When it got hot in the valley, Thomas and Alfred drove their cows up to a cool, green pasture in the mountains to graze. Usually they stayed there with the cows for two months. Then they brought them down to the valley again. The work was easy enough, but, oh, it was boring. All day the two men tended their cows. At night they went back to the tiny hut where they lived. They ate supper and worked in the garden and went to sleep. It was always the same.

Then Thomas had an idea that changed everything. "Let's make a doll the size of a man." he said. "It would be fun to make, and we could put it in the garden to scare the birds."

"It should look like Harold," Alfred said. Harold was a farmer they both hated. They made a doll out of old sacks stuffed with straw. They gave it a pointy nose like Harold's and tiny eyes like his. Then they added dark hair and a twisted frown. Of course they also gave it Harold's name.

Each morning on their way to the pasture, they tied Harold to a pole in the garden to scare away the birds. Each night they brought him inside so that he wouldn't get ruined if it rained.

When they were feeling playful, they would talk to him. One of them might say, "How are the vegetables growing today, Harold?" Then the other, making believe he was Harold, would answer in a crazy voice, "Very slowly." They both would laugh, but not Harold.

Whenever something went wrong, they took it out on Harold. They would curse at him, even kick or punch him. Sometimes one of them would take the food they were eating (which they both were sick of) and smear it on the doll's face. "How do you like that stew, Harold?" he would ask. "Well, you better eat it - or else." Then the two men would howl with laughter.

One night, after Thomas had wiped Harold's face with food, Harold grunted. "Did you hear that?" Alfred asked.

"It was Harold," Thomas said. "I was watching him when it happened. I can't believe it."

"How could he grunt?" Alfred asked, "He's just a sack of straw. It's not possible."

"Let's throw him in the fire," Thomas said, "and that will be that."

"Let's not do anything stupid," said Alfred. "We don't know what's going on. When we move the cows down, we'll leave him behind. For now, let's just keep an eye on him."

So they left Harold sitting in the corner of the hut. They didn't talk to him or take him outside anymore. Now and then the doll grunted, but that was all. After a few days, they decided there was nothing to be afraid of. Maybe a mouse or some insects had gotten inside Harold and were making those sounds.

So Thomas and Alfred went back to their old ways. Each morning they put Harold out in the garden, and each night they brought him back into the hut. When they felt playful, they joked with him. When they felt mean, they treated him as badly as ever.

Then one night Alfred noticed something that frightened him. "Harold is growing," he said.

"I was thinking the same thing." Thomas said.

"Maybe it's just our imagination," Alfred replied. "We have been up here on this mountain for too long."

The Next morning, while they were eating, Harold stood up and walked out of the hut. He climbed up on the roof and trotted back and forth, like a horse on its hind legs. All day and all night, he trotted like that. In the morning Harold climbed down and stood in a far corner of the pasture. The men had no idea what he would do next. They were afraid.

They decided to take the cows down into the valley that same day. When they left, Harold was nowhere in sight. They felt as if they had escaped a great danger and began joking and singing. But when they had gone only a mile or two, they realized they had forgotten to bring the milking stools.

Neither one wanted to go back for them, but the stools would cost a lot to replace. "There really is nothing to be afraid of," they told one another. "After all, what could a doll do?"

They drew straws to see which one would go back. It was Thomas. "I'll catch up with you." he said, and Alfred walked toward the valley.

When Alfred came to a rise in the path, he looked back for Thomas. He did not see him anywhere. But he did see Harold. The doll was on the roof of the hut again. As Alfred watched, Harold kneeled and stretched out a bloody skin to dry in the sun.

During the summer of 1983, in a quiet town near Minneapolis, Minnesota, the charred body of a woman was found inside the kitchen stove of a small farmhouse. A video camera was also found in the kitchen, standing on a tripod and pointing at the oven. No tape was found inside the camera at the time.

Although the scene was originally labeled as a homicide by police, an unmarked VHS tape was later discovered at the bottom of the farm's well (which had apparently dried up earlier that year).

Despite its worn condition, and the fact that it contained no audio, police were still able to view the contents of the tape. It depicted a woman recording herself in front of a video camera (seemingly using the same camera the police found in the kitchen). After positioning the camera to include both her and her kitchen stove in the image, the tape then showed her turning on the oven, opening the door, crawling inside, and then closing the door behind her. Eight minutes into the video, the oven could be seen shaking violently, after which point thick black smoke could be seen emanating from it. For the remaining 45 minutes of video, until the batteries in the camera died, it remained in its stationary position.

To avoid disturbing the local community, police never released any information about the tape, or even the fact that it was found. Police were also not able to determine who put the tape in the well.

Or why the height and stature of the woman in the video didn't come close to matching the body they'd found in the oven.

rather than cp the whole thing, here is a link:

http://everything2.com/e2node/The%2520Difference

go read it.

During the war a soldier faithfully wrote his mother every week so she would know he was all right, until one week she didn't get a letter and immediately began to worry. Within a couple of weeks she got a letter from the Army saying that her son had been captured and was being held in a Prisoner-of-War camp, and they assured her that they had no reason to believe the American prisoners were being mistreated in any way. A few weeks later the woman finally received another letter from her son, it read: "Dear Mom, Try not to worry about me, they are treating us well and I'll be released as soon as the war is over. Make sure that little Teddy gets the stamp for his collection. Love you, Joe" The woman was overjoyed to hear the news, but was confused because she had no idea who "little Teddy" was. She decided to steam the stamp from the envelope and have a look. When she did she saw that written on the back of the stamp were the words: "They've cut off my legs".

I started getting letters from you three weeks ago. They were weird, confusing things, but I knew it was your handwriting (you signed your name with the inverted F and you teased me about my tattoo, it had to be you) and I knew it was you. The first one read:

( Read more... )

read it:

http://www.unexplained-mysteries.com/column.php?id=110528

You get up in the morning, hungover. You roll over; your digital clock reads "MON 6:45". Shit, you think to yourself, you have work. Over the next hour you sluggishly get up and get ready for work. Before you leave the house you look in the mirror and admire your blue eyes. You truly believe you're a gift to women.

All day long at the office something is nagging you at the back of your mind, but you figure its just your previous night of drinking. In the car on the way home, however, it hits you.

Your eyes are brown.

In 1976, Cosmonaut Nikolai Peckmann was sent alone to an orbiting space station for what would be called Mission Six- to study the radiation levels and strange circumstances that killed all four crewmen of the last research mission.

By the third day, Peckmann's broken transmissions were coming back to ground control filled with increasing paranoia and delusion. He claimed that the spirits of the dead cosmonauts were coming to claim him, and that he had to keep moving to evade them. He shouted that if he could capture consume these spirits himself while he still had strength, he could move to the next level of consciousness...Truly the rantings of an insane man.

Indeed, video recovered later would show Peckmann running around the confined but maze-like station, downing emergency sedatives like a madman....pausing in a corner momentarily, only to throw back vitamin pills and give chase to his invisible demons.

He had exhausted the entire cargo of vitamins, pills, and fresh fruit well ahead of schedule. There was no way another crew could be assembled to rescue him before he starved. After one rather violently garbled transmission, the static cleared and the last live image on record is that of Peckmann's empty, wilted spacesuit on the cabin floor.

It was determined that another mission to recover any remains or gather any more research would be a waste of the people's money, and the station was allowed to drift out of orbit and into space- a failure never to be mentioned again. It was ordered and assumed that all video and paper evidence had been destroyed.

..then, at the dawn of the eighties, a fledgling arcade game company called NAMCO would stumble across the transcripts of these events, and the rest -as they say- is history.

My grandfather served in the European Theater of Operations during WWII, an experience he rarely talks much about. I've only managed to coax one story out of him.

He and a low-ranking officer (granddad was an enlisted man) were travelling by jeep somewhere in Belgium with a cache of much-needed ammunition. Taking a wrong turn on an unpaved road they first became lost, then began to run low on fuel. They sought to ask some locals for help, as the Belgians were highly sympathetic to the Allied effort.

They spied a small hamlet, made up of fewer than a dozen thatched huts, and began walking towards it. They were met halfway by a group of three men dressed mostly in animal skins, all of whom spoke angrily in a language neither of them understood (not French, not German, and certainly not English).

Negotiations proved futile, and one of the three drew a small rusty knife. The Lieutenant drew his .45 sidearm in return and killed the man when he rushed at them as if to attack. This act scared the other two off.

Eventually they repaired the jeep themselves and found their way back to base by the next day. A report was filed, but not much made of it. The following winter the Lieutenant was killed in an artillery barrage, making my grandfather the only known living witness to the event.

Now what's interesting is what reminded him of the story: we were watching a documentary on the development of language, this one specifically about the Saxon tongue, which thousands of years ago developed into languages like German and English. Granddad remarked how much it sounded like the words he'd heard that day.

In rural southern Illinois a toy company began selling "realistic" baby dolls to expectant mothers. But apparently after the mother had her child the toy baby would start crying. Eventually the "rocking motion" advertised to calm it down wouldn't work, and you couldn't get it to stop without shaking it. Eventually when it started crying the parent would have to beat it, and the beatings and thrashings would have to get harder and harder to get it to be quiet. The only thing that seemed to shut the baby doll up permanently was the bash its head against the wall to destroy whatever mechanism triggered the crying. On more than one occasion though, neighbors called the authorities to report child abuse, and when the police arrived they found the the bloody remains of infants smeared across the walls and the floor. In most cases the mother couldn't understand why the police were there, she just "got rid of the stupid doll" as she rocked a baby-shaped bundle in her arms.

There is a book that has only been spoken of in terrified whispers behind closed and locked doors. It is said that only seven people have ever seen this book over the course of all of human history and only four have opened it.

Only one man has ever read it.

The book...isn't really a book at all, but a machine. The binding opens and locks, with a grate in the center where the pages can slide through. When the book is opened, and the pages lie flat, they can be shifted into different positions. Each page is made of metal, the words embossed on it. On each edge of the page is a specially cut design; no two designs are the same. It is said that one must find the proper arrangement of each of the five hundred and thirty six pages and go to the "Rock of Chaos", where time is the only constant. It is a place of madness where lightning moves from all directions and the sky itself burns with an insane blue fire. The Rock is the face of an immense cliff, the bottom of which can never be seen by mortal eyes lest they go blind and mad. Somewhere on the face of the rock there is a single hole, an opening just the right size for the book. Properly aligned, the book must be brought to this "keyhole" at the exact moment specified by the stars and spoken of within the book. One places the book in the hole at the exact moment, and unlocks the Chaos Chain. This is a chain of pure ether, which runs from our world deep into that of the Void, and there, at the Throne of Darkness, the Chain binds that dark soul who rules the Void and would wreak apocalypse on us all: Unenon, the Blind Angel of Darkness.

What the book says...well, only one man ever read it, and it is said that he locked himself in his room for thirty days before emerging, tome in hand, and swore to take the book to the ends of the earth before he died.

He has never been seen or heard from since.

On the underside of your refrigerator there is a switch. Reach under there and feel for it. Don't mind the dust clumps and the roaches. You'll know it when you feel it, it's a hard metal tab sticking out of a slot in the plastic underside. I will be set on the righthand side (when you're facing the fridge). If you switch it to the left, nothing will happen. Your appliances will continue to run, the floor won't open into a swirling vortex that leads directly into the deepest circle of hell. You won't even hear a hitch in the hum of the refrigerator. You will get up and brush off and go about your business, you may move out of your apartment and leave the refrigerator behind, switch set to the left like it doesn't even matter.

When you die, five years later, the fingers, toes, and eyes of an unidentified person will be found in your stomach.

In Berlin, after World War II, money was short, supplies were tight, and it seemed like everyone was hungry. At that time, people were telling the tale of a young woman who saw a blind man picking his way through a crowd. The two started to talk. The man asked her for a favor: could she deliver the letter to the address on the envelope? Well, it was on her way home, so she agreed.

She started out to deliver the message, when she turned around to see if there was anything else the blind man needed. But she spotted him hurrying through the crowd without his smoked glasses or white cane. She went to the police, who raided the address on the envelope, where they found heaps of human flesh for sale.

And what was in the envelope? "This is the last one I am sending you today."

The assassination of John F. Kennedy started a macabre chain that continues to this day. Oswald killed Kennedy, Jack Ruby killed Oswald, this much we know. What few people are aware of is how far it continued after that.

In 1967 while awaiting retrial for the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald, Ruby died in Parkland Hospital (the place of death of both Oswald and JFK), some say due to the negligence of the doctor overseeing him. A few years following this, that same doctor died in an auto accident while on his way home. The driver of the car that struck him would make a full recovery, though the medical costs would bankrupt him and drive him to a life of crime. A store owner acting in self defense would be the one to claim his life, and so on.

Few have kept full track of the chain up 'til now, or how far from Dallas it's traveled, but many believe it still continues. Fewer still are sure if it started with Oswald and JFK, or if perhaps it goes further back than that... betraying some unknown transgression from President Kennedy's past.

Just be careful out there.

During a wedding reception of a young couple the guests decided on a drunken game of hide and seek. It was decided that the groom was "it" and he eventually found everyone but his new bride. Eventually the man became furious and decided it wasn't funny anymore and left her there. As weeks went by he accepted that she'd had second thoughts and went on with her life so he did the same. A few years later a cleaning lady dusted off an old trunk in the attic of the building where the reception had taken place, out of curiosity she opened it. Inside the trunk was the rotted body of the missing bride who'd apparently became locked in the trunk she'd hid in. Whether she'd suffocated or starved was unknown, but her face was frozen in a scream.

You're walking down your street, it's a gray, cloudy, unseasonably cold day.

As the brown leaves swirl about you, you hear, faintly yet distinctly, a baby crying. As you move toward the noise, it becomes the sound of a young girl sobbing. Closer you approach the sound, and as the wind picks up, it is clearly the sound of a young woman screaming. You race toward the corner, and as you near it, the sound becomes that of an old crone choking. Then silence as you turn the corner, revealing nothingg but a puddle of water on the sidewalk. As you look into the puddle, it seems your reflection is delayed by a few seconds...as if it is watching you and then mimicking you...

Prominently displayed in the children's section of the Houston Downtown Public Library, among several others of the same title, My First Cookbook appears as a run-of-the-mill children's cookbook, complete with large print, simple instructions, colorful, friendly illustrations and a somewhat disproportionate desert section. In fact, the only major deviation from this theme is an article near the end of the book entitled "A Recipe for Success". This is a complex, macabre ritual involving human sacrifice, self mutilation and sacrilege, as well as more curious and innocuous practices such as walking down a stair case with a prime number of stairs taking them two at a time and then up it taking them three at a time. It's written in the same cheerfully simple prose as the rest of the book and accompanied by the same helpful, pastel drawings.

I can't say where/when or how often this will work, but I've tried it a few times with mixed results. If for some reason you find you can't sleep one night, indigestion, test the next day, hard mattress, too many creepy threads, whatever, close your eyes and start to play a slow and deliberate game of patty-cake. If you keep it up long enough you may start to feel a pair of something coming back to meet your hands from the void. Congratulations, you've just summoned your first... something. I can't say it's important not to open your eyes at this point, but I didn't anyway. The first time I tried this was in my apartment when I had a presentation to give the following morning, a real toss-turn kind of night. For whatever reason I sat up and decided to put one hand out before me and I felt a faint tingle from a rather low angle. I unconsiously started to play and after a while I noticed I was humming some sort of tuneless lulliby. After about an hour or so whatever was playing on the other end stopped and I went into a deep, dreamless and very restful sleep. I tried this trick again at my girlfriend's parents house while she was with me in their crappy spare bed (I was facing back to her, legs over the side of the bed, eyes closed). After about twenty minutes this time it actually felt like a pair of solid hands, from a much higher angle than before, was coming back and hitting mine a bit harder every time. Suddenly the game stopped and something made a noise in my right ear like a human shriek combined with car breaks causing me to cringe before it ran up the wall behind me into the ceiling. Maybe whatever was in that house had outgrown the game. I still slept ok. For all I know I was just hitting the wall/my blanket tiring my own gullible self out and my girlfriend's just a noisy bitch but... I still can't wait to try it again the next time I can't sleep. Still not sure what happens if you open your eyes, though.

The four-leaf clover supposedly brings luck. Have you ever found a four leaf clover?

You have.

And it didn't bring you luck at all, did it?

Of course, it's hardly recognizable as a four-leaf clover at all, but the name attributed to it means exactly that: four leaves.

It is called the Yotsuba, and it is horror incarnate.