#like. i was suicidal. my mother and father had to hide the kitchen knives level of suicidal

[prudereality]

oofta

[collegeemt3]

The Red Spirit (Horror Story)

My parents never really thought anything was suspicious about the new house when we moved to Fredericksburg. The first thing that set me off was that the history of the previous owners was very vague. The only information I could manage to find was that they had passed away recently, and at a fairly young age. The thing that struck me as most odd was there was no cause of death listed on the Death Certificates: it was filled in as “unknown.”

My suspicions seemed to soothe as nothing happened for the first few months after we moved in. Then weird, random things started happening. Objects were found in different places than where they were last set down, which aroused my suspicions again. I decided to try to do some more research, and after extensive digging, managed to find some very intriguing information about my current place of residence. I learned that several centuries back, a boy, around my age, had died on the grounds upon which the house was built.

Before the subdivision was built, this area used to be a single piece of property. It was a Victorian style mansion with several acres of surrounding land. The plot of land that was my family’s property was where the original foundation of the mansion had lain. The boy’s name was Richard, and his family was plenty wealthy. He had everything he could ever want, except true happiness.

Richard fell into an incurable depression. His family paid for various treatments of the time, but they either didn’t work at all, or were barely effective. They eventually admitted him to an asylum. After a while he managed to fool the orderlies into thinking he had gotten everything under control, and was allowed to leave. He hid his pain and troubles from his parents until he decided that he just couldn’t live anymore.

He committed suicide by hanging himself from the balcony railing of the stairs in the main entrance hall. When his parents came back home from a night on the town, they walked into their house to see their son’s body hanging in front of them, slightly blue. Richard’s mother would’ve screamed if she wasn’t paralyzed with fear and disbelief. His father stared for a moment, and then called the butler to come and take down his son. Richard’s body was buried on the property, right next to the house.

Richard died with contempt of life. He hated anyone who was happy, because he couldn’t be happy. He didn’t understand why he couldn’t be happy, no matter what he tried. He lived as any other boy his age did, but he didn’t have the same satisfaction in his life as the other boys. He vowed with his last dying breath that he would do all in his power to make as many of the living as he could suffer the same pain he did, in one way or another.

I was somewhat skeptical that maybe it was Richard’s ghost haunting the area, because after all, I didn’t really  believe in the paranormal type stuff. I had thought it was something else that was causing my feelings of suspicion in the beginning, but as more and more stuff started happening, the more I came to believe that it was Richard’s doing. Objects were showing up in hazardous places, and other dangerous situations started happening. I was always the first one up in the morning, and I would notice things like fishing line tied across the top of the stairs, and knives placed precariously in doorways. My parents didn’t believe that these things were happening, because they never saw any of it. Even if I didn’t touch the objects, they were either moved back to their original positions when my parents awoke, or my parents just weren’t able to see them. I stopped trying to convince my parents of the supernatural happenings that were taking place right under their noses. I learned to live around all the hazardous pranks and objects. Then came one night when it went too far for me.

I was home alone that night, my parents were out on an anniversary date. I had just turned out the lights and walked out of the kitchen when I heard a clattering noise behind me. I slowly turned around and turned the light back on. What I saw paralyzed me with terror.

There was a knife floating around two to three feet away from me, at about chest level. I could only stare at it. As I stared, I noticed it started coming closer, slowly at first, like a fraction of an inch per second, then faster. I flung my arms up in front of my chest in self-defense, and felt the stinging pain of the knife repeatedly slashing my arms. I lost track of how many times the knife was thrust against me, and eventually fainted from shock, terror, and probably blood loss as well.

I came back to consciousness with my parents crouched over me, looks of distraught concern filling their faces. “What happened?” my mother asked me.

“More like ‘what did you do?’” my father asked, almost with a tone of annoyance.

“I didn’t do anything,” I responded weakly, but defensively. “I had just left the kitchen after cleaning up from dinner, when I heard a noise, so I turned around to see what it was. When I turned around, there was a knife pointed straight at me, floating in mid-air. Then it came at me, like someone was trying to stab me with it, so I put my arms up in self-defense, and ended up with all these cuts on my arms.”

“Let me get this straight,” my father said in an inquisitive manner, “you turned around when you heard a noise in the kitchen, and there was a knife floating in front of you?” He sounded very skeptical, like I was psychotic. I nodded my head, the only thing I could do. My father leaned over to my mother and whispered in her ear, “She’s gone crazy. First she tells us she’s seeing all these supernatural kinds of things, and now this. She’s lost it. We’re taking her to the hospital.”

“Charles,” I heard my mother whisper back, “she’s not insane.”

“Are you sure about that, Lynnette?”

“I know my daughter. She may be a little crazy, maybe even a little weird, but not psychotic and insane,” my mother responded to him in my defense. “I agree; she needs to go to the hospital to get the wounds cleaned, bandaged, and stitched up if they need to. But we are NOT having her admitted to the psych ward. I don’t care what you think right now. If she says she didn’t do this, then she didn’t do this. Why would she lie to us? What would she have to hide? She talks to us on a daily basis, about everything that’s going on. I would know if she was hiding something from us, and she’s not.”

“You’re hysterical right now. I’m not going to argue with you,” my dad responded to her argumentative points. My mother just glared at him. “Let’s just get her to the hospital right now. They look pretty deep, and probably will need stitches. We can discuss what to do with her once we get there and doctors have had a chance to take a look and give us their opinion. Does that sound reasonable to you?”

“Fine,” she growled back at him. “You okay to walk?” she asked me much more gently.

“I think so,” I answered her, “I don’t feel faint or dizzy right now.”

“Okay. Let’s get you out to the car.” She gave me a hand up, and followed closely behind me as I shuffled to the car. The drive to the hospital was tense silence. My mom sat in the back seat with me trying to comfort me while my dad drove. When we reached the hospital, my mom remained very quiet, only speaking when it was absolutely required of her to provide information. My dad spoke, but in a very coarse manner. I knew he didn’t believe me, that he thought I was making up the whole story to try to cover up something that I didn’t actually do. I figured that’s what the doctors and nurses would think as well, but there was nothing I could do once we were at the hospital.  

Once my parents filled out the admission paperwork for the ER, a nurse took us back to a “room,” which was really more of a cubicle with three walls and a curtain. The nurse took my vitals, asked a few questions, wrote some notes on what I assumed was my chart, and then left. A few minutes later, the doctor walked in.

“So what happened?” he asked, even though I’m pretty sure he has basic background information already. My father started to explain, but my mom silenced him with a gesture of her hand.

“Let her explain,” she said coldly to him.

“You probably won’t believe me,” I started off. “A ghost attacked me with a knife from our kitchen while I was home alone. I threw up my arms in self-defense. I lost consciosness, and reagained it when my parents came home and aroused me.”

The doctor looked at me with suspicious confusion. “So, you’re saying that there was a supernatural presence that tried to stab you, and you put up your arms in defense, and that’ s how you ended up with all these lacerations?”

“Yes,” I answered, maybe a little too hurriedly. “Our house is haunted by the ghost of a teenage boy who committed suicide. I know it sounds crazy, but I swear it’s true!”

The doctor continued to stare at me suspiciously for a moment, then put on the gloves that were on the tray he wheeled in with him. “Regardless of how they happened, they need to be stitched up. I’m going to administer a general anesthetic into each arm before I do the stitches.” He took one of the two syringes off the tray, and gave me the anesthetic just below the elbow on my right arm first. He waited for a moment, then tapped his fingers along my arm. “Feel that?” I shook my head no. He picked up the needle from the tray, threaded it, then set to work stitching up the many lacerations on my right arm.

When he finished on my right arm, he repeated the same process on my left arm. The whole process took about an hour, but it didn’t feel like it was that long while I was watching him intently as he stitched up my arms. When he was done with stitching, he took the roll of gauze off the tray and started wrapping it around each of my arms over the stitches.

When he had finished doing that, he called my parents out into the hallway, beyond the curtained entrance to my room. I could hear hushed voices, but I couldn’t make out what they were saying. After a few minutes, my mom stormed back in, and came and sat by the side of my bed, crying, holding my hands, trying to comfort me for the upcoming news I was surely about to hear as much as herself. The doctor and my father discussed a few more things outside, then came back in. The look on my father’s face was one of triumph. At that point I started getting very nervous.

The doctor looked at me, then started in on what were possibly the most condemning words I have heard in my life. “In my professional, medical opinion, you need to be admitted to the psyche ward. Self-harm, for any reason, is not healthy.”

“But I didn’t cut myself!” I started to interject.

“Coming up with excuses that are out of the realm of possibility just means that there is even more mental instability. It is for mainly these reasons that I feel you should be admitted to the psychiatric ward. Your parents-” my mom gives of a very disapproving grunt, and the doctor continues, changing tracks slightly, “your father agrees with me that you should be admitted, or at least have a psychiatric evaluation done.”

“Let me guess, if at least one of my parents agrees to it, there’s nothing I can do about it, is there?”

“That’s pretty much right. There are a few legalities involved, but in essence, yes: There’s nothing you can do about it,” the doctor responded.

“Great,” I muttered to myself, “I’m going to the looney bin, even though I’m not looney. They think I am, but that’s just because they don’t believe me.”  The doctor left during my muttering, and a few minutes after that a nurse came in with a wheelchair. She had me get into it, then wheeled me off to the elevators, my parents following behind. We went up a few floors from the ER to the psych ward.

After we went through admissions, a somewhat lengthy process (lots of forms and signatures), my parents were saying goodbye. “We’ll bring you a bag of clothes and toiletries tomorrow.”

“Okay,” I answered back solemnly. “Don’t get attacked by Richard,” I remarked quietly as they walked out the doors of the ward, heading to the elevator. At that moment I started sending thoughts out to Richard’s ghost: Please don’t hurt my mom; I don’t particularly care what you do to my father right now, but please, my mom believes me; don’t harm her.

My parents brought a few days’ worth of clothes and toiletries like they said, but my dad wouldn’t let my mom stay to visit for even a few minutes. I passed through a few torturous days in the psyche ward before I managed to convince the nurses that I’m okay to be discharged. When my parents came to get me, my father looked very skeptical that I was really ready to go home. I pretended that I didn’t believe that the house was haunted anymore, that everything I thought before were delusions.

When I got home however, Richard picked up right from where he had left off. It was harder pretending that I didn’t believe the paranormal stuff when it was happening right in front of me. There were more attacks from Richard, always when I was home alone, which seemed to be fairly frequently, despite my father thinking I was insane. Each time was different from every other time, but similar at the same time. They always caused physical damage to me. It would be done in different ways: cutting me with knives in different places, throwing objects at me, causing disorientation, those types of things. I would try my best to hide what would happen, but I couldn’t always conceal it. My father assumed it was just me being insane, didn’t even bother to listen to my “fake” explanations. My mother, on the other hand, believed me, and was really concerned. But seeing as my father was head of the household, there wasn’t much she could do unless he wanted to do it.

Months passed by torturously, with my father threatening several times to take me back to the psyche ward if I didn’t stop harming myself. No matter how many times I tried to explain to him that I wasn’t doing this to myself, that our house was haunted by a murderous spirit, he wouldn’t listen. Despite my efforts to try to communicate with Richard, to help him, things only got worse. I was in and out of the psyche ward countless more times. There was nothing I could do. I couldn’t get Richard to stop, and I couldn’t get my father to believe.

Richard’s attacks kept becoming more and more intense. I would have completely black periods in my memory, and I could only assume that Richard had started possessing me. I found damage done to the house, the objects within, and myself. I would wake up in my room, looking like I had just lost a fist fight, but have absolutely no clue how I got there or what had happened before. When Richard outright physically attacked me, it was worse. The attacks were getting longer, the injuries he was causing worse. He started by causing injuries like sprained wrists and ankles, and hyperextensions, then muscle pulls and tears. Then he moved on to breaking my bones.

My father gave up on trying to stop what he thought was my own behavior, and stopped threatening to put me back in the psyche ward. He left me as my “Mother’s problem.” Soon Richard started attacking my mother as well; even then, he still didn’t believe that the house was haunted. He thought that because my mother spent so much time with me, taking care of me, that my “delusional mind and way of thinking” had spread to her, like a disease. We gave up trying to convince my father, knowing it was a lost cause. Instead, we concentrated out energy on dealing with Richard.

Richard started attacking my dad, but still, he didn’t believe. He thought it was me and my mother trying to make him go “delusional” too. The times when Richard would possess any one of us was getting worse. He would attack one of us through another. Or if it was only one of us home alone, he would cause us to wreak havoc upon ourselves and the house. Life became one hell of a living nightmare. We stopped scrubbing the blood splatters off the walls, and the blood stains out of the carpets. The house was falling to ruins within. We were helpless against this murderous spirit. My father started renting a one-room apartment near his workplace so he didn’t have live in “The Asylum,” as he termed our house. He continued to pay the bills for the house, and had groceries delivered to the house weekly, but he refused to live with us anymore.

He stopped in about once a month to “check” on us, but I honestly think that every time he stopped by, he was seeing whether or not we had reached a state where he could legally have us admitted to a permanent psyche ward. I think he was close to that verdict the last time he stopped by, because when he stopped by this time, he seemed totally and utterly convinced that “the time had come,” as he had put it. He went down to the basement, and came back up a few minutes later with one of the big suitcases. He went upstairs, first to my room, then my bathroom, then the master bedroom and bathroom, and packed up clothing and toiletries for me and my mom. My mom and I stood speechless, looking back and forth between each other and upstairs towards the room that my father was in at the time.

My father lugged the full suitcase downstairs and out to the trunk of his car. Then he came back inside and headed to the kitchen. A few moments later, I heard a metallic clatter from the kitchen, and a very wet, dull, heavy thud. My mom and I slowly and fearfully headed to the kitchen, afraid of what we would find had happened to my father.

What we saw as we entered the kitchen was my father, lying on his back, in a pool of his own dark, crimson blood, with a knife that had been shoved into his stomach, then up towards his heart. The front of his once-white shirt was now the same color of the expanding pool of blood on the floor around him. Then Richard attacked again.

Another knife came flying through the air. It was headed towards me, but my mom threw herself in between me and the possessed knife. Richard didn’t bother to avoid her. He seemed like he had fun murdering her. He gouged out her eyes, and then cut open her abdomen. He removed her organs one by one, the large intestine, the small intestine, her stomach, liver, kidney, spleen. Then he extended the cut from her abdomen up her chest jaggedly. He ripped her lungs open with the knife, then stabbed her heart and ripped it from her chest.

I don’t know how I could tell, but I knew that when Richard killed me, it was going to be as slow and painful as he could make it. I felt Richard starting to possess me, and I fought as hard as I could, but he still won. This time though, he didn’t knock out my conscious mind, just took physical control of my body. He made me go into the garage and get a handful of six inch long nails from my dad’s old toolbox. Then he made me go back through the kitchen and out onto the back deck.

He forced me onto my back, then started driving the nails through my ankles into the deck. I screamed at the excruciating pain, but I knew that somehow, no one would hear my suffering screams of torment and horror. I sat up and tried to pry the nails out of my ankles, but he forced me back down onto the wood, and drove more nails through my wrists. I screamed again in agony, but still having a gut feeling that my screams would not be heard.

A few seconds later, the knives that were used to brutally murder my father and mother were hovering over me. I felt one plunge into each of my shins, shattering the bone. They were then dragged upward to the bottom of my hips, splintering the bone in my legs. I let loose a volley of agonizing screams from the excruciating pain, but he continued on. He pulled the knives out of me, and stabbed them into my wrists, just above the nails. He dragged the knives up my arms to my shoulders, shattering the bone in my arms as well. Again I screamed from the excruciating pain. Then he removed the knives from my shoulders, this time twisting them as he pulled them out.

The last thing I saw were the tips of the knives directly in front of the center of my eyes. Then, just like he did to my mother, he gouged out my eyes. He wasn’t finished yet, though. He proceeded to stab a knife into my stomach, and drag it up my chest, like he had done to my father. Then he took the two knives and used them to pry open my rib cage. I screamed as I felt my ribs crack near my spine. He tore my lungs like he had done to my mother, and I felt my last breath instantaneously leave. He then stabbed my heart with one knife, and used the other to sever its connections to my body.

I screamed no more. I knew I was dead, murdered more brutally than either of my parents. Murdered by a vengeful spirit who never understood why it seemed to be that life hated him. He made his eternal vow to seek his revenge, and a part of that is what I became. That is my story.