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stevie-finds · 5 months ago

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"Tape 1" - Retrospective

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This was the first of a series of emails sent to me by an old friend of mine, Piper, back in 2023. We lived pretty far apart from each other at the time, so she would send me things she’d found that she thought I’d like in emails or by post (if it was a physical item she wanted me to have).

She had a tendency to get involved in mysteries- or at least, what she deemed as ‘mysteries’.

She was always smarter and more outgoing than I was, being very introverted and bookish myself, she was constantly blamed for getting me into trouble as a kid. She’s always created fantastical situations for us both out of boredom.

At first, this is what I thought the tapes were, until she stopped emailing, messaging, and calling me altogether.

I am still unsure as to why I am sharing the tapes she sent me- she sure as hell isn’t ‘missing’ in any conventional sense so it’s not like I’m raising awareness for anything; it wouldn’t surprise me if she went off-grid for a bit, but I would at least expect her to tell me.

Back when I first got the emails, I didn’t look as much into it as I have done now- I assumed that Piper was just keeping it to herself this time since she didn’t share her findings with me which was very unusual (though not outside of the realm of possibility.)

But in unearthing this email, and the subsequent ones, I’ve felt myself drawn towards her mystery game. So I started digging, following the first trail of breadcrumbs: “Elmsbury”.

***

Of course, I started by Googling it. I think I must’ve scrolled down for hours on my tiny laptop touchpad to no avail- I decided to sod it off and try something different in the morning, telling myself that if I couldn’t come across anything concrete I’d give up. I’m not the most resilient person.

The next day, I decided to go old-school and take a trip to my local library to see if they had anything archived with the word “Elmsbury” in it. I took my old camera with me to take photos for this blog too, just so you guys can feel included :).

I live down south, far away from where Piper lived in the West Midlands, so I wasn’t extremely hopeful that I’d come across anything strictly West Mids-local (assuming that the person on the other end of the tape recorder was from nearby). I couldn’t find anything in the archives, but upon mentioning “Elmsbury” off-hand to one of the librarians- an older man, very tall and broad, he looked to be roughly in his 40’s- his ears pricked up.

He asked me where I’d heard the word before, and I told him a friend mentioned it- he looked extremely pale, his mouth slightly open and jaw mechanically opening and closing as if something were lodged halfway up his throat.

I rounded up all of my inner-Piper, and asked how he knew the word, and he told me it was the name of a small town he had found himself stuck in around 10 years ago: “Elmsbury-Gallows”.

He said he couldn’t really get into the whole story in detail as small parts were “falling away” from him- I assumed he meant he forgot them. He did tell me about a forum post he made around the time it happened, though, which he found for me on a library computer. Apparently, that was the only way of finding it- I tried to copy the URL into my phone and all I got was an error message. Interesting.

I tried to email myself the link from the library computer, but when I got home, I couldn’t open the link. I had to go back the next day and copy-paste it into an email to send to myself.

Here is the forum post:

***

Titled: "Has Anyone Heard of Elmsbury-Gallows?"

Posted to a paranormal experiences forum on 4th August, 2019

I live in England in the rural West Midlands, someplace between Tamworth and Burton but I won’t get into too many details since I’m not a fan of doxxing myself; I will say though, that Tamworth is closer to where I am but Burton is where I go for work and it’s about an hour and a half drive there from where I live. However, the lengths of the journeys back home really vary since I really enjoy the longer drives down rural backroads through the countryside, especially in the winter as nighttime drives are my favourite. It’s just something about the curling of the road only visible a few feet ahead of the car, as if the map is just rendering in as you move along it.

I’ve taken a different route home nearly every journey back out of Burton, but I’ve been working there for nearing on seven years now so I have pretty much all of them committed to memory, regardless of season, and I’ve only ever gotten lost out there twice: once being the first time I ever tried to take a detour home, and the second time in January of 2015 on my way back from an evening shift.

I wasn’t the last to pack up that night, but the rush hour traffic out of Burton made it so I actually left the town around 7:30pm, still with an hour and a half before I even got remotely close to home. I remember driving away and watching in my peripheral as the lights reflected in my rear-view mirror gradually became more distant, dying down and fizzling out as I turned into a new-build estate that I often cut through to get onto a B-road that led through the countryside back towards my hometown. The housing estate was very pristine and new, built a year prior to this event, I think, and I once got lost in there trying to cut through since every junction, semi-detached red-brick nightmare, and cul-de-sac looked so similar. The light in each window was a pale yellow, beaming down onto the pavement below though never reaching the road; it made me feel safe and hidden there in the dark, despite my headlights on low-beam; the only other lights in the neighbourhood were the small modernist patio lamps out front of the houses, but as soon as I turned onto the B-road home, the winter evening swallowed the light behind me, leaving me floating through that darkness only really found deep into the rural countryside.

I drive a 1989 Toyota Camry, so on nights like those I tended to listen to my old cassette tapes- I collect them, and have dabbled in making one or two janky mixtapes. I remember what I listened to that night: it was the album Squeeze by The Velvet Underground. A friend got me into it in university, what must’ve been ten years ago at the time that this happened to me. With the stereo on, I continued my drive as usual, flicking my full beam headlights on and off as the rare other driver came round the camber on the other side of the road. In between these sparse encounters, it was only me and the road unfolding in front of me listening to the hazy sound of 60’s rock.

This was my first drive back home from work after coming back after Christmas, so the route must not have been as fresh in my mind as I thought it would be, and I only realised that I missed my turning as I drove into a town that I didn’t recognise. I would describe it best as ‘sleepy’, though sleeping as though it were having an uncomfortable nightmare. As my tyres crunched on the road, they made an almost hollow rumbling, as if the whole place were built on a concave housing something curled up underneath it. The town was entirely overrun by fog: thick, impermeable fog that flowed and meandered like water over the pavements and through the cracks under doors. It was a little run-down, but looked like it had once been quite quaint.

I pulled up on the side of the road, switching on my phone to check Google Maps for a route out of here, only to find that I had no signal. I decided it was no matter, though, as I’m pretty adept at navigation, and it wouldn’t be difficult to just turn around and retrace my steps until I came back across the turning I missed.

So, I did. I reversed, and drove back down what I thought was the road I had just driven along, back onto the B-road and finding the turning and making it. I tried very hard not to focus on how little I recognised this road and just continue driving. A few minutes later, I arrived back in the town I had just left from.

This, obviously, confused me- I hadn’t been too clued in on which road I was driving down, but I was damn sure that I hadn’t just driven in a circle. I crawled my way through the town looking for any road signs, until I came across a small Tudor pub called The King Henry. I decided to park up and go inside, set on getting directions out of here and back towards my hometown. By this time, I think it was nearing on 9pm.

I entered the tiny pub and made my way towards the bar. There was a kid manning it, they looked around 16, with a mess of bright ginger hair, painted black fingernails and a black t-shirt with some manga cover on it, I think? I don’t know, I’m not really into all that kind of stuff. I asked if I could talk to their boss, to which they craned their head over their shoulder and yelled: “Muuuuuum!” into the back room. They gave a thumbs up before a shorter woman, also with bright ginger hair, made her way over to me. She asked what she could help me with and I told her I needed directions back towards Tamworth- I figured she was more likely to know how to get there rather than directly back to my home. I figured I’d get to Tamworth and just take the main roads home. The woman told me I was in a town called Elmsbury-Gallows, and that my best bet at getting out towards Tamworth would be to go southward on Main Street onto Elmsbury Way, then head towards Deerfolk Way before veering off right onto Eastford Road. This, I was told, would lead me out of town- I’d then continue forwards until I hit a roundabout and take the third exit towards Tamworth. I asked her for a pen and sticky note so I could jot down the directions and stick them to my steering wheel so I wouldn’t forget.

When she vanished off into the back room, a tall man came up and sat next to me at the bar. He greeted me warmly, as if we knew each other, then gave me a wide grin, though his glasses had magnified his black eyes so largely that I couldn’t make out any smile creases next to them in order to tell if he was being genuine or not. He shook my hand when I introduced myself, telling me his name was: “Reverend James Fairfax, but you can call me ‘Jim’, everyone does.” When he asked why I was in Elmsbury- clearly sensing an outsider- I hesitated, a nagging feeling at the back of my head warning me not to tell him I’d gotten lost. I ended up telling him I was just passing through, though my lie was quickly revealed when the owner returned from the back room with my sticky note with directions on it. She said hi to Jim, who gave me a look of something close to triumph? Like he knew all along that I had lied to him. I quickly got up and headed out, back to my car.

When I reached it, there was a man leaning against it, chain smoking. He was short, dark haired, and flinched when I gently tapped his shoulder and asked him to get off my car. He was clearly very drunk as he had been leaning all of his weight onto one hand propping him up on my bonnet, which had left a handprint seared into the frost. I watched him stumble away to lean against a brown VW Beetle as I got back into my own vehicle, sticking my directions to the steering wheel and muttering them to myself before setting off. I started my car and drove off towards Elmsbury Way.

***

The fog was so unbearably thick that I had to lean forward in the driver’s seat and squint at the road to see better. It had been about fifteen minutes, and I think I got onto Deerfolk Way when my car stalled; stopping with a splutter in the middle of the road, headlights flickering off and my cassette tape ejecting from the stereo and into the passenger seat. I sat for a moment, listening to the deathly silence of the night, no longer assisted by the streetlamps of the town since I’d driven a little way out now. I cursed loudly, and am ashamed to say I threw a little tantrum in my car and cried quite pathetically. It felt it was unfair that this was happening, although there was precious little I could do to change things. I didn’t want to open my door and get out and risk letting the heat escape from my car into the cold January night, so I checked my phone to see if I had signal enough to call for help: very much not to my surprise, it was a dead zone. I cried again.

I had stopped on a small gravel road between a sprawling crop field and the outskirts of the forest that surrounded Elmsbury-Gallows- neither of which looked all too welcoming, and I seriously didn’t like the option of a probable 30-45 minute walk all the way back into town. There did look to be a small farm up on the hill past the crop field, however none of the windows had any light in them, and since it was now human contact I was looking for, it didn’t strike me as being very promising. Honestly, at this point I was more so looking for a bed to sleep in for the night. I think now is a good time to mention that I’m a man of about 6’5 and 300lbs, so sleeping horizontally in the backseat of my car wasn’t looking too appealing to me if I wanted to keep the blood flow in my arms and legs.

I was just about to brave the walk back into town when a small trickle of smoke caught my eye, rising above the treeline. A forest fire? Borderline impossible in the UK in January. Campers then, maybe. Also, borderline impossible in the UK in January. Someone must live out there. From where I was, the smoke didn’t look that far out, and I resolved that my best bet was to walk towards what I had decided was my saviour in the forest and ask if they had a spare room. This sounded like a flawless plan to a brain running on a 6am start, four coffees, and a pot noodle from lunchtime. As I picked up my things and zipped up my coat against the burningly cold outside, I reassured myself that I was physically imposing enough to scare off anything that wished me harm: we don’t really get nighttime predators like wolves or bears in the UK anyway- I think the biggest wild animal I’d ever seen up until that point had been a fox. Regardless, I picked up a big stick as I walked into the forest: nobody’s gonna mess with a 300lb giant wielding a tree branch. I checked the time: 10:43pm.

Basically, as soon as the road disappeared behind me, the little cabin came into view. It sat squat in a clearing, camouflaged against the forest save for the tiny orange rims of the windows which I guessed was the light of the fire inside being absorbed into the tightly-drawn blinds. Smoke trailed up from the chimney, and under the awning on the wooden deck I could see an axe sticking out of a chopping block, bits of splinters and kindling littered around it. The place smelled very strongly of pine- I guessed because it was a pine forest, but it was overpoweringly strong here. I breathed a small sigh of relief, happy that the cabin was closer to the road than I thought and a little impressed with myself for taking this risk and having it pay off.

I knocked on the door and tossed aside my big stick, now wanting to appear as non-threatening as I could in order to maximise my chances of being allowed to stay. I was expecting an old, lumberjack-type to answer the door, or maybe a little old lady, but the woman who made eye contact with me through the gap of the open door looked no older than 35. The chain latch was pulled taught, a line just under her singularly visible wide hazel eye, and she asked me what I wanted in a low voice. I explained to her my situation, trying my best not to come across like some kind of serial killer, and after a moments hesitation she undid the latch and let me in, saying that she had a spare room her family used sometimes when they came to visit her. Before closing the door behind me, she poked her head out onto the porch, looking from left to right very quickly, as if she were checking for something. The warmth of the cabin pressed in on me, and I awkwardly took off my coat and hung it on a deer ivory hat stand.

The cabin was homely and a lot more modernized than I initially thought it would be. There was a large, hand-crocheted rug on the floor of the living room, along with matching handmade blankets and pillow-covers. The fire glowed a sultry amber in its hearth, and I briefly noted the presence of a hunting rifle mounted on the wall above the mantlepiece, looming over the framed family photos and bric-a-brac. My host was a short- though most people are short to me- pale woman wearing a cable-knit blue sweater and baggy grey joggers tucked into Ugg boots. She had short-cropped curly blonde hair and a sour expression; when we made eye contact again, she slid her chipped, bitten fingernails back up into her sleeves. I thought she looked a little nervous of me, so I introduced myself and tried to think of a way of saying “I’m not a rapist, I promise!” without sounding like I was in fact a rapist. I’m not, and I wasn’t- just to clarify.

She told me her name was Imogen, and followed that up by offering me some hot chocolate. I sheepishly asked if she had any food I could eat as well, only now realizing just how starving I was. She told me to help myself to what she had in her fridge. I opened it, craving a bacon or sausage sandwich: something substantial, but was disappointed to find that there were no meat products whatsoever. At the time, I assumed she was vegetarian. I poured myself a bowl of cornflakes, thanking her through a mouthful of them for the hot chocolate she’d made me. Something about watching a grown man scoff down cereal and cocoa like it was his first meal in months as he profusely thanked her for letting him stay seemed to indicate to Imogen that I wasn’t so much of a threat after all.

We chatted for a bit, I can’t really remember what about, but at some point I must have asked her why she lived out here in the forest- politely, of course, I actually used to like the idea of a little secluded cabin in the woods. Used to. She told me that she loved nature, and that she had a friend who wanted to be a conservationist that she was meant to go to uni to study biology with back in the 90’s. They had both worked in the National Park which apparently the town had, though she told me that it had been closed down a number of years ago. I asked why it had closed and she hesitated, staring off a little past my shoulder for a moment before telling me that her friend went missing one evening in the park. They never found her.

There was a moment then, and a ghostly whistle of wintery wind hit the cabin. Wanting to change the subject, but not really knowing how, I pretended to shiver and asked if it ever got scary out here alone in the woods. She raised an eyebrow, eyes flicking back towards the hunting rifle on the wall, which caused me to quickly clarify that I only meant to ask if she had any ghost stories. Look, I was in a strange town in a little log cabin in the woods- why wouldn’t I want to hear a ghost story?

Imogen told me then, a little up-front, that so long as The Moonsilver Hunter didn’t find us, we’d be safe. Initially, I thought she was joking- given the context, I assumed she was just referencing a local legend that I wasn’t privy to as an outsider- so I chuckled and asked her who The Moonsilver Hunter was. She stared at me, deadpan, then repeated a tale in the cadence of an old children’s story.

“The Moonsilver Hunter,” she told me, “Is an old fairytale- a local one, anyway. My dad used to tell it to me to scare me to sleep. I think they even once told it to us in primary school after a kid went missing in the forest; it’s actually a pretty famous case, made National News, you’d recognise it if you saw it- the kid went missing on a Cub’s hike in the forest, no trace of him was ever found except three milk teeth showing up in a dog’s vomit weeks later?”

I actually had heard about this, and told Imogen that. She said she thought I would have, then continued, “well, The Moonsilver Hunter is pretty well-known around here, ask any 80’s or 90’s kid and they’ll be able to tell it all by memory,” she shook her head, realising she was getting a little side-tracked, “anyway, the story goes that The Moonsilver Hunter was originally a young man who lived out in these woods with his father in the early 1900’s, though some people say it was the late 1800’s- hell, I’ve even heard someone say once that it was in the English Civil War period but, whatever—” she redirected herself, “—he lived out here with his ailing father. A senile man who he cared for alone out here in a little cabin as they had both been shunned from the town. Together out in the forest, they began to develop a sort of folie-a-deux- this shared madness that would feed one another’s delusions which all started when the young man’s father began talking about a ‘moon-silver wolf whose hide is strong as armour, and whose blood is pure and holy as an Angel’s’.”

She smiled to herself, “I will always remember that part—anyway, the man’s father would talk on and on about this wolf, saying how in his younger years he really wanted to capture it as a trophy: to wear its hide and drink its blood in the hopes of achieving a sort of immortality. As the cabin fever began to eat away at the young man’s mind, he started to think about going out and capturing this wolf: rationalising that he could use its hide to protect himself from attacks from townsfolk, and its blood to heal his father’s ailments and slowly deteriorating mind. This madness grew into a righteous conviction, and one winter’s night, he packed his rifle and net and ventured out to track and trap the beast.”

“So, he wandered out deep into the forest until the early hours of the morning when a little off into a glade, he saw the shining hide of the moon-silver wolf. Taking his chance, he aimed and shot, hitting the wolf in its side and knocking it to the ground- he ran up to it, elated that he had actually managed to get the thing, and aimed to slit its throat to bottle its blood before carrying it back home to skin. So, he cut, and as the blood pooled in the bottom of the little glass bottle a scent wafted up from the wolf: a scent like red wine, honey, and ambrosia- like a warm-baked cake or sweet, honey-roasted ham. The blood was said to be angelic, after all, and the smell alone was enough to convince the young man that this was fact. Not only could this blood heal his father, but couldn’t it also give him immortality? There was certainly enough to go around.”

“Overcome, he put his mouth to the wound he had opened and began to drink. After drinking his fill, he tried to pull away, only to find that his tongue seemed to be stuck to the wound like it was an icy pole, and with each pull a new part of him stuck, until his head had entirely fused with the wolf’s, tearing it from its body and attaching itself to his neck. Now with the head of the moon-silver wolf, the man was overcome with an animalistic, primal bloodlust, and to this day he stalks the woods at night, hunting rifle on his back, empty bottles strapped to his waist, seeking to track down and drain the blood of anything awake after sundown.”

I sat for a moment, stunned, asking if she still believed the story. I felt a little pang of fear as she emphatically nodded her head ‘yes’.

“He was what took Sydney. He made her missing.”

She followed that pretty harrowing statement up by telling me that The Moonsilver Hunter was drawn to the smell of meat, and to the sight of light, and that the real reason she was out here was to finally catch him and kill him for taking her friend.

I was regretting not taking that 45 minute cold walk back into town, now fairly certain that The King Henry had a sign outside that said it rented some rooms upstairs. Imogen was clearly not too well, and I didn’t want to make any wrong moves that could make her lash out at me in fear. I was pretty confident that I could overpower her on my own, if worse came to worst, but I probably couldn’t overpower a bullet.

I made some obvious excuse to go and eat the rest of my cereal in my room, and though I could tell she saw through my bullshit she let me go anyway. I walked into my room, repeating to myself over and over in my head that this was just for one night. In the morning, I could get her to drive me out into town or call for help on her landline.

My little room for the night was cozy, and I remember being impressed that the bed frame and chest-of-drawers looked to be handmade from pine wood. The prospect that Imogen had maybe hand-crafted most, if not all, of the furniture in her house- and possibly even the house itself- overshadowed her concerning neurosis and I truly felt like a guest in that moment. I had my own little en-suite: I tried turning on the shower, but it didn’t work, so I resorted to just to washing my face in the sink and using the mouthwash I prayed wasn’t that expired from the little cupboard above it. When retrieving it, I tried not to make too long of eye contact with the empty prescription pill bottles filed inside the cabinet- at least Imogen seemed to be taking her meds, or have been taking them. I sank down into bed, checking the time on my phone: 12:03am. I prayed that the night would pass quickly so I could just get home.

***

I think it was around 4am when I woke up needing water. I was annoyed: I had been hoping that I could get this all over with fast, so I decided to just grab the water before I could procrastinate doing it and get back to sleep as soon as possible. I stood up, and realized that I probably didn’t want to accidentally bump into Imogen wearing just my boxers; I really couldn’t be bothered to put my work uniform back on just to grab some water, so I threw on the bathrobe that I saw hanging in the bathroom and decided that would simply do.

I shuffled into the open kitchen, flicking on and off the lights until I found the switch for the ones that just illuminated the countertops. The sound of the water filling my glass was so loud against the silence of the night that I nearly missed the whistling coming from outside. It was a sharp, commanding whistle, like a hunter calling for his dogs. I froze, trying to convince myself that I was just sleep deprived and Imogen’s story had got to me subconsciously until I heard it again. And it was closer. And it was calling out to me.

I looked up, and against the blackout blinds, the silhouette of a wolf’s head peered in. I had to cover my mouth to stifle a yell- my first thought was that it was somehow Imogen trying to scare me: that she had told me that ghost story to rile me up and was now fucking around outside in a costume to really hammer the prank home.

It wasn’t funny. I damn near shit myself.

The shape on the blackout blinds was still, unmoving, though I could see the shadow of plumes of hot breath slowly drifting up from it as if the thing were panting. It was leering at me through the blinds, and we both stood in this strange acknowledgement of each other, silently. It lifted a thin hand, putting it to its lips as it shushed me. I know it shushed me because I heard it. A single, loud, rushing shushing noise, piercing through the cabin. I stood there, stunned into silence, as it turned and walked round the side of the cabin, my eyes following its silhouette against the blackout blinds, once catching its eye through a gap between the blind and the window as it circled round the front of the house. It’s eye was round and tiny and humanoid- like taxidermy. I had to wait for a few minutes before I felt like I could move. Before I was sure that it had gone.

I lay awake until I saw daylight peeking round through the edges of the blinds in my room- only then my mind felt it was safe enough to sleep.

***

In the morning, Imogen told me she had called into town. Apparently, a local who lived up on Johnson’s Farm (the farm up on the hill near where I broke down) had called the local police about my car since it appeared to have been abandoned. I got home alright, albeit a little unsettled- someone actually whistled at me to get my attention as I zoned out at a green light, and it made me jump. I hope Imogen is okay- I still get a little worried about her alone out there in the woods as she’s clearly not well mentally. I’m trying to pretend that fear stems solely from a place of rationality like that.

It's been years but this occurrence still sticks with me- I think I may have even spoken to my therapist at the time about it, since I was scared it could have been a hallucination of some kind, but it was a one-off as far as I’m concerned. I haven’t had any visual hallucinations since then. It actually wasn't until recently that I looked to see if I could find a route to Elmsbury-Gallows, mainly to check up on Imogen again. Every road map, local library, local encyclopedia, anything I tried to look into to find the town came up with nothing. As far as everyone else is concerned, Elmsbury-Gallows does not exist.

#alternate reality game #analog horror #arg #alternate universe #internet horror #unreality #horror #short horror #r/nosleep #Youtube

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