#i couldve sworn i saw a typo in this when i reread it a little while ago but ive lost it and cant find it again

[writinglittlebeasts]

The Lurch - a short horror story

in 2021, i wrote a horror story from the perspective of a paranormal magazine journalist (think, like, an online publication) chasing down an urban legend in made-up town, pennsylvania and getting a bit too close for comfort

without further ado (under the cut): the lurch (i took a screenshot of the title in my document because i love this font, sorry lmao)

content warnings for animal death (mentioned and implied) and personal injury

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You come by a lot of stories about monsters in the mountains. It’s hard to avoid them, honestly, when the light from any given street or home seems almost snuffed out at the treeline. Forests so thick that you can’t see the neighbors. As these things go, it’s often children who tell these stories; shapes in the dark, noises they haven’t yet familiarized themselves with and can’t place, and on. The rumor mill of the elementary school playground works quick and constant, and there are always new stories to go around. If you look hard enough between the lines you’ll find glimmers of real fear inside. In between the boogeymen and the bullshit there are things that your cleverest parents can’t explain. If schoolchildren make the most monsters-- and if stories of this nature so often trickle down --then it follows that to get to the root of the truth and the source of the story, you need to look to the teenagers. 

My introduction to Trailhead, Pennsylvania was idyllic, in a word. When you look at it, it feels very clean; touristy. The taxi stood on the curb before a small park, a bubbling fountain in the center and trimmed hedges in neat rows at neat intervals between cobbled footpaths. There were three motels, catty-corner to each-other and almost ringing the park, their parking lots deserted in the off-season. The street was quiet, several shops were closed while others hosted one or two employees that I could see through their large front windows. It was very centralized, as these places often are, waiting to shake off the last dredges of winter and open their arms to waves of transients. Waves pouring out the doors of these three motels, one of which I would call my home while I researched idyllic Trailhead’s darker tales. 

One tale in particular had caught my eye. 

Schoolyards work the same way in every town. Mine is no exception, and my niece regales me with rumors while I pack her lunch in the morning and while I help her tidy her room before bed. On one such evening, poring over her homework, she told me a story that one of her classmates had told her, one he himself was told on a family trip to Trailhead, Pennsylvania in the fall. To hear her tell it, somewhere in the woods, up the mountain, is a monster made of sagging skin and limp hair which drags itself over the ground by its boney fingernails. She explained to me that it eats small animals and leaves traces of itself where it passes, though she was unsure what these traces might be. Between her mother’s scolding and her pencil etching short lines into her workbook she told me that its name is The Lurch, and that it was all the rage in Pennsylvania. 

The nature of my work means that I didn’t immediately dismiss this story. I was interested in its origins, how much I could find. Whether it was local to Trailhead or was more widespread, like your jackalope or your killer clown. I found nothing online. Other lurches exist, but not of the sort that my niece described. On the heels of my last article, I brought this curious story to my editor. They agreed that it was interesting, but had no contacts in Pennsylvania who might know more. I had my own, but the fact that I made the trip to Pennsylvania in person might tell you that they knew nothing at all. 

Setting my bag on the floor and turning back to look out over the parking lot, over the park and quiet street, I couldn’t help but feel that I knew nothing at all. It was hard to look at these little brick buildings with their white roofs and pristine surroundings and imagine that it could birth a monster like The Lurch my niece had told me about. The next day I would venture into town and the suburb that sprawls around it, and if I was lucky I would find out just how it might have. 

In the morning the sun woke me even through the dark motel curtains. I thought, quite optimistically as I hadn’t come out of sleep and to my senses and likewise hadn’t been in town for very long, that the sun itself wanted me to start my investigation. 

I started it in the donut shop where I ate my breakfast. I say donut shop, but it felt like a waystation. There were no tables or chairs, only a long room with a door at one end and a counter packed with toppings at the other. They fried your donuts fresh, just behind the counter and to order. While my donut-- a large, advertised as they were by size on a menu board over the workstation --fried, I spoke to the baker. When I asked him if he had ever heard of The Lurch he set his gloved hands on the counter between us and looked up at the ceiling for a long moment, only the sound of dough fighting oil filling the air until he finally shook his head. 

“Can’t say that I have,” he said, and turned back to his fryer. Tonging my donut out of the oil he continued, “But I don’t think you have to worry about it, you know?” 

After assuring him that I did and collecting my donut, I thanked him for his time and ventured back out onto the street. Shops that had been dark and empty yesterday were now cheerfully lit and their employees bustled about inside like they were waiting for me to come in. They probably were. It seemed like I was the first new face they’d seen in weeks. 

I toured through every store on the main street, exchanging polite greetings and answering the same questions about where I’d come from and how I was enjoying the town. Asking these shopkeepers my questions was somewhat less predictable. A few didn’t want to be interviewed at all, which I had to accept though it frustrated me. Most of them knew a little of the story, second or third-hand from one of their children, but could only nod along with my retelling, offering no details of their own. 

One shop’s register was tended by a young individual who couldn’t have been more than a year out of college who was intrigued by my article and offered a similar outline of The Lurch’s story to that of my niece. The Lurch was a monster made of misshapen flesh that ate small animals and dragged itself along the ground. They did add one detail that my niece had missed, however: that The Lurch would eat any animal that it came across, including human beings. It was a small victory, but any information is useful information when the story seems so small itself. I thanked the individual and left their shop, knowing that I would need to go deeper to learn what I wanted to know. I would need to go to the source. 

My interviews with the teenagers were informal. The town of Trailhead is small and amusements are largely expensive, but in posting myself up at a diner close to the high school I was confident that I would get to speak to many of its students, and I was right. They poured in in groups of two or more and sat around large baskets of french fries, some milling from table to table when they would recognize friends who arrived after or before and escaped notice. I approached them in their larger groups with my notebook in hand. Of course, the table quieted when I appeared beside it. It was only after I explained myself and told them what I was hoping to learn that they started to open up to me, some students even waiting expectantly for their turn at my ear. I found it refreshing, in a way, after the enthusiastic but dry interviews I’d conducted that morning. 

Before I name any names, I want to make it clear that all of those names have been changed to protect the identities of both the minors who have assisted me and of other individuals who would rather not be associated with my article or larger publication. I make this clear because I have to, but I word it in this way because Andrew (which is not his name) didn’t believe that I would and threatened to read my article to ensure that I had. The fiend. I hope that you enjoyed the lengthy passage above, Andrew (which is not his name), which I’m assuming that you had to read to find this disclaimer, and that the disclaimer itself met your expectations. 

The first student to answer me, I will call Josephine. They were bracketed on either side by school friends and soft drinks, and the longer we talked, the more of their friends joined in to add details or contradictions, the more enthusiastic they became. Josephine told me that The Lurch was a local legend, a so-called cryptid that the teenagers used to scare younger kids around town. I asked if that meant that they didn’t believe in The Lurch, but they shook their head and told me that they did. Rather, they told me that they did, almost. They wanted to believe in a flesh-eating monster living in the woods outside their town, but it was hard without any proof. When the story was so fantastic. I asked which parts of the story seemed fantastic, and a second student answered: “All of it.” 

Different students chimed in, some from adjacent booths. One said that The Lurch had arms but no legs, and I nodded. As there were no known species of animal with only one or the other, I took it down in my notebook. One said that The Lurch had no mouth and was shouted down by everyone at his table, who then insisted that eating small animals was a tenet of the legend and therefore it had to have a mouth. Nothing could survive without a mouth, they said, and he was forced to concede. I took it down in my notes regardless, interested in any variations to the story. You really can’t help but wonder how a creature might eat small animals without one, even if it is irrelevant. Others told me that my investigation was a waste of time, as The Lurch couldn’t have been real. When I asked what they meant, one of the students told me very matter-of-factly that if pets were going missing with any real frequency then they would have heard about it by now. I had to agree. I made a note of it. 

I next asked if any of them had stories of encounters with The Lurch. None present had personal experience, but I heard six stories in that diner. The rough outline of each, with variations only on minor details, involved someone (whose name was a topic of debate among the group) stumbling upon a creature which dragged itself along the ground in the middle of a meal. The observer would hide themselves, and in the disgusting fashion of any good story about a monster they would hear the blood-curdling screams of The Lurch’s victim. Of the six stories, five took place at night. The sixth wasn’t popular with the students, who insisted that if someone had seen The Lurch in a gas station parking lot during regular business hours then it would have been all over the news. 

I asked before I left if any of the students had ever heard of The Lurch eating humans. Every one of them had, but they assured me that somebody at school must have made that up to scare elementary schoolers. They couldn’t answer when I asked who had done it. I wasn’t about to try to interview elementary schoolers, either. That lead was a bust, but I didn’t cross the note off of my list. It was part of the greater story, and I hadn’t gotten to the bottom of it yet. 

I spent the next morning interviewing employees at the Trailhead ecology center. It was small, and it was closed when I arrived. Both employees had jobs at a university out of town, but lived in Trailhead and maintained the center for local outreach and coordination with the Trailhead school district. I was interested in animals that could be found locally, more specifically local predators. How they could have impressed themselves into the local consciousness as a monster. The employees were very helpful, but I couldn’t make any determinations based on what they told me about local carnivorans. Hoping to make any progress at all I inquired after any animals that may have only forelegs, but they had no knowledge of any animals like that in the area. I thanked them and returned to my last haunt: the diner.

It took some convincing, and then a little more convincing by way of a cash bribe, but I found a group of teenagers willing to take me up the mountain. On my insistence, Josephine’s older brother agreed to come along. His name is not Andrew, and he used to frequent trails up the mountain before he settled into his career at the local auto repair. He was skeptical of my motivations until I reminded him that I was a strange woman paying a handful of teenagers to follow me into the woods, and agreed very quickly after that. 

There were five of us in all when we met for our first leg of the search; myself, Andrew, Josephine, Charlotte, and Nathan. None claimed to have seen The Lurch themselves, but the students wanted to see what I found-- if I found anything --and were more familiar with the woods than I. Josephine and Nathan alternated leading the charge, conferring with one-another before deciding which forking path to take or how far to stray off of it. Saturday and Sunday we found nothing at all, picking our way up the trails with our eyes on the ground for any evidence of a body crashing through the undergrowth or of animals that body might have eaten. We managed three trails in one afternoon, turning back when we deemed we’d gone too far. 

It’s poor investigation, but our determination of ‘too far’ was arbitrary. I am no woodsman, and while the trails were beautiful they were also very boring and offered little by way of tracking a monster which may or may not have existed based on very little evidence of behavior. Charlotte shared my opinion, and on the third day of our search she decided to discontinue her involvement with the investigation. I racked my brain for information that might prove more forthcoming but came up empty-handed. 

The students had a test on Thursday for which they needed to prepare, so on Wednesday I languished in my motel room and tried to make sense of my findings. I don’t go into these situations expecting to find a monster or a creature; it’s even rare for me to arrive expecting an animal. After all of my interviews and days in the woods I still had little evidence. The stories were consistent, but was this a hint of fact or a story that had been concentrated by time and tale? I didn’t want to admit that there was nothing to find, even though all of the signs seemed to be telling me so. Like something stuck in my teeth I couldn’t help but think about The Lurch. It was possible that someone had made it up, passed it around until it became a local legend, but something as absurd as a creature of flesh, subsisting on any meat it could find and dragging itself along the ground, with very few, relatively plain second-hand accounts of encounters hardly had so much sticking power in the public consciousness as The Lurch seemed to have in Trailhead. Even children grow bored of tall tales eventually, but The Lurch persisted like it were being told in a round. I left the motel to perform more interviews. If I went further from the motel, if I could find a grocery store or a neighborhood park, maybe I might find someone who knew more. 

I didn’t make it to the grocery store, but I found myself passing an auto repair shop. Directionless and curious, I paid a visit to Andrew. He was in the middle of something when I let myself into the open garage, elbows-deep in someone’s chassis. 

I asked Andrew if he knew of anyone who might know more about The Lurch, its habits or its diet or its location. I explained my fruitless research at the ecology center and I told him that I was ready to branch out-- that perhaps there were parents who knew more, or otherwise older members of the community. 

Andrew seemed uncertain for a moment, but he admitted that he hadn’t been entirely honest with me. Now that I write it down, I wonder if my comment about students’ families seemed accusatory. I was frustrated, but I wasn’t angry; often in my line of work people will withhold information out of fear of looking foolish, or superstitious. I don’t mean to sound proud when I tell you that I know I am embarrassing company to keep. He didn’t need additional prompting to begin his story, which I dutifully took down in my notebook. 

He was in high school at the time, senior year, with finals preparation in full swing. He told me that he would regularly be awake past midnight to study or whittle away at essays for his college applications, and that if he recalled correctly this occurred at just past one in the morning. From his parents’ kitchen he could see out the wide front window and onto the lawns of his neighbors across the street. He told me that he wouldn’t have seen it at all if the bulb of a streetlamp hadn’t burst while he stood at the refrigerator. After the initial flash and the sudden flood of darkness in its wake, leaning in against the glass of the window Andrew could see something on the ground. It could have been a trash bag, or it could have been a person. A darker lump in a dark space. 

He told me that what he did next was stupid, and I’m inclined to agree. Andrew opened the front door. 

He recalled a wave of heat, not moist like the air in the late spring that it would have been but dry and thready like the heat of an oven. It came over him on the breeze and died down again when the air stilled, but he could still feel it radiating from yards away. As his eyes adjusted Andrew stepped further out of the house and down the lawn. The lump he’d seen from the window was taking on no clearer shape the more the moonlight fell across it or how much closer he came to it, but he could hear the scratch of something moving over the grass and feel the same strange heat on his face and arms. 

The closer to the creature he came, the more unbearable that heat became. He described a choking feeling, the hot air uncomfortable in his nose and mouth. There was a point where he could move no closer, and I’m thankful that he didn’t. What he next described I have taken down word-for-word so that I don’t twist the events to fit my own perception.

Andrew said: “I couldn’t step onto the sidewalk because it was too hot to approach. I could feel the heat burning my toes through my shoes. It just didn’t seem safe. Instead I walked further down the street, kind of, I guess, parallel to the sidewalk. It was making that rustling, like it was dragging itself, and I heard something smacking into the ground. It was moving so slowly I didn’t notice at first, but it really was dragging itself forward. I could see thin shadows where I thought it must have arms-- or legs. Limbs. I think that it was pulling itself by its fingers. I didn’t have a long time to think about it, because all of a sudden the thing shot across two lawns like it was nothing. It moved so fast that I almost lost it, but I didn’t try to follow it. Something yowled, like a cat-- it was a cat --and it hissed and it screamed, and I could hear something like a release of steam. I didn’t even get a good look at the thing, but I went back inside.”

After locking his front door, Andrew returned to the halo of light in his kitchen. He told me that his skin was red, like a sunburn, and felt warm to the touch. The next day Andrew walked to school with a friend who lived down the street, and as they passed the lawns crossed by The Lurch he noticed that the grass was scorched and blackened in an uneven trail, fish-hooking onto the street and disappearing. Andrew finished his story by admitting that one of his friends at the time, another student at Trailhead Public High School, had shared the story behind his back. 

It wasn’t a long story, but it was a first-hand account of a creature that, until that point, I had only glimpsed through hearsay. As these stories often do, it rippled out from the high school and into the middle school, the elementary school, into children’s homes. His encounter had been scrubbed clean out of the story over the years, iterations replacing him with anything from the school janitor to a friend’s younger sister, the cat with any imaginable animal, and the location was lost in the same way. The suffocating heat, though, was a detail I hadn’t heard before.

“Unless it wasn’t,” I said, implying that the stories of other encounters may have come out following his own, and that in the natural way of things they had twined together. I don’t know if he caught my meaning, but I didn’t give him the time to ask if he did not. 

Something about Andrew’s words had struck a chord with something else I had noticed about the town of Trailhead, Pennsylvania. It was something easy to shrug off until that point, an aesthetic choice, maybe, or a practical one for the sake of maintaining aesthetics. I wrote while I was speaking, brain on fire with possibility. “There are a lot of bricks in Trailhead, for a tourist town whose draw is nature trails.” He seemed to be realizing it for the first time, himself. Even after speculation we don’t know what this means for the town, but we can guess. You can’t see a smoldering trail in the grass if there is no grass to burn. Unsure of where to proceed, I said my farewell to Andrew and returned to my motel room. If I could take him at his word, who was to say that The Lurch was in the forest at all? Maybe I was on the wrong trail. Maybe I needed to reconsider my understanding of the story. 

It snowed overnight. Not an incredible amount, but surely enough to obscure whatever trail we might find based on what Andrew had told me the night before. The snow would cover everything I’d thought to look for, in fact, and so it was no surprise when our group reconvened at the edge of the forest that everyone seemed a bit chafed. They’d had the same reservations as myself, but after some convincing we began our search again. Our next trail would be half-way up one which we’d already explored, a branch we hadn’t had time to follow on Tuesday. 

Even the trails themselves were harder to follow in the snow, light as it was. The trail was marked at its head by a colored tree marker, but past that point only the footpath led hikers on. Nathan and Josephine occupied themselves by scouting ahead, looking for landmarks that would naturally lead hikers around the path. Andrew walked between myself and the students, as I lingered occasionally to theorize in my notebook. The next hour passed in much the same way that every previous search had, with no clear evidence and no clear trail to follow. However, in the next hour, Nathan pulled our small group to a halt. 

Some ways off the trail, the soft blanket of snow simply stopped. In a small enough patch this would have meant very little to us, but for as far as we could see the ground was brown and dry. We approached and eventually stepped into this patch of leaves. I exchanged a glance with Andrew. It was warm enough here to melt the snow. 

I led the group, now, trying to measure every change in temperature. The air was warming the further we walked, something I was tracking to the best of my ability in my notebook. The air wasn’t humid, but flat and dry; without wind. The dead leaves, which had until this point been soaked underfoot by the snow, were now curling in on themselves as they were leached of moisture. I told Andrew that the radius of heat was much larger than I anticipated, but didn’t share any more of his story with the students nearby. The rest of the walk was under a heavy air of excitement and a blanket of worsening heat. The hotter it got, the harder it was to avoid tearing off my winter coat, the closer we got to The Lurch. 

Walking ahead, I saw the creature first. It was a mass of solid flesh, emanating heat without disrupting the air around it. I stood in its scorched trail, surrounded by the unburning, blackened detritus it had pulled itself over. I moved closer to examine it.

You’ll forgive me, but from this point on I can hardly read my shorthand. The carefully constructed narrative ends here, and I’ll be supplementing what I can not read from my memory. I’ve done my best to lay everything out as objectively as I can, but my words will doubtlessly be tinged by the effect that these events had on me as a participant. As a journalist my words and meaning are always a point of contention, the fingers of an agenda never far from mine on the keyboard, but I want you to understand that everything I write here is true and to the best of my recollection. 

It was much larger than I imagined it to be. Its size was contested in every iteration of the story, and in Andrew’s it had been no larger than a person. In front of me, its flat body could have been the length of a school bus and the width of two. As Andrew had told me the night before, the air was almost suffocatingly hot this close to the mass. It moved and churned but I could see no musculature underneath. Across what I must call its back for the sake of clarity it bubbled like it were boiling, the skin popping without breaking, only disturbing the long wefts of hair that were pulled underneath the surface, or else pushed through it. Closest to me on the ground I could see the ends of the grass and the crusting of dead leaves blackening. In its center, the mass roiling around the trunks of trees singed them without settling light to them. I was focused both on watching this creature for every detail my eyes could absorb and on scribbling down my notes-- its physical features but also the smokeless, hot air, the way it unsettled physics itself --and so I did not notice its slow roll towards the toe of my boot. I was very close to it, and it pulled in and pressed out over the ground as it moved. Andrew took my shoulder to pull me back before it could touch me. I started. 

It’s strange to break objectivity so late into the story, or even so far into my career, but at that moment I felt that The Lurch was looking at me. It recognized that I was standing there and it turned its eyeless gaze onto me. It may have been fear clouding my senses, so you can choose to read on and disregard me, but I felt like I was in its headlights. My throat felt like it had caught fire and I couldn’t tear my dry eyes away, nor could I move anything else. The mass jolted over the ground, and from its far edge I could see thin, boney arms pull into view. Its fingers dug into the leaf litter and it heaved itself towards me. Too close to its now rioting body, I was already in its grip. 

I didn’t see what happened, but I could feel its flesh closing over my foot and squeezing. Through my shoe my foot started to burn. The sensation climbed up my ankle and it started to pull on me, strong and fast though it had no momentum to draw on. 

Andrew pulled me out of the mass. It took him some time, which I know because it was only his hard grip around my shoulders and waist that grounded me in space. I had nothing outside of physical sensation: just the stifling of my breath, the heat and pressure as The Lurch tried to absorb my foot, and the rough tug that pulled me free. 

I was not carried down the mountain. We didn’t have the time. For minutes we ran-- Andrew and myself bringing up the rear while Nathan and Josephine crashed down the trail some feet ahead of us. We stopped at one point, realizing that the oppressive heat was gone. All was quiet in the woods around us, and we’d re-emerged into the brisk cold of the snow, the typical Pennsylvania winter. There was no way to know if The Lurch was still following, or if it even could at this distance. We descended more slowly after that, one or the other of the group supporting me as I hobbled down the trail, but we didn’t stop again. The threat of what was behind us hung heavy in our memories and we didn’t want answers to our questions.

As I write this my ankle is elevated, wrapped in a bag of ice which is itself wrapped in a towel. I’m unsure whether or not I’ll take it to the hospital. It’s painful, and red as anything and sure to bruise, but I managed the walk to my motel the same way that Andrew presumably managed to drive himself and the children home. I look at it, propped in a nest of motel pillows that I can see cresting over the edge of my laptop, and I have to wonder how I feel about knowing without a shadow of doubt that The Lurch exists. My life has been dedicated to the origins of local legends for so long, but it must be years since I’ve thought about the reality of monsters. Am I excited? Perhaps I will be once the shock of my encounter has worn off. Perhaps I won’t be, when the reality of what The Lurch will mean for Trailhead and its surroundings sets in.

I’ve contacted the local news network-- I’ve emailed them. I even emailed the networks of the towns surrounding Trailhead. It’s very late at night, and even if they do respond in the morning I am not hopeful that they’ll be receptive to what I have to say. Regardless, I must get the word out. The Lurch is coming down the mountain and it is crawling towards Trailhead, Pennsylvania. Its progress is slow but it will arrive. I don’t know what, if anything, can be done to stop it. I implore you to begin making plans to leave Trailhead before it is too late.