? How do I end it?”
I heard a horrible, choked breathing behind me, then the world faded.
***
I woke up suddenly on the lawn, my head pounding. It didn’t seem like much time had passed. I must have knocked myself out. I raised my fingers to my forehead. My fingers came away slick with blood.
For a long moment, I lay there, hyperventilating and looking up at the cloudless abyss of a sky. My body felt bruised and battered, and I wasn’t even sure if I could walk.
Then I saw a pale, hairless visage peeking over the edge of the windowsill with eyes as dark as night. Its face split into a grin with a crack, making a sound like ripping plastic. The bone-white mask of dead skin looked at me with a feverish intensity, a kind of psychopathic hunger that radiated from every pore of his body. With horror, I saw the Crooked Man’s teeth were as black as his eyes, gleaming like polished jetstone.
A rush of adrenaline pushed me up from the ground. I realized I was tremendously lucky, that I had been laying there with my keys still in my pocket and my cell phone in hand, fully dressed except for the fact I was wearing slippers. I sprinted across the lawn towards my car. I heard the Crooked Man scream out after me.
“You’ll be with Grandmother soon, Jackie boy,” he hissed in his gurgling voice. “No one escapes. No one.”
***
I flew down the highway in my car, the phone in my trembling hand. Looking down at it, I called Iris right away. She answered groggily.
“Hello?” she said.
“Jesus, Iris, it’s after me,” I said frantically. “Something’s happening. I got attacked in my own bedroom!”
“Did you call the cops?” she asked, seeming to wake up instantly. I looked down at the clock in the center console, seeing it was already past midnight.
“It wasn’t a person. I saw something. I think it was the same thing that took those teenagers, and now it’s after me. Are you guys home?” There was a long pause on the other end. I heard whispering in the background.
“Yeah… sure, come over,” she said. I knew Ben was somewhat of a gun nut, and had a nice little collection at the house. I would feel much safer if I made it there. And if I had them on my side, that would be all the better.
***
Ben and Iris lived in the middle of a back road surrounded by forests. The dark trees loomed overhead like priests with their heads bowed. The light from their front porch streamed into the creeping shadows as I pulled into their driveway. The sound of the car idling seemed far too loud in this place where the woods closed in all around me. I didn’t know what was hiding in those trees. I immediately shut it off.
Ben was a veteran who knew much more about combat and guns than I did. His collection was also somewhat impressive- an Armalite AR-15, a Judge, a 12-gauge Benelli, two crappy little .22s, a .45 Ruger, a Nosler 21 and a 10-gauge Mossberg. I had gone out shooting with him and Iris quite a few times. I would feel much safer once I was inside.
The cloudless black sky hung overhead like the lid of a coffin. Their little two-story place with the wraparound porch looked quaint, almost like a little rural cabin.
I stumbled out of the car. I’m sure I was quite a sight, battered and covered in clotting gashes and cuts, my eyes wide and panicked. I constantly looked around, checking my back. Every time I did, I expected to see something there, something close by with blue lips like a corpse and deformed, twisting bones.
I had nearly gotten to the front of the house when I saw, through the narrow sidelights at top of the door, the face of the Crooked Man. Standing only feet away, I heard faint gurgling of his diseased breathing even through the wall.
His hairless face was split into a grin like a death’s head, his lidless eyes bulging and excited. He raised his misshapen fingers to the window and gave me a little wave, opening and closing his fingers slowly. Then he turned and disappeared deeper into the house.
***
I immediately tried opening the door, to yell to Iris and Ben to watch out, but the door was locked. I called Iris. Each ring seemed to take an eternity. Finally, she answered.
“Hello? What, are you here?” she asked.
“Iris! Get the fuck out of the house! You and Ben aren’t alone in there! There’s a man coming in your direction right now!” I screamed, panicked. “Jump out the window if you have to! It’s coming!”
“What?” she said, sounding alarmed and confused. “Are you being serious?” I heard soft murmuring in the background.
“Tell Ben to grab a gun right now!” I started to say, but a high-pitched scream carried through the phone and the house at that moment.
“Iris? Iris! Answer me!” I said. The call immediately went dead.
From inside, I heard the first of the gunshots.
***
At that point, I decided to run back to my car. I needed to get inside and help them. A small voice in the back of my mind asked me what I could possibly do, however. If an AR-15 or a lead slug from a 12-gauge couldn’t stop the Crooked Man, then what could? At that moment, I wished fervently that Grandma would have told me.
I grabbed a tire iron from the back of my trunk and sprinted back toward the front of the house. They had large windows leading into the kitchen from their wraparound porch. Without hesitation, I drew the tire iron back and smashed it. The tinkling of glass seemed explosively loud. I realized that the gunshots and screaming had stopped.
At that moment, something pale came scurrying around the side of the building. I jumped, but I looked over and realized it was Iris, dressed in a white hoodie and white pants. Her pale face was contorted with mortal terror. To my horror, I realized hundreds of small drops spattered her clothes, covering her face and body like crimson raindrops. She had the .45 Ruger in her hands, and she was limping.
“Where’s Ben?” I cried. She shook her head.
“I jumped out the bedroom window… he was behind me,” she said. Suddenly, there was another explosion of glass from behind the house. Something heavy thudded hard against the ground. We heard wretched wailing follow it. Looking at each other with horrified eyes, we both turned and ran towards the noise.
We found Ben laying on the lawn. The right side of his neck was nearly severed. Bright-red streams of blood spurted from the mutilated flesh. His back looked broken as well. He laid there like a hornet smashed under someone’s boot. With dilated eyes, he looked from me to Iris. Terror and agony oozed from his eyes. He opened his mouth to say something, but only a frothy puddle of blood came up.
Then his eyes turned away, looking straight up into the cloudless black void of a sky. The last exhalation came, the death gasp that bubbled and stretched out until I thought it might never end. He died staring into that abyss, that eternity from which no one returns.
The Crooked Man murdered my family. Now he has awoken again [part 2] : stories (reddit.com)

I remember when I first heard the rhyme as a child. It terrified me. To me, the Crooked Man was some sort of boogeyman with freakishly long arms and legs that were twisted and broken in horrifying ways. I still have the rhyme memorized. It repeats in my brain like a skipping record.
“There was a Crooked Man, and he walked a crooked mile,
He found a crooked sixpence against a crooked stile;
He bought a crooked cat which caught a crooked mouse,
And they all lived together in a little crooked house.”
My brother Benton, who loved to torture me as a child, ended up adding his own parts to the rhyme over time. The extra parts he added did nothing to console me or end my nightmares of this twisted boogeyman who always seemed to slink through the shadows. I remember the rhyme Benton told me by heart to this day.
“The Crooked Man watches you.
His eyes are black, his lips are blue.
The crooked man twists and crawls.
He uses his crooked blade to kill.
And when the curtain of night falls,
He comes to get his thrill.”
***
So I found it strange when, a few weeks ago, I was sitting with a couple of my friends drinking and the subject of the Crooked Man came up again. They were rambling about shootings and serial killers and other fairly interesting subjects that I knew almost nothing about. But my friend Iris knew everything about such morbid subjects.
She was a small drink of water, no more than five feet, with platinum blonde hair and green eyes like a cat. She was extremely attractive with high cheekbones and a small nose and chin. She always talked extremely fast and made violent slashing gestures with her hands. Sometimes I wondered if she had a secret amphetamine habit I didn’t know about.
“But did you hear about the murders in Union?” Iris asked, glancing over at her boyfriend, Ben. Ben was the opposite of Iris- tall and nerdy with thick, black-rimmed glasses and a low whisper of a voice.
“I just heard that some kids went missing,” Ben murmured. I shrugged.
“I don’t watch TV,” I said. “The news is all bullshit anyway. They only show you the bad stuff. After all, no one wants to hear about new breakthroughs in fusion technology or discoveries in particle physics. Instead, people just want to watch others get murdered, robbed and beaten, so that they can feel that at least someone else has it worse than them. That’s all the news is, really: a form of schadenfreude, the joy people get from seeing others’ misfortune and suffering. Our entire media industry is built on a foundation of schadenfreude.” I took a long sip from my beer, a Harpoon that tasted like pure raspberries. Iris rolled her eyes.
“While probably true, I don’t care,” she said, turning her green eyes on me. “Don’t you want to know what happened to the kids?”
“I do,” Ben said, leaning forward. “Was it something… supernatural?” Iris gave a sardonic laugh at that. Ben sat back, offended.
“What’s so funny? I heard there was weird stuff going on around that factory. In fact, I heard they used to manufacture some dye there for clocks and stuff, right? So all these people went to work, painting watches and clocks and whatever else they told them to paint. It was this special green dye that would glow in the dark. The factory was staffed by mostly women, and I heard they used to lick their paintbrushes to form them into points. They figured this stuff was just regular paint that glowed in the dark.” I leaned back, interested. Ben started talking faster, getting more animated.
“So what happened?” I asked, my curiosity piqued.
“Well, the workers started getting cancer and dying in huge numbers,” Ben continued as the kitchen lights sparkled off his glasses. “One woman even had her entire jaw rot off. Others had pieces of their faces falling off. So it turns out, they were using radioactive isotopes to make the paint glow! And these women were just licking the paintbrushes and touching the paint…”
“Holy shit,” I whispered, horrified.
“They called them the Radium girls,” Ben said. “That factory killed hundreds and hundreds of people. That’s why a lot of people think it’s haunted. People claim they see ghosts and weird shit around it. And that’s not all. The case gets even weirder when you look at workers’ families.
“It seems a lot of their kids went missing, too. The cops never found any of them. The entire time the factory was operational, and even after it shutdown, the families of the workers kept having strange things happen- children disappearing from their bedrooms in the middle of the night, strange murders and unexplained suicides that kept killing off healthy, normal people all over town.”
“So, anyways,” Iris continued, looking slightly annoyed at the interruption, “the kids that went into that abandoned factory were all found… torn apart. Their limbs were all amputated and crooked.” She leaned forward, using her spooky campfire voice. “And the limbs were long. Freakishly long, as if they had just grown overnight to inhuman lengths before they got lopped off. But they never found the heads or the torsos. All they found was ten legs and ten arms.”
“And no one knows what happened?” I asked. She shook her head.
“Officially, no. The police and media said it was some sort of serial killer, of course. But there wasn’t a shred of evidence anywhere. It was like a ghost had done it. Where the limbs were piled up in the basement, there was no evidence that anyone had been there in months, no footsteps or microscopic evidence of any presence. But the story doesn’t end there. Because there were six teenagers that went into that building, and one of them was found alive three months later, wandering, covered in blood and scratches, mostly naked and totally insane. One of my friends is an EMT and she said that the kid would not stop talking about the Crooked Man taking his friends and keeping him prisoner in some other world.”
At the mention of those words, the Crooked Man, a chill went down my spine. My heart felt like ice.
“What’d you say? What did the kid say?” I asked anxiously. Suddenly the room felt very hot, and the alcohol was not sitting well in my stomach.
“He said he got kidnapped by someone called the Crooked Man,” Iris repeated, taking a long sip from her wine. “According to the kid, it was some sort of fucking monster, apparently. I think his mind must have just snapped. He was probably kidnapped and held in the basement of some serial killer for three goddamned months. Who knows what he saw and experienced? People make up all sorts of crazy shit when they’re traumatized.”
My hand was shaking so badly that I had to put my bottle down on the table. For some reason, my mind kept flashing back to my sister, Emilia, who had been kidnapped from her room in the middle of the night when my brother Benton and I were little. She had never been found. We had never gotten a ransom note or found a body. It was as if Emilia had simply disappeared, vanished from the surface of the planet in an instant.
“I think some of that stuff is real,” Ben said. “People have been talking about cryptids and ghosts for thousands of years across countless different and unrelated cultures. What are the chances that all of them are just hallucinations or delusions?”
I didn’t know, but I thought I might know someone who might.
***
My brother Benton was a long-term drug addict living in a flophouse. I went to see him the next morning. He opened the door with a glazed, half-aware expression. Scars covered his arms and legs. He looked like a walking skeleton. His eyes shone like the last bit of water at the bottom of a dying well.
“Jack,” he said, surprised, appearing to wake up slightly. “What are you doing here?”
“I need to talk to you,” I said, pushing past him into the one-bedroom place he called home. A cockroach skittered across the wall. As he closed the door, I saw bites from bedbugs all over his body. Benton turned, spreading out his hands.
“Well, what is it, little brother? You know I’m all ears.”
“You remember that rhyme you used to scare me with when we were little?” I asked. “That rhyme you made up about the Crooked Man?” He seemed to go a shade paler.
“I didn’t make anything up,” he said. “That rhyme came from Grandma. She told it to dad when he was little, before she died.”
“Grandma?” I asked, startled. Our grandmother had died of cancer when she was extremely young, in her late 20s. “Did you hear about the murders over in Union? The survivor was talking about the Crooked Man.”
“That’s pretty freaking weird, man,” he said. “Especially considering what happened to Grandma and Emilia, you know.” He sat down on the threadbare mattress, laying back and sighing.
“Why is it weird?” I asked.
“Because, you know, that’s where Grandma used to work. At that factory in Union. Didn’t Dad ever tell you?” I shook my head, feeling sick.
“So Grandma was one of the radium girls?” I said. My brother shrugged his thin shoulders, the stained T-shirt clinging tight to his frail body.
“I don’t know what that is, but whatever she was doing there, it killed her.”
“But what does that have to do with Emilia?” I asked, my heart pounding at the mention of our long-lost little sister. He shook his head in wonder.
“You don’t remember? You were older than me when it happened. Before she went missing, she kept talking about the same thing, saying weird stuff about some ‘Crooked Man’. Don’t you remember what happened the night she went missing?” I thought back, but it all seemed like a blur. I remembered flashing police sirens and my parents screaming. I had tried to block it out, but apparently Benton hadn’t been able to. That night must be like a fresh wound on his mind all the time.
“No, I just remembered… screaming, and police…” I whispered, my voice trailing off into nothing. Benton leaned forward on the bed, looking sick.
“We both saw it,” he said. “The Crooked Man. That thing she was talking about. It was real. We saw it in her room that night- when it took her.” I shook my head, refusing to look at him. Feeling sick, I walked toward the door without looking back. “Where are you going?”
“I’m going home,” I said. “I can’t deal with this shit right now.” But that night, I would find out that the long-lost nightmare from my childhood was not nearly as buried in the past as I thought.
***
I was laying in my dark bedroom, reading the local news on my phone, when I saw an article that disturbed me greatly. I sat up, looking out the window into the cloudless night. The sky hung overhead like a black hole, colorless and empty. Fear radiated through my heart as I glanced back down at the screen and started reading.
“Sole survivor of serial killer commits suicide,” the article read in garish black-and-white letters. “Michael Galentino, 18, was found dead in a psychiatric facility early this morning. In February, Michael Galentino and five others entered a local abandoned building. Friends who knew them stated that they often explored abandoned structures as part of an ‘urban exploration’ group. But this would not be a normal night for the group. They all disappeared, and within 24 hours, police and search teams had been dispatched to look for the missing teenagers…”
The house was silent. I read the rest of the article with bated breath, my eyes wide. Some of the details I already knew, but others, such as the radioactive isotopes found on the dismembered limbs of the victims, I did not. I wondered about that. The police claimed that, after finding this strange clue, they had sent a team to inspect the abandoned factory with Geiger counters and look for signs of radioactivity. Perhaps the radium, which had a notoriously long half-life, had accumulated on the surfaces over the decades. But they said the radioactivity within the building was all within acceptable levels. It was just another bizarre piece of a puzzle that no one could solve.
The house was deathly silent. I could hear my own heart beating a runaway rhythm in my ears. A rising sense of anxiety was filling me, but I didn’t know why. It felt like some sort of pressure had changed all around me, as if the first wave of a massive blizzard had just blown into the room.
I heard a creaking from across the dark room. At the same time, I felt a sting on my arm. I looked down, seeing a bedbug crawling across my skin, a small red welt rising in its wake.
“Fuck!” I swore, grabbing it between my fingers and slicing it between my nails. Crimson spurted from its swollen body as if it were a tiny balloon. It exploded, staining my fingers red with my own blood.
“I should’ve never gone to see my brother. Goddamned bedbugs,” I muttered to myself. I hoped that was the only one. If I had picked up some extra travelers at the flophouse, I knew they would spread throughout the entire house within days.
The creaking came again, louder this time, almost insistent. I glanced across the curtain of shadows that hung thick and black in the room, seeing the dark silhouette of my closet door swinging open. I could only stare, open-mouthed. A long moment passed, and then I heard breathing. It came out, ragged and slow with long pauses, like the choking of a murder victim.
Slowly, I raised my phone’s dim light, shining it across the room. On the closet door, I saw four inhumanly long, crooked fingers. They shone pale like the skin of a corpse. They twitched, then started rhythmically tapping on the door. And then I heard it, that rhyme, that horrible, gurgling rhyme. It came echoing out from the door in that same choked voice, like a forgotten wound from long ago.
“The Crooked Man watches you.
His eyes are black, his lips are blue…”
It felt like I was in some sort of nightmare, but I knew from the sweat dripping down my forehead and the sensation of cloth sheets against my skin that this was all too real. Even a couple months later, I still remember that sensation of dread, the first of many terrors that this night would bring.
I looked around for a weapon. All I found was a letter opener sitting next to some mail on the nearby nightstand. I grabbed it, a flimsy piece of metal in my shaking hands. I was afraid to move, afraid to call out or do anything, out of fear it might shatter the stillness and cause that ineffable horror to come oozing out. I knew I didn’t want to see what was hiding behind that door.
I looked at the open window. I was on the second floor. I was afraid to even breathe too loudly at that moment. With the letter opener in my hand, I tried to silently slide myself across the mattress to the window only a few feet away.
The bedframe groaned softly as I shifted my weight. The breathing from the closet stopped abruptly. I heard the door creaking open, the floorboards shifting. Heavy steps started in the darkness, heading towards me. As I pushed myself off the bed, I glanced back and saw something twisted loping across the room on crooked legs.
It was the Crooked Man, the nightmare from my childhood. He towered over me with a tophat that nearly scraped the ceiling. His lidless eyes were pure darkness, as black as death. They contrasted heavily with his bone-white skin. His lips and fingernails were a suffocating, cyanotic blue, like the lips of a murder victim.
He stood up tall. The bones in his freakishly long legs cracked as the many strange joints of his enormous limbs bent in ways no human limb should bend. His fingers were strange and misshapen, each a foot long. They ended in sharp points of bone that poked out through the dead, white skin. He wore a black suit on his tall, emaciated frame. He moved towards me like flashing static, seeming to disappear and reappear closer and closer in every moment.
In panic and terror, I dived headfirst toward the open window, hearing the gurgling breathing of the Crooked Man only a few feet behind me. I felt slashing talons of bone rip across my back, a burning pain and a feeling of blood soaking my shirt. Then I was flying out the window and falling headfirst towards the grass and bushes below.
***
Time seemed to slow down as the ground rushed up to meet me. The wind whipped past my ears like the currents of a tornado. Instinctively, I tried to curl into a ball. As I smashed into the first of the bushes under my window, I rolled to try to put the brunt of the impact on my right shoulder.
The thin branches of the bush crumpled under me like wet cardboard. I felt sharp sticks stabbing into my skin, opening up new slices and cuts to mix with the deep gashes on my back.
I hit the dirt hard, a sudden pain radiating through my back. A jarring sensation crashed through my body. I rolled as I hit the ground, smacking my head into the lawn. The world spun around me and went dark.
Suddenly, I was somewhere else.
***
I found myself standing in a dark factory, surrounded by debris. Broken glass covered the floor, twinkling like fireflies under the light of the distant streetlights outside. Strange graffiti covered the concrete walls all around me.
“DON’T LOOK BEHIND YOU,” one of the tags read in slashing red letters. Underneath it, someone had spraypainted pure black eyes over a massive grinning mouth full of crooked black teeth.
“Destroy it with fire! SAVE your soul,” another one read in small, blue letters. I ran my hands over my face, wondering if I was dreaming. This all felt so real. I could feel the gentle breeze blowing through the broken windows on my skin, hear the rhythmic chirping of crickets outside.
I heard soft sobbing behind me. I remembered the first graffiti tag I had seen and a sense of panic gripped my heart. I did not want to look back.
“Fuck,” I swore under my breath, trembling as I turned. But I didn’t find some eldritch monstrosity with obsidian teeth and black, lidless eyes waiting there. Instead, I found a woman. She was crying, her back turned to me. She wore a black funeral gown that looked ancient and decayed. With a trembling heart, I took a step forward, wondering if I would regret this.
“Hello?” I called out. She spun, her eyes widening. In front of me stood a pretty blonde woman in her mid-twenties, one that I immediately recognized. For I saw many of my own features reflected in that panicked face: the high cheekbones, the large chin, even the waviness of her hair.
“Grandma,” I whispered, looking around in wonder. “What is this? Am I dead?” She shook her head, her eyes still wet and red. She took a deep, shuddering breath and gave a faint smile.
“Jack,” she said in a soft, melodic voice. “I’m so happy to see you. I’ve been watching you. I’ve been so proud of you. Even though we never met, I want you to know that. I wished I could have lived longer, could have met you. If only I hadn’t been murdered by that thing…” She spat the last word with hatred and fear oozing from her voice.
“I thought you died of cancer, Grandma?” I asked. “What do you mean, he killed you?” She shook like a leaf in the wind, refusing to meet my gaze.
“Everyone in that place was touched by something evil,” she murmured, putting her face in her hands. Her voice quavered like a frightened little girl’s. “The sickness radiated from that thing. It followed us like a cancer, made us weak, and then took our breath away. After the long torture was finished, he came to strangle me. He didn’t just kill me, Jack. He murdered my sister and brother, too. I saw it.” Her head ratcheted up, looking behind me all of a sudden. Her eyes widened in terror.
“You need to kill it, Jack,” she whispered grimly. “He’s woken up again after all these years, and he’s starving. The Crooked Man must feed, and feed he will if you don’t stop him. You need to come to the factory and end it. Otherwise, he will keep on killing. The Crooked Man will never stop hunting you. He will kill you and everyone you love.”
“How?” I asked, afraid to look back as the disturbing sounds grew closer and closer. Grandma backpedaled quickly, as if the demons of Hell were approaching. “How? How do I end it?”
I heard a horrible, choked breathing behind me, then the world faded.
***
I woke up suddenly on the lawn, my head pounding. It didn’t seem like much time had passed. I must have knocked myself out. I raised my fingers to my forehead. My fingers came away slick with blood.
For a long moment, I lay there, hyperventilating and looking up at the cloudless abyss of a sky. My body felt bruised and battered, and I wasn’t even sure if I could walk.
Then I saw a pale, hairless visage peeking over the edge of the windowsill with eyes as dark as night. Its face split into a grin with a crack, making a sound like ripping plastic. The bone-white mask of dead skin looked at me with a feverish intensity, a kind of psychopathic hunger that radiated from every pore of his body. With horror, I saw the Crooked Man’s teeth were as black as his eyes, gleaming like polished jetstone.
A rush of adrenaline pushed me up from the ground. I realized I was tremendously lucky, that I had been laying there with my keys still in my pocket and my cell phone in hand, fully dressed except for the fact I was wearing slippers. I sprinted across the lawn towards my car. I heard the Crooked Man scream out after me.
“You’ll be with Grandmother soon, Jackie boy,” he hissed in his gurgling voice. “No one escapes. No one.”
***
I flew down the highway in my car, the phone in my trembling hand. Looking down at it, I called Iris right away. She answered groggily.
“Hello?” she said.
“Jesus, Iris, it’s after me,” I said frantically. “Something’s happening. I got attacked in my own bedroom!”
“Did you call the cops?” she asked, seeming to wake up instantly. I looked down at the clock in the center console, seeing it was already past midnight.
“It wasn’t a person. I saw something. I think it was the same thing that took those teenagers, and now it’s after me. Are you guys home?” There was a long pause on the other end. I heard whispering in the background.
“Yeah… sure, come over,” she said. I knew Ben was somewhat of a gun nut, and had a nice little collection at the house. I would feel much safer if I made it there. And if I had them on my side, that would be all the better.
***
Ben and Iris lived in the middle of a back road surrounded by forests. The dark trees loomed overhead like priests with their heads bowed. The light from their front porch streamed into the creeping shadows as I pulled into their driveway. The sound of the car idling seemed far too loud in this place where the woods closed in all around me. I didn’t know what was hiding in those trees. I immediately shut it off.
Ben was a veteran who knew much more about combat and guns than I did. His collection was also somewhat impressive- an Armalite AR-15, a Judge, a 12-gauge Benelli, two crappy little .22s, a .45 Ruger, a Nosler 21 and a 10-gauge Mossberg. I had gone out shooting with him and Iris quite a few times. I would feel much safer once I was inside.
The cloudless black sky hung overhead like the lid of a coffin. Their little two-story place with the wraparound porch looked quaint, almost like a little rural cabin.
I stumbled out of the car. I’m sure I was quite a sight, battered and covered in clotting gashes and cuts, my eyes wide and panicked. I constantly looked around, checking my back. Every time I did, I expected to see something there, something close by with blue lips like a corpse and deformed, twisting bones.
I had nearly gotten to the front of the house when I saw, through the narrow sidelights at top of the door, the face of the Crooked Man. Standing only feet away, I heard faint gurgling of his diseased breathing even through the wall.
His hairless face was split into a grin like a death’s head, his lidless eyes bulging and excited. He raised his misshapen fingers to the window and gave me a little wave, opening and closing his fingers slowly. Then he turned and disappeared deeper into the house.
***
I immediately tried opening the door, to yell to Iris and Ben to watch out, but the door was locked. I called Iris. Each ring seemed to take an eternity. Finally, she answered.
“Hello? What, are you here?” she asked.
“Iris! Get the fuck out of the house! You and Ben aren’t alone in there! There’s a man coming in your direction right now!” I screamed, panicked. “Jump out the window if you have to! It’s coming!”
“What?” she said, sounding alarmed and confused. “Are you being serious?” I heard soft murmuring in the background.
“Tell Ben to grab a gun right now!” I started to say, but a high-pitched scream carried through the phone and the house at that moment.
“Iris? Iris! Answer me!” I said. The call immediately went dead.
From inside, I heard the first of the gunshots.
***
At that point, I decided to run back to my car. I needed to get inside and help them. A small voice in the back of my mind asked me what I could possibly do, however. If an AR-15 or a lead slug from a 12-gauge couldn’t stop the Crooked Man, then what could? At that moment, I wished fervently that Grandma would have told me.
I grabbed a tire iron from the back of my trunk and sprinted back toward the front of the house. They had large windows leading into the kitchen from their wraparound porch. Without hesitation, I drew the tire iron back and smashed it. The tinkling of glass seemed explosively loud. I realized that the gunshots and screaming had stopped.
At that moment, something pale came scurrying around the side of the building. I jumped, but I looked over and realized it was Iris, dressed in a white hoodie and white pants. Her pale face was contorted with mortal terror. To my horror, I realized hundreds of small drops spattered her clothes, covering her face and body like crimson raindrops. She had the .45 Ruger in her hands, and she was limping.
“Where’s Ben?” I cried. She shook her head.
“I jumped out the bedroom window… he was behind me,” she said. Suddenly, there was another explosion of glass from behind the house. Something heavy thudded hard against the ground. We heard wretched wailing follow it. Looking at each other with horrified eyes, we both turned and ran towards the noise.
We found Ben laying on the lawn. The right side of his neck was nearly severed. Bright-red streams of blood spurted from the mutilated flesh. His back looked broken as well. He laid there like a hornet smashed under someone’s boot. With dilated eyes, he looked from me to Iris. Terror and agony oozed from his eyes. He opened his mouth to say something, but only a frothy puddle of blood came up.
Then his eyes turned away, looking straight up into the cloudless black void of a sky. The last exhalation came, the death gasp that bubbled and stretched out until I thought it might never end. He died staring into that abyss, that eternity from which no one returns.
The Crooked Man murdered my family. Now he has awoken again [part 2] : stories (reddit.com)

I remember when I first heard the rhyme as a child. It terrified me. To me, the Crooked Man was some sort of boogeyman with freakishly long arms and legs that were twisted and broken in horrifying ways. I still have the rhyme memorized. It repeats in my brain like a skipping record.
“There was a Crooked Man, and he walked a crooked mile,
He found a crooked sixpence against a crooked stile;
He bought a crooked cat which caught a crooked mouse,
And they all lived together in a little crooked house.”
My brother Benton, who loved to torture me as a child, ended up adding his own parts to the rhyme over time. The extra parts he added did nothing to console me or end my nightmares of this twisted boogeyman who always seemed to slink through the shadows. I remember the rhyme Benton told me by heart to this day.
“The Crooked Man watches you.
His eyes are black, his lips are blue.
The crooked man twists and crawls.
He uses his crooked blade to kill.
And when the curtain of night falls,
He comes to get his thrill.”
***
So I found it strange when, a few weeks ago, I was sitting with a couple of my friends drinking and the subject of the Crooked Man came up again. They were rambling about shootings and serial killers and other fairly interesting subjects that I knew almost nothing about. But my friend Iris knew everything about such morbid subjects.
She was a small drink of water, no more than five feet, with platinum blonde hair and green eyes like a cat. She was extremely attractive with high cheekbones and a small nose and chin. She always talked extremely fast and made violent slashing gestures with her hands. Sometimes I wondered if she had a secret amphetamine habit I didn’t know about.
“But did you hear about the murders in Union?” Iris asked, glancing over at her boyfriend, Ben. Ben was the opposite of Iris- tall and nerdy with thick, black-rimmed glasses and a low whisper of a voice.
“I just heard that some kids went missing,” Ben murmured. I shrugged.
“I don’t watch TV,” I said. “The news is all bullshit anyway. They only show you the bad stuff. After all, no one wants to hear about new breakthroughs in fusion technology or discoveries in particle physics. Instead, people just want to watch others get murdered, robbed and beaten, so that they can feel that at least someone else has it worse than them. That’s all the news is, really: a form of schadenfreude, the joy people get from seeing others’ misfortune and suffering. Our entire media industry is built on a foundation of schadenfreude.” I took a long sip from my beer, a Harpoon that tasted like pure raspberries. Iris rolled her eyes.
“While probably true, I don’t care,” she said, turning her green eyes on me. “Don’t you want to know what happened to the kids?”
“I do,” Ben said, leaning forward. “Was it something… supernatural?” Iris gave a sardonic laugh at that. Ben sat back, offended.
“What’s so funny? I heard there was weird stuff going on around that factory. In fact, I heard they used to manufacture some dye there for clocks and stuff, right? So all these people went to work, painting watches and clocks and whatever else they told them to paint. It was this special green dye that would glow in the dark. The factory was staffed by mostly women, and I heard they used to lick their paintbrushes to form them into points. They figured this stuff was just regular paint that glowed in the dark.” I leaned back, interested. Ben started talking faster, getting more animated.
“So what happened?” I asked, my curiosity piqued.
“Well, the workers started getting cancer and dying in huge numbers,” Ben continued as the kitchen lights sparkled off his glasses. “One woman even had her entire jaw rot off. Others had pieces of their faces falling off. So it turns out, they were using radioactive isotopes to make the paint glow! And these women were just licking the paintbrushes and touching the paint…”
“Holy shit,” I whispered, horrified.
“They called them the Radium girls,” Ben said. “That factory killed hundreds and hundreds of people. That’s why a lot of people think it’s haunted. People claim they see ghosts and weird shit around it. And that’s not all. The case gets even weirder when you look at workers’ families.
“It seems a lot of their kids went missing, too. The cops never found any of them. The entire time the factory was operational, and even after it shutdown, the families of the workers kept having strange things happen- children disappearing from their bedrooms in the middle of the night, strange murders and unexplained suicides that kept killing off healthy, normal people all over town.”
“So, anyways,” Iris continued, looking slightly annoyed at the interruption, “the kids that went into that abandoned factory were all found… torn apart. Their limbs were all amputated and crooked.” She leaned forward, using her spooky campfire voice. “And the limbs were long. Freakishly long, as if they had just grown overnight to inhuman lengths before they got lopped off. But they never found the heads or the torsos. All they found was ten legs and ten arms.”
“And no one knows what happened?” I asked. She shook her head.
“Officially, no. The police and media said it was some sort of serial killer, of course. But there wasn’t a shred of evidence anywhere. It was like a ghost had done it. Where the limbs were piled up in the basement, there was no evidence that anyone had been there in months, no footsteps or microscopic evidence of any presence. But the story doesn’t end there. Because there were six teenagers that went into that building, and one of them was found alive three months later, wandering, covered in blood and scratches, mostly naked and totally insane. One of my friends is an EMT and she said that the kid would not stop talking about the Crooked Man taking his friends and keeping him prisoner in some other world.”
At the mention of those words, the Crooked Man, a chill went down my spine. My heart felt like ice.
“What’d you say? What did the kid say?” I asked anxiously. Suddenly the room felt very hot, and the alcohol was not sitting well in my stomach.
“He said he got kidnapped by someone called the Crooked Man,” Iris repeated, taking a long sip from her wine. “According to the kid, it was some sort of fucking monster, apparently. I think his mind must have just snapped. He was probably kidnapped and held in the basement of some serial killer for three goddamned months. Who knows what he saw and experienced? People make up all sorts of crazy shit when they’re traumatized.”
My hand was shaking so badly that I had to put my bottle down on the table. For some reason, my mind kept flashing back to my sister, Emilia, who had been kidnapped from her room in the middle of the night when my brother Benton and I were little. She had never been found. We had never gotten a ransom note or found a body. It was as if Emilia had simply disappeared, vanished from the surface of the planet in an instant.
“I think some of that stuff is real,” Ben said. “People have been talking about cryptids and ghosts for thousands of years across countless different and unrelated cultures. What are the chances that all of them are just hallucinations or delusions?”
I didn’t know, but I thought I might know someone who might.
***
My brother Benton was a long-term drug addict living in a flophouse. I went to see him the next morning. He opened the door with a glazed, half-aware expression. Scars covered his arms and legs. He looked like a walking skeleton. His eyes shone like the last bit of water at the bottom of a dying well.
“Jack,” he said, surprised, appearing to wake up slightly. “What are you doing here?”
“I need to talk to you,” I said, pushing past him into the one-bedroom place he called home. A cockroach skittered across the wall. As he closed the door, I saw bites from bedbugs all over his body. Benton turned, spreading out his hands.
“Well, what is it, little brother? You know I’m all ears.”
“You remember that rhyme you used to scare me with when we were little?” I asked. “That rhyme you made up about the Crooked Man?” He seemed to go a shade paler.
“I didn’t make anything up,” he said. “That rhyme came from Grandma. She told it to dad when he was little, before she died.”
“Grandma?” I asked, startled. Our grandmother had died of cancer when she was extremely young, in her late 20s. “Did you hear about the murders over in Union? The survivor was talking about the Crooked Man.”
“That’s pretty freaking weird, man,” he said. “Especially considering what happened to Grandma and Emilia, you know.” He sat down on the threadbare mattress, laying back and sighing.
“Why is it weird?” I asked.
“Because, you know, that’s where Grandma used to work. At that factory in Union. Didn’t Dad ever tell you?” I shook my head, feeling sick.
“So Grandma was one of the radium girls?” I said. My brother shrugged his thin shoulders, the stained T-shirt clinging tight to his frail body.
“I don’t know what that is, but whatever she was doing there, it killed her.”
“But what does that have to do with Emilia?” I asked, my heart pounding at the mention of our long-lost little sister. He shook his head in wonder.
“You don’t remember? You were older than me when it happened. Before she went missing, she kept talking about the same thing, saying weird stuff about some ‘Crooked Man’. Don’t you remember what happened the night she went missing?” I thought back, but it all seemed like a blur. I remembered flashing police sirens and my parents screaming. I had tried to block it out, but apparently Benton hadn’t been able to. That night must be like a fresh wound on his mind all the time.
“No, I just remembered… screaming, and police…” I whispered, my voice trailing off into nothing. Benton leaned forward on the bed, looking sick.
“We both saw it,” he said. “The Crooked Man. That thing she was talking about. It was real. We saw it in her room that night- when it took her.” I shook my head, refusing to look at him. Feeling sick, I walked toward the door without looking back. “Where are you going?”
“I’m going home,” I said. “I can’t deal with this shit right now.” But that night, I would find out that the long-lost nightmare from my childhood was not nearly as buried in the past as I thought.
***
I was laying in my dark bedroom, reading the local news on my phone, when I saw an article that disturbed me greatly. I sat up, looking out the window into the cloudless night. The sky hung overhead like a black hole, colorless and empty. Fear radiated through my heart as I glanced back down at the screen and started reading.
“Sole survivor of serial killer commits suicide,” the article read in garish black-and-white letters. “Michael Galentino, 18, was found dead in a psychiatric facility early this morning. In February, Michael Galentino and five others entered a local abandoned building. Friends who knew them stated that they often explored abandoned structures as part of an ‘urban exploration’ group. But this would not be a normal night for the group. They all disappeared, and within 24 hours, police and search teams had been dispatched to look for the missing teenagers…”
The house was silent. I read the rest of the article with bated breath, my eyes wide. Some of the details I already knew, but others, such as the radioactive isotopes found on the dismembered limbs of the victims, I did not. I wondered about that. The police claimed that, after finding this strange clue, they had sent a team to inspect the abandoned factory with Geiger counters and look for signs of radioactivity. Perhaps the radium, which had a notoriously long half-life, had accumulated on the surfaces over the decades. But they said the radioactivity within the building was all within acceptable levels. It was just another bizarre piece of a puzzle that no one could solve.
The house was deathly silent. I could hear my own heart beating a runaway rhythm in my ears. A rising sense of anxiety was filling me, but I didn’t know why. It felt like some sort of pressure had changed all around me, as if the first wave of a massive blizzard had just blown into the room.
I heard a creaking from across the dark room. At the same time, I felt a sting on my arm. I looked down, seeing a bedbug crawling across my skin, a small red welt rising in its wake.
“Fuck!” I swore, grabbing it between my fingers and slicing it between my nails. Crimson spurted from its swollen body as if it were a tiny balloon. It exploded, staining my fingers red with my own blood.
“I should’ve never gone to see my brother. Goddamned bedbugs,” I muttered to myself. I hoped that was the only one. If I had picked up some extra travelers at the flophouse, I knew they would spread throughout the entire house within days.
The creaking came again, louder this time, almost insistent. I glanced across the curtain of shadows that hung thick and black in the room, seeing the dark silhouette of my closet door swinging open. I could only stare, open-mouthed. A long moment passed, and then I heard breathing. It came out, ragged and slow with long pauses, like the choking of a murder victim.
Slowly, I raised my phone’s dim light, shining it across the room. On the closet door, I saw four inhumanly long, crooked fingers. They shone pale like the skin of a corpse. They twitched, then started rhythmically tapping on the door. And then I heard it, that rhyme, that horrible, gurgling rhyme. It came echoing out from the door in that same choked voice, like a forgotten wound from long ago.
“The Crooked Man watches you.
His eyes are black, his lips are blue…”
It felt like I was in some sort of nightmare, but I knew from the sweat dripping down my forehead and the sensation of cloth sheets against my skin that this was all too real. Even a couple months later, I still remember that sensation of dread, the first of many terrors that this night would bring.
I looked around for a weapon. All I found was a letter opener sitting next to some mail on the nearby nightstand. I grabbed it, a flimsy piece of metal in my shaking hands. I was afraid to move, afraid to call out or do anything, out of fear it might shatter the stillness and cause that ineffable horror to come oozing out. I knew I didn’t want to see what was hiding behind that door.
I looked at the open window. I was on the second floor. I was afraid to even breathe too loudly at that moment. With the letter opener in my hand, I tried to silently slide myself across the mattress to the window only a few feet away.
The bedframe groaned softly as I shifted my weight. The breathing from the closet stopped abruptly. I heard the door creaking open, the floorboards shifting. Heavy steps started in the darkness, heading towards me. As I pushed myself off the bed, I glanced back and saw something twisted loping across the room on crooked legs.
It was the Crooked Man, the nightmare from my childhood. He towered over me with a tophat that nearly scraped the ceiling. His lidless eyes were pure darkness, as black as death. They contrasted heavily with his bone-white skin. His lips and fingernails were a suffocating, cyanotic blue, like the lips of a murder victim.
He stood up tall. The bones in his freakishly long legs cracked as the many strange joints of his enormous limbs bent in ways no human limb should bend. His fingers were strange and misshapen, each a foot long. They ended in sharp points of bone that poked out through the dead, white skin. He wore a black suit on his tall, emaciated frame. He moved towards me like flashing static, seeming to disappear and reappear closer and closer in every moment.
In panic and terror, I dived headfirst toward the open window, hearing the gurgling breathing of the Crooked Man only a few feet behind me. I felt slashing talons of bone rip across my back, a burning pain and a feeling of blood soaking my shirt. Then I was flying out the window and falling headfirst towards the grass and bushes below.
***
Time seemed to slow down as the ground rushed up to meet me. The wind whipped past my ears like the currents of a tornado. Instinctively, I tried to curl into a ball. As I smashed into the first of the bushes under my window, I rolled to try to put the brunt of the impact on my right shoulder.
The thin branches of the bush crumpled under me like wet cardboard. I felt sharp sticks stabbing into my skin, opening up new slices and cuts to mix with the deep gashes on my back.
I hit the dirt hard, a sudden pain radiating through my back. A jarring sensation crashed through my body. I rolled as I hit the ground, smacking my head into the lawn. The world spun around me and went dark.
Suddenly, I was somewhere else.
***
I found myself standing in a dark factory, surrounded by debris. Broken glass covered the floor, twinkling like fireflies under the light of the distant streetlights outside. Strange graffiti covered the concrete walls all around me.
“DON’T LOOK BEHIND YOU,” one of the tags read in slashing red letters. Underneath it, someone had spraypainted pure black eyes over a massive grinning mouth full of crooked black teeth.
“Destroy it with fire! SAVE your soul,” another one read in small, blue letters. I ran my hands over my face, wondering if I was dreaming. This all felt so real. I could feel the gentle breeze blowing through the broken windows on my skin, hear the rhythmic chirping of crickets outside.
I heard soft sobbing behind me. I remembered the first graffiti tag I had seen and a sense of panic gripped my heart. I did not want to look back.
“Fuck,” I swore under my breath, trembling as I turned. But I didn’t find some eldritch monstrosity with obsidian teeth and black, lidless eyes waiting there. Instead, I found a woman. She was crying, her back turned to me. She wore a black funeral gown that looked ancient and decayed. With a trembling heart, I took a step forward, wondering if I would regret this.
“Hello?” I called out. She spun, her eyes widening. In front of me stood a pretty blonde woman in her mid-twenties, one that I immediately recognized. For I saw many of my own features reflected in that panicked face: the high cheekbones, the large chin, even the waviness of her hair.
“Grandma,” I whispered, looking around in wonder. “What is this? Am I dead?” She shook her head, her eyes still wet and red. She took a deep, shuddering breath and gave a faint smile.
“Jack,” she said in a soft, melodic voice. “I’m so happy to see you. I’ve been watching you. I’ve been so proud of you. Even though we never met, I want you to know that. I wished I could have lived longer, could have met you. If only I hadn’t been murdered by that thing…” She spat the last word with hatred and fear oozing from her voice.
“I thought you died of cancer, Grandma?” I asked. “What do you mean, he killed you?” She shook like a leaf in the wind, refusing to meet my gaze.
“Everyone in that place was touched by something evil,” she murmured, putting her face in her hands. Her voice quavered like a frightened little girl’s. “The sickness radiated from that thing. It followed us like a cancer, made us weak, and then took our breath away. After the long torture was finished, he came to strangle me. He didn’t just kill me, Jack. He murdered my sister and brother, too. I saw it.” Her head ratcheted up, looking behind me all of a sudden. Her eyes widened in terror.
“You need to kill it, Jack,” she whispered grimly. “He’s woken up again after all these years, and he’s starving. The Crooked Man must feed, and feed he will if you don’t stop him. You need to come to the factory and end it. Otherwise, he will keep on killing. The Crooked Man will never stop hunting you. He will kill you and everyone you love.”
“How?” I asked, afraid to look back as the disturbing sounds grew closer and closer. Grandma backpedaled quickly, as if the demons of Hell were approaching. “How? How do I end it?”
I heard a horrible, choked breathing behind me, then the world faded.
***
I woke up suddenly on the lawn, my head pounding. It didn’t seem like much time had passed. I must have knocked myself out. I raised my fingers to my forehead. My fingers came away slick with blood.
For a long moment, I lay there, hyperventilating and looking up at the cloudless abyss of a sky. My body felt bruised and battered, and I wasn’t even sure if I could walk.
Then I saw a pale, hairless visage peeking over the edge of the windowsill with eyes as dark as night. Its face split into a grin with a crack, making a sound like ripping plastic. The bone-white mask of dead skin looked at me with a feverish intensity, a kind of psychopathic hunger that radiated from every pore of his body. With horror, I saw the Crooked Man’s teeth were as black as his eyes, gleaming like polished jetstone.
A rush of adrenaline pushed me up from the ground. I realized I was tremendously lucky, that I had been laying there with my keys still in my pocket and my cell phone in hand, fully dressed except for the fact I was wearing slippers. I sprinted across the lawn towards my car. I heard the Crooked Man scream out after me.
“You’ll be with Grandmother soon, Jackie boy,” he hissed in his gurgling voice. “No one escapes. No one.”
***
I flew down the highway in my car, the phone in my trembling hand. Looking down at it, I called Iris right away. She answered groggily.
“Hello?” she said.
“Jesus, Iris, it’s after me,” I said frantically. “Something’s happening. I got attacked in my own bedroom!”
“Did you call the cops?” she asked, seeming to wake up instantly. I looked down at the clock in the center console, seeing it was already past midnight.
“It wasn’t a person. I saw something. I think it was the same thing that took those teenagers, and now it’s after me. Are you guys home?” There was a long pause on the other end. I heard whispering in the background.
“Yeah… sure, come over,” she said. I knew Ben was somewhat of a gun nut, and had a nice little collection at the house. I would feel much safer if I made it there. And if I had them on my side, that would be all the better.
***
Ben and Iris lived in the middle of a back road surrounded by forests. The dark trees loomed overhead like priests with their heads bowed. The light from their front porch streamed into the creeping shadows as I pulled into their driveway. The sound of the car idling seemed far too loud in this place where the woods closed in all around me. I didn’t know what was hiding in those trees. I immediately shut it off.
Ben was a veteran who knew much more about combat and guns than I did. His collection was also somewhat impressive- an Armalite AR-15, a Judge, a 12-gauge Benelli, two crappy little .22s, a .45 Ruger, a Nosler 21 and a 10-gauge Mossberg. I had gone out shooting with him and Iris quite a few times. I would feel much safer once I was inside.
The cloudless black sky hung overhead like the lid of a coffin. Their little two-story place with the wraparound porch looked quaint, almost like a little rural cabin.
I stumbled out of the car. I’m sure I was quite a sight, battered and covered in clotting gashes and cuts, my eyes wide and panicked. I constantly looked around, checking my back. Every time I did, I expected to see something there, something close by with blue lips like a corpse and deformed, twisting bones.
I had nearly gotten to the front of the house when I saw, through the narrow sidelights at top of the door, the face of the Crooked Man. Standing only feet away, I heard faint gurgling of his diseased breathing even through the wall.
His hairless face was split into a grin like a death’s head, his lidless eyes bulging and excited. He raised his misshapen fingers to the window and gave me a little wave, opening and closing his fingers slowly. Then he turned and disappeared deeper into the house.
***
I immediately tried opening the door, to yell to Iris and Ben to watch out, but the door was locked. I called Iris. Each ring seemed to take an eternity. Finally, she answered.
“Hello? What, are you here?” she asked.
“Iris! Get the fuck out of the house! You and Ben aren’t alone in there! There’s a man coming in your direction right now!” I screamed, panicked. “Jump out the window if you have to! It’s coming!”
“What?” she said, sounding alarmed and confused. “Are you being serious?” I heard soft murmuring in the background.
“Tell Ben to grab a gun right now!” I started to say, but a high-pitched scream carried through the phone and the house at that moment.
“Iris? Iris! Answer me!” I said. The call immediately went dead.
From inside, I heard the first of the gunshots.
***
At that point, I decided to run back to my car. I needed to get inside and help them. A small voice in the back of my mind asked me what I could possibly do, however. If an AR-15 or a lead slug from a 12-gauge couldn’t stop the Crooked Man, then what could? At that moment, I wished fervently that Grandma would have told me.
I grabbed a tire iron from the back of my trunk and sprinted back toward the front of the house. They had large windows leading into the kitchen from their wraparound porch. Without hesitation, I drew the tire iron back and smashed it. The tinkling of glass seemed explosively loud. I realized that the gunshots and screaming had stopped.
At that moment, something pale came scurrying around the side of the building. I jumped, but I looked over and realized it was Iris, dressed in a white hoodie and white pants. Her pale face was contorted with mortal terror. To my horror, I realized hundreds of small drops spattered her clothes, covering her face and body like crimson raindrops. She had the .45 Ruger in her hands, and she was limping.
“Where’s Ben?” I cried. She shook her head.
“I jumped out the bedroom window… he was behind me,” she said. Suddenly, there was another explosion of glass from behind the house. Something heavy thudded hard against the ground. We heard wretched wailing follow it. Looking at each other with horrified eyes, we both turned and ran towards the noise.
We found Ben laying on the lawn. The right side of his neck was nearly severed. Bright-red streams of blood spurted from the mutilated flesh. His back looked broken as well. He laid there like a hornet smashed under someone’s boot. With dilated eyes, he looked from me to Iris. Terror and agony oozed from his eyes. He opened his mouth to say something, but only a frothy puddle of blood came up.
Then his eyes turned away, looking straight up into the cloudless black void of a sky. The last exhalation came, the death gasp that bubbled and stretched out until I thought it might never end. He died staring into that abyss, that eternity from which no one returns.
The Crooked Man murdered my family. Now he has awoken again [part 2] : stories (reddit.com)

I remember when I first heard the rhyme as a child. It terrified me. To me, the Crooked Man was some sort of boogeyman with freakishly long arms and legs that were twisted and broken in horrifying ways. I still have the rhyme memorized. It repeats in my brain like a skipping record.
“There was a Crooked Man, and he walked a crooked mile,
He found a crooked sixpence against a crooked stile;
He bought a crooked cat which caught a crooked mouse,
And they all lived together in a little crooked house.”
My brother Benton, who loved to torture me as a child, ended up adding his own parts to the rhyme over time. The extra parts he added did nothing to console me or end my nightmares of this twisted boogeyman who always seemed to slink through the shadows. I remember the rhyme Benton told me by heart to this day.
“The Crooked Man watches you.
His eyes are black, his lips are blue.
The crooked man twists and crawls.
He uses his crooked blade to kill.
And when the curtain of night falls,
He comes to get his thrill.”
***
So I found it strange when, a few weeks ago, I was sitting with a couple of my friends drinking and the subject of the Crooked Man came up again. They were rambling about shootings and serial killers and other fairly interesting subjects that I knew almost nothing about. But my friend Iris knew everything about such morbid subjects.
She was a small drink of water, no more than five feet, with platinum blonde hair and green eyes like a cat. She was extremely attractive with high cheekbones and a small nose and chin. She always talked extremely fast and made violent slashing gestures with her hands. Sometimes I wondered if she had a secret amphetamine habit I didn’t know about.
“But did you hear about the murders in Union?” Iris asked, glancing over at her boyfriend, Ben. Ben was the opposite of Iris- tall and nerdy with thick, black-rimmed glasses and a low whisper of a voice.
“I just heard that some kids went missing,” Ben murmured. I shrugged.
“I don’t watch TV,” I said. “The news is all bullshit anyway. They only show you the bad stuff. After all, no one wants to hear about new breakthroughs in fusion technology or discoveries in particle physics. Instead, people just want to watch others get murdered, robbed and beaten, so that they can feel that at least someone else has it worse than them. That’s all the news is, really: a form of schadenfreude, the joy people get from seeing others’ misfortune and suffering. Our entire media industry is built on a foundation of schadenfreude.” I took a long sip from my beer, a Harpoon that tasted like pure raspberries. Iris rolled her eyes.
“While probably true, I don’t care,” she said, turning her green eyes on me. “Don’t you want to know what happened to the kids?”
“I do,” Ben said, leaning forward. “Was it something… supernatural?” Iris gave a sardonic laugh at that. Ben sat back, offended.
“What’s so funny? I heard there was weird stuff going on around that factory. In fact, I heard they used to manufacture some dye there for clocks and stuff, right? So all these people went to work, painting watches and clocks and whatever else they told them to paint. It was this special green dye that would glow in the dark. The factory was staffed by mostly women, and I heard they used to lick their paintbrushes to form them into points. They figured this stuff was just regular paint that glowed in the dark.” I leaned back, interested. Ben started talking faster, getting more animated.
“So what happened?” I asked, my curiosity piqued.
“Well, the workers started getting cancer and dying in huge numbers,” Ben continued as the kitchen lights sparkled off his glasses. “One woman even had her entire jaw rot off. Others had pieces of their faces falling off. So it turns out, they were using radioactive isotopes to make the paint glow! And these women were just licking the paintbrushes and touching the paint…”
“Holy shit,” I whispered, horrified.
“They called them the Radium girls,” Ben said. “That factory killed hundreds and hundreds of people. That’s why a lot of people think it’s haunted. People claim they see ghosts and weird shit around it. And that’s not all. The case gets even weirder when you look at workers’ families.
“It seems a lot of their kids went missing, too. The cops never found any of them. The entire time the factory was operational, and even after it shutdown, the families of the workers kept having strange things happen- children disappearing from their bedrooms in the middle of the night, strange murders and unexplained suicides that kept killing off healthy, normal people all over town.”
“So, anyways,” Iris continued, looking slightly annoyed at the interruption, “the kids that went into that abandoned factory were all found… torn apart. Their limbs were all amputated and crooked.” She leaned forward, using her spooky campfire voice. “And the limbs were long. Freakishly long, as if they had just grown overnight to inhuman lengths before they got lopped off. But they never found the heads or the torsos. All they found was ten legs and ten arms.”
“And no one knows what happened?” I asked. She shook her head.
“Officially, no. The police and media said it was some sort of serial killer, of course. But there wasn’t a shred of evidence anywhere. It was like a ghost had done it. Where the limbs were piled up in the basement, there was no evidence that anyone had been there in months, no footsteps or microscopic evidence of any presence. But the story doesn’t end there. Because there were six teenagers that went into that building, and one of them was found alive three months later, wandering, covered in blood and scratches, mostly naked and totally insane. One of my friends is an EMT and she said that the kid would not stop talking about the Crooked Man taking his friends and keeping him prisoner in some other world.”
At the mention of those words, the Crooked Man, a chill went down my spine. My heart felt like ice.
“What’d you say? What did the kid say?” I asked anxiously. Suddenly the room felt very hot, and the alcohol was not sitting well in my stomach.
“He said he got kidnapped by someone called the Crooked Man,” Iris repeated, taking a long sip from her wine. “According to the kid, it was some sort of fucking monster, apparently. I think his mind must have just snapped. He was probably kidnapped and held in the basement of some serial killer for three goddamned months. Who knows what he saw and experienced? People make up all sorts of crazy shit when they’re traumatized.”
My hand was shaking so badly that I had to put my bottle down on the table. For some reason, my mind kept flashing back to my sister, Emilia, who had been kidnapped from her room in the middle of the night when my brother Benton and I were little. She had never been found. We had never gotten a ransom note or found a body. It was as if Emilia had simply disappeared, vanished from the surface of the planet in an instant.
“I think some of that stuff is real,” Ben said. “People have been talking about cryptids and ghosts for thousands of years across countless different and unrelated cultures. What are the chances that all of them are just hallucinations or delusions?”
I didn’t know, but I thought I might know someone who might.
***
My brother Benton was a long-term drug addict living in a flophouse. I went to see him the next morning. He opened the door with a glazed, half-aware expression. Scars covered his arms and legs. He looked like a walking skeleton. His eyes shone like the last bit of water at the bottom of a dying well.
“Jack,” he said, surprised, appearing to wake up slightly. “What are you doing here?”
“I need to talk to you,” I said, pushing past him into the one-bedroom place he called home. A cockroach skittered across the wall. As he closed the door, I saw bites from bedbugs all over his body. Benton turned, spreading out his hands.
“Well, what is it, little brother? You know I’m all ears.”
“You remember that rhyme you used to scare me with when we were little?” I asked. “That rhyme you made up about the Crooked Man?” He seemed to go a shade paler.
“I didn’t make anything up,” he said. “That rhyme came from Grandma. She told it to dad when he was little, before she died.”
“Grandma?” I asked, startled. Our grandmother had died of cancer when she was extremely young, in her late 20s. “Did you hear about the murders over in Union? The survivor was talking about the Crooked Man.”
“That’s pretty freaking weird, man,” he said. “Especially considering what happened to Grandma and Emilia, you know.” He sat down on the threadbare mattress, laying back and sighing.
“Why is it weird?” I asked.
“Because, you know, that’s where Grandma used to work. At that factory in Union. Didn’t Dad ever tell you?” I shook my head, feeling sick.
“So Grandma was one of the radium girls?” I said. My brother shrugged his thin shoulders, the stained T-shirt clinging tight to his frail body.
“I don’t know what that is, but whatever she was doing there, it killed her.”
“But what does that have to do with Emilia?” I asked, my heart pounding at the mention of our long-lost little sister. He shook his head in wonder.
“You don’t remember? You were older than me when it happened. Before she went missing, she kept talking about the same thing, saying weird stuff about some ‘Crooked Man’. Don’t you remember what happened the night she went missing?” I thought back, but it all seemed like a blur. I remembered flashing police sirens and my parents screaming. I had tried to block it out, but apparently Benton hadn’t been able to. That night must be like a fresh wound on his mind all the time.
“No, I just remembered… screaming, and police…” I whispered, my voice trailing off into nothing. Benton leaned forward on the bed, looking sick.
“We both saw it,” he said. “The Crooked Man. That thing she was talking about. It was real. We saw it in her room that night- when it took her.” I shook my head, refusing to look at him. Feeling sick, I walked toward the door without looking back. “Where are you going?”
“I’m going home,” I said. “I can’t deal with this shit right now.” But that night, I would find out that the long-lost nightmare from my childhood was not nearly as buried in the past as I thought.
***
I was laying in my dark bedroom, reading the local news on my phone, when I saw an article that disturbed me greatly. I sat up, looking out the window into the cloudless night. The sky hung overhead like a black hole, colorless and empty. Fear radiated through my heart as I glanced back down at the screen and started reading.
“Sole survivor of serial killer commits suicide,” the article read in garish black-and-white letters. “Michael Galentino, 18, was found dead in a psychiatric facility early this morning. In February, Michael Galentino and five others entered a local abandoned building. Friends who knew them stated that they often explored abandoned structures as part of an ‘urban exploration’ group. But this would not be a normal night for the group. They all disappeared, and within 24 hours, police and search teams had been dispatched to look for the missing teenagers…”
The house was silent. I read the rest of the article with bated breath, my eyes wide. Some of the details I already knew, but others, such as the radioactive isotopes found on the dismembered limbs of the victims, I did not. I wondered about that. The police claimed that, after finding this strange clue, they had sent a team to inspect the abandoned factory with Geiger counters and look for signs of radioactivity. Perhaps the radium, which had a notoriously long half-life, had accumulated on the surfaces over the decades. But they said the radioactivity within the building was all within acceptable levels. It was just another bizarre piece of a puzzle that no one could solve.
The house was deathly silent. I could hear my own heart beating a runaway rhythm in my ears. A rising sense of anxiety was filling me, but I didn’t know why. It felt like some sort of pressure had changed all around me, as if the first wave of a massive blizzard had just blown into the room.
I heard a creaking from across the dark room. At the same time, I felt a sting on my arm. I looked down, seeing a bedbug crawling across my skin, a small red welt rising in its wake.
“Fuck!” I swore, grabbing it between my fingers and slicing it between my nails. Crimson spurted from its swollen body as if it were a tiny balloon. It exploded, staining my fingers red with my own blood.
“I should’ve never gone to see my brother. Goddamned bedbugs,” I muttered to myself. I hoped that was the only one. If I had picked up some extra travelers at the flophouse, I knew they would spread throughout the entire house within days.
The creaking came again, louder this time, almost insistent. I glanced across the curtain of shadows that hung thick and black in the room, seeing the dark silhouette of my closet door swinging open. I could only stare, open-mouthed. A long moment passed, and then I heard breathing. It came out, ragged and slow with long pauses, like the choking of a murder victim.
Slowly, I raised my phone’s dim light, shining it across the room. On the closet door, I saw four inhumanly long, crooked fingers. They shone pale like the skin of a corpse. They twitched, then started rhythmically tapping on the door. And then I heard it, that rhyme, that horrible, gurgling rhyme. It came echoing out from the door in that same choked voice, like a forgotten wound from long ago.
“The Crooked Man watches you.
His eyes are black, his lips are blue…”
It felt like I was in some sort of nightmare, but I knew from the sweat dripping down my forehead and the sensation of cloth sheets against my skin that this was all too real. Even a couple months later, I still remember that sensation of dread, the first of many terrors that this night would bring.
I looked around for a weapon. All I found was a letter opener sitting next to some mail on the nearby nightstand. I grabbed it, a flimsy piece of metal in my shaking hands. I was afraid to move, afraid to call out or do anything, out of fear it might shatter the stillness and cause that ineffable horror to come oozing out. I knew I didn’t want to see what was hiding behind that door.
I looked at the open window. I was on the second floor. I was afraid to even breathe too loudly at that moment. With the letter opener in my hand, I tried to silently slide myself across the mattress to the window only a few feet away.
The bedframe groaned softly as I shifted my weight. The breathing from the closet stopped abruptly. I heard the door creaking open, the floorboards shifting. Heavy steps started in the darkness, heading towards me. As I pushed myself off the bed, I glanced back and saw something twisted loping across the room on crooked legs.
It was the Crooked Man, the nightmare from my childhood. He towered over me with a tophat that nearly scraped the ceiling. His lidless eyes were pure darkness, as black as death. They contrasted heavily with his bone-white skin. His lips and fingernails were a suffocating, cyanotic blue, like the lips of a murder victim.
He stood up tall. The bones in his freakishly long legs cracked as the many strange joints of his enormous limbs bent in ways no human limb should bend. His fingers were strange and misshapen, each a foot long. They ended in sharp points of bone that poked out through the dead, white skin. He wore a black suit on his tall, emaciated frame. He moved towards me like flashing static, seeming to disappear and reappear closer and closer in every moment.
In panic and terror, I dived headfirst toward the open window, hearing the gurgling breathing of the Crooked Man only a few feet behind me. I felt slashing talons of bone rip across my back, a burning pain and a feeling of blood soaking my shirt. Then I was flying out the window and falling headfirst towards the grass and bushes below.
***
Time seemed to slow down as the ground rushed up to meet me. The wind whipped past my ears like the currents of a tornado. Instinctively, I tried to curl into a ball. As I smashed into the first of the bushes under my window, I rolled to try to put the brunt of the impact on my right shoulder.
The thin branches of the bush crumpled under me like wet cardboard. I felt sharp sticks stabbing into my skin, opening up new slices and cuts to mix with the deep gashes on my back.
I hit the dirt hard, a sudden pain radiating through my back. A jarring sensation crashed through my body. I rolled as I hit the ground, smacking my head into the lawn. The world spun around me and went dark.
Suddenly, I was somewhere else.
***
I found myself standing in a dark factory, surrounded by debris. Broken glass covered the floor, twinkling like fireflies under the light of the distant streetlights outside. Strange graffiti covered the concrete walls all around me.
“DON’T LOOK BEHIND YOU,” one of the tags read in slashing red letters. Underneath it, someone had spraypainted pure black eyes over a massive grinning mouth full of crooked black teeth.
“Destroy it with fire! SAVE your soul,” another one read in small, blue letters. I ran my hands over my face, wondering if I was dreaming. This all felt so real. I could feel the gentle breeze blowing through the broken windows on my skin, hear the rhythmic chirping of crickets outside.
I heard soft sobbing behind me. I remembered the first graffiti tag I had seen and a sense of panic gripped my heart. I did not want to look back.
“Fuck,” I swore under my breath, trembling as I turned. But I didn’t find some eldritch monstrosity with obsidian teeth and black, lidless eyes waiting there. Instead, I found a woman. She was crying, her back turned to me. She wore a black funeral gown that looked ancient and decayed. With a trembling heart, I took a step forward, wondering if I would regret this.
“Hello?” I called out. She spun, her eyes widening. In front of me stood a pretty blonde woman in her mid-twenties, one that I immediately recognized. For I saw many of my own features reflected in that panicked face: the high cheekbones, the large chin, even the waviness of her hair.
“Grandma,” I whispered, looking around in wonder. “What is this? Am I dead?” She shook her head, her eyes still wet and red. She took a deep, shuddering breath and gave a faint smile.
“Jack,” she said in a soft, melodic voice. “I’m so happy to see you. I’ve been watching you. I’ve been so proud of you. Even though we never met, I want you to know that. I wished I could have lived longer, could have met you. If only I hadn’t been murdered by that thing…” She spat the last word with hatred and fear oozing from her voice.
“I thought you died of cancer, Grandma?” I asked. “What do you mean, he killed you?” She shook like a leaf in the wind, refusing to meet my gaze.
“Everyone in that place was touched by something evil,” she murmured, putting her face in her hands. Her voice quavered like a frightened little girl’s. “The sickness radiated from that thing. It followed us like a cancer, made us weak, and then took our breath away. After the long torture was finished, he came to strangle me. He didn’t just kill me, Jack. He murdered my sister and brother, too. I saw it.” Her head ratcheted up, looking behind me all of a sudden. Her eyes widened in terror.
“You need to kill it, Jack,” she whispered grimly. “He’s woken up again after all these years, and he’s starving. The Crooked Man must feed, and feed he will if you don’t stop him. You need to come to the factory and end it. Otherwise, he will keep on killing. The Crooked Man will never stop hunting you. He will kill you and everyone you love.”
“How?” I asked, afraid to look back as the disturbing sounds grew closer and closer. Grandma backpedaled quickly, as if the demons of Hell were approaching. “How? How do I end it?”
I heard a horrible, choked breathing behind me, then the world faded.
***
I woke up suddenly on the lawn, my head pounding. It didn’t seem like much time had passed. I must have knocked myself out. I raised my fingers to my forehead. My fingers came away slick with blood.
For a long moment, I lay there, hyperventilating and looking up at the cloudless abyss of a sky. My body felt bruised and battered, and I wasn’t even sure if I could walk.
Then I saw a pale, hairless visage peeking over the edge of the windowsill with eyes as dark as night. Its face split into a grin with a crack, making a sound like ripping plastic. The bone-white mask of dead skin looked at me with a feverish intensity, a kind of psychopathic hunger that radiated from every pore of his body. With horror, I saw the Crooked Man’s teeth were as black as his eyes, gleaming like polished jetstone.
A rush of adrenaline pushed me up from the ground. I realized I was tremendously lucky, that I had been laying there with my keys still in my pocket and my cell phone in hand, fully dressed except for the fact I was wearing slippers. I sprinted across the lawn towards my car. I heard the Crooked Man scream out after me.
“You’ll be with Grandmother soon, Jackie boy,” he hissed in his gurgling voice. “No one escapes. No one.”
***
I flew down the highway in my car, the phone in my trembling hand. Looking down at it, I called Iris right away. She answered groggily.
“Hello?” she said.
“Jesus, Iris, it’s after me,” I said frantically. “Something’s happening. I got attacked in my own bedroom!”
“Did you call the cops?” she asked, seeming to wake up instantly. I looked down at the clock in the center console, seeing it was already past midnight.
“It wasn’t a person. I saw something. I think it was the same thing that took those teenagers, and now it’s after me. Are you guys home?” There was a long pause on the other end. I heard whispering in the background.
“Yeah… sure, come over,” she said. I knew Ben was somewhat of a gun nut, and had a nice little collection at the house. I would feel much safer if I made it there. And if I had them on my side, that would be all the better.
***
Ben and Iris lived in the middle of a back road surrounded by forests. The dark trees loomed overhead like priests with their heads bowed. The light from their front porch streamed into the creeping shadows as I pulled into their driveway. The sound of the car idling seemed far too loud in this place where the woods closed in all around me. I didn’t know what was hiding in those trees. I immediately shut it off.
Ben was a veteran who knew much more about combat and guns than I did. His collection was also somewhat impressive- an Armalite AR-15, a Judge, a 12-gauge Benelli, two crappy little .22s, a .45 Ruger, a Nosler 21 and a 10-gauge Mossberg. I had gone out shooting with him and Iris quite a few times. I would feel much safer once I was inside.
The cloudless black sky hung overhead like the lid of a coffin. Their little two-story place with the wraparound porch looked quaint, almost like a little rural cabin.
I stumbled out of the car. I’m sure I was quite a sight, battered and covered in clotting gashes and cuts, my eyes wide and panicked. I constantly looked around, checking my back. Every time I did, I expected to see something there, something close by with blue lips like a corpse and deformed, twisting bones.
I had nearly gotten to the front of the house when I saw, through the narrow sidelights at top of the door, the face of the Crooked Man. Standing only feet away, I heard faint gurgling of his diseased breathing even through the wall.
His hairless face was split into a grin like a death’s head, his lidless eyes bulging and excited. He raised his misshapen fingers to the window and gave me a little wave, opening and closing his fingers slowly. Then he turned and disappeared deeper into the house.
***
I immediately tried opening the door, to yell to Iris and Ben to watch out, but the door was locked. I called Iris. Each ring seemed to take an eternity. Finally, she answered.
“Hello? What, are you here?” she asked.
“Iris! Get the fuck out of the house! You and Ben aren’t alone in there! There’s a man coming in your direction right now!” I screamed, panicked. “Jump out the window if you have to! It’s coming!”
“What?” she said, sounding alarmed and confused. “Are you being serious?” I heard soft murmuring in the background.
“Tell Ben to grab a gun right now!” I started to say, but a high-pitched scream carried through the phone and the house at that moment.
“Iris? Iris! Answer me!” I said. The call immediately went dead.
From inside, I heard the first of the gunshots.
***
At that point, I decided to run back to my car. I needed to get inside and help them. A small voice in the back of my mind asked me what I could possibly do, however. If an AR-15 or a lead slug from a 12-gauge couldn’t stop the Crooked Man, then what could? At that moment, I wished fervently that Grandma would have told me.
I grabbed a tire iron from the back of my trunk and sprinted back toward the front of the house. They had large windows leading into the kitchen from their wraparound porch. Without hesitation, I drew the tire iron back and smashed it. The tinkling of glass seemed explosively loud. I realized that the gunshots and screaming had stopped.
At that moment, something pale came scurrying around the side of the building. I jumped, but I looked over and realized it was Iris, dressed in a white hoodie and white pants. Her pale face was contorted with mortal terror. To my horror, I realized hundreds of small drops spattered her clothes, covering her face and body like crimson raindrops. She had the .45 Ruger in her hands, and she was limping.
“Where’s Ben?” I cried. She shook her head.
“I jumped out the bedroom window… he was behind me,” she said. Suddenly, there was another explosion of glass from behind the house. Something heavy thudded hard against the ground. We heard wretched wailing follow it. Looking at each other with horrified eyes, we both turned and ran towards the noise.
We found Ben laying on the lawn. The right side of his neck was nearly severed. Bright-red streams of blood spurted from the mutilated flesh. His back looked broken as well. He laid there like a hornet smashed under someone’s boot. With dilated eyes, he looked from me to Iris. Terror and agony oozed from his eyes. He opened his mouth to say something, but only a frothy puddle of blood came up.
Then his eyes turned away, looking straight up into the cloudless black void of a sky. The last exhalation came, the death gasp that bubbled and stretched out until I thought it might never end. He died staring into that abyss, that eternity from which no one returns.
The Crooked Man murdered my family. Now he has awoken again [part 2] : mrcreeps (reddit.com)

I remember when I first heard the rhyme as a child. It terrified me. To me, the Crooked Man was some sort of boogeyman with freakishly long arms and legs that were twisted and broken in horrifying ways. I still have the rhyme memorized. It repeats in my brain like a skipping record.
“There was a Crooked Man, and he walked a crooked mile,
He found a crooked sixpence against a crooked stile;
He bought a crooked cat which caught a crooked mouse,
And they all lived together in a little crooked house.”
My brother Benton, who loved to torture me as a child, ended up adding his own parts to the rhyme over time. The extra parts he added did nothing to console me or end my nightmares of this twisted boogeyman who always seemed to slink through the shadows. I remember the rhyme Benton told me by heart to this day.
“The Crooked Man watches you.
His eyes are black, his lips are blue.
The crooked man twists and crawls.
He uses his crooked blade to kill.
And when the curtain of night falls,
He comes to get his thrill.”
***
So I found it strange when, a few weeks ago, I was sitting with a couple of my friends drinking and the subject of the Crooked Man came up again. They were rambling about shootings and serial killers and other fairly interesting subjects that I knew almost nothing about. But my friend Iris knew everything about such morbid subjects.
She was a small drink of water, no more than five feet, with platinum blonde hair and green eyes like a cat. She was extremely attractive with high cheekbones and a small nose and chin. She always talked extremely fast and made violent slashing gestures with her hands. Sometimes I wondered if she had a secret amphetamine habit I didn’t know about.
“But did you hear about the murders in Union?” Iris asked, glancing over at her boyfriend, Ben. Ben was the opposite of Iris- tall and nerdy with thick, black-rimmed glasses and a low whisper of a voice.
“I just heard that some kids went missing,” Ben murmured. I shrugged.
“I don’t watch TV,” I said. “The news is all bullshit anyway. They only show you the bad stuff. After all, no one wants to hear about new breakthroughs in fusion technology or discoveries in particle physics. Instead, people just want to watch others get murdered, robbed and beaten, so that they can feel that at least someone else has it worse than them. That’s all the news is, really: a form of schadenfreude, the joy people get from seeing others’ misfortune and suffering. Our entire media industry is built on a foundation of schadenfreude.” I took a long sip from my beer, a Harpoon that tasted like pure raspberries. Iris rolled her eyes.
“While probably true, I don’t care,” she said, turning her green eyes on me. “Don’t you want to know what happened to the kids?”
“I do,” Ben said, leaning forward. “Was it something… supernatural?” Iris gave a sardonic laugh at that. Ben sat back, offended.
“What’s so funny? I heard there was weird stuff going on around that factory. In fact, I heard they used to manufacture some dye there for clocks and stuff, right? So all these people went to work, painting watches and clocks and whatever else they told them to paint. It was this special green dye that would glow in the dark. The factory was staffed by mostly women, and I heard they used to lick their paintbrushes to form them into points. They figured this stuff was just regular paint that glowed in the dark.” I leaned back, interested. Ben started talking faster, getting more animated.
“So what happened?” I asked, my curiosity piqued.
“Well, the workers started getting cancer and dying in huge numbers,” Ben continued as the kitchen lights sparkled off his glasses. “One woman even had her entire jaw rot off. Others had pieces of their faces falling off. So it turns out, they were using radioactive isotopes to make the paint glow! And these women were just licking the paintbrushes and touching the paint…”
“Holy shit,” I whispered, horrified.
“They called them the Radium girls,” Ben said. “That factory killed hundreds and hundreds of people. That’s why a lot of people think it’s haunted. People claim they see ghosts and weird shit around it. And that’s not all. The case gets even weirder when you look at workers’ families.
“It seems a lot of their kids went missing, too. The cops never found any of them. The entire time the factory was operational, and even after it shutdown, the families of the workers kept having strange things happen- children disappearing from their bedrooms in the middle of the night, strange murders and unexplained suicides that kept killing off healthy, normal people all over town.”
“So, anyways,” Iris continued, looking slightly annoyed at the interruption, “the kids that went into that abandoned factory were all found… torn apart. Their limbs were all amputated and crooked.” She leaned forward, using her spooky campfire voice. “And the limbs were long. Freakishly long, as if they had just grown overnight to inhuman lengths before they got lopped off. But they never found the heads or the torsos. All they found was ten legs and ten arms.”
“And no one knows what happened?” I asked. She shook her head.
“Officially, no. The police and media said it was some sort of serial killer, of course. But there wasn’t a shred of evidence anywhere. It was like a ghost had done it. Where the limbs were piled up in the basement, there was no evidence that anyone had been there in months, no footsteps or microscopic evidence of any presence. But the story doesn’t end there. Because there were six teenagers that went into that building, and one of them was found alive three months later, wandering, covered in blood and scratches, mostly naked and totally insane. One of my friends is an EMT and she said that the kid would not stop talking about the Crooked Man taking his friends and keeping him prisoner in some other world.”
At the mention of those words, the Crooked Man, a chill went down my spine. My heart felt like ice.
“What’d you say? What did the kid say?” I asked anxiously. Suddenly the room felt very hot, and the alcohol was not sitting well in my stomach.
“He said he got kidnapped by someone called the Crooked Man,” Iris repeated, taking a long sip from her wine. “According to the kid, it was some sort of fucking monster, apparently. I think his mind must have just snapped. He was probably kidnapped and held in the basement of some serial killer for three goddamned months. Who knows what he saw and experienced? People make up all sorts of crazy shit when they’re traumatized.”
My hand was shaking so badly that I had to put my bottle down on the table. For some reason, my mind kept flashing back to my sister, Emilia, who had been kidnapped from her room in the middle of the night when my brother Benton and I were little. She had never been found. We had never gotten a ransom note or found a body. It was as if Emilia had simply disappeared, vanished from the surface of the planet in an instant.
“I think some of that stuff is real,” Ben said. “People have been talking about cryptids and ghosts for thousands of years across countless different and unrelated cultures. What are the chances that all of them are just hallucinations or delusions?”
I didn’t know, but I thought I might know someone who might.
***
My brother Benton was a long-term drug addict living in a flophouse. I went to see him the next morning. He opened the door with a glazed, half-aware expression. Scars covered his arms and legs. He looked like a walking skeleton. His eyes shone like the last bit of water at the bottom of a dying well.
“Jack,” he said, surprised, appearing to wake up slightly. “What are you doing here?”
“I need to talk to you,” I said, pushing past him into the one-bedroom place he called home. A cockroach skittered across the wall. As he closed the door, I saw bites from bedbugs all over his body. Benton turned, spreading out his hands.
“Well, what is it, little brother? You know I’m all ears.”
“You remember that rhyme you used to scare me with when we were little?” I asked. “That rhyme you made up about the Crooked Man?” He seemed to go a shade paler.
“I didn’t make anything up,” he said. “That rhyme came from Grandma. She told it to dad when he was little, before she died.”
“Grandma?” I asked, startled. Our grandmother had died of cancer when she was extremely young, in her late 20s. “Did you hear about the murders over in Union? The survivor was talking about the Crooked Man.”
“That’s pretty freaking weird, man,” he said. “Especially considering what happened to Grandma and Emilia, you know.” He sat down on the threadbare mattress, laying back and sighing.
“Why is it weird?” I asked.
“Because, you know, that’s where Grandma used to work. At that factory in Union. Didn’t Dad ever tell you?” I shook my head, feeling sick.
“So Grandma was one of the radium girls?” I said. My brother shrugged his thin shoulders, the stained T-shirt clinging tight to his frail body.
“I don’t know what that is, but whatever she was doing there, it killed her.”
“But what does that have to do with Emilia?” I asked, my heart pounding at the mention of our long-lost little sister. He shook his head in wonder.
“You don’t remember? You were older than me when it happened. Before she went missing, she kept talking about the same thing, saying weird stuff about some ‘Crooked Man’. Don’t you remember what happened the night she went missing?” I thought back, but it all seemed like a blur. I remembered flashing police sirens and my parents screaming. I had tried to block it out, but apparently Benton hadn’t been able to. That night must be like a fresh wound on his mind all the time.
“No, I just remembered… screaming, and police…” I whispered, my voice trailing off into nothing. Benton leaned forward on the bed, looking sick.
“We both saw it,” he said. “The Crooked Man. That thing she was talking about. It was real. We saw it in her room that night- when it took her.” I shook my head, refusing to look at him. Feeling sick, I walked toward the door without looking back. “Where are you going?”
“I’m going home,” I said. “I can’t deal with this shit right now.” But that night, I would find out that the long-lost nightmare from my childhood was not nearly as buried in the past as I thought.
***
I was laying in my dark bedroom, reading the local news on my phone, when I saw an article that disturbed me greatly. I sat up, looking out the window into the cloudless night. The sky hung overhead like a black hole, colorless and empty. Fear radiated through my heart as I glanced back down at the screen and started reading.
“Sole survivor of serial killer commits suicide,” the article read in garish black-and-white letters. “Michael Galentino, 18, was found dead in a psychiatric facility early this morning. In February, Michael Galentino and five others entered a local abandoned building. Friends who knew them stated that they often explored abandoned structures as part of an ‘urban exploration’ group. But this would not be a normal night for the group. They all disappeared, and within 24 hours, police and search teams had been dispatched to look for the missing teenagers…”
The house was silent. I read the rest of the article with bated breath, my eyes wide. Some of the details I already knew, but others, such as the radioactive isotopes found on the dismembered limbs of the victims, I did not. I wondered about that. The police claimed that, after finding this strange clue, they had sent a team to inspect the abandoned factory with Geiger counters and look for signs of radioactivity. Perhaps the radium, which had a notoriously long half-life, had accumulated on the surfaces over the decades. But they said the radioactivity within the building was all within acceptable levels. It was just another bizarre piece of a puzzle that no one could solve.
The house was deathly silent. I could hear my own heart beating a runaway rhythm in my ears. A rising sense of anxiety was filling me, but I didn’t know why. It felt like some sort of pressure had changed all around me, as if the first wave of a massive blizzard had just blown into the room.
I heard a creaking from across the dark room. At the same time, I felt a sting on my arm. I looked down, seeing a bedbug crawling across my skin, a small red welt rising in its wake.
“Fuck!” I swore, grabbing it between my fingers and slicing it between my nails. Crimson spurted from its swollen body as if it were a tiny balloon. It exploded, staining my fingers red with my own blood.
“I should’ve never gone to see my brother. Goddamned bedbugs,” I muttered to myself. I hoped that was the only one. If I had picked up some extra travelers at the flophouse, I knew they would spread throughout the entire house within days.
The creaking came again, louder this time, almost insistent. I glanced across the curtain of shadows that hung thick and black in the room, seeing the dark silhouette of my closet door swinging open. I could only stare, open-mouthed. A long moment passed, and then I heard breathing. It came out, ragged and slow with long pauses, like the choking of a murder victim.
Slowly, I raised my phone’s dim light, shining it across the room. On the closet door, I saw four inhumanly long, crooked fingers. They shone pale like the skin of a corpse. They twitched, then started rhythmically tapping on the door. And then I heard it, that rhyme, that horrible, gurgling rhyme. It came echoing out from the door in that same choked voice, like a forgotten wound from long ago.
“The Crooked Man watches you.
His eyes are black, his lips are blue…”
It felt like I was in some sort of nightmare, but I knew from the sweat dripping down my forehead and the sensation of cloth sheets against my skin that this was all too real. Even a couple months later, I still remember that sensation of dread, the first of many terrors that this night would bring.
I looked around for a weapon. All I found was a letter opener sitting next to some mail on the nearby nightstand. I grabbed it, a flimsy piece of metal in my shaking hands. I was afraid to move, afraid to call out or do anything, out of fear it might shatter the stillness and cause that ineffable horror to come oozing out. I knew I didn’t want to see what was hiding behind that door.
I looked at the open window. I was on the second floor. I was afraid to even breathe too loudly at that moment. With the letter opener in my hand, I tried to silently slide myself across the mattress to the window only a few feet away.
The bedframe groaned softly as I shifted my weight. The breathing from the closet stopped abruptly. I heard the door creaking open, the floorboards shifting. Heavy steps started in the darkness, heading towards me. As I pushed myself off the bed, I glanced back and saw something twisted loping across the room on crooked legs.
It was the Crooked Man, the nightmare from my childhood. He towered over me with a tophat that nearly scraped the ceiling. His lidless eyes were pure darkness, as black as death. They contrasted heavily with his bone-white skin. His lips and fingernails were a suffocating, cyanotic blue, like the lips of a murder victim.
He stood up tall. The bones in his freakishly long legs cracked as the many strange joints of his enormous limbs bent in ways no human limb should bend. His fingers were strange and misshapen, each a foot long. They ended in sharp points of bone that poked out through the dead, white skin. He wore a black suit on his tall, emaciated frame. He moved towards me like flashing static, seeming to disappear and reappear closer and closer in every moment.
In panic and terror, I dived headfirst toward the open window, hearing the gurgling breathing of the Crooked Man only a few feet behind me. I felt slashing talons of bone rip across my back, a burning pain and a feeling of blood soaking my shirt. Then I was flying out the window and falling headfirst towards the grass and bushes below.
***
Time seemed to slow down as the ground rushed up to meet me. The wind whipped past my ears like the currents of a tornado. Instinctively, I tried to curl into a ball. As I smashed into the first of the bushes under my window, I rolled to try to put the brunt of the impact on my right shoulder.
The thin branches of the bush crumpled under me like wet cardboard. I felt sharp sticks stabbing into my skin, opening up new slices and cuts to mix with the deep gashes on my back.
I hit the dirt hard, a sudden pain radiating through my back. A jarring sensation crashed through my body. I rolled as I hit the ground, smacking my head into the lawn. The world spun around me and went dark.
Suddenly, I was somewhere else.
***
I found myself standing in a dark factory, surrounded by debris. Broken glass covered the floor, twinkling like fireflies under the light of the distant streetlights outside. Strange graffiti covered the concrete walls all around me.
“DON’T LOOK BEHIND YOU,” one of the tags read in slashing red letters. Underneath it, someone had spraypainted pure black eyes over a massive grinning mouth full of crooked black teeth.
“Destroy it with fire! SAVE your soul,” another one read in small, blue letters. I ran my hands over my face, wondering if I was dreaming. This all felt so real. I could feel the gentle breeze blowing through the broken windows on my skin, hear the rhythmic chirping of crickets outside.
I heard soft sobbing behind me. I remembered the first graffiti tag I had seen and a sense of panic gripped my heart. I did not want to look back.
“Fuck,” I swore under my breath, trembling as I turned. But I didn’t find some eldritch monstrosity with obsidian teeth and black, lidless eyes waiting there. Instead, I found a woman. She was crying, her back turned to me. She wore a black funeral gown that looked ancient and decayed. With a trembling heart, I took a step forward, wondering if I would regret this.
“Hello?” I called out. She spun, her eyes widening. In front of me stood a pretty blonde woman in her mid-twenties, one that I immediately recognized. For I saw many of my own features reflected in that panicked face: the high cheekbones, the large chin, even the waviness of her hair.
“Grandma,” I whispered, looking around in wonder. “What is this? Am I dead?” She shook her head, her eyes still wet and red. She took a deep, shuddering breath and gave a faint smile.
“Jack,” she said in a soft, melodic voice. “I’m so happy to see you. I’ve been watching you. I’ve been so proud of you. Even though we never met, I want you to know that. I wished I could have lived longer, could have met you. If only I hadn’t been murdered by that thing…” She spat the last word with hatred and fear oozing from her voice.
“I thought you died of cancer, Grandma?” I asked. “What do you mean, he killed you?” She shook like a leaf in the wind, refusing to meet my gaze.
“Everyone in that place was touched by something evil,” she murmured, putting her face in her hands. Her voice quavered like a frightened little girl’s. “The sickness radiated from that thing. It followed us like a cancer, made us weak, and then took our breath away. After the long torture was finished, he came to strangle me. He didn’t just kill me, Jack. He murdered my sister and brother, too. I saw it.” Her head ratcheted up, looking behind me all of a sudden. Her eyes widened in terror.
“You need to kill it, Jack,” she whispered grimly. “He’s woken up again after all these years, and he’s starving. The Crooked Man must feed, and feed he will if you don’t stop him. You need to come to the factory and end it. Otherwise, he will keep on killing. The Crooked Man will never stop hunting you. He will kill you and everyone you love.”
“How?” I asked, afraid to look back as the disturbing sounds grew closer and closer. Grandma backpedaled quickly, as if the demons of Hell were approaching. “How? How do I end it?”
I heard a horrible, choked breathing behind me, then the world faded.
***
I woke up suddenly on the lawn, my head pounding. It didn’t seem like much time had passed. I must have knocked myself out. I raised my fingers to my forehead. My fingers came away slick with blood.
For a long moment, I lay there, hyperventilating and looking up at the cloudless abyss of a sky. My body felt bruised and battered, and I wasn’t even sure if I could walk.
Then I saw a pale, hairless visage peeking over the edge of the windowsill with eyes as dark as night. Its face split into a grin with a crack, making a sound like ripping plastic. The bone-white mask of dead skin looked at me with a feverish intensity, a kind of psychopathic hunger that radiated from every pore of his body. With horror, I saw the Crooked Man’s teeth were as black as his eyes, gleaming like polished jetstone.
A rush of adrenaline pushed me up from the ground. I realized I was tremendously lucky, that I had been laying there with my keys still in my pocket and my cell phone in hand, fully dressed except for the fact I was wearing slippers. I sprinted across the lawn towards my car. I heard the Crooked Man scream out after me.
“You’ll be with Grandmother soon, Jackie boy,” he hissed in his gurgling voice. “No one escapes. No one.”
***
I flew down the highway in my car, the phone in my trembling hand. Looking down at it, I called Iris right away. She answered groggily.
“Hello?” she said.
“Jesus, Iris, it’s after me,” I said frantically. “Something’s happening. I got attacked in my own bedroom!”
“Did you call the cops?” she asked, seeming to wake up instantly. I looked down at the clock in the center console, seeing it was already past midnight.
“It wasn’t a person. I saw something. I think it was the same thing that took those teenagers, and now it’s after me. Are you guys home?” There was a long pause on the other end. I heard whispering in the background.
“Yeah… sure, come over,” she said. I knew Ben was somewhat of a gun nut, and had a nice little collection at the house. I would feel much safer if I made it there. And if I had them on my side, that would be all the better.
***
Ben and Iris lived in the middle of a back road surrounded by forests. The dark trees loomed overhead like priests with their heads bowed. The light from their front porch streamed into the creeping shadows as I pulled into their driveway. The sound of the car idling seemed far too loud in this place where the woods closed in all around me. I didn’t know what was hiding in those trees. I immediately shut it off.
Ben was a veteran who knew much more about combat and guns than I did. His collection was also somewhat impressive- an Armalite AR-15, a Judge, a 12-gauge Benelli, two crappy little .22s, a .45 Ruger, a Nosler 21 and a 10-gauge Mossberg. I had gone out shooting with him and Iris quite a few times. I would feel much safer once I was inside.
The cloudless black sky hung overhead like the lid of a coffin. Their little two-story place with the wraparound porch looked quaint, almost like a little rural cabin.
I stumbled out of the car. I’m sure I was quite a sight, battered and covered in clotting gashes and cuts, my eyes wide and panicked. I constantly looked around, checking my back. Every time I did, I expected to see something there, something close by with blue lips like a corpse and deformed, twisting bones.
I had nearly gotten to the front of the house when I saw, through the narrow sidelights at top of the door, the face of the Crooked Man. Standing only feet away, I heard faint gurgling of his diseased breathing even through the wall.
His hairless face was split into a grin like a death’s head, his lidless eyes bulging and excited. He raised his misshapen fingers to the window and gave me a little wave, opening and closing his fingers slowly. Then he turned and disappeared deeper into the house.
***
I immediately tried opening the door, to yell to Iris and Ben to watch out, but the door was locked. I called Iris. Each ring seemed to take an eternity. Finally, she answered.
“Hello? What, are you here?” she asked.
“Iris! Get the fuck out of the house! You and Ben aren’t alone in there! There’s a man coming in your direction right now!” I screamed, panicked. “Jump out the window if you have to! It’s coming!”
“What?” she said, sounding alarmed and confused. “Are you being serious?” I heard soft murmuring in the background.
“Tell Ben to grab a gun right now!” I started to say, but a high-pitched scream carried through the phone and the house at that moment.
“Iris? Iris! Answer me!” I said. The call immediately went dead.
From inside, I heard the first of the gunshots.
***
At that point, I decided to run back to my car. I needed to get inside and help them. A small voice in the back of my mind asked me what I could possibly do, however. If an AR-15 or a lead slug from a 12-gauge couldn’t stop the Crooked Man, then what could? At that moment, I wished fervently that Grandma would have told me.
I grabbed a tire iron from the back of my trunk and sprinted back toward the front of the house. They had large windows leading into the kitchen from their wraparound porch. Without hesitation, I drew the tire iron back and smashed it. The tinkling of glass seemed explosively loud. I realized that the gunshots and screaming had stopped.
At that moment, something pale came scurrying around the side of the building. I jumped, but I looked over and realized it was Iris, dressed in a white hoodie and white pants. Her pale face was contorted with mortal terror. To my horror, I realized hundreds of small drops spattered her clothes, covering her face and body like crimson raindrops. She had the .45 Ruger in her hands, and she was limping.
“Where’s Ben?” I cried. She shook her head.
“I jumped out the bedroom window… he was behind me,” she said. Suddenly, there was another explosion of glass from behind the house. Something heavy thudded hard against the ground. We heard wretched wailing follow it. Looking at each other with horrified eyes, we both turned and ran towards the noise.
We found Ben laying on the lawn. The right side of his neck was nearly severed. Bright-red streams of blood spurted from the mutilated flesh. His back looked broken as well. He laid there like a hornet smashed under someone’s boot. With dilated eyes, he looked from me to Iris. Terror and agony oozed from his eyes. He opened his mouth to say something, but only a frothy puddle of blood came up.
Then his eyes turned away, looking straight up into the cloudless black void of a sky. The last exhalation came, the death gasp that bubbled and stretched out until I thought it might never end. He died staring into that abyss, that eternity from which no one returns.
The Crooked Man murdered my family. Now he has awoken again [part 2] : mrcreeps (reddit.com)

I remember when I first heard the rhyme as a child. It terrified me. To me, the Crooked Man was some sort of boogeyman with freakishly long arms and legs that were twisted and broken in horrifying ways. I still have the rhyme memorized. It repeats in my brain like a skipping record.
“There was a Crooked Man, and he walked a crooked mile,
He found a crooked sixpence against a crooked stile;
He bought a crooked cat which caught a crooked mouse,
And they all lived together in a little crooked house.”
My brother Benton, who loved to torture me as a child, ended up adding his own parts to the rhyme over time. The extra parts he added did nothing to console me or end my nightmares of this twisted boogeyman who always seemed to slink through the shadows. I remember the rhyme Benton told me by heart to this day.
“The Crooked Man watches you.
His eyes are black, his lips are blue.
The crooked man twists and crawls.
He uses his crooked blade to kill.
And when the curtain of night falls,
He comes to get his thrill.”
***
So I found it strange when, a few weeks ago, I was sitting with a couple of my friends drinking and the subject of the Crooked Man came up again. They were rambling about shootings and serial killers and other fairly interesting subjects that I knew almost nothing about. But my friend Iris knew everything about such morbid subjects.
She was a small drink of water, no more than five feet, with platinum blonde hair and green eyes like a cat. She was extremely attractive with high cheekbones and a small nose and chin. She always talked extremely fast and made violent slashing gestures with her hands. Sometimes I wondered if she had a secret amphetamine habit I didn’t know about.
“But did you hear about the murders in Union?” Iris asked, glancing over at her boyfriend, Ben. Ben was the opposite of Iris- tall and nerdy with thick, black-rimmed glasses and a low whisper of a voice.
“I just heard that some kids went missing,” Ben murmured. I shrugged.
“I don’t watch TV,” I said. “The news is all bullshit anyway. They only show you the bad stuff. After all, no one wants to hear about new breakthroughs in fusion technology or discoveries in particle physics. Instead, people just want to watch others get murdered, robbed and beaten, so that they can feel that at least someone else has it worse than them. That’s all the news is, really: a form of schadenfreude, the joy people get from seeing others’ misfortune and suffering. Our entire media industry is built on a foundation of schadenfreude.” I took a long sip from my beer, a Harpoon that tasted like pure raspberries. Iris rolled her eyes.
“While probably true, I don’t care,” she said, turning her green eyes on me. “Don’t you want to know what happened to the kids?”
“I do,” Ben said, leaning forward. “Was it something… supernatural?” Iris gave a sardonic laugh at that. Ben sat back, offended.
“What’s so funny? I heard there was weird stuff going on around that factory. In fact, I heard they used to manufacture some dye there for clocks and stuff, right? So all these people went to work, painting watches and clocks and whatever else they told them to paint. It was this special green dye that would glow in the dark. The factory was staffed by mostly women, and I heard they used to lick their paintbrushes to form them into points. They figured this stuff was just regular paint that glowed in the dark.” I leaned back, interested. Ben started talking faster, getting more animated.
“So what happened?” I asked, my curiosity piqued.
“Well, the workers started getting cancer and dying in huge numbers,” Ben continued as the kitchen lights sparkled off his glasses. “One woman even had her entire jaw rot off. Others had pieces of their faces falling off. So it turns out, they were using radioactive isotopes to make the paint glow! And these women were just licking the paintbrushes and touching the paint…”
“Holy shit,” I whispered, horrified.
“They called them the Radium girls,” Ben said. “That factory killed hundreds and hundreds of people. That’s why a lot of people think it’s haunted. People claim they see ghosts and weird shit around it. And that’s not all. The case gets even weirder when you look at workers’ families.
“It seems a lot of their kids went missing, too. The cops never found any of them. The entire time the factory was operational, and even after it shutdown, the families of the workers kept having strange things happen- children disappearing from their bedrooms in the middle of the night, strange murders and unexplained suicides that kept killing off healthy, normal people all over town.”
“So, anyways,” Iris continued, looking slightly annoyed at the interruption, “the kids that went into that abandoned factory were all found… torn apart. Their limbs were all amputated and crooked.” She leaned forward, using her spooky campfire voice. “And the limbs were long. Freakishly long, as if they had just grown overnight to inhuman lengths before they got lopped off. But they never found the heads or the torsos. All they found was ten legs and ten arms.”
“And no one knows what happened?” I asked. She shook her head.
“Officially, no. The police and media said it was some sort of serial killer, of course. But there wasn’t a shred of evidence anywhere. It was like a ghost had done it. Where the limbs were piled up in the basement, there was no evidence that anyone had been there in months, no footsteps or microscopic evidence of any presence. But the story doesn’t end there. Because there were six teenagers that went into that building, and one of them was found alive three months later, wandering, covered in blood and scratches, mostly naked and totally insane. One of my friends is an EMT and she said that the kid would not stop talking about the Crooked Man taking his friends and keeping him prisoner in some other world.”
At the mention of those words, the Crooked Man, a chill went down my spine. My heart felt like ice.
“What’d you say? What did the kid say?” I asked anxiously. Suddenly the room felt very hot, and the alcohol was not sitting well in my stomach.
“He said he got kidnapped by someone called the Crooked Man,” Iris repeated, taking a long sip from her wine. “According to the kid, it was some sort of fucking monster, apparently. I think his mind must have just snapped. He was probably kidnapped and held in the basement of some serial killer for three goddamned months. Who knows what he saw and experienced? People make up all sorts of crazy shit when they’re traumatized.”
My hand was shaking so badly that I had to put my bottle down on the table. For some reason, my mind kept flashing back to my sister, Emilia, who had been kidnapped from her room in the middle of the night when my brother Benton and I were little. She had never been found. We had never gotten a ransom note or found a body. It was as if Emilia had simply disappeared, vanished from the surface of the planet in an instant.
“I think some of that stuff is real,” Ben said. “People have been talking about cryptids and ghosts for thousands of years across countless different and unrelated cultures. What are the chances that all of them are just hallucinations or delusions?”
I didn’t know, but I thought I might know someone who might.
***
My brother Benton was a long-term drug addict living in a flophouse. I went to see him the next morning. He opened the door with a glazed, half-aware expression. Scars covered his arms and legs. He looked like a walking skeleton. His eyes shone like the last bit of water at the bottom of a dying well.
“Jack,” he said, surprised, appearing to wake up slightly. “What are you doing here?”
“I need to talk to you,” I said, pushing past him into the one-bedroom place he called home. A cockroach skittered across the wall. As he closed the door, I saw bites from bedbugs all over his body. Benton turned, spreading out his hands.
“Well, what is it, little brother? You know I’m all ears.”
“You remember that rhyme you used to scare me with when we were little?” I asked. “That rhyme you made up about the Crooked Man?” He seemed to go a shade paler.
“I didn’t make anything up,” he said. “That rhyme came from Grandma. She told it to dad when he was little, before she died.”
“Grandma?” I asked, startled. Our grandmother had died of cancer when she was extremely young, in her late 20s. “Did you hear about the murders over in Union? The survivor was talking about the Crooked Man.”
“That’s pretty freaking weird, man,” he said. “Especially considering what happened to Grandma and Emilia, you know.” He sat down on the threadbare mattress, laying back and sighing.
“Why is it weird?” I asked.
“Because, you know, that’s where Grandma used to work. At that factory in Union. Didn’t Dad ever tell you?” I shook my head, feeling sick.
“So Grandma was one of the radium girls?” I said. My brother shrugged his thin shoulders, the stained T-shirt clinging tight to his frail body.
“I don’t know what that is, but whatever she was doing there, it killed her.”
“But what does that have to do with Emilia?” I asked, my heart pounding at the mention of our long-lost little sister. He shook his head in wonder.
“You don’t remember? You were older than me when it happened. Before she went missing, she kept talking about the same thing, saying weird stuff about some ‘Crooked Man’. Don’t you remember what happened the night she went missing?” I thought back, but it all seemed like a blur. I remembered flashing police sirens and my parents screaming. I had tried to block it out, but apparently Benton hadn’t been able to. That night must be like a fresh wound on his mind all the time.
“No, I just remembered… screaming, and police…” I whispered, my voice trailing off into nothing. Benton leaned forward on the bed, looking sick.
“We both saw it,” he said. “The Crooked Man. That thing she was talking about. It was real. We saw it in her room that night- when it took her.” I shook my head, refusing to look at him. Feeling sick, I walked toward the door without looking back. “Where are you going?”
“I’m going home,” I said. “I can’t deal with this shit right now.” But that night, I would find out that the long-lost nightmare from my childhood was not nearly as buried in the past as I thought.
***
I was laying in my dark bedroom, reading the local news on my phone, when I saw an article that disturbed me greatly. I sat up, looking out the window into the cloudless night. The sky hung overhead like a black hole, colorless and empty. Fear radiated through my heart as I glanced back down at the screen and started reading.
“Sole survivor of serial killer commits suicide,” the article read in garish black-and-white letters. “Michael Galentino, 18, was found dead in a psychiatric facility early this morning. In February, Michael Galentino and five others entered a local abandoned building. Friends who knew them stated that they often explored abandoned structures as part of an ‘urban exploration’ group. But this would not be a normal night for the group. They all disappeared, and within 24 hours, police and search teams had been dispatched to look for the missing teenagers…”
The house was silent. I read the rest of the article with bated breath, my eyes wide. Some of the details I already knew, but others, such as the radioactive isotopes found on the dismembered limbs of the victims, I did not. I wondered about that. The police claimed that, after finding this strange clue, they had sent a team to inspect the abandoned factory with Geiger counters and look for signs of radioactivity. Perhaps the radium, which had a notoriously long half-life, had accumulated on the surfaces over the decades. But they said the radioactivity within the building was all within acceptable levels. It was just another bizarre piece of a puzzle that no one could solve.
The house was deathly silent. I could hear my own heart beating a runaway rhythm in my ears. A rising sense of anxiety was filling me, but I didn’t know why. It felt like some sort of pressure had changed all around me, as if the first wave of a massive blizzard had just blown into the room.
I heard a creaking from across the dark room. At the same time, I felt a sting on my arm. I looked down, seeing a bedbug crawling across my skin, a small red welt rising in its wake.
“Fuck!” I swore, grabbing it between my fingers and slicing it between my nails. Crimson spurted from its swollen body as if it were a tiny balloon. It exploded, staining my fingers red with my own blood.
“I should’ve never gone to see my brother. Goddamned bedbugs,” I muttered to myself. I hoped that was the only one. If I had picked up some extra travelers at the flophouse, I knew they would spread throughout the entire house within days.
The creaking came again, louder this time, almost insistent. I glanced across the curtain of shadows that hung thick and black in the room, seeing the dark silhouette of my closet door swinging open. I could only stare, open-mouthed. A long moment passed, and then I heard breathing. It came out, ragged and slow with long pauses, like the choking of a murder victim.
Slowly, I raised my phone’s dim light, shining it across the room. On the closet door, I saw four inhumanly long, crooked fingers. They shone pale like the skin of a corpse. They twitched, then started rhythmically tapping on the door. And then I heard it, that rhyme, that horrible, gurgling rhyme. It came echoing out from the door in that same choked voice, like a forgotten wound from long ago.
“The Crooked Man watches you.
His eyes are black, his lips are blue…”
It felt like I was in some sort of nightmare, but I knew from the sweat dripping down my forehead and the sensation of cloth sheets against my skin that this was all too real. Even a couple months later, I still remember that sensation of dread, the first of many terrors that this night would bring.
I looked around for a weapon. All I found was a letter opener sitting next to some mail on the nearby nightstand. I grabbed it, a flimsy piece of metal in my shaking hands. I was afraid to move, afraid to call out or do anything, out of fear it might shatter the stillness and cause that ineffable horror to come oozing out. I knew I didn’t want to see what was hiding behind that door.
I looked at the open window. I was on the second floor. I was afraid to even breathe too loudly at that moment. With the letter opener in my hand, I tried to silently slide myself across the mattress to the window only a few feet away.
The bedframe groaned softly as I shifted my weight. The breathing from the closet stopped abruptly. I heard the door creaking open, the floorboards shifting. Heavy steps started in the darkness, heading towards me. As I pushed myself off the bed, I glanced back and saw something twisted loping across the room on crooked legs.
It was the Crooked Man, the nightmare from my childhood. He towered over me with a tophat that nearly scraped the ceiling. His lidless eyes were pure darkness, as black as death. They contrasted heavily with his bone-white skin. His lips and fingernails were a suffocating, cyanotic blue, like the lips of a murder victim.
He stood up tall. The bones in his freakishly long legs cracked as the many strange joints of his enormous limbs bent in ways no human limb should bend. His fingers were strange and misshapen, each a foot long. They ended in sharp points of bone that poked out through the dead, white skin. He wore a black suit on his tall, emaciated frame. He moved towards me like flashing static, seeming to disappear and reappear closer and closer in every moment.
In panic and terror, I dived headfirst toward the open window, hearing the gurgling breathing of the Crooked Man only a few feet behind me. I felt slashing talons of bone rip across my back, a burning pain and a feeling of blood soaking my shirt. Then I was flying out the window and falling headfirst towards the grass and bushes below.
***
Time seemed to slow down as the ground rushed up to meet me. The wind whipped past my ears like the currents of a tornado. Instinctively, I tried to curl into a ball. As I smashed into the first of the bushes under my window, I rolled to try to put the brunt of the impact on my right shoulder.
The thin branches of the bush crumpled under me like wet cardboard. I felt sharp sticks stabbing into my skin, opening up new slices and cuts to mix with the deep gashes on my back.
I hit the dirt hard, a sudden pain radiating through my back. A jarring sensation crashed through my body. I rolled as I hit the ground, smacking my head into the lawn. The world spun around me and went dark.
Suddenly, I was somewhere else.
***
I found myself standing in a dark factory, surrounded by debris. Broken glass covered the floor, twinkling like fireflies under the light of the distant streetlights outside. Strange graffiti covered the concrete walls all around me.
“DON’T LOOK BEHIND YOU,” one of the tags read in slashing red letters. Underneath it, someone had spraypainted pure black eyes over a massive grinning mouth full of crooked black teeth.
“Destroy it with fire! SAVE your soul,” another one read in small, blue letters. I ran my hands over my face, wondering if I was dreaming. This all felt so real. I could feel the gentle breeze blowing through the broken windows on my skin, hear the rhythmic chirping of crickets outside.
I heard soft sobbing behind me. I remembered the first graffiti tag I had seen and a sense of panic gripped my heart. I did not want to look back.
“Fuck,” I swore under my breath, trembling as I turned. But I didn’t find some eldritch monstrosity with obsidian teeth and black, lidless eyes waiting there. Instead, I found a woman. She was crying, her back turned to me. She wore a black funeral gown that looked ancient and decayed. With a trembling heart, I took a step forward, wondering if I would regret this.
“Hello?” I called out. She spun, her eyes widening. In front of me stood a pretty blonde woman in her mid-twenties, one that I immediately recognized. For I saw many of my own features reflected in that panicked face: the high cheekbones, the large chin, even the waviness of her hair.
“Grandma,” I whispered, looking around in wonder. “What is this? Am I dead?” She shook her head, her eyes still wet and red. She took a deep, shuddering breath and gave a faint smile.
“Jack,” she said in a soft, melodic voice. “I’m so happy to see you. I’ve been watching you. I’ve been so proud of you. Even though we never met, I want you to know that. I wished I could have lived longer, could have met you. If only I hadn’t been murdered by that thing…” She spat the last word with hatred and fear oozing from her voice.
“I thought you died of cancer, Grandma?” I asked. “What do you mean, he killed you?” She shook like a leaf in the wind, refusing to meet my gaze.
“Everyone in that place was touched by something evil,” she murmured, putting her face in her hands. Her voice quavered like a frightened little girl’s. “The sickness radiated from that thing. It followed us like a cancer, made us weak, and then took our breath away. After the long torture was finished, he came to strangle me. He didn’t just kill me, Jack. He murdered my sister and brother, too. I saw it.” Her head ratcheted up, looking behind me all of a sudden. Her eyes widened in terror.
“You need to kill it, Jack,” she whispered grimly. “He’s woken up again after all these years, and he’s starving. The Crooked Man must feed, and feed he will if you don’t stop him. You need to come to the factory and end it. Otherwise, he will keep on killing. The Crooked Man will never stop hunting you. He will kill you and everyone you love.”
“How?” I asked, afraid to look back as the disturbing sounds grew closer and closer. Grandma backpedaled quickly, as if the demons of Hell were approaching. “How? How do I end it?”
I heard a horrible, choked breathing behind me, then the world faded.
***
I woke up suddenly on the lawn, my head pounding. It didn’t seem like much time had passed. I must have knocked myself out. I raised my fingers to my forehead. My fingers came away slick with blood.
For a long moment, I lay there, hyperventilating and looking up at the cloudless abyss of a sky. My body felt bruised and battered, and I wasn’t even sure if I could walk.
Then I saw a pale, hairless visage peeking over the edge of the windowsill with eyes as dark as night. Its face split into a grin with a crack, making a sound like ripping plastic. The bone-white mask of dead skin looked at me with a feverish intensity, a kind of psychopathic hunger that radiated from every pore of his body. With horror, I saw the Crooked Man’s teeth were as black as his eyes, gleaming like polished jetstone.
A rush of adrenaline pushed me up from the ground. I realized I was tremendously lucky, that I had been laying there with my keys still in my pocket and my cell phone in hand, fully dressed except for the fact I was wearing slippers. I sprinted across the lawn towards my car. I heard the Crooked Man scream out after me.
“You’ll be with Grandmother soon, Jackie boy,” he hissed in his gurgling voice. “No one escapes. No one.”
***
I flew down the highway in my car, the phone in my trembling hand. Looking down at it, I called Iris right away. She answered groggily.
“Hello?” she said.
“Jesus, Iris, it’s after me,” I said frantically. “Something’s happening. I got attacked in my own bedroom!”
“Did you call the cops?” she asked, seeming to wake up instantly. I looked down at the clock in the center console, seeing it was already past midnight.
“It wasn’t a person. I saw something. I think it was the same thing that took those teenagers, and now it’s after me. Are you guys home?” There was a long pause on the other end. I heard whispering in the background.
“Yeah… sure, come over,” she said. I knew Ben was somewhat of a gun nut, and had a nice little collection at the house. I would feel much safer if I made it there. And if I had them on my side, that would be all the better.
***
Ben and Iris lived in the middle of a back road surrounded by forests. The dark trees loomed overhead like priests with their heads bowed. The light from their front porch streamed into the creeping shadows as I pulled into their driveway. The sound of the car idling seemed far too loud in this place where the woods closed in all around me. I didn’t know what was hiding in those trees. I immediately shut it off.
Ben was a veteran who knew much more about combat and guns than I did. His collection was also somewhat impressive- an Armalite AR-15, a Judge, a 12-gauge Benelli, two crappy little .22s, a .45 Ruger, a Nosler 21 and a 10-gauge Mossberg. I had gone out shooting with him and Iris quite a few times. I would feel much safer once I was inside.
The cloudless black sky hung overhead like the lid of a coffin. Their little two-story place with the wraparound porch looked quaint, almost like a little rural cabin.
I stumbled out of the car. I’m sure I was quite a sight, battered and covered in clotting gashes and cuts, my eyes wide and panicked. I constantly looked around, checking my back. Every time I did, I expected to see something there, something close by with blue lips like a corpse and deformed, twisting bones.
I had nearly gotten to the front of the house when I saw, through the narrow sidelights at top of the door, the face of the Crooked Man. Standing only feet away, I heard faint gurgling of his diseased breathing even through the wall.
His hairless face was split into a grin like a death’s head, his lidless eyes bulging and excited. He raised his misshapen fingers to the window and gave me a little wave, opening and closing his fingers slowly. Then he turned and disappeared deeper into the house.
***
I immediately tried opening the door, to yell to Iris and Ben to watch out, but the door was locked. I called Iris. Each ring seemed to take an eternity. Finally, she answered.
“Hello? What, are you here?” she asked.
“Iris! Get the fuck out of the house! You and Ben aren’t alone in there! There’s a man coming in your direction right now!” I screamed, panicked. “Jump out the window if you have to! It’s coming!”
“What?” she said, sounding alarmed and confused. “Are you being serious?” I heard soft murmuring in the background.
“Tell Ben to grab a gun right now!” I started to say, but a high-pitched scream carried through the phone and the house at that moment.
“Iris? Iris! Answer me!” I said. The call immediately went dead.
From inside, I heard the first of the gunshots.
***
At that point, I decided to run back to my car. I needed to get inside and help them. A small voice in the back of my mind asked me what I could possibly do, however. If an AR-15 or a lead slug from a 12-gauge couldn’t stop the Crooked Man, then what could? At that moment, I wished fervently that Grandma would have told me.
I grabbed a tire iron from the back of my trunk and sprinted back toward the front of the house. They had large windows leading into the kitchen from their wraparound porch. Without hesitation, I drew the tire iron back and smashed it. The tinkling of glass seemed explosively loud. I realized that the gunshots and screaming had stopped.
At that moment, something pale came scurrying around the side of the building. I jumped, but I looked over and realized it was Iris, dressed in a white hoodie and white pants. Her pale face was contorted with mortal terror. To my horror, I realized hundreds of small drops spattered her clothes, covering her face and body like crimson raindrops. She had the .45 Ruger in her hands, and she was limping.
“Where’s Ben?” I cried. She shook her head.
“I jumped out the bedroom window… he was behind me,” she said. Suddenly, there was another explosion of glass from behind the house. Something heavy thudded hard against the ground. We heard wretched wailing follow it. Looking at each other with horrified eyes, we both turned and ran towards the noise.
We found Ben laying on the lawn. The right side of his neck was nearly severed. Bright-red streams of blood spurted from the mutilated flesh. His back looked broken as well. He laid there like a hornet smashed under someone’s boot. With dilated eyes, he looked from me to Iris. Terror and agony oozed from his eyes. He opened his mouth to say something, but only a frothy puddle of blood came up.
Then his eyes turned away, looking straight up into the cloudless black void of a sky. The last exhalation came, the death gasp that bubbled and stretched out until I thought it might never end. He died staring into that abyss, that eternity from which no one returns.
The Crooked Man murdered my family. Now he has awoken again [part 2] : mrcreeps (reddit.com)

I remember when I first heard the rhyme as a child. It terrified me. To me, the Crooked Man was some sort of boogeyman with freakishly long arms and legs that were twisted and broken in horrifying ways. I still have the rhyme memorized. It repeats in my brain like a skipping record.
“There was a Crooked Man, and he walked a crooked mile,
He found a crooked sixpence against a crooked stile;
He bought a crooked cat which caught a crooked mouse,
And they all lived together in a little crooked house.”
My brother Benton, who loved to torture me as a child, ended up adding his own parts to the rhyme over time. The extra parts he added did nothing to console me or end my nightmares of this twisted boogeyman who always seemed to slink through the shadows. I remember the rhyme Benton told me by heart to this day.
“The Crooked Man watches you.
His eyes are black, his lips are blue.
The crooked man twists and crawls.
He uses his crooked blade to kill.
And when the curtain of night falls,
He comes to get his thrill.”
***
So I found it strange when, a few weeks ago, I was sitting with a couple of my friends drinking and the subject of the Crooked Man came up again. They were rambling about shootings and serial killers and other fairly interesting subjects that I knew almost nothing about. But my friend Iris knew everything about such morbid subjects.
She was a small drink of water, no more than five feet, with platinum blonde hair and green eyes like a cat. She was extremely attractive with high cheekbones and a small nose and chin. She always talked extremely fast and made violent slashing gestures with her hands. Sometimes I wondered if she had a secret amphetamine habit I didn’t know about.
“But did you hear about the murders in Union?” Iris asked, glancing over at her boyfriend, Ben. Ben was the opposite of Iris- tall and nerdy with thick, black-rimmed glasses and a low whisper of a voice.
“I just heard that some kids went missing,” Ben murmured. I shrugged.
“I don’t watch TV,” I said. “The news is all bullshit anyway. They only show you the bad stuff. After all, no one wants to hear about new breakthroughs in fusion technology or discoveries in particle physics. Instead, people just want to watch others get murdered, robbed and beaten, so that they can feel that at least someone else has it worse than them. That’s all the news is, really: a form of schadenfreude, the joy people get from seeing others’ misfortune and suffering. Our entire media industry is built on a foundation of schadenfreude.” I took a long sip from my beer, a Harpoon that tasted like pure raspberries. Iris rolled her eyes.
“While probably true, I don’t care,” she said, turning her green eyes on me. “Don’t you want to know what happened to the kids?”
“I do,” Ben said, leaning forward. “Was it something… supernatural?” Iris gave a sardonic laugh at that. Ben sat back, offended.
“What’s so funny? I heard there was weird stuff going on around that factory. In fact, I heard they used to manufacture some dye there for clocks and stuff, right? So all these people went to work, painting watches and clocks and whatever else they told them to paint. It was this special green dye that would glow in the dark. The factory was staffed by mostly women, and I heard they used to lick their paintbrushes to form them into points. They figured this stuff was just regular paint that glowed in the dark.” I leaned back, interested. Ben started talking faster, getting more animated.
“So what happened?” I asked, my curiosity piqued.
“Well, the workers started getting cancer and dying in huge numbers,” Ben continued as the kitchen lights sparkled off his glasses. “One woman even had her entire jaw rot off. Others had pieces of their faces falling off. So it turns out, they were using radioactive isotopes to make the paint glow! And these women were just licking the paintbrushes and touching the paint…”
“Holy shit,” I whispered, horrified.
“They called them the Radium girls,” Ben said. “That factory killed hundreds and hundreds of people. That’s why a lot of people think it’s haunted. People claim they see ghosts and weird shit around it. And that’s not all. The case gets even weirder when you look at workers’ families.
“It seems a lot of their kids went missing, too. The cops never found any of them. The entire time the factory was operational, and even after it shutdown, the families of the workers kept having strange things happen- children disappearing from their bedrooms in the middle of the night, strange murders and unexplained suicides that kept killing off healthy, normal people all over town.”
“So, anyways,” Iris continued, looking slightly annoyed at the interruption, “the kids that went into that abandoned factory were all found… torn apart. Their limbs were all amputated and crooked.” She leaned forward, using her spooky campfire voice. “And the limbs were long. Freakishly long, as if they had just grown overnight to inhuman lengths before they got lopped off. But they never found the heads or the torsos. All they found was ten legs and ten arms.”
“And no one knows what happened?” I asked. She shook her head.
“Officially, no. The police and media said it was some sort of serial killer, of course. But there wasn’t a shred of evidence anywhere. It was like a ghost had done it. Where the limbs were piled up in the basement, there was no evidence that anyone had been there in months, no footsteps or microscopic evidence of any presence. But the story doesn’t end there. Because there were six teenagers that went into that building, and one of them was found alive three months later, wandering, covered in blood and scratches, mostly naked and totally insane. One of my friends is an EMT and she said that the kid would not stop talking about the Crooked Man taking his friends and keeping him prisoner in some other world.”
At the mention of those words, the Crooked Man, a chill went down my spine. My heart felt like ice.
“What’d you say? What did the kid say?” I asked anxiously. Suddenly the room felt very hot, and the alcohol was not sitting well in my stomach.
“He said he got kidnapped by someone called the Crooked Man,” Iris repeated, taking a long sip from her wine. “According to the kid, it was some sort of fucking monster, apparently. I think his mind must have just snapped. He was probably kidnapped and held in the basement of some serial killer for three goddamned months. Who knows what he saw and experienced? People make up all sorts of crazy shit when they’re traumatized.”
My hand was shaking so badly that I had to put my bottle down on the table. For some reason, my mind kept flashing back to my sister, Emilia, who had been kidnapped from her room in the middle of the night when my brother Benton and I were little. She had never been found. We had never gotten a ransom note or found a body. It was as if Emilia had simply disappeared, vanished from the surface of the planet in an instant.
“I think some of that stuff is real,” Ben said. “People have been talking about cryptids and ghosts for thousands of years across countless different and unrelated cultures. What are the chances that all of them are just hallucinations or delusions?”
I didn’t know, but I thought I might know someone who might.
***
My brother Benton was a long-term drug addict living in a flophouse. I went to see him the next morning. He opened the door with a glazed, half-aware expression. Scars covered his arms and legs. He looked like a walking skeleton. His eyes shone like the last bit of water at the bottom of a dying well.
“Jack,” he said, surprised, appearing to wake up slightly. “What are you doing here?”
“I need to talk to you,” I said, pushing past him into the one-bedroom place he called home. A cockroach skittered across the wall. As he closed the door, I saw bites from bedbugs all over his body. Benton turned, spreading out his hands.
“Well, what is it, little brother? You know I’m all ears.”
“You remember that rhyme you used to scare me with when we were little?” I asked. “That rhyme you made up about the Crooked Man?” He seemed to go a shade paler.
“I didn’t make anything up,” he said. “That rhyme came from Grandma. She told it to dad when he was little, before she died.”
“Grandma?” I asked, startled. Our grandmother had died of cancer when she was extremely young, in her late 20s. “Did you hear about the murders over in Union? The survivor was talking about the Crooked Man.”
“That’s pretty freaking weird, man,” he said. “Especially considering what happened to Grandma and Emilia, you know.” He sat down on the threadbare mattress, laying back and sighing.
“Why is it weird?” I asked.
“Because, you know, that’s where Grandma used to work. At that factory in Union. Didn’t Dad ever tell you?” I shook my head, feeling sick.
“So Grandma was one of the radium girls?” I said. My brother shrugged his thin shoulders, the stained T-shirt clinging tight to his frail body.
“I don’t know what that is, but whatever she was doing there, it killed her.”
“But what does that have to do with Emilia?” I asked, my heart pounding at the mention of our long-lost little sister. He shook his head in wonder.
“You don’t remember? You were older than me when it happened. Before she went missing, she kept talking about the same thing, saying weird stuff about some ‘Crooked Man’. Don’t you remember what happened the night she went missing?” I thought back, but it all seemed like a blur. I remembered flashing police sirens and my parents screaming. I had tried to block it out, but apparently Benton hadn’t been able to. That night must be like a fresh wound on his mind all the time.
“No, I just remembered… screaming, and police…” I whispered, my voice trailing off into nothing. Benton leaned forward on the bed, looking sick.
“We both saw it,” he said. “The Crooked Man. That thing she was talking about. It was real. We saw it in her room that night- when it took her.” I shook my head, refusing to look at him. Feeling sick, I walked toward the door without looking back. “Where are you going?”
“I’m going home,” I said. “I can’t deal with this shit right now.” But that night, I would find out that the long-lost nightmare from my childhood was not nearly as buried in the past as I thought.
***
I was laying in my dark bedroom, reading the local news on my phone, when I saw an article that disturbed me greatly. I sat up, looking out the window into the cloudless night. The sky hung overhead like a black hole, colorless and empty. Fear radiated through my heart as I glanced back down at the screen and started reading.
“Sole survivor of serial killer commits suicide,” the article read in garish black-and-white letters. “Michael Galentino, 18, was found dead in a psychiatric facility early this morning. In February, Michael Galentino and five others entered a local abandoned building. Friends who knew them stated that they often explored abandoned structures as part of an ‘urban exploration’ group. But this would not be a normal night for the group. They all disappeared, and within 24 hours, police and search teams had been dispatched to look for the missing teenagers…”
The house was silent. I read the rest of the article with bated breath, my eyes wide. Some of the details I already knew, but others, such as the radioactive isotopes found on the dismembered limbs of the victims, I did not. I wondered about that. The police claimed that, after finding this strange clue, they had sent a team to inspect the abandoned factory with Geiger counters and look for signs of radioactivity. Perhaps the radium, which had a notoriously long half-life, had accumulated on the surfaces over the decades. But they said the radioactivity within the building was all within acceptable levels. It was just another bizarre piece of a puzzle that no one could solve.
The house was deathly silent. I could hear my own heart beating a runaway rhythm in my ears. A rising sense of anxiety was filling me, but I didn’t know why. It felt like some sort of pressure had changed all around me, as if the first wave of a massive blizzard had just blown into the room.
I heard a creaking from across the dark room. At the same time, I felt a sting on my arm. I looked down, seeing a bedbug crawling across my skin, a small red welt rising in its wake.
“Fuck!” I swore, grabbing it between my fingers and slicing it between my nails. Crimson spurted from its swollen body as if it were a tiny balloon. It exploded, staining my fingers red with my own blood.
“I should’ve never gone to see my brother. Goddamned bedbugs,” I muttered to myself. I hoped that was the only one. If I had picked up some extra travelers at the flophouse, I knew they would spread throughout the entire house within days.
The creaking came again, louder this time, almost insistent. I glanced across the curtain of shadows that hung thick and black in the room, seeing the dark silhouette of my closet door swinging open. I could only stare, open-mouthed. A long moment passed, and then I heard breathing. It came out, ragged and slow with long pauses, like the choking of a murder victim.
Slowly, I raised my phone’s dim light, shining it across the room. On the closet door, I saw four inhumanly long, crooked fingers. They shone pale like the skin of a corpse. They twitched, then started rhythmically tapping on the door. And then I heard it, that rhyme, that horrible, gurgling rhyme. It came echoing out from the door in that same choked voice, like a forgotten wound from long ago.
“The Crooked Man watches you.
His eyes are black, his lips are blue…”
It felt like I was in some sort of nightmare, but I knew from the sweat dripping down my forehead and the sensation of cloth sheets against my skin that this was all too real. Even a couple months later, I still remember that sensation of dread, the first of many terrors that this night would bring.
I looked around for a weapon. All I found was a letter opener sitting next to some mail on the nearby nightstand. I grabbed it, a flimsy piece of metal in my shaking hands. I was afraid to move, afraid to call out or do anything, out of fear it might shatter the stillness and cause that ineffable horror to come oozing out. I knew I didn’t want to see what was hiding behind that door.
I looked at the open window. I was on the second floor. I was afraid to even breathe too loudly at that moment. With the letter opener in my hand, I tried to silently slide myself across the mattress to the window only a few feet away.
The bedframe groaned softly as I shifted my weight. The breathing from the closet stopped abruptly. I heard the door creaking open, the floorboards shifting. Heavy steps started in the darkness, heading towards me. As I pushed myself off the bed, I glanced back and saw something twisted loping across the room on crooked legs.
It was the Crooked Man, the nightmare from my childhood. He towered over me with a tophat that nearly scraped the ceiling. His lidless eyes were pure darkness, as black as death. They contrasted heavily with his bone-white skin. His lips and fingernails were a suffocating, cyanotic blue, like the lips of a murder victim.
He stood up tall. The bones in his freakishly long legs cracked as the many strange joints of his enormous limbs bent in ways no human limb should bend. His fingers were strange and misshapen, each a foot long. They ended in sharp points of bone that poked out through the dead, white skin. He wore a black suit on his tall, emaciated frame. He moved towards me like flashing static, seeming to disappear and reappear closer and closer in every moment.
In panic and terror, I dived headfirst toward the open window, hearing the gurgling breathing of the Crooked Man only a few feet behind me. I felt slashing talons of bone rip across my back, a burning pain and a feeling of blood soaking my shirt. Then I was flying out the window and falling headfirst towards the grass and bushes below.
***
Time seemed to slow down as the ground rushed up to meet me. The wind whipped past my ears like the currents of a tornado. Instinctively, I tried to curl into a ball. As I smashed into the first of the bushes under my window, I rolled to try to put the brunt of the impact on my right shoulder.
The thin branches of the bush crumpled under me like wet cardboard. I felt sharp sticks stabbing into my skin, opening up new slices and cuts to mix with the deep gashes on my back.
I hit the dirt hard, a sudden pain radiating through my back. A jarring sensation crashed through my body. I rolled as I hit the ground, smacking my head into the lawn. The world spun around me and went dark.
Suddenly, I was somewhere else.
***
I found myself standing in a dark factory, surrounded by debris. Broken glass covered the floor, twinkling like fireflies under the light of the distant streetlights outside. Strange graffiti covered the concrete walls all around me.
“DON’T LOOK BEHIND YOU,” one of the tags read in slashing red letters. Underneath it, someone had spraypainted pure black eyes over a massive grinning mouth full of crooked black teeth.
“Destroy it with fire! SAVE your soul,” another one read in small, blue letters. I ran my hands over my face, wondering if I was dreaming. This all felt so real. I could feel the gentle breeze blowing through the broken windows on my skin, hear the rhythmic chirping of crickets outside.
I heard soft sobbing behind me. I remembered the first graffiti tag I had seen and a sense of panic gripped my heart. I did not want to look back.
“Fuck,” I swore under my breath, trembling as I turned. But I didn’t find some eldritch monstrosity with obsidian teeth and black, lidless eyes waiting there. Instead, I found a woman. She was crying, her back turned to me. She wore a black funeral gown that looked ancient and decayed. With a trembling heart, I took a step forward, wondering if I would regret this.
“Hello?” I called out. She spun, her eyes widening. In front of me stood a pretty blonde woman in her mid-twenties, one that I immediately recognized. For I saw many of my own features reflected in that panicked face: the high cheekbones, the large chin, even the waviness of her hair.
“Grandma,” I whispered, looking around in wonder. “What is this? Am I dead?” She shook her head, her eyes still wet and red. She took a deep, shuddering breath and gave a faint smile.
“Jack,” she said in a soft, melodic voice. “I’m so happy to see you. I’ve been watching you. I’ve been so proud of you. Even though we never met, I want you to know that. I wished I could have lived longer, could have met you. If only I hadn’t been murdered by that thing…” She spat the last word with hatred and fear oozing from her voice.
“I thought you died of cancer, Grandma?” I asked. “What do you mean, he killed you?” She shook like a leaf in the wind, refusing to meet my gaze.
“Everyone in that place was touched by something evil,” she murmured, putting her face in her hands. Her voice quavered like a frightened little girl’s. “The sickness radiated from that thing. It followed us like a cancer, made us weak, and then took our breath away. After the long torture was finished, he came to strangle me. He didn’t just kill me, Jack. He murdered my sister and brother, too. I saw it.” Her head ratcheted up, looking behind me all of a sudden. Her eyes widened in terror.
“You need to kill it, Jack,” she whispered grimly. “He’s woken up again after all these years, and he’s starving. The Crooked Man must feed, and feed he will if you don’t stop him. You need to come to the factory and end it. Otherwise, he will keep on killing. The Crooked Man will never stop hunting you. He will kill you and everyone you love.”
“How?” I asked, afraid to look back as the disturbing sounds grew closer and closer. Grandma backpedaled quickly, as if the demons of Hell were approaching. “How? How do I end it?”
I heard a horrible, choked breathing behind me, then the world faded.
***
I woke up suddenly on the lawn, my head pounding. It didn’t seem like much time had passed. I must have knocked myself out. I raised my fingers to my forehead. My fingers came away slick with blood.
For a long moment, I lay there, hyperventilating and looking up at the cloudless abyss of a sky. My body felt bruised and battered, and I wasn’t even sure if I could walk.
Then I saw a pale, hairless visage peeking over the edge of the windowsill with eyes as dark as night. Its face split into a grin with a crack, making a sound like ripping plastic. The bone-white mask of dead skin looked at me with a feverish intensity, a kind of psychopathic hunger that radiated from every pore of his body. With horror, I saw the Crooked Man’s teeth were as black as his eyes, gleaming like polished jetstone.
A rush of adrenaline pushed me up from the ground. I realized I was tremendously lucky, that I had been laying there with my keys still in my pocket and my cell phone in hand, fully dressed except for the fact I was wearing slippers. I sprinted across the lawn towards my car. I heard the Crooked Man scream out after me.
“You’ll be with Grandmother soon, Jackie boy,” he hissed in his gurgling voice. “No one escapes. No one.”
***
I flew down the highway in my car, the phone in my trembling hand. Looking down at it, I called Iris right away. She answered groggily.
“Hello?” she said.
“Jesus, Iris, it’s after me,” I said frantically. “Something’s happening. I got attacked in my own bedroom!”
“Did you call the cops?” she asked, seeming to wake up instantly. I looked down at the clock in the center console, seeing it was already past midnight.
“It wasn’t a person. I saw something. I think it was the same thing that took those teenagers, and now it’s after me. Are you guys home?” There was a long pause on the other end. I heard whispering in the background.
“Yeah… sure, come over,” she said. I knew Ben was somewhat of a gun nut, and had a nice little collection at the house. I would feel much safer if I made it there. And if I had them on my side, that would be all the better.
***
Ben and Iris lived in the middle of a back road surrounded by forests. The dark trees loomed overhead like priests with their heads bowed. The light from their front porch streamed into the creeping shadows as I pulled into their driveway. The sound of the car idling seemed far too loud in this place where the woods closed in all around me. I didn’t know what was hiding in those trees. I immediately shut it off.
Ben was a veteran who knew much more about combat and guns than I did. His collection was also somewhat impressive- an Armalite AR-15, a Judge, a 12-gauge Benelli, two crappy little .22s, a .45 Ruger, a Nosler 21 and a 10-gauge Mossberg. I had gone out shooting with him and Iris quite a few times. I would feel much safer once I was inside.
The cloudless black sky hung overhead like the lid of a coffin. Their little two-story place with the wraparound porch looked quaint, almost like a little rural cabin.
I stumbled out of the car. I’m sure I was quite a sight, battered and covered in clotting gashes and cuts, my eyes wide and panicked. I constantly looked around, checking my back. Every time I did, I expected to see something there, something close by with blue lips like a corpse and deformed, twisting bones.
I had nearly gotten to the front of the house when I saw, through the narrow sidelights at top of the door, the face of the Crooked Man. Standing only feet away, I heard faint gurgling of his diseased breathing even through the wall.
His hairless face was split into a grin like a death’s head, his lidless eyes bulging and excited. He raised his misshapen fingers to the window and gave me a little wave, opening and closing his fingers slowly. Then he turned and disappeared deeper into the house.
***
I immediately tried opening the door, to yell to Iris and Ben to watch out, but the door was locked. I called Iris. Each ring seemed to take an eternity. Finally, she answered.
“Hello? What, are you here?” she asked.
“Iris! Get the fuck out of the house! You and Ben aren’t alone in there! There’s a man coming in your direction right now!” I screamed, panicked. “Jump out the window if you have to! It’s coming!”
“What?” she said, sounding alarmed and confused. “Are you being serious?” I heard soft murmuring in the background.
“Tell Ben to grab a gun right now!” I started to say, but a high-pitched scream carried through the phone and the house at that moment.
“Iris? Iris! Answer me!” I said. The call immediately went dead.
From inside, I heard the first of the gunshots.
***
At that point, I decided to run back to my car. I needed to get inside and help them. A small voice in the back of my mind asked me what I could possibly do, however. If an AR-15 or a lead slug from a 12-gauge couldn’t stop the Crooked Man, then what could? At that moment, I wished fervently that Grandma would have told me.
I grabbed a tire iron from the back of my trunk and sprinted back toward the front of the house. They had large windows leading into the kitchen from their wraparound porch. Without hesitation, I drew the tire iron back and smashed it. The tinkling of glass seemed explosively loud. I realized that the gunshots and screaming had stopped.
At that moment, something pale came scurrying around the side of the building. I jumped, but I looked over and realized it was Iris, dressed in a white hoodie and white pants. Her pale face was contorted with mortal terror. To my horror, I realized hundreds of small drops spattered her clothes, covering her face and body like crimson raindrops. She had the .45 Ruger in her hands, and she was limping.
“Where’s Ben?” I cried. She shook her head.
“I jumped out the bedroom window… he was behind me,” she said. Suddenly, there was another explosion of glass from behind the house. Something heavy thudded hard against the ground. We heard wretched wailing follow it. Looking at each other with horrified eyes, we both turned and ran towards the noise.
We found Ben laying on the lawn. The right side of his neck was nearly severed. Bright-red streams of blood spurted from the mutilated flesh. His back looked broken as well. He laid there like a hornet smashed under someone’s boot. With dilated eyes, he looked from me to Iris. Terror and agony oozed from his eyes. He opened his mouth to say something, but only a frothy puddle of blood came up.
Then his eyes turned away, looking straight up into the cloudless black void of a sky. The last exhalation came, the death gasp that bubbled and stretched out until I thought it might never end. He died staring into that abyss, that eternity from which no one returns.
The Crooked Man murdered my family. Now he has awoken again [part 2] : mrcreeps (reddit.com)

I remember when I first heard the rhyme as a child. It terrified me. To me, the Crooked Man was some sort of boogeyman with freakishly long arms and legs that were twisted and broken in horrifying ways. I still have the rhyme memorized. It repeats in my brain like a skipping record.
“There was a Crooked Man, and he walked a crooked mile,
He found a crooked sixpence against a crooked stile;
He bought a crooked cat which caught a crooked mouse,
And they all lived together in a little crooked house.”
My brother Benton, who loved to torture me as a child, ended up adding his own parts to the rhyme over time. The extra parts he added did nothing to console me or end my nightmares of this twisted boogeyman who always seemed to slink through the shadows. I remember the rhyme Benton told me by heart to this day.
“The Crooked Man watches you.
His eyes are black, his lips are blue.
The crooked man twists and crawls.
He uses his crooked blade to kill.
And when the curtain of night falls,
He comes to get his thrill.”
***
So I found it strange when, a few weeks ago, I was sitting with a couple of my friends drinking and the subject of the Crooked Man came up again. They were rambling about shootings and serial killers and other fairly interesting subjects that I knew almost nothing about. But my friend Iris knew everything about such morbid subjects.
She was a small drink of water, no more than five feet, with platinum blonde hair and green eyes like a cat. She was extremely attractive with high cheekbones and a small nose and chin. She always talked extremely fast and made violent slashing gestures with her hands. Sometimes I wondered if she had a secret amphetamine habit I didn’t know about.
“But did you hear about the murders in Union?” Iris asked, glancing over at her boyfriend, Ben. Ben was the opposite of Iris- tall and nerdy with thick, black-rimmed glasses and a low whisper of a voice.
“I just heard that some kids went missing,” Ben murmured. I shrugged.
“I don’t watch TV,” I said. “The news is all bullshit anyway. They only show you the bad stuff. After all, no one wants to hear about new breakthroughs in fusion technology or discoveries in particle physics. Instead, people just want to watch others get murdered, robbed and beaten, so that they can feel that at least someone else has it worse than them. That’s all the news is, really: a form of schadenfreude, the joy people get from seeing others’ misfortune and suffering. Our entire media industry is built on a foundation of schadenfreude.” I took a long sip from my beer, a Harpoon that tasted like pure raspberries. Iris rolled her eyes.
“While probably true, I don’t care,” she said, turning her green eyes on me. “Don’t you want to know what happened to the kids?”
“I do,” Ben said, leaning forward. “Was it something… supernatural?” Iris gave a sardonic laugh at that. Ben sat back, offended.
“What’s so funny? I heard there was weird stuff going on around that factory. In fact, I heard they used to manufacture some dye there for clocks and stuff, right? So all these people went to work, painting watches and clocks and whatever else they told them to paint. It was this special green dye that would glow in the dark. The factory was staffed by mostly women, and I heard they used to lick their paintbrushes to form them into points. They figured this stuff was just regular paint that glowed in the dark.” I leaned back, interested. Ben started talking faster, getting more animated.
“So what happened?” I asked, my curiosity piqued.
“Well, the workers started getting cancer and dying in huge numbers,” Ben continued as the kitchen lights sparkled off his glasses. “One woman even had her entire jaw rot off. Others had pieces of their faces falling off. So it turns out, they were using radioactive isotopes to make the paint glow! And these women were just licking the paintbrushes and touching the paint…”
“Holy shit,” I whispered, horrified.
“They called them the Radium girls,” Ben said. “That factory killed hundreds and hundreds of people. That’s why a lot of people think it’s haunted. People claim they see ghosts and weird shit around it. And that’s not all. The case gets even weirder when you look at workers’ families.
“It seems a lot of their kids went missing, too. The cops never found any of them. The entire time the factory was operational, and even after it shutdown, the families of the workers kept having strange things happen- children disappearing from their bedrooms in the middle of the night, strange murders and unexplained suicides that kept killing off healthy, normal people all over town.”
“So, anyways,” Iris continued, looking slightly annoyed at the interruption, “the kids that went into that abandoned factory were all found… torn apart. Their limbs were all amputated and crooked.” She leaned forward, using her spooky campfire voice. “And the limbs were long. Freakishly long, as if they had just grown overnight to inhuman lengths before they got lopped off. But they never found the heads or the torsos. All they found was ten legs and ten arms.”
“And no one knows what happened?” I asked. She shook her head.
“Officially, no. The police and media said it was some sort of serial killer, of course. But there wasn’t a shred of evidence anywhere. It was like a ghost had done it. Where the limbs were piled up in the basement, there was no evidence that anyone had been there in months, no footsteps or microscopic evidence of any presence. But the story doesn’t end there. Because there were six teenagers that went into that building, and one of them was found alive three months later, wandering, covered in blood and scratches, mostly naked and totally insane. One of my friends is an EMT and she said that the kid would not stop talking about the Crooked Man taking his friends and keeping him prisoner in some other world.”
At the mention of those words, the Crooked Man, a chill went down my spine. My heart felt like ice.
“What’d you say? What did the kid say?” I asked anxiously. Suddenly the room felt very hot, and the alcohol was not sitting well in my stomach.
“He said he got kidnapped by someone called the Crooked Man,” Iris repeated, taking a long sip from her wine. “According to the kid, it was some sort of fucking monster, apparently. I think his mind must have just snapped. He was probably kidnapped and held in the basement of some serial killer for three goddamned months. Who knows what he saw and experienced? People make up all sorts of crazy shit when they’re traumatized.”
My hand was shaking so badly that I had to put my bottle down on the table. For some reason, my mind kept flashing back to my sister, Emilia, who had been kidnapped from her room in the middle of the night when my brother Benton and I were little. She had never been found. We had never gotten a ransom note or found a body. It was as if Emilia had simply disappeared, vanished from the surface of the planet in an instant.
“I think some of that stuff is real,” Ben said. “People have been talking about cryptids and ghosts for thousands of years across countless different and unrelated cultures. What are the chances that all of them are just hallucinations or delusions?”
I didn’t know, but I thought I might know someone who might.
***
My brother Benton was a long-term drug addict living in a flophouse. I went to see him the next morning. He opened the door with a glazed, half-aware expression. Scars covered his arms and legs. He looked like a walking skeleton. His eyes shone like the last bit of water at the bottom of a dying well.
“Jack,” he said, surprised, appearing to wake up slightly. “What are you doing here?”
“I need to talk to you,” I said, pushing past him into the one-bedroom place he called home. A cockroach skittered across the wall. As he closed the door, I saw bites from bedbugs all over his body. Benton turned, spreading out his hands.
“Well, what is it, little brother? You know I’m all ears.”
“You remember that rhyme you used to scare me with when we were little?” I asked. “That rhyme you made up about the Crooked Man?” He seemed to go a shade paler.
“I didn’t make anything up,” he said. “That rhyme came from Grandma. She told it to dad when he was little, before she died.”
“Grandma?” I asked, startled. Our grandmother had died of cancer when she was extremely young, in her late 20s. “Did you hear about the murders over in Union? The survivor was talking about the Crooked Man.”
“That’s pretty freaking weird, man,” he said. “Especially considering what happened to Grandma and Emilia, you know.” He sat down on the threadbare mattress, laying back and sighing.
“Why is it weird?” I asked.
“Because, you know, that’s where Grandma used to work. At that factory in Union. Didn’t Dad ever tell you?” I shook my head, feeling sick.
“So Grandma was one of the radium girls?” I said. My brother shrugged his thin shoulders, the stained T-shirt clinging tight to his frail body.
“I don’t know what that is, but whatever she was doing there, it killed her.”
“But what does that have to do with Emilia?” I asked, my heart pounding at the mention of our long-lost little sister. He shook his head in wonder.
“You don’t remember? You were older than me when it happened. Before she went missing, she kept talking about the same thing, saying weird stuff about some ‘Crooked Man’. Don’t you remember what happened the night she went missing?” I thought back, but it all seemed like a blur. I remembered flashing police sirens and my parents screaming. I had tried to block it out, but apparently Benton hadn’t been able to. That night must be like a fresh wound on his mind all the time.
“No, I just remembered… screaming, and police…” I whispered, my voice trailing off into nothing. Benton leaned forward on the bed, looking sick.
“We both saw it,” he said. “The Crooked Man. That thing she was talking about. It was real. We saw it in her room that night- when it took her.” I shook my head, refusing to look at him. Feeling sick, I walked toward the door without looking back. “Where are you going?”
“I’m going home,” I said. “I can’t deal with this shit right now.” But that night, I would find out that the long-lost nightmare from my childhood was not nearly as buried in the past as I thought.
***
I was laying in my dark bedroom, reading the local news on my phone, when I saw an article that disturbed me greatly. I sat up, looking out the window into the cloudless night. The sky hung overhead like a black hole, colorless and empty. Fear radiated through my heart as I glanced back down at the screen and started reading.
“Sole survivor of serial killer commits suicide,” the article read in garish black-and-white letters. “Michael Galentino, 18, was found dead in a psychiatric facility early this morning. In February, Michael Galentino and five others entered a local abandoned building. Friends who knew them stated that they often explored abandoned structures as part of an ‘urban exploration’ group. But this would not be a normal night for the group. They all disappeared, and within 24 hours, police and search teams had been dispatched to look for the missing teenagers…”
The house was silent. I read the rest of the article with bated breath, my eyes wide. Some of the details I already knew, but others, such as the radioactive isotopes found on the dismembered limbs of the victims, I did not. I wondered about that. The police claimed that, after finding this strange clue, they had sent a team to inspect the abandoned factory with Geiger counters and look for signs of radioactivity. Perhaps the radium, which had a notoriously long half-life, had accumulated on the surfaces over the decades. But they said the radioactivity within the building was all within acceptable levels. It was just another bizarre piece of a puzzle that no one could solve.
The house was deathly silent. I could hear my own heart beating a runaway rhythm in my ears. A rising sense of anxiety was filling me, but I didn’t know why. It felt like some sort of pressure had changed all around me, as if the first wave of a massive blizzard had just blown into the room.
I heard a creaking from across the dark room. At the same time, I felt a sting on my arm. I looked down, seeing a bedbug crawling across my skin, a small red welt rising in its wake.
“Fuck!” I swore, grabbing it between my fingers and slicing it between my nails. Crimson spurted from its swollen body as if it were a tiny balloon. It exploded, staining my fingers red with my own blood.
“I should’ve never gone to see my brother. Goddamned bedbugs,” I muttered to myself. I hoped that was the only one. If I had picked up some extra travelers at the flophouse, I knew they would spread throughout the entire house within days.
The creaking came again, louder this time, almost insistent. I glanced across the curtain of shadows that hung thick and black in the room, seeing the dark silhouette of my closet door swinging open. I could only stare, open-mouthed. A long moment passed, and then I heard breathing. It came out, ragged and slow with long pauses, like the choking of a murder victim.
Slowly, I raised my phone’s dim light, shining it across the room. On the closet door, I saw four inhumanly long, crooked fingers. They shone pale like the skin of a corpse. They twitched, then started rhythmically tapping on the door. And then I heard it, that rhyme, that horrible, gurgling rhyme. It came echoing out from the door in that same choked voice, like a forgotten wound from long ago.
“The Crooked Man watches you.
His eyes are black, his lips are blue…”
It felt like I was in some sort of nightmare, but I knew from the sweat dripping down my forehead and the sensation of cloth sheets against my skin that this was all too real. Even a couple months later, I still remember that sensation of dread, the first of many terrors that this night would bring.
I looked around for a weapon. All I found was a letter opener sitting next to some mail on the nearby nightstand. I grabbed it, a flimsy piece of metal in my shaking hands. I was afraid to move, afraid to call out or do anything, out of fear it might shatter the stillness and cause that ineffable horror to come oozing out. I knew I didn’t want to see what was hiding behind that door.
I looked at the open window. I was on the second floor. I was afraid to even breathe too loudly at that moment. With the letter opener in my hand, I tried to silently slide myself across the mattress to the window only a few feet away.
The bedframe groaned softly as I shifted my weight. The breathing from the closet stopped abruptly. I heard the door creaking open, the floorboards shifting. Heavy steps started in the darkness, heading towards me. As I pushed myself off the bed, I glanced back and saw something twisted loping across the room on crooked legs.
It was the Crooked Man, the nightmare from my childhood. He towered over me with a tophat that nearly scraped the ceiling. His lidless eyes were pure darkness, as black as death. They contrasted heavily with his bone-white skin. His lips and fingernails were a suffocating, cyanotic blue, like the lips of a murder victim.
He stood up tall. The bones in his freakishly long legs cracked as the many strange joints of his enormous limbs bent in ways no human limb should bend. His fingers were strange and misshapen, each a foot long. They ended in sharp points of bone that poked out through the dead, white skin. He wore a black suit on his tall, emaciated frame. He moved towards me like flashing static, seeming to disappear and reappear closer and closer in every moment.
In panic and terror, I dived headfirst toward the open window, hearing the gurgling breathing of the Crooked Man only a few feet behind me. I felt slashing talons of bone rip across my back, a burning pain and a feeling of blood soaking my shirt. Then I was flying out the window and falling headfirst towards the grass and bushes below.
***
Time seemed to slow down as the ground rushed up to meet me. The wind whipped past my ears like the currents of a tornado. Instinctively, I tried to curl into a ball. As I smashed into the first of the bushes under my window, I rolled to try to put the brunt of the impact on my right shoulder.
The thin branches of the bush crumpled under me like wet cardboard. I felt sharp sticks stabbing into my skin, opening up new slices and cuts to mix with the deep gashes on my back.
I hit the dirt hard, a sudden pain radiating through my back. A jarring sensation crashed through my body. I rolled as I hit the ground, smacking my head into the lawn. The world spun around me and went dark.
Suddenly, I was somewhere else.
***
I found myself standing in a dark factory, surrounded by debris. Broken glass covered the floor, twinkling like fireflies under the light of the distant streetlights outside. Strange graffiti covered the concrete walls all around me.
“DON’T LOOK BEHIND YOU,” one of the tags read in slashing red letters. Underneath it, someone had spraypainted pure black eyes over a massive grinning mouth full of crooked black teeth.
“Destroy it with fire! SAVE your soul,” another one read in small, blue letters. I ran my hands over my face, wondering if I was dreaming. This all felt so real. I could feel the gentle breeze blowing through the broken windows on my skin, hear the rhythmic chirping of crickets outside.
I heard soft sobbing behind me. I remembered the first graffiti tag I had seen and a sense of panic gripped my heart. I did not want to look back.
“Fuck,” I swore under my breath, trembling as I turned. But I didn’t find some eldritch monstrosity with obsidian teeth and black, lidless eyes waiting there. Instead, I found a woman. She was crying, her back turned to me. She wore a black funeral gown that looked ancient and decayed. With a trembling heart, I took a step forward, wondering if I would regret this.
“Hello?” I called out. She spun, her eyes widening. In front of me stood a pretty blonde woman in her mid-twenties, one that I immediately recognized. For I saw many of my own features reflected in that panicked face: the high cheekbones, the large chin, even the waviness of her hair.
“Grandma,” I whispered, looking around in wonder. “What is this? Am I dead?” She shook her head, her eyes still wet and red. She took a deep, shuddering breath and gave a faint smile.
“Jack,” she said in a soft, melodic voice. “I’m so happy to see you. I’ve been watching you. I’ve been so proud of you. Even though we never met, I want you to know that. I wished I could have lived longer, could have met you. If only I hadn’t been murdered by that thing…” She spat the last word with hatred and fear oozing from her voice.
“I thought you died of cancer, Grandma?” I asked. “What do you mean, he killed you?” She shook like a leaf in the wind, refusing to meet my gaze.
“Everyone in that place was touched by something evil,” she murmured, putting her face in her hands. Her voice quavered like a frightened little girl’s. “The sickness radiated from that thing. It followed us like a cancer, made us weak, and then took our breath away. After the long torture was finished, he came to strangle me. He didn’t just kill me, Jack. He murdered my sister and brother, too. I saw it.” Her head ratcheted up, looking behind me all of a sudden. Her eyes widened in terror.
“You need to kill it, Jack,” she whispered grimly. “He’s woken up again after all these years, and he’s starving. The Crooked Man must feed, and feed he will if you don’t stop him. You need to come to the factory and end it. Otherwise, he will keep on killing. The Crooked Man will never stop hunting you. He will kill you and everyone you love.”
“How?” I asked, afraid to look back as the disturbing sounds grew closer and closer. Grandma backpedaled quickly, as if the demons of Hell were approaching. “How? How do I end it?”
I heard a horrible, choked breathing behind me, then the world faded.
***
I woke up suddenly on the lawn, my head pounding. It didn’t seem like much time had passed. I must have knocked myself out. I raised my fingers to my forehead. My fingers came away slick with blood.
For a long moment, I lay there, hyperventilating and looking up at the cloudless abyss of a sky. My body felt bruised and battered, and I wasn’t even sure if I could walk.
Then I saw a pale, hairless visage peeking over the edge of the windowsill with eyes as dark as night. Its face split into a grin with a crack, making a sound like ripping plastic. The bone-white mask of dead skin looked at me with a feverish intensity, a kind of psychopathic hunger that radiated from every pore of his body. With horror, I saw the Crooked Man’s teeth were as black as his eyes, gleaming like polished jetstone.
A rush of adrenaline pushed me up from the ground. I realized I was tremendously lucky, that I had been laying there with my keys still in my pocket and my cell phone in hand, fully dressed except for the fact I was wearing slippers. I sprinted across the lawn towards my car. I heard the Crooked Man scream out after me.
“You’ll be with Grandmother soon, Jackie boy,” he hissed in his gurgling voice. “No one escapes. No one.”
***
I flew down the highway in my car, the phone in my trembling hand. Looking down at it, I called Iris right away. She answered groggily.
“Hello?” she said.
“Jesus, Iris, it’s after me,” I said frantically. “Something’s happening. I got attacked in my own bedroom!”
“Did you call the cops?” she asked, seeming to wake up instantly. I looked down at the clock in the center console, seeing it was already past midnight.
“It wasn’t a person. I saw something. I think it was the same thing that took those teenagers, and now it’s after me. Are you guys home?” There was a long pause on the other end. I heard whispering in the background.
“Yeah… sure, come over,” she said. I knew Ben was somewhat of a gun nut, and had a nice little collection at the house. I would feel much safer if I made it there. And if I had them on my side, that would be all the better.
***
Ben and Iris lived in the middle of a back road surrounded by forests. The dark trees loomed overhead like priests with their heads bowed. The light from their front porch streamed into the creeping shadows as I pulled into their driveway. The sound of the car idling seemed far too loud in this place where the woods closed in all around me. I didn’t know what was hiding in those trees. I immediately shut it off.
Ben was a veteran who knew much more about combat and guns than I did. His collection was also somewhat impressive- an Armalite AR-15, a Judge, a 12-gauge Benelli, two crappy little .22s, a .45 Ruger, a Nosler 21 and a 10-gauge Mossberg. I had gone out shooting with him and Iris quite a few times. I would feel much safer once I was inside.
The cloudless black sky hung overhead like the lid of a coffin. Their little two-story place with the wraparound porch looked quaint, almost like a little rural cabin.
I stumbled out of the car. I’m sure I was quite a sight, battered and covered in clotting gashes and cuts, my eyes wide and panicked. I constantly looked around, checking my back. Every time I did, I expected to see something there, something close by with blue lips like a corpse and deformed, twisting bones.
I had nearly gotten to the front of the house when I saw, through the narrow sidelights at top of the door, the face of the Crooked Man. Standing only feet away, I heard faint gurgling of his diseased breathing even through the wall.
His hairless face was split into a grin like a death’s head, his lidless eyes bulging and excited. He raised his misshapen fingers to the window and gave me a little wave, opening and closing his fingers slowly. Then he turned and disappeared deeper into the house.
***
I immediately tried opening the door, to yell to Iris and Ben to watch out, but the door was locked. I called Iris. Each ring seemed to take an eternity. Finally, she answered.
“Hello? What, are you here?” she asked.
“Iris! Get the fuck out of the house! You and Ben aren’t alone in there! There’s a man coming in your direction right now!” I screamed, panicked. “Jump out the window if you have to! It’s coming!”
“What?” she said, sounding alarmed and confused. “Are you being serious?” I heard soft murmuring in the background.
“Tell Ben to grab a gun right now!” I started to say, but a high-pitched scream carried through the phone and the house at that moment.
“Iris? Iris! Answer me!” I said. The call immediately went dead.
From inside, I heard the first of the gunshots.
***
At that point, I decided to run back to my car. I needed to get inside and help them. A small voice in the back of my mind asked me what I could possibly do, however. If an AR-15 or a lead slug from a 12-gauge couldn’t stop the Crooked Man, then what could? At that moment, I wished fervently that Grandma would have told me.
I grabbed a tire iron from the back of my trunk and sprinted back toward the front of the house. They had large windows leading into the kitchen from their wraparound porch. Without hesitation, I drew the tire iron back and smashed it. The tinkling of glass seemed explosively loud. I realized that the gunshots and screaming had stopped.
At that moment, something pale came scurrying around the side of the building. I jumped, but I looked over and realized it was Iris, dressed in a white hoodie and white pants. Her pale face was contorted with mortal terror. To my horror, I realized hundreds of small drops spattered her clothes, covering her face and body like crimson raindrops. She had the .45 Ruger in her hands, and she was limping.
“Where’s Ben?” I cried. She shook her head.
“I jumped out the bedroom window… he was behind me,” she said. Suddenly, there was another explosion of glass from behind the house. Something heavy thudded hard against the ground. We heard wretched wailing follow it. Looking at each other with horrified eyes, we both turned and ran towards the noise.
We found Ben laying on the lawn. The right side of his neck was nearly severed. Bright-red streams of blood spurted from the mutilated flesh. His back looked broken as well. He laid there like a hornet smashed under someone’s boot. With dilated eyes, he looked from me to Iris. Terror and agony oozed from his eyes. He opened his mouth to say something, but only a frothy puddle of blood came up.
Then his eyes turned away, looking straight up into the cloudless black void of a sky. The last exhalation came, the death gasp that bubbled and stretched out until I thought it might never end. He died staring into that abyss, that eternity from which no one returns.
The Crooked Man murdered my family. Now he has awoken again [part 2] : mrcreeps (reddit.com)