#you can tell on the exact frame my hand woke up and shifted into animation gear

[little-shiny-sharpies]

Wishing a fun and spooky halloween to you and the dragons 😈🖤

Thank you very much!!! ‘Twas the funnest and spookiest hallow’s end ever enjoyed! 🕸️👻🖤🎃🖤👻🎃🕸️(ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧

Audio from my favorite TikTok ever

[myhauntedsalem]

13 True Horror Stories from the Psychiatric Ward that Will Give You the Creeps

Death, illness and tragedy have long been part of the history of insane asylums, and for as long as they have existed, so too have the scary stories associated with them. From haunted hospitals to sadistic doctors and nurses, psychiatric wards have been the inspiration for many of our favorite horror movies and books. Yet, the true stories told by the psych ward workers below far surpass any horrors that we might have seen at the cinema or read in a book.

Without further ado, here are thirteen of some of the creepiest psych ward stories on the internet that have been shared by health care professionals.

1. Holding her own Eyes

My mom told me this story from her time at a neuropsychiatric ward while she was in grad school. She was making her routine room checks and happened upon the most horrific scene I’ve ever heard.

This was during the night shift, and generally, all the patients’ bedroom doors should be closed. So my mom turned a corner and noticed an open door. She saw a staff member’s legs on the floor, halfway out the doorway.

When she looked into the room, she saw the patient, a woman with a severe postpartum psychiatric disorder, who had just gouged both of her own eyes out with her bare hands. She was sitting cross-legged on the floor, holding her eyes in her hands.

The first staff member to witness the scene, who was now lying face down on the floor, had a heart attack when he first witnessed the woman while he was making his rounds.

My mom screamed for help and frantically tried to perform CPR on the staff member. All the while, the woman just sat rather calmly, holding her own eyes.

2. The Saw

I work as a psychotherapist in a hospital system. My definition of creepy is probably quite a bit different from other medical professionals.

The one that got to me the most was a patient who came to us after attempting suicide by sawing both his arms off at the forearm with a table saw. His arms were reattached, fairly successfully too, with only limited impairments in mobility. All I could think was how bad it would have to be to live in his head that sawing his arms off seemed better than that.

He has since completed suicide.

3. Jane?

We had a young lady in our custody with quite a few issues. We’ll call her Jane. Jane’s first night at our facility staff doing a bed check found Jane in a puddle of blood. Turns out Jane had been slicing the skin around her shin with her finger nails and was pulling her skin up her leg, essentially de-gloving her calf.

Jane also had a ritual she performed every night before bed. While in her room she would run between walls in her room touching them in a crucifix pattern. After doing this for a few hours she would sit on her bed and go to sleep. This particular night Jane was frantic in her pace, practically running between walls. Our night staff observed the entire interaction and reported Jane screaming late into the night. When the staff went to check on Jane she reported Jane standing in the doorway smiling. The staff asked what was wrong and Jane replied, “what makes you think you are speaking to Jane?”

4. The Vampire

My mom worked in mental institutions in her younger years (and actually worked at a large, well-known asylum before it was shut down.)

There was one woman there that thought she was a vampire of sorts. She was only allowed out one hour a day, and they had to use safety precautions. She had already attacked and killed at least one hospital worker before these were enacted.

When my Mom asked about her, it was revealed that she had killed at least two of her children, wounded another as well as her husband because she had some sort of physical condition called Porphyria, which apparently made her crave blood.

By the time that they discovered there was something physically wrong with her, she already had lost her mind from guilt and grief.

5. The Spitter

I’m not a psychologist but my friend is. She told me about a patient of hers who was HIV positive and a paranoid schizophrenic. He thought that the nurses who worked at the hospital he was in were trying to kill him, so he would frequently bite his tongue, and spit HIV positive blood into their faces/mouths. When they had to come into contact with him, they were required to wear full masks and gloves.

6. The Only One

I once knew a woman who had spent part of her residency at a psychiatric hospital for people with severe mental conditions. Apparently, the grounds had a lovely, enclosed greenhouse. One day, one of their schizophrenic patients was sitting on a bench, smoking a cigarette, as a heron frantically flew around. It had found its way in and, not being able to escape, it was smashing into the large panes of glass. The man just sat there watching.

Finally, my counselor asked him if the bird was bothering him and he kind of sighed and said, “Thank god, I thought I was the only one seeing that.”

7. Family Photographs

My sister is the director of a psychiatric hospital. There was recently a lady there who would cut her arms, legs and torso open and place photographs of her family under her skin.

8. Under the Bed

Once, a fellow female patient told me she found writings under her bed. They were just old, small wooden bed frames with hard mattresses that would make all kinds of noises when you rolled over, but I still wondered what exactly she was doing lying under her bed to find these writings.

When she first told me, I thought it was a joke. But sure enough, one day during group we managed to sneak away, and she showed me. Indeed, there were stories written under her bed. After that, we had everyone check under their own beds, and there was more writing under every single bed.

They were stories of patients who had stayed here before, or ways they were planning on killing themselves, or who the good and bad nurses were. It creeped me out.

9. Time of Death

Well, my mother was a nurse that specialized in geriatrics, and she worked for several hospice hospitals for many years. She often described situations at her work with several of the patients. She would say that each person tends to have a very similar “checklist” that they follow right before death. This checklist often ended in a very similar way.

They would get caught talking to someone that wasn’t there. When asked who they (otherwise lucid people) were talking to, they would describe an individual who was already dead. When asked what they were talking about, they would say that their relative wanted to know if they were ready to move on. A pretty common response would be, “Yeah, he/she said that she will take me tomorrow at 3:00.” Well, it would often happen that they would die at the exact time their relatives quoted.

10. The Test Subject

I had an hour-long conversion with a delusional guy who was confined to a mental health facility, and who was probably smarter than I am. Lots of these folks believe that somebody – often the CIA – is either beaming thoughts into their heads, or has implanted a microchip in their brains for this purpose. This guy was offering a very thoughtful argument as to why such claims should not be so quickly dismissed.

“It’s precisely because such delusions are so common that mental patients make the best test subjects,” he said. There he was, confined and protected, constantly observed, his health and behavior documented, and there is zero chance that anyone would ever take his concerns seriously. How else would you test and improve such technology? Does the government not have a strong motivation and a plausible ability to create such a device?

“You can see I’m not irrational,” the man said. “I’m just straight-up telling you that they are doing this to me. I know just how unbelievable it sounds, and yet, here I am.”

11. The Boy who Loved Knives

As a tech in psych years ago, there was a 7-year-old kid sent to the floor because the mom didn’t know what to do with him. Sadly, common thing to happen, even if the kids don’t have psych issues. Anyway, the mom was shaking and crying, and they had to take the kid into another room. She was genuinely afraid of her own son. She had suspected something was wrong when she kept finding mutilated animals in the backyard, but never heard or saw coyotes or anything around. The neighbors smaller pets started disappearing. The boy had an obsession with knives, hiding them around the house. Denying anything when the mom confronted him. Then when the two started getting into arguments, he would get really violent and hit her, push her down and kick her, threaten to kill her. On multiple occasions she woke up in the middle of the night with him standing beside her bed, staring her in the face. She put extra locks on her bedroom door to feel safe while she slept. The last straw was when she lifted up his mattress and found 50+ knives of all shapes and sizes under there. So she brought him to us.

I remember talking to him, treating him like he was just any other kid that came through. He seemed remarkably normal, until you spoke directly to him. He had this way of looking right through you, or maybe like he didn’t see you at all while you were speaking.

He would respond like a robot, like he was just saying words because that’s what we wanted to hear. And he would always put on this creepy, dead-looking smile. Like all mouth and no eye involvement in the smile. Especially when he would get away with something, like taking another kid’s markers and they couldn’t figure it out. Still gives me chills laying here thinking about him.

I believe I met a 7-year-old psychopath.

12. The New Mom

I was a pharmacy technician at a hospital with a psych ward for some time. We would have to go around with a cart and dispense the patients’ medications, and being a 5’2″ girl, a security guard or male nurse would accompany me, just as a precaution. I never had any real issues other than the occasional death grip onto my arm or manic outbursts, but there was one boy who was entirely different.

His chart said he was nine and he had pale skin, dark hair, and huge bright, green eyes. He always greeted me in the most polite way, asked how I was doing, and always found something different to compliment me on every time. He was extremely well-spoken and mature for his age, so I began looking forward to seeing him, as normal small talk is definitely cherished in that setting. If he saw me outside of his room in the halls, he made sure to say hello and always called me “Miss Jones” or “ma’am.”

One day, a couple of our female nurses saw me pause to chat with him in the hallway, and waved me over to ask if I was out of my mind. Apparently, when he was in kindergarten, he grew an intense attachment to his young female teacher.

This escalated to the point of him calling her “Mom” and leaving notes for her about how he wished he were her son. He had a normal home-life with both parents, and the teacher tried to explain to him that she couldn’t be his mom because that would hurt his real mother’s feelings, and that she already had that job covered.

So, he went home and, killed his own mother in her sleep by cutting her throat, so his teacher could be his mom. The female staff had a general rule of not interacting with him excessively to prevent any kind of attachment from forming.

13. Bugs

Nothing I can say can possibly describe the year I worked in Psychiatric Intensive Care. Creepy isn’t the thing that comes to mind when I think back on it…more heartbreaking and horrifying. But creepiness was a part of it. Especially evening and night shifts, naturally.

There is always something disturbing about watching someone while they hallucinate. You can tell it is 100% real to them, and something about that makes you believe it, on some level. A lot of stories end with, “and of course, I had to look over my shoulder to make sure”. You see the emotions it brings out.

There was a woman that came in and sat down across the table from me for her admission interview. She had bandages all over her arms and scotch tape over her mouth and ears. She looked very uncomfortable and wouldn’t really sit still. When the nurse would ask her a question, she would peel the corner of the tape back and answer, then stick the tape back on really fast.

We eventually found out that she saw and felt bugs crawling all over her, and they were trying to get inside her body. The tape was to keep the bugs out. The bandages were because some bugs got in and she had to dig them out. She couldn’t sit still because she felt the bugs all over her even while we sat and talked. The worst part was, she had some idea that it was her mind playing tricks on her. Can you imagine going through your life, feeling like someone is continuously dumping buckets of cockroaches on your head, feeling like they’re all over you and getting inside of you to the point that you’re digging chunks out of your flesh in a panic, all while knowing intellectually that none of it is real?

[capricornus-rex]

Two Sides of the Coin (8)

Chapter 8: Hazy Clairvoyance | Jidné Sheedra x Cal Kestis

Summary: Hell-bent on exacting revenge and retrieving the Holocron, the dreaded Darth Vader is now on the hunt for the young Jedi Knight, Cal Kestis. Under the assumption that he still possessed the artifact, while fueled by the intrigue of the boy’s strength and skill with the Force, the dark lord hires the bounty hunter, Jidné Sheedra, to track him down and have him delivered alive. However, the task becomes a trial for young Jidné, as she faces a conflict that tests her beliefs of a scarred past she had hidden for so long.

Also tagging @silver-is-in-too-many-fandoms

Also in AO3

Tags: Fem OC, Jidné Sheedra, Force-Sensitive! Fem OC, Bounty Hunter! Fem OC, Jedi! Fem OC

Chapters: 1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 – 6 | Previous: Part 7 | Next: Part 9 | Masterlist

8 of ?

The afternoon turned into dusk, deep indigo had begun to eat away at the golden shine of the sunset in the sky. The farmers and vendors gathered their harvest to be put away, and then be put back on display for tomorrow. Jidné saw the sun sink behind the mountain ridges and the treelines.

Eventually, they had to go their separate ways that day as dusk was beginning to fall upon Ombari.

“You staying in a lodge?”

“No, I have my ship but it’s in the outskirts—the badlands, they call it,”

“Quite far from where we are. A little dangerous too, animals might jump on you again like last time,”

Cal’s got a point and Jidné didn’t argue with that. She had spotted some relatively larger predators—deadlier than a pack of Bashiji cats—when she landed the Scarab on the badlands. Initially, she thought she could sneak past those creatures if they came close to her ship, albeit she’s hidden it quite well from their sights.

“Don’t worry, Cal, I’m a big girl. I can handle myself,” chuckled Jidné.

“I don’t doubt that,”

“Well, if neither of us want to be dinner for the animals out there, best we mosey on over,”

She scrambled back up to her feet, Cal followed suit shortly after. Jidné went a couple of paces away from Cal to stretch her legs and bask in the remaining sunlight before night falls.

“I guess we’ll see each other again?”

She turned around to face him while answering, “Depends, if you’ve managed to bring the trouble with you to me.”

He chuckled awkwardly and rubbed the back of his neck. The sunset’s gradient did him a favor of concealing the burning of his cheeks, but that didn’t escape Jidné’s eagle eyes. An exchange of hushed goodbyes transpired before they parted ways; Cal headed back to the town—going through it would bring him to the other side where he came in, where the Mantis would be—and Jidné would navigate her way to the badlands, returning to the confines of the Crescent Scarab.

Jidné jogged through the forest, stalking and crouching behind the shrubs to shield herself from wandering animals. She climbed over the ridge and the badlands were already in the horizon. She slip down the slope with great care, skidding her boots as brakes while patrolling predators circled their turfs—hissing and roaring at anything that comes close. In the distance, she spots the trench were she had hidden the Scarab, she hoped that nothing or no one has assumed it was abandoned and shredded it to pieces.

“There you are, old girl,” Jidné cooed, relieved to find her metal baby still sitting in one piece.

Home sweet home.

She unwrapped her cowl and untied the jacket around her waist, dumping them on the vacant seat in the lounge area.  Immediately, she went to the cramped room of a medical bay and rummaged the cabinets for Bacta. She returned to the lounge with a small vial of Bacta in hand, a pea-sized dollop was potent enough even for the gravest of injuries. A generous drop plopped on the tip of her finger and then rubbed it on the flesh wound on her shoulders.

“That should close by tomorrow,” she diagnosed.

A great sigh escaped Jidné’s lungs, the overall exhaustion for today had constricted her chest that her body realized just now that she’s truly safe. Her back slouched lazily against the leather cushion of the couch, the muscles around her joints eased—as if twisted rope had been loosed from a strenuous grip—and her heavy eyelids fell until darkness blanketed her eyesight.

Jidné…?

Her eyes shot up and her heart pounded a loud beat at the same time. At first, her eyes shifted left and right, searching the sound and assuming that she’s hearing things.

Jidné?

“That voice…”

“Come now, my little one…”

My little one.

She knows that pet name even if she heard it from a parsec away.

She straightened herself on her seat, looked around and saw that she was still inside her ship, ID-3 had put himself to a snooze mode atop the table; she listened for the faceless voice again, its origin was unclear for it echoed as it called her name, but the words were distinct. The voice beckoned her again, it was coming from the other side of the door that separated the lounge from the cockpit.

“Come now, little one.” The voice repeated.

Jidné could have sworn that the voice could be heard from the other side of the door. Her hand hovered over the door controls, she was hesitating when the silence followed the beckoning, but her eagerness prevailed. A touch of a button did nothing. Jidné pressed the button in five-second intervals for three times, when it didn’t do anything, she dared to look past her shoulder and found herself in a hallway not of her own ship.

Her heat stamped wildly through her chest that her breathing could not keep up. Shallow, rapid breathing was all her lungs could produce. In the farthest end of the hallway, the figure had its back turned but the long, twin tendrils dangled until their thighs—deep indigo patches intricately framed the white montral from top to the bottom.

“Master?”

Jidné clutched at her throat. The voice that uttered was her younger self’s. Her head was swirling as she tried to comprehend what was happening.

“Master, wait for me!” she strained her vocal chords in an attempt to regain the true sound of her voice.

“Don’t delay now, little one. Come, come.”

The figure was definitely the owner of that voice, but not once did it turn around to beckon her properly. Not even realizing it, Jidné’s own legs suddenly had a volition of their own, dragging the girl across the metal floor.

“I’m coming, I’m here…!” Jidné cracked, her younger persona taking over her adult body. “Wait for me, please! Master Anesh!”

The waking memory of Jidné’s master continued through a door that gaped open, as if waiting for Jidné to come; when she was halfway there, blaster fire whistled—and out of instinct, Jidné ducked as if to avoid them, but they’re part of the illusion—indistinct yet familiar voices of the clones shouting the order to fire rang ricocheted among the walls.

“Jidné, come on now,” Master Anesh beckoned again calmly, contrast to the situation that Jidné finds herself in.

The entire experience set Jidné’s body and mentality back to that fateful day years ago. All of her survival instincts were notched to the highest setting; though it wasn’t the graceful elusiveness that she usually uses for her bounty-hunting—it was the desperate, nerve-racking attempt to escape alive that heightens one’s senses. She didn’t realize that tears had begun to well up and dribble down her cheeks, her throat ran dry from the shallow, rapid breathing, and her stomach churned in complete fear.

“MASTER, TAKE COVER!!” shrieked Jidné, it was more of an impulse than a voluntary utterance; her body and consciousness are reliving that horrifying, life-changing scenario.

She continued to run with her back crouched low as the mirage blasters continue to whistle and fire behind her ears. She glances at the sight in front of her, the figure of Master Anesh—back still turned against her—remained sage and stood there idly, without a care in the world.

Jidné threw her entire self to the door, successfully passing through, and rejoining Master Anesh. Quickly, the girl pulled herself back up on her feet; by the time that she did, her master had gone farther from her—so close, yet so far. She forgave that, she just wanted to get closer to the Togruta.

“Jidné…” beckoned the voice once more, somberly.

The young girl finally caught up to her master. Master Anesh stood taller than Jidné remembered, when she hoisted her hand towards the Togruta’s back, she hesitated and jerked it back—discovering that in this illusion, she had taken over the form of her younger self: a Padawan, a child who still had a lot of ways to learn.

“Have you forgotten what I taught you?” Master Anesh’s voice sounded stricter, as if dismayed at the little child that stood in front of her.

The girl shakes her head fervently, “No, of course not!”

“You’re troubled, Jidné. Don’t you remember what I keep telling you?”

“The Force is in its strongest in one’s emotions and instincts; it resonates with the clearest eyes of the mind,” Jidné recited, surprised at herself that she still remembers it word for word. She jerked her head up to face her master, in search of affirmation from the kindly-faced Togruta.

“Master… I…”

Before Jidné could even finish, tremors ravaged the floor beneath her feet, the lights that paneled the walls flickered until they died, and the beams above their heads were giving away… the entire hallway collapsed—along with Master Anesh standing in it!

“MASTER, NO!!!”

The devastation was so surreal that Jidné felt like she was going to die there. She felt like falling to a deep, ceaseless abyss as her surroundings fully reduced to nothing.

She gasped and sat back up again, only this time in a cold sweat. Her exclamation woke ID-3 from his snooze mode, his tentacles popped out partially and turned into little feet, he stepped to the edge of the table close to Jidné as he asked her well-being.

“Yeah… I’m okay, ID…” she heaved. “Just a bad dream…”

“Woooo…” ID-3 points out the tears staining Jidné’s face. “Beep, trill?”

Jidné wiped her tears with her arm. Her mind was still spewing sparks as it tried to register everything that transpired. She propped her elbows on her knees, her fingers raking through her hair, coaching herself to breathe slower and more relaxed as she realizes that she’s back in reality.

ID-3 hopped from the table to the couch, he tried to squeeze himself into the space behind Jidné’s arms—as if like a pet animal would—and beeped a soft, slow moan of a note. He occupied the entirety of Jidné’s laps, she weakly giggle and wrapped the little disc of a droid in her arms.

“Thanks, ID, I’m really glad you’re here,”

She pulls him in closer to a hug, planting her cheek against the cold dome top of his head. Two of ID’s arms extended and wrapped around her forearms, embracing her back—one of his pincers even patted her to comfort her.

“You’re such a sweet droid, I don’t remember putting an affection chip in your motherboard,” Jidné joked through a sniffle.

When Jidné regained her bearings, she attempted to meditate tonight. It was a slow progress, but she acknowledged every little change she noticed throughout the phase. She stands up from the couch and settled herself on the floor right beside the table.

Legs crossed together, hands on the knees, and an erect back.

Deep breaths.

Closed eyes.

A sharp focus within a calm, sound mind.

Breathe, Jidné.

To her, she bared everything to the Force—she allowed its flow take over her bloodstreams, its energy rippling its current underneath her skin—her fingers trembled, her nails sank through the fabric of her pants until the flesh of her knees, she has latched onto the Force but she’s struggling to get a hold on it.

Her heart leapt when she felt a soothing sensation blanket her—it was warm and cold at the same time, but still comforting—and then her subconscious reached out as far as the rich expanse of Ombari’s wilderness: the lush green of the trees, the harsh heat in the blood-orange desert, the azure sheen of the waters, the life that resided in all of those things from the largest predator down to the tiniest insect burrowed underneath the soil.

An involuntary smile twitched and curled at the corner of her lip. What a relief, Jidné thought, she had yearned for this kind of result for a long time—and she savored every moment of it. Gradually, the Force allowed her to see beyond the life on the planet. The darkness was replaced with a blurry golden light behind her eyes, hushed and incoherent sounds whispered in her ears, and she’s started to feel sensations—firm yet gentle grips, the natural warmth of one’s skin, the feeling of having one’s eyes gazing fondly at her, and the utterance of her name of a yet-incoherent voice.

With her subconscious, she tried to reach out for the origin—she wanted more of it, thus she allowed herself to be a bit greedy.

“What are you…?” she uttered in a whisper, taking a step closer.

Upon touching the source, dark nothingness returned and befell her eyesight. Her neediness had become her undoing; that soft, warm, comforting feeling disappeared as easily as ash lost in the sand.

Like terrors in the night, nightmarish images rear their ugly heads right in front of her face: agonizing cries of pain, the wild crack of lightning, the sound of a body thudding harshly against the hard ground…

And the foreboding sound of a rhythmic, robotic breathing.

It all felt real, even though Jidné knew that it’s not her who is—or perhaps, will not—experiencing these things.

“Make it stop…!” she yelped, unable to open her eyes and free herself from this trance that’s ensnared her, begging to a non-existent tormentor.

Hissing breaths entered and then left her through the hairline-thin gaps between her teeth, her eyebrows pulled together and her head slightly thrashed—fighting it off while her concentration gradually ebbed. The intensity spilled its way out of her; the interior of the Scarab rumbled, the trinkets and decorations that lined the shelves of the lounge room clattered and shuddered at the whim of Jidné’s Force energy.

“Beeee!” ID-3 lowed in surprise, panicked and unable to do anything except watch his owner lose herself in the trance.

Finally, the glue that kept Jidné’s eyelids shut was gone. The shuddering around her ship vanished as well. Jidné tried to regain her bearings, her eyes surveyed everything around her—she’s still in the ship. She melted to the floor and let all of those emotions and feelings sink into her from the vision of Master Anesh appearing before her until that scenario of her witnessing a torturing that wasn’t hers.

“Beeep, chirp?”

“Yeah, I’m okay… I’m okay, ID-3…” she panted. She rubbed her entire face, massaging the muscles of her cheeks and forehead. “How stupid of me to meditate when I’m exhausted… So much for trying to fix myself. Damn, what a long day.”

[1-1snailxd-art]

The Shield to your Sword

Masterlist ———- Chapter 5

Warnings: panic (please message or ask me if more need to be added)

Tag Support Team - Thank you for your support 💜 (let me know if you want to be added or removed) 

@the-real-wholesome-bitch @small-reptile-cake @phe-purple-parade-ts @daflangstlairde @quoth-the-sparrow @it-me-the-phi @soul-of-a-vixen @littleladynightshade @thequeensphinx @5150brotherbear @ollyollyoxinfree @celeste-tyrrell @ahyeahisurehopeit-does @pumpkinminette

Summary: The Fates shared their message with the King and other fortunate souls throughout the land; hoping their cryptic glimpse into the future would prepare them for it. Unfortunately for them, not everyone was able to process their visions completely.  

Beginning note: Sorry this took so long

——————————

Chapter 6 - Fates Fail

Logan woke and blindly reached their hand out to locate their glasses; wrapping tired fingers around the wooden frames and placing them on their face. A vision from the Fates had a very distinct feeling from normal dreams; they were intense and tiring. Shuffling downstairs, Logan set some water to boil as they collected herbs to mix a calming tea. The aroma was just beginning to fill the main area when Haefen came down the stairs to join his child at the mixing table.

"Care to share what you saw?" Haefen questioned, seeing Logan's furrowed brow.

"Only if you are willing to share your own vision."

Silence came as an obvious response of their reluctance to share and Logan carefully poured a cup of tea for their father before pouring the rest into a larger travel container.

"What are your plans, Logan?"

"If the Fates are calling to us, they may have touched others." Stepping away, Haefen sipped at the warm, sweet tea while Logan packed. "I'm going to check on Virgil and the other young servers."

"Take care not to catch the guard’s attention."

"They've never caught me before."

 Logan left without another word, mind still thinking about the message the Fates had sent. They questioned if the deer was referring to Spirit or themself; and if the deer wasn't them, it would make them the arrow filled wolf. All they could know for sure was they were one of the animals; they could feel that warning strong in their gut. It terrified them and they wished to be like Virgil and forget the vision altogether.

   ******************** 

  Slipping into Virgil's room was easy, but Roman was surprised to find the bed empty as he approached. Heavy breathing in the rooms furthest corner alerted him to his friend’s presence, and he activated a lamp to try and assess the state they were in.

"Virgil?"

The lamps light barely reached the far corner, but it was enough for Roman to see Virgil pressed against the wall with his arms wrapped tightly around his chest; breathing fast and desperate.

"It's okay, Virge." Keeping his hands in view, Roman carefully stepped forward as he watched the other’s eyes dart blindly around the room. "It's me. Roman."

"R-r-ro-roman?" "Yeah. It's me."

"I-I-I ca-can-n-can-n-t ssee. I-it hur-t-ts-ts-s" "It's okay. I'm right here." Hand reaching Virgil's shoulder, Roman felt guilty at the way he flinched before leaning his head forward to find their chest. "I need you to breathe for me, okay? Lets just slow it down."

   When Logan peeked into the room, he found Roman with his arms protectively wrapped around Virgil as they counted their breaths. The Prince turned his head and saw the physician looking in; giving them a nod of permission to enter.

"Logan's here. I'm going to help you back to bed, okay?"

With a small approving nod, Roman carefully lifted Virgil up and met Logan by the bed; sitting so panicked man remained on his lap.

"What happened?" Logan asked, immediately looking them over for injuries. "I don’t know. He just said he can't see and he's in pain," Roman shifted onto the bed further to lift Virgil's legs up as Logan continued to check him over.

Brow creasing in thought, Logan looked into Virgil's eyes; void and pupils small despite the low light. Mind sifting through everything they knew about Virgil and the Fates visions; a realisation dawned on the young physician.

   "You're fine, Virgil. You're just sleeping." They said, giving his shoulder a supportive squeeze.

"Um, no offense, Logan;" Roman said with a slight chuckle, "but you might have the wrong glasses on. Virgil is awake. His eyes are open."

"Yes, but his mind is still sleeping and trying to process the Fates vision." Logan replied, moving to pour some tea into a nearby cup. "Close your eyes, Virgil, and you will be able to see again." Roman watched in confusion as Virgil complied and their body relaxed further into his hold.

"Talk to us for a while, Virgil. Tell us what you can see right now."

"Virgil doesn't dream, Logan, you know that. He won't see anything. What is with you tonight?"

"Shush and let him speak." Logan replied sternly and helped Roman shuffle around so his back was against the bed's headboard. Virgil clung to his friend’s bed clothes and began whispering as they settled into their new position.

   "I just see the sky peeking through the leaves of the Queen’s garden."

"Can you hear anything, besides us?" Logan prompted, offering a cup of tea to Roman.

"No. It's nice. Peaceful."

"How do you feel?"

"The pain is gone. I just feel...Alone." The observing pair exchanged a glance; Roman nervously sipped the tea Logan had given him. "I know you're here though and...and I feel...happy."

"Happy? How can you feel alone and happy?" Roman asked, earning stern look from Logan.

"I don't know. I haven't felt like this before, but it's nice to feel it." "What do you mean by that? Aren't you happy here, Virgil?" That outburst earnt a slap to his shoulder from Logan.

"It's a different happy, Ro." Virgil hummed, breathing levelling as sleep began to take him. "Different... To with...you."

Opening his mouth to comment further, Logan silence the Prince with a raised hand.

"Let it go, Roman. He's asleep."

   "What was all that?" Roman eventually whispered, setting his cup aside. "How did you know he was asleep, even though he looked awake and was talking?"

"I remember listening to my parents talk about him when I was young. He experienced a great trauma before the Queen brought him here, Roman." Sitting on the bed opposite the pair, Logan stared at their hands to avoid the Prince's eyes. "The particulars of that trauma are not mine to share, but I'm sure you have a general awareness of them."

"I know Mother saved him during an attack on his village, and he was the only child to survive."

"Yes, well... To protect himself from that memory and lose, Virgil's mind has engaged a barrier of sorts. His subconscious remembers and recalls everything, but his conscious mind won't let everything through. As a result, Virgil recalls basic feelings and emotions on the rare occasion that information slips through, but otherwise he recalls nothing. That is my understanding at least." Sensing the others confusion, Logan sighed and met his eye. "The mind doesn't always follow an exact science, Roman. It isn't something we are meant to completely understand. But I knew the Fates spoke through the subconscious mind and I knew that that was the part Virgil keeps separate. I made a simple deduction that was thankfully proven correct."

"So, if that’s the case...will he remember what happened tonight?"

"Most likely not. I predict he will either remember nothing at all or have a vague memory of us assisting him to return to bed. The Fates vision was pointless either way. Lost in a mix of repressed memories."

"The Fates are pointless in general."

"You don't believe in their warnings, Roman?"

"I don't believe in them all together." Roman stroked Virgil's hair and relished the sigh of content that escaped his lips at the action. "As far as I'm concerned, they are manipulative liars that use fear so they can feed on the belief of their followers."

"Interesting viewpoint from a royal." Logan stood and poured more tea into a cup. "Considering you will receive their visions monthly soon enough."

"They can feed me their lies all they like, but that doesn't mean I will trust them." "What did they say tonight?" Logan waited, but when no response came, they decided to lead the conversation themself. "I saw a wolf with fur as dark as the night sky alongside a grey deer. Their heads touched and my heart was filled with love and adoration before arrows rained from the sky. The wolf stood over the deer and protected it."

"Sounds like utter nonsense."

"I agree that it sounds ridiculous, but that is only because I cannot yet comprehend what they are trying to tell me. In time, I will come to understand the meaning behind it and-"

"Trying to understand the meaning behind their visions is what drove my grandmother to her death." Roman snapped.

Virgil stiffened and whimpered in his arms, before Roman softened his voice and started stroking his hair again.

"Forgive me, your highness," Logan bowed their head and ignored the pained look in Roman's eye at their sudden formal tone. "I spoke out of line. I shouldn't have tried to force my own beliefs onto you. I will take my leave." "Logan." The physician stopped at the door but refused to turn back around. "I appreciate what you have done for us, and what I hope you will continue to do."

"I will be here whenever you or Virgil need me." Logan turned their head; eyes appearing ablaze with the lamp lights reflection on their glasses. "I believe I am the wolf after all."

   The door clicked shut and Roman was left with Virgil once more; shifting lower onto the bed so they could lay side by side. Lamplight slowly fading after Roman's hand brushed the rune and he settled down to find a few hours of rest before the sun rose on a new day.

    ******************** 

   A soft knocking on the door caused Virgil to stir; his body so relaxed that he didn't flinch as the door creaked open.

"Well aren't you just precious."

Virgil's eyelids were still too heavy to open as Val came inside and he let out a grunt at her words. Mind slowly waking, he became aware of just how warm and comfortable he was; unusual for his generally cold living conditions.

"Look, I'm glad you two reconciled after last night, and as much as I would love to let you both sleep, you need to get up before suspicion spreads."

"What are you-"

Finally opening his eyes, Virgil came to his senses and woke up fully when he realised he had been curled up against the Prince's chest.

"Roman! What the fu-"

Val managed to catch Virgil before he fully slipped off the bed; blankets tangled around his feet in his rush to move away. Reacting just as fast, Roman sat up and held his arms out in surrender as he saw the panic in his friend’s eyes.

"It's okay. Your fine, Virge."

"Like hell I am! What are you doing here? WHEN did you get in here?"

"Well I guess that means Logan's first assumption was correct, you don't remember anything, do you?"

Seeing the red blossom on the Prince’s cheeks, Val cut in before Virgil could answer.

"I'd love to let this continue, my Lord, but I'm afraid your absence will soon cause suspicion."

"My absence?" Roman blinked and ran a hand through his bed-hair as Virgil scrambled over to check the time. "

"Shit, Roman, it's almost 10. I was meant to be on duty over an hour ago."

"Holly went to cover for you." Val assured, as Virgil raced to grab clothing for the day. "She said you would know her price."

"Great. I imagine I am going to love it. Ro," the Prince was still sitting cross-legged on the bed despite the nervous energy in the room, "you need to get back to your room before someone else finds you here."

"Of course, but Virgil, I need to expla-"

"Tell me later, alright?" His voice came out harsher than he intended, and Virgil took a breath to calm himself before speaking further. "Let's just get through the morning without anyone jumping to conclusions, okay?"

With an affirming nod, Virgil slipped out to the bathrooms while Val helped Roman sneak back to his room without detection.

   ******************** 

   The informal dining room filled with natural light as the sun rose higher into the sky, and Iris scrubbed the windows to calm her nerves. The Prince still hadn’t called for breakfast and the morning was inching away, meaning her schedule of chores was extending further into the evening. Silently begging the spirits to hurry the tardy man along, she jumped in horror when Roman burst through the doors a moment later.

“Good morning, Iris. Sorry I’m late, but a prince must have his beauty sleep.”

“No apologies needed, my lord. I will fetch your breakfast immediately.”

Iris slipped out the door before Roman could reply and he was left alone in the silent room; staring out the freshly cleaned window. While the scenery was great, he tired of it. It was always the same view of the same part of the market, with the same indistinguishable bodies pushing past one another. Training his eyes to a guard tower, he imagined Virgil settling into his watch position and fretting over what price Holly would have him pay. Checking the suns position, Roman sighed, realising he would have a few hours to himself before Virgil would join him in the library for study.

   ******************** 

   Dodging one fist and backing out of reach of another, Virgil kept his expression void of emotion as the replacing guard cackled.

“I haven’t had the privilege of punishing the outsider for a while.” Desperate fists came forward again; feet shuffling against stone to maintain distance in the limited space. “Bout time I put you in your place again.”

“Unlikely.” Virgil retorted, allowing himself to reach the back wall. “You’re the slowest purist I’ve come across. You won’t lay a finger in me.”

   He would never admit it out loud, but Virgil enjoyed the look of false hope that flared in the guard’s eyes as he saw Virgil’s back  touch the wall. It was the moment when the predator believed it was about to capture its prey; only in this case, the prey wasn’t as cornered as he appeared.

Using magic in unregistered fights was outlawed within the city walls; which had saved Virgil a lot of hurt in the long run. Adara had sadly said it was one law that worked in his favour and was the reason why Holly trained him exclusively in hand to hand combat from a young age. However, activating strength runes on your clothing wasn’t illegal in any way, and Virgil knew how to use it to his advantage.

   Pulling his arms up to shield his face, Virgil brushed his hand across the faint rune on the cuff of his shirt; the fabric stiffening on his back. The moment he felt the fabric change, Virgil let his legs buckle, sliding down the rough wall as the guard jabbed his fist forward. Rewarded with the satisfying sound of knuckles on stone, he rolled to the side as the guard stumbled back and clutched his hand to his chest; springing to his feet and fleeing before any further attempts were made against him.

   Exiting the tower, Virgil stopped and looked up to the guard tower above; the torture chamber he would have to return to soon enough. His shifts didn’t always end in a fight; most guards were reasonably pleasant or indifferent towards the young ward, but others were still unaccepting of an outsider receiving royal privileges and achieving the title of weapons master. The view of many was that only those of an appropriate bloodline should be allowed to train as weapon masters; though Virgil thought that belief stemmed from their own jealousy and incapability.  

   Leaving the tower in his shadow, Virgil headed into the market to collect a well overdue breakfast. He handed a few extra coins to the baker for his new child before he stuffed one savoury roll in his mouth and bagged the other for later. Satisfied with the purchase, he quickened his pace to reach Roman in the library before he missed any more of the session. Logan watched from afar as Virgil scaled the stairs and disappeared inside the castle; glad to see him moving without a limp or sign of injury. Feeling relieved, Logan continued their journey into the outer town to make house-calls at their father’s request; bag packed for a trip to the forest when they were done.

   ******************** 

   Quills scraped against paper as the scholars spoke; eager learners taking vigorous notes of their every word. English letters and runes filled pages of roughly bound notes of every student but one; Roman’s page was a mess of inked scratches that formed a shaky landscape the more he added. His complacency was hardly due to arrogance, more frustration at his inabilities. For years Roman had been similar to the others; notebooks filled with information and messy runes that read as nonsense. While his English handwriting was immaculate, Roman struggled to understand or record even the simplest of runes alone. When he tried to write them, he couldn’t recall the ancient lettering beyond the elements; even looking at them had the lines rising from their positions on the page and blurring together before him. It was an anomaly that no one could explain, and the only support they offered the Prince was more lessons and the instruction to try harder.  

   “Looks good, Ro.” Virgil said quietly as he slumped into the chair beside him. “Though I don’t think you’re going to manipulate flames with that.”

“I could too,” he whined in reply. “If I put it on a heat rune, I could make it burst into flames.”

   The scholars, Luka and Cole, ignored the royal pair; rolling their eyes at their muffled laughter. Luka watched knowingly as Virgil set about his normal routine of getting Roman back on track; turning back to the board when he saw they were ready. Though offers of private lessons had been given, the Prince had turned them down in favour of normal lessons. It was to the scholar’s great relief that he didn’t however turn down Virgil’s assistance. Since completing his own studies, Virgil could now focus exclusively on Roman; slowly stepping him through runes in a far more simplistic manner.

   “Please turn in your parchment for assessment,” Luka instructed at the sessions end.

Chairs scrapped against the floor as the other students lined up to have their work assessed; Roman joining the back and practically bouncing in anticipation.

“How did he do?” Cole whispered to Virgil as he packed up the table.

“Three are usable.” He said, keeping his voice low. “He’s improving, but many of his strokes are off.“

“Perhaps if you both attended extra lessons, he wou-“

“I don’t think he’s lying when he says he can’t see. This isn’t as simple as him studying more.”

“You know that is impossible. Physicians have tested his sight and Roman’s handwriting is without fault normally. The only logical course of action is to increase his lessons. He’ll never graduate otherwise.”

“Strange that we live in a land of magic and a person’s inability to learn is the thing that seems illogical. Perhaps there is more at play and we just haven’t discovered it yet.”

Cole looked deep into Virgil’s stormy eyes and pondered their words. Though they didn’t agree; they nodded in acceptance and moved aside so Virgil could meet the now whooping Roman.

   “I passed, Virgil! I actually achieved a pass today!”

“Proud of you, Ro.” Virgil gave his shoulder a comforting squeeze as they made their way out of the library. “Now, lets get a snack before going to the training field. I’ve got some exercise to make up for.”

“Not today my bleary-eyed friend, we have a date with the outside world.”

Virgil stopped dead in his tracks, causing the Prince to look over his shoulder in confusion.

“Virge? You okay?”

“You want to skip training? Today?”

“Well, yeah.” Roman laughed as the answer seemed very obvious to him and he could hardly believe he had to explain himself to Virgil. “You’re healthy again, I just passed a runes lesson, and we finally have permission to go out without a pack of guards following us; why wouldn’t we go out?”

“How about the fact that I owe Holly a favour and I’d rather pay sooner rather than later.”

“Aw, don’t you worry about Holly.” Roman took Virgil’s hand and began pulling him down the hall towards the kitchens. “It won’t be the first, or even the last time we’ve skipped out on her and Sir Dolt. It’ll be fine.”

“Easy for you to say.” Virgil mumbled, allowing himself to be pulled along the rest of the way.

   Holly and Andrew were excellent trainers; both worthy of their titles despite Roman’s nicknames. Virgil imagined the look of annoyance on Andrew’s face as he waited under the tree for the pair to arrive. Holly on the other hand would be hacking at a block of wood with her blades or shooting arrows to form patterns on the trees. Ignoring them without reason always ended in pain eventually, and Virgil was not in the mood for that after the few days he’d had.

Reaching the kitchens, Roman released his friend’s hand and went inside to sprinkle the chef with enough praise to earn a specially packed basket of goodies. From his position in the doorway, Virgil caught Val’s eye and gave her a pleading look. Excusing herself from the wash trough, the serving girl stepped out to speak with her friend.

“Judging by those puppy-dog eyes, you need something.”

“Unfortunately, yes.” He held out his hand and Val accepted the small array of coins he offered. “Take some for yourself and offer the rest to Holly with an apology. I’d rather she doesn’t beat me to death the next time I see her.”

With a small laugh, Val pocketed the coins. “I wish I could say you’re exaggerating, but knowing Holly as I do, she sure would beat your ass into the ground.”

Without further explanation, Val headed off down the hall and left Virgil in his solitude.

    It took 15 minutes for the cooks to finish the basket; Val returning just as Roman dragged his wary friend away. In a further 15, the pair were on their horses and heading towards the outer wall. Though they rode side by side, Roman repeatedly turned to check over his shoulder, happy to see the path behind them void of following guards.

“Where are you headed, sire?” Damien called from his position at the outer towns gate; scratching absently at the scars on his hand.

“To a suitable picnic area.” He smiled at Virgil; eyes gleaming with joy, before returning his focus to the guard. “We’ll return well before sunset, you needn’t worry.”

With than, Roman encouraged his horse ahead; Virgil following close behind for their first solo journey outside.

    ******************** 

   Running water from the stream soothed Virgil’s nerves as he lay back on the blanket, belly full of the meal they had brought. The ride had been uneventful, besides Roman’s random whoops of joy as he encouraged his mount to quicken her pace and charge along a long-forgotten path. The Prince looked out over the water and watched a pair of birds’ dance around each other; flying and landing to a beat only they could hear. Virgil would have happily continued to enjoy the tranquillity of the afternoon, but Roman unfortunately had things on his mind that he had to get out.

   “Do you mind if we talk?”

“I assumed that was why you wanted to come out here.” Virgil kept his eyes closed, focusing on the sound of the water to keep himself calm. “What’s on your mind, Princey?”

“I wanted to talk about last night.”

“Which part? The one where you refused to accept my own beliefs, or the one where you let yourself into my bed and made me oversleep?”

“Hey, I said there was an explanation for that.”

“I’m all ears.”

A breeze shifted the branches above them, causing shadows to dance across the Virgil’s seemingly calm face. Roman shifted closer; his face warming as he looked at his peaceful friend.

“The fates sent out a message last night.”

“Didn’t think you believed in them.”

“I don’t!” Roman snapped; immediately regretting it as he saw Virgil go tense. “I… I know they exist…I just don’t believe in what they say. The point is, I woke up and felt something was wrong. Turns out I was right because when I got to your room you were having a full-on panic.”

“I was?” Opening his eyes, it was Virgil’s turn to experience guilt from Roman’s solemn look.

“It was scary how upset you were. I would have been lost if Logan hadn’t turned up out of the blue and helped me calm you down. I… I never… I never fully understood your nightmares until last night.”

   Virgil sat up and hugged his knees to his chest, desperately trying to remember the evening and get some hint of what Roman spoke about.

“Logan thought the fates had tried to speak to you. Tell me honestly, Virgil… do you remember anything from last night? Or any of your dreams?”

Breathing deeply through his nose, Virgil closed his eyes and did his best to hold the impending tears at bay. Roman shifted slightly closer, but still not enough to physically touch his friend just yet.

“I… I’ve never lied to you fully, Roman. I don’t…I don’t remember my dreams, but I-“ his throat tightened as he continued to hold back the emotion that threatened to bubble out. “I often hear… screams before I wake. A-a-and there are feelings… feelings that I cannot explain.”

“What about last night?”

“Nothing. I don’t remember anything. The last thing I remember was reading Logan’s book on rune marked animals and being angry with you. Honestly, waking up in your arms was the last thing I expected.”

“Wasn’t exactly what I was expecting either.”

   Arms snaked around Virgil’s body as Roman shuffled right up behind him; resting his chin on the smaller man’s shoulder, bodies coming closer together. Virgil’s heart ached, wanting to lean back into the safety and warmth of the Prince’s arms; but another part of him screamed to move away.

“I know we don’t agree on everything, Virgil.” Roman whispered; breath warm against the others cheek. “It frustrates me to no end sometimes. Regardless, I can’t stay mad at you.”

“Ro-“

“Especially not when you need me.” Sensing Virgil’s body relax at his words, Roman pulled him close and guided them both back down to the blanket. “And I… I need you too.”

Virgil rolled over so he was laying on Roman’s chest; part of his mind still screaming to move away. Fingers started gently stoking his hair and Virgil’s mind went blissfully silent; fully accepting the sanctuary of Roman’s company. Virgil felt freer than he’d ever felt in the Queen’s gardens; while on the other hand, Roman was overwhelmed with the feeling of success. He’d passed a class, gotten out unguarded and now had the man he loved willing accepting his embrace. No panic attacks. No fresh nightmare. Just the two of them alone in the forest.

   “We shouldn’t be doing this.” Virgil eventually mumbled, opening his eyes as he registered that he’d been gently stroking the Prince’s chest. “Someone could see us and make assumptions.”

“Let them look. I’m not ashamed.”

“It’s not a good look, Ro.” Sitting up slightly, Virgil looked at the Prince with eyes full of concern. “What would your suitors think if they heard about this?”

“Let them think what they want;” he reached up caressed Virgil’s cheek, “I don’t care.”

Leaning into the touch, Virgil’s mind was once again screaming the negative implications; face contorting in frustration as he finally began moving away.

“We can’t do this, Princey. It’s not right.”

“Says who?” Roman whined, sitting up but making no move to close the gap Virgil had quickly established.

“Your responsibilities and royal traditions.”

“Screw that. I don’t have to listen to any of that if I don’t want to.”

“Don’t be a moron, Roman.” Standing, Virgil looked down at the slightly dejected royal. “I won’t come between you and your right to the throne.”

“And what if I said I didn’t want the throne?” The Prince stood and faced the other with determination.

“Then you’d be lying to me and yourself.” All fire drain from Roman’s eyes, unable to argue with the truth. “I know you, Roman. I’d never forgive myself if you gave up your dreams for an outside like me.”

Silence returned to the area as Virgil moved to check on the horses, leaving Roman alone with his thoughts. He’d hoped his boldness would have been rewarded; instead he was left feeling lonelier than before watching his love move away.

____________________

End Note:

Hey *waves awkwardly* Looks like waiting a month for an update is gonna be a thing…I should have seen that coming. Unfortunately, I can’t plan writers block or mental health relapses; but I can plan for my approaching report writing to take away every ounce of free time I have. So, lets be honest…I’ll probably see you all in late December. 

(Though I will still be trolling around on here because, lets be honest, I’m a major procrastinator) 💜🐌

——————————

Looking for more Snail 💜🐌 writing? Check out my writing master post

Or check out my main blog @snail-giggles for fandom reblogs and whatever

[strangewhitegirl321]

Injured (Newt Scamander)

{Not my gif.}

Words: 1746

Unedited.

Originally posted to my Wattpad account.

   Newt nimbly dove to the side as a large paw came raking through the dirt. A growl and snarl met his movements as he threw himself through the dirt and jumped to his feet, his wand flying out of his sweaty hands.

   The roars of the beast's heads sent Pickett scrambling up Newt's jacket and into his hair in an attempt to hide. Eyes darting to her friend's wand discarded in the dirt, Newt's companion, (Y/n), bravely called out in order to get the beasts attention, drawing it's focus from the man who reached up to sloppily relocate a certain small, green creature from his hair.

   "C'mere!" Loudly She yelled, stealing it's attention. Her eyes widened as three snarling heads spun in her direction, the canine's hackles straight up in the air as it whipped towards her.

   "(Y/n)-" Newt cried. "Don't! He's already startled- anymore loud noises-"

   "Then why are you yelling at me?" She objected, throwing herself into a clumsy roll over the ground in order to avoid a very large paw that tried to practically smack her straight out of existence. With a huff, she spit out the dirt she had gotten in her mouth before her eyes darted up just as the beast made a leap to pounce on her.

   "Newt-!" She found herself screeching, barely managing to roll to the side and scramble to her feet. Newt barely managed to shove Pickett safely into his pocket before clambering over to his wand. He scooped it up with a lazy hand before (Y/n) darted towards him.

   The beast was hot on her heels, however, as (Y/n) bowled down Newt, they both yelled as the three headed dog's jaws snapped at their feet.

   Quickly struggling to their feet, the two glanced at each other before turning their gazes to the creature. Both their eyes widened, before (Y/n) burst into action. The beast rushed towards them, paws flying and an angry glare in its eyes, lashing it's paws out and sending slobber everywhere.

   Reacting quickly, (Y/n) began to shove Newt out of the way, trying to move both herself and the man from the giant dog's path before teeth connected with her shoulder. Newt watched as a screech left her lips as the dog threw her across the room. A sickening crunch caused the man to reel back and a wince to cross his face as his companion slammed into a nearby tree. Her body tumbled to the ground, limp as she laid curled in the dirt, unconsciously curled around her new, raw injuries.

   The cracks of her body replied in his mind for just a moment, before Newt drew in a sharp breath. He watched his beast wheel around to face him. The dog's heads lowered threateningly as it snapped it's jaws at him, blood mixed into the drool dripping from beneath the middle head's tongue. The canine's hackles were so stiff in the air they seemed to tremble at the effort.

   Eyes still darting to the precious girl on the floor, he muttered, "That's it." Lifting his wand, he had a hard glare in his eye. He understood this animal had been abused- the scars running down it's side proved it- but the way it lashed out and attacked was reason enough to put it under a sleep like trance.

   "Immobulus!" Newt shouted, and before he could even blink the animal slowly crumpled to the ground, automatically filling the case with the rumble of it's snores. And yet, the earth-shaking breaths still seemed quiet compared to the loud growls from before.

   Without a second thought, Newt rushed to (Y/n)'s side. A worried breath left his lips as he looked down at her. Kneeling beside her frame, he took in all the blood that was slowly seeping from the obvious, ragged teeth marks that had torn through her shirt.

   Deciding he needed to act fast, he swore under his breath followed by a quick apology to the girl. Sticking his wand deep inside one of the wounds, he muttered a healing spell.

   "Altum sanitatum," He repeated over and over again, each time having to plunge his poor, bloody tipped wand into a new tear in (Y/n)'s flesh and slowly dragging it across the raw, open muscle there.

   (Y/n) began to rouse, whimpering as her hand reached out to grasp at seemingly anything in reach. Gently, Newt laid a hand on her forehead, shushing her as he finished up. He ignored when her weak hand gently grasped at his pants, only finishing his work as quickly as possible. Then, he awkwardly wiggled his arms under her form, before lifting her into the air with a slight struggle, seeing as he was still sitting by the time he had gathered her into his arms.

   Quickly, Newt rushed back to his cabin, unknowingly drawing the attention of a worried demiguise who trailed behind. Kicking open the door, Newt hurried to haphazardly fling everything off his desk with his elbows. Then, slowly and carefully, he laid the girl in his arms on the desk. Cradling her head in the nook of his arm, his hand fluttered down to the new scars on her exposed shoulder.

   Gulping, the quiet man shuffled back on his feet, eyes glancing over the bloody, torn fabric. Just in that moment, he noticed Pickett had at some point clambered clumsily out of his pocket. The silly little creature was grasping at (Y/n)'s chin- apparently trying to wake her.

   Newt decided to leave Pickett with the girl- knowing she would find it a comfort when she woke- and softly leaned back against the table behind him. Without a word, he watched over her as he waited for her to wake. Dougal joined him, wide golden eyes latched onto the girl as he curled up into Newt's side.

   The minute her eyes fluttered open, Newt rushed forward. He had to stop himself, remind himself that she was just injured- he needed to be careful with her.

   "(Y/n)?" His voice gently called. Slowly, her eyes drifted over to him, before being dragged to the tiny creature that hopped up and down on her chest, fighting with Newt for her attention.

   Quietly clearing his throat, Newt once again tried to earn her focus, "(Y/n)."

   Finally, her eyes connected with his. Newt fought the urge to look away, hide his eyes, reminding himself that at the moment she was his patient.

   "Newt?" Her voice was groggy, confused. "My side-"

   "What about your side?" Cautiousness thrown to the wind and long forgotten, the man practically jumped on her. His hand connected with her shirt, and without really thinking about it he tugged it up. Sickly yellow and purple marks were beginning to appear on her skin. Thick, blue veins crawled through the mess of colour and disappeared past the marks. All around leading to under her, her skin was an angry, agitated red.

   "Newt," (Y/n) complained, shoving her shirt back down.

   Stuttering even in his mind, Newt licked his lips before explaining, "I'm- I'm sorry, (Y/n), but I think you may have some broken ribs. I don't quite know- Well, I do- but I don't- I know a spell but I've never used it before-"

   Dougal's hand gripped onto the back of Newt's pants leg. The poor man nearly jumped out of his skin, glancing down to the small animal who looked up at him with a disapproving stare. Taking a moment to calm himself, Newt's eyes flickered nervously back to the girl in front of him. Unfortunately, Newt took note of the fact that (Y/n) was being extremely patient with him. She was in pain, and yet she was so used to his rambling awkwardness that her careful, steady (e/c) eyes encouraged him as her lips turned up in a patient smile. Honestly, it just made him more nervous.

   Swallowing his ridiculous fears, Newt muttered, "I can try the spell if you want me to."

   "What is it?" (Y/n) asked, shuffling uncomfortably, hand moving to gently brush at her bruised side.

   "Ferula. It wouldn't do much-" Newt suddenly rushed out, huffing before trying to slow himself down. "But it will support the broken bones, and I believe ease any pain you might have-"

   "Do it," (Y/n) suddenly encouraged him, hand moving to latch onto one of his.

   Astounded, Newt gulped slightly, eyes shifting slightly before he asked, "That quickly?"

   "Yes," Once again, (Y/n) jumped on her reply. Licking his lips, Newt took a couple shuffling steps back. (Y/n) released his hand, letting her arm hang off the table in an attempt to keep it out of the way. With another gulp, Newt pulled out his wand, and hovered it over the bruises.

   "Ferula," He tried his best to enunciate, not wanting to mess up the spell. The minute a relieved sigh flew from (Y/n)'s lips, he felt his entire body relax. Shoulders slumping forward, he lowered his wand.

   "You're still going to have to take it easy," He stated the exact minute it came to mind. "Especially after the scare you gave me. I was so scared I don't think I even realised I was scared."

   "That didn't make sense," (Y/n) replied with a snort, slowly easing herself into a sitting position, scooping Pickett into one of her hands and gently resting him on her shoulder.

   "Maybe it wasn't supposed to," Newt sassed, tucking his wand away carefully. A sudden confidence brought about by worry urged through him, and gingerly Newt reached forward. His hand rested underneath (Y/n)'s chin, and he raised her face to look him straight in the eye. Confused yet intrigued, (Y/n) locked eyes with him.

   "I want you to be more careful from now on," A protective edge fell upon his voice, his beautiful eyes flickering between her own. "I'm serious. Sometimes we both forget- these animals can be dangerous. Just like us, when they're scared they lash out. We both need to be more careful."

   Letting out a soft breath of air, (Y/n) nodded, "I don't think you really needed to tell me that. I think the broken ribs were lesson enough."

   Rolling his eyes, Newt's gaze flickered down to Dougal, who still had one of his hands clamped around Newt's pants. A warm, fond light shimmered in his eyes as he glanced back up to (Y/n). Her joking, tired smile brought a grin of his own to his lips. Hesitantly, he let his hands carefully grasp hers. He watched happily as the smile on her face grew, a giggle escaping her chest.

   "It's the thought that counts," He declared quietly, a soft blush taking over his cheeks.

(A.N.- I hope you enjoyed.)

[astrofireworks]

new year’s day

There's glitter on the floor after the party Girls carrying their shoes down in the lobby Candle wax and Polaroids on the hardwood floor

(1 Jan 2018)

From where he is on the floor, Jinjin can see dust motes floating on a ray of sunshine. It’s almost peaceful, with MJ’s head pillowed on his chest and Sanha draped a distance away over an armchair, the only interruption being soft snores from Rocky somewhere on the sofa behind him. The curtains are pulled closed, leaving only a crack to allow daylight in.

He isn’t sure at what point last night they all clocked out – the last thing he remembers is MJ deciding to take a nap some time past three in the morning, and him pulling a sleepy MJ into his embrace while the other four, huddled around a Monopoly board with drinks in their hands, laugh at their oldest. He remembers tugging MJ closer to him and burying his nose into MJ’s hair; he remembers telling a drowsy MJ to sleep and pressing a kiss to his forehead and reassuring Eunwoo that no, he’s fine with being on the floor even though Eunwoo’s offering his own bed and even though he knows his back will kill him when he wakes up.

There is a small noise from the kitchen and Jinjin smiles. Trust Eunwoo to be the one to wake up first to clean up the drinks from last night. There are still green and pink pieces of monopoly money scattered around the floor, traces of the kids giving the game up one by one. Jinjin wonders who won.

He sees Eunwoo step out of the kitchen, socked feet quiet against the hardwood floor as he pads into the living room.

“You’re up?” Eunwoo mouths.

Jinjin smiles in response. “Where’s Bin?”

There is a light blush across Eunwoo’s cheeks as he answers, “Our room.” He catches Eunwoo sliding into a smile the moment he says ‘our’, and feels his heart warm in response. He will be forever grateful that Bin finally took his head out of his ass to confess his feelings to Eunwoo – he wasn’t sure how many more secret looks and longing sighs he could have taken.

He watches Eunwoo pick up the stray pieces of Monopoly money, strange as it looks through horizontal mode from his position lying on the floor. “Eunwoo,” he whispers.

Eunwoo pauses in his cleaning and looks up, long fingers still curled around pink papers.

“Where are the polaroids from last night?”

Eunwoo’s eyes curve into a smile, and he reaches over to the coffee table to gather up the photos to hand to Jinjin.

Jinjin grins, the arm not curled around MJ reaching out to receive the polaroids. They’re beautiful, he thinks.

He shuffles through them one-handedly. There’s one of Sanha peeking from behind his hot chocolate mug, and another of him pretending to chug from an unopened soda bottle. There’s one of Rocky trying to bite Bin’s shoulder and Bin leaning away – Jinjin feels like if he focuses hard enough, he might just be able to hear Bin’s laughter.

There’s one of Rocky holding up a thick wad of monopoly money, looking far off into the distance with a haughty expression, and Jinjin can barely hold back a snort. There’s one of Eunwoo doing the exact same thing, haughty expression and all, except with only a singular note between his fingers and Jinjin can’t help but let out a quiet laugh. Now he knows who won.

MJ shifts in his arms, no doubt jostled by the laugh, and Jinjin runs his fingers through MJ’s hair to soothe him before picking up the next polaroids.

There’s one of him trying to stuff an entire sandwich in his mouth, with Sanha cheering on one side and Bin giving him a judgemental look on the other. There’s one of MJ attempting the same thing, with himself and Sanha laughing hard in the far corner. There’s one of Bin, cheeks already stuffed full and another sandwich in his hand, leaning against a slightly perturbed Eunwoo.

There’s one of Bin pressing a kiss to Eunwoo’s cheek, with Eunwoo’s face mid-laugh and dim lighting making it such that their faces are the only two visible things in frame. They are so, so in love it makes Jinjin’s heart swell.

And then there’s one of MJ, with his lovely cheeks crinkled up in his carefree smile and his messy bangs falling over bright eyes. Jinjin stares at it for a while – it isn’t often that you capture something this beautiful and get to keep with you forever.

There is a shift on Jinjin’s chest, and he looks down just in time to see MJ bury his nose into his chest. There is a beat, and MJ looks up, eyes still half-closed.  

“Morning, sweetheart,” Jinjin whispers.

MJ smiles blearily, fists coming up to rub the sleep away. “What’re you looking at?”

Jinjin hands him the polaroid he was looking at, and MJ snorts, tossing it a distance away.

Jinjin makes an indignant sound, “What did you do that for? That was my favourite one – “

“There’s no point looking at a photo when you have the real deal right here,” MJ sounds back, smile evident in a voice still slightly gravelly from sleep, and Jinjin can’t stop the laughter bubbling up from his chest.

He’s right though, Jinjin thinks. He brushes MJ’s bangs away from his eyes and presses a good morning kiss to his forehead.

“I love you.”

I want your midnights But I'll be cleaning up bottles with you on New Year's Day

(1 Jan 2019)

Bin has barely time to wonder why his bed is so cold when there is a dip in the mattress, and an arm snakes around his waist.

“Morning, sleepyhead.” A pair of lips press against the back of his neck.

Bin smiles and turns to face Eunwoo. “You weren’t here when I woke up.”

“I went to clean up the stuff in the living room before everyone else wakes up. Don’t want anyone crashing into bottles.”

Eunwoo’s eyes are sparkling and Bin feels the warmth of the smile in Eunwoo’s voice all the way down to his toes. “Are the two old men in your old room?”

Eunwoo snorts and presses a kiss to Bin’s nose. “Don’t let them hear you call you old men; MJ won’t come over anymore.”

“They always fall asleep before anyone else does, anyway. We can have New Year’s parties over at their place instead then, so they can sleep in their own bed.”

“Sanha lost the bet last night, remember? He’s already hosting 2020’s.”

Bin laughs, and tucks himself into Eunwoo’s arms. There is a sort of comforting thrill in the confidence with which Eunwoo announces the fact, a confidence in their friend group staying best friends and ringing in the next new year together. There is a moment of silence, with Bin’s head on Eunwoo’s heart and Bin feeling Eunwoo’s chest rise and fall with each breath.

Eunwoo tightens his hold on Bin and watches Bin’s eyelashes as he blinks drowsily. He’s beautiful, Eunwoo thinks, with his soft cheeks pressed against Eunwoo’s chest and his lips pushed out in a slight pout. How lucky he is to have this sight to wake up to, every day.

“We never got our midnight kiss this year,” Eunwoo says, instead. “We were too busy playing charades.”

Bin looks up and laughs. He stretches, all languid lines and soft muscles, before flipping over and propping himself up on his forearms. He leans over to press a gentle kiss to Eunwoo’s lips.

Eunwoo savours the soft warmth of Bin’s lips against his own, morning breath and all, before Bin pulls away.

“There’s no point in having kisses at midnight on New Year’s only,” Bin murmurs against his lips, “when we can have kisses all year round.”

Eunwoo laughs, then pulls himself out of bed. “You’re right. Now I gotta go clean up the rest of the room before the old men and the kids wake up.”

Bin’s response of, “Don’t let them hear that!” is met with a soft laugh as Eunwoo pads out of the room.

Bin yawns and appreciates the view of Eunwoo’s back for a moment before hauling his ass out of bed too. If Eunwoo’s set on clearing the apartment before the boys crashed in their living room wake up, he might as well help.

Please don't ever become a stranger whose laugh I could recognize anywhere

(1 Jan 2020)

Sanha isn’t sure how they got themselves into this tangle, but he’s learnt to never question his best friends.

Especially when they’re in a literal tangle on the Twister mat. Rocky is trapped somewhere underneath Bin and he’s laughing breathlessly and Jinjin’s yelling about someone’s elbow being in his face. Eunwoo’s face is dangerously close to MJ’s and Sanha can only laugh at how ridiculous this entire situation looks from where he’s perched on the sofa.

He grabs his polaroid camera and calls out to the giggling heap, “Look up, y’all!”

Rocky is the only one vaguely facing in his direction and he gives Sanha a bright smile just as Sanha presses his finger on the shutter. A whir of the camera later, the polaroid has come out perfectly and what used to be five men playing Twister has devolved into a full out tickle fight with Rocky screaming at Sanha for backup.

Their laughs are bright and way too loud for two in the morning, but Sanha can somehow pick out each individual laugh – MJ’s loud cackling, Rocky’s animated yelps, Bin’s breathy laughter, Eunwoo’s squeaky inhales and Jinjin’s low chuckling. Sanha’s heart is warm and full and he’s standing in the middle of his living room with his reindeer onesie with his best friends in a screaming mess on the floor, but honestly? He would give anything to pause time and keep this moment forever.

He snaps another polaroid and Rocky screeches louder for Sanha to come and save him from the rest of the boys.

Sanha sets down his camera, and with a high-pitched war cry, delves into the mess.

Hold on to the memories, they will hold on to you And I will hold on to you.

(31 Dec 2020)

Rocky sets down the wine bottle in his hand and lets out a low whistle. MJ and Jinjin have managed to decorate their new apartment pretty well, despite their bickering about the colour scheme. Their living room is painted a homey sunshine yellow and there are photographs of multiple sizes in frames above the sofa, arranged so that they cover nearly the entire wall.

There are throw pillows with covers that have cheesy sayings on them, and one pillow with a badly patterned “Goat!”. Rocky isn’t sure if he wants to know the back story behind it, but knowing MJ, it probably is hilarious.

Bin is already sprawled on the sofa, head hanging off one arm and talking to Sanha upside down. There is some unidentifiable piano music coming from the phone abandoned beside Bin and Sanha’s shuffling through a stack of what seems like playing cards and threatening to throw one at Bin’s head; Rocky has to stifle a laugh.

Eunwoo pops his head out of MJ’s kitchen and asks Rocky for help in carrying the food into the living room. Rocky complies.

A disaster.

There is flour all over the table and the sink is overflowing with soap suds and Rocky’s pretty sure the oven isn’t supposed to be smoking. Jinjin has a streak of chocolate across his cheek and a tray of what looks like charcoal sticks in front of him. The only edible food seems to be the ones in the Tupperware Eunwoo’s brought over from his own apartment.

But Jinjin and MJ are laughing and Eunwoo is shaking his head fondly and Rocky can’t help but smile because this is them, this is the six of them in a nutshell – a mess, but a beautiful and happy mess, and Rocky couldn’t feel more warm.

Jinjin waves him towards the food and turns around to toss the coal bricks into the trash. “Utensils are in the second drawer on the left. Should we forgo plates this year too?”

“We never use plates. Who needs plates when you have your rice bowls?” Eunwoo peels back a Tupperware cover and peers into it. “This one’s curry.”

Rocky clicks open another Tupperware container and wrinkles his nose, “This one’s pickled cucumbers.”

“Just because you don’t like cucumbers doesn’t mean the rest of us won’t eat it,” Jinjin says sensibly, then shoves three more Tupperwares into Rocky’s hands. “Bring these out, will you?”

Rocky heads out to the living room to set down the food, topmost Tupperware nearly tumbling onto the coffee table.

Bin perks up at the sight of food, and swings himself into a sitting position. “Are we eating yet?”

As the other three bring more food to the living room, Rocky watches Sanha clear his playing cards from the table. He squints. Those aren’t playing cards.

He picks one up, and it’s a polaroid of them, four years ago. Eunwoo is holding the camera and the five of them are piled up behind him, Sanha just making it into the top right corner of the polaroid. They are all squinting in the sunlight, and Jinjin’s smile is nearly blinding.

MJ sets down another stack of Tupperwares and picks up a polaroid from the stack in Sanha’s hands. “Oooh, I remember this.” It’s one of the six of them huddling on the beach in their winter coats, with Eunwoo screaming about how cold it was and Jinjin hollering at whoever it was holding the camera to take it quickly, before they all froze to death.

There’s one of Eunwoo in a suit, tossing autumn leaves into the air, laugh nearly audible. There’s one of Rocky in a striped turtle neck and red blazer, standing in front of some random rich man’s house, holding a rose from their rose bush in front of his face. There’s one of Sanha dead asleep on a chair, mouth open, and Bin squatting down next to him and pretending to poke his face.

There’s one of all six of them in suits at Sanha’s brother’s wedding. Sanha’s beaming at the camera like there’s no tomorrow, happiness palpable even two years after the fact and Rocky can’t help but smile.

Eunwoo sits down next to Rocky, setting down all the Tupperwares in his arms. He peers over Rocky’s shoulder at the polaroids in Rocky’s hands. “Why’d you bring these, Sanha?”

“I thought it’d be nice for MJ and Jinjin to string them up on a wall or something. I have so many of them from over the years we might as well start turning them into decoration; I already have about forty of them up on my wall, remember?”

Eunwoo hums in agreement, shuffling through some of the polaroids. He says something about making sure each row has a balance of portrait and landscape polaroids, but his voice fades into the background as Rocky squints hard at Sanha.

Rocky’s pretty sure he’s seen Sanha’s wall before, but Sanha’s honestly been over to his place more than he’s ever been to Sanha’s. In fact, he thinks, all the memories he’s had with Sanha – Sanha screaming over Mario Kart, Sanha finishing all the ice cream in Rocky’s fridge, Sanha doodling whiskers on his face in Sharpie when Rocky fell asleep on the sofa, Sanha rummaging through Rocky’s drawers for something large enough to function as pyjamas, Sanha falling asleep on Rocky’s lap – have all been in his apartment.

He looks back up at Sanha, who’s staring at him expectantly, playful frustration a thin mask over palpable disappointment. “Do you not remember my wall?”

“Um,” Rocky says instead, and pulls out a copy of his apartment key from his pocket, “Move in with me?”

hello happy end-2017, may 2018 be better for the world and for astro and for you!!! 

[imagine-nation20]

The Art Of The Soul

Summary: The reader is an aspiring british artist currently in america. She is surprised when her brother newt says he will be coming to america, but even more surprised when she meets her soulmate through him. Maybe being a witch wasn’t so bad after all.

Requested By: Anon

Request: !! how about Queenie and her soulmate? (Newt’s sister or something? An animal loving hufflepuff) Like, the soulmate keeps doodling Queenie everywhere and at a certain moment Newt finds out tells Tina, who tells Queenie

A/N: So the reader’s house is not specified in this fic so that anyone can read it. It is a Soulmate AU. One where you see your soulmate in visions. As well, the reader makes muggle/no-maj art, not wizard/witch art.

     You couldn’t believe the letter you were reading. Early in the morning, right after you woke up, you had you owl fly through your window and drop a thick envelope into your breakfast. With a sigh, you had opened the musty smelling paper and read over the words.

     Your brother Newt was coming to America, for reason he wouldn’t explain, and he was wanting to stay with you. You were astonish that he was coming here, knowing how magic creatures weren’t allowed and you knew he wouldn’t leave them.

     You loved your brother’s creatures, but you knew he would risk his own life for them, and that is where you disagreed. While they were important and what he was doing was as well, you wished he would be more careful with his choices.

     You moved away from the letter, leaving it on your table. You knew you couldn’t stop him, even if you wanted to, so you chose to instead head down to the local art gallery and see if anyone had purchased your art. You were a aspiring muggle artist, and people seemed to like what you did. Even if you went under a male alias, it made you more confident in your work. It also caused less fuss over a woman being as important as you.

     It wasn’t a long walk. You had specifically chosen an apartment close to the gallery for this exact reason. The large marble building soon came into view, making you speed up slightly.

     The guard at the door nodded to you, knowing that you came there every day. It was the first step into the gallery that you noticed a crowd around a familiar painting. You smiled at the fact, the oil on canvas being one of your favorites.

     Her bright green eyes shone like diamonds. The painting only featured her eyes and a bit of curly blonde hair that fell into frame. You knew she was a real person, your soulmate, but you had no idea who she was. People awed and pointed at the hyper realism. You could see the crinkle around her eyes, giving away that she was smiling. One woman suggested that the woman in the picture was the artist’s soulmate or wife, and you smiled at the fact.

     Of course she thought that, most of your paintings were of said woman. You had a whole wall of your own paintings, and most of them were of her from different angles. One was a picture of her from behind. She wore a bright pink coat, and leather heeled shoes. Her blonde curly hair barely brushed her neck.

     “She must be his soulmate, look at this wall. She is his muse.” The others nodded, glancing at the other pictures. With a smile, you stepped from the room, walking back outside. None of the paintings were gone. You would have to pick up an extra shift at the bar to pay for this months rent. 

     With a sigh, you walked back to your apartment to take a short break before your were due for work.

~~~

     It had been a day since newt had came to America, and to say it was going poorly was an understatement. His niffler had escaped the second day and now he was forced to leave you, his sister, at her apartment alone with a muggle while he chased after it. You didn’t mind, you liked to interact with muggles even if it was against MACUSA laws.

~~~

     It wasn’t long after that the muggle stumbled out your door while your back was turned. You cursed yourself as you slipped on your coat and left the apartment. You planned on taking Newt to see your paintings again today so he could look at them again. He was surprised when you said the woman was your soulmate, but he quickly dismissed the thought and congratulated you. 

     After about an hour of wandering you gave up and went back to the apartment. Whatever was going on, you wanted no part in it. You sunk into bed, the light turning off with a wave of your hand, and you fell asleep thinking of your soulmate and brother.

~~~

     Newt was in a worse condition. Not only had a MACUSA agent caught him, but now he was forced to stay with them and the muggle who had caused more trouble for newt than anyone else. The real kick in the shin for him though was the moment he saw Tina’s sister, Queenie Goldstein. She was most definitely the woman in his sister’s paintings, and that made him more perturb than it should have.

     He tried to block the thought from his head once he learned Queenie say she could read minds, and t seemed to work until the end of dinner. He glanced up and met her eyes, the though accidentally popping into his head. Queenie’s fork dropped to the table with a clang, everyone else freezing. He hand shot up to her mouth, covering he as a smile spread across her face. 

     Tina asked what was wrong as Newt internally panicked. Before any of them could act, Queenie had shot up and ran to the coat rack. Her pink coat was pulled from it’s place, being flung around her as she rushed out the door. Tina called after her, racing to catch up. She looked to Newt with a furious glare.

     “What in Merlin’s beard did you think?” 

~~~

     Woke up after a very empty sleep. Usually you would see your soulmate, the beautiful blonde woman, but this time there was nothing. I a panicked and half asleep haste, you rushed out of bed and grabbed your coat. With your shoes strapped to your feet and a scarf around your neck, you pushed out the door and rushed down the dark and empty street. 

     You soon made it to the Gallery, seeing the guard at the front, a flashlight in hand. You hid behind a building, forming a plan. You didn’t know why you had to get into that building, you just did. You took a deep breath and stepped out, straightening your coat and trotting up to the guard.

     “Sorry miss, Gallery is closed.” You didn’t answer, simply pulled your wand from your boot and pointed it at him.

     “Obliviate.” His eyes hazed over and in that moment you crept past into the building. It was pitch black, and with your still drawn wand, you lit up the room.

     “Lumos.” A small light shone from your wand revealing a thin figure staring at your art.

      “People aren’t allowed in the gallery at this time of night you know.” You spoke, and the woman didn’t even flinch.

     “I could say the same to you.” She turned, and you stopped, frozen on the spot. The woman of your literal dreams stood before you. A smile was plastered onto her face, a mischievous look in her shiny eyes. Without a word you ran to her, her arms opening. You hit her like a train, almost knocking you both to the ground.

     With a deep inhale of breath, you smelt her coat, a warm scent of sugar and fruit hitting your nose. She smelled how you thought she would, like home. Her face was buried in your neck making you shiver. She backed up, looking you in the eye. You stared at hers, looking for what to say. Instead, she spoke first, a glint in her eye.

     “You painted me?” A smiled stretched across you face, lightening up your eyes as Queenie gazed at the painting of her eyes.

     “You were my muse before I even knew you.” She looked back to you, surprise flashing across her face.

     “Is that really what you think of me?” Her face held wonder and amazement, but also confusion.

     “Well, you are my muse, but your also my soulmate so-”

     “That’s not what I meant.” She spoke with a smile. It never left her face as she stepped closer to you. Her eyes were locked to yours, the intensity of the situation making you squirm.

     “Then, what do you mean?” You asked, straightening yourself and stopping the shaking. She just stared at you a moment before seeming to come out of a trance as she laughed.

     “I can read minds. I was asking if that is really what you thought of me?” Your face went beet red, as you sputtered out a response.

     “Well I mean-I don’t kno-…Well, what did-what did you hear?” You stepped closer, a much more serious air around the two of you. She was still grinning, her eyes crinkling just like in the picture.

     “You think my smile is the best thing you have ever seen. You think I smell like your mother’s old fruit tarts, which you love, and you are wondering how you got so lucky with me. Is that all true?” Her smile fell and she seemed hopeful as she waited for your answer. You tried to think up a coherent sentence of how much all of that was true. She hadn’t even scraped the surface of how much you thought she was amazing.

     “Oh bloody hell…” You whispered, pulling on the font of her coat and kissing her. It was like everything in the world now fit into place. Everywhere you went now seemed to make sense. It was all leading to her. 

     You pulled apart before you could think to hard on all of that, and you gazed into her eye. They were possibly the most beautiful eyes you had ever seen, the kind that haunted your dreams. Her smile was brighter than your future, but you guessed that maybe now it was your future. She laughed, and your remembered that she could read minds.

     “I’ll have to get used to that, but I guess it lets you skip my intorduction. That’s probably for the best, I might have given my brother’s name if I had to.” She laughed again, and you realized that you wanted to be able to here that laugh until you died.

     “Well, my name is Queenie Goldstein, and I believe I have something to show you.” You smiled, a cheeky grin, and she smacked your arm. “Get your head out of that gutter.” You laughed, but continued walking as you stepped out the door of the gallery.

Sorry if any of the characters are OOC, I haven’t seen the movie since I got it on DVD and I may have messed up. Hope you still like it though!

[puppetwritings]

Burned at the Stake || Minghao || Oneshot

Word Count: 2108

Genre: witch!au, fluff

Summary: Minghao wasn’t usually one to meddle in other people’s businesses. But he also wasn’t going to stand by when someone was being innocently murdered.

Woozi // Mingyu // Wonwoo // Seungcheol // Junhui // Hoshi // Joshua //

You couldn’t place how you felt in this exact moment. Was it hatred? Terror? Anger? Sadness? Or perhaps it was betrayal. Whatever it was or however many mixes of negative emotions it was, there was one that that was clear–you were in pain. Of course, being tied to a stake and having your skin seared off did that to you.

Now, how had you ended up in this position?

It started off simply. A girl was jealous. Or, rather, envious. You had what she couldn’t have and that was your boyfriend. One thing led to another and she had accused you of coming into her dreams at night and attacking her. You tried to kill her and you almost succeeded. On top of that, she told your boyfriend that what he felt wasn’t real love–it was witchcraft. Who, in this day and age, she asked, could love someone that deeply? You thought it was absurd. They felt that she was correct. You were a witch.

Witches in this area were not revered like they were in other parts. In other parts, they were gods and deities in mortal form, come to save and protect the humans. Here though, they were the Devil’s helpers. And you had committed the greatest sin of all–you seduced a man and made him a slave to you and your love.

Of course, you knew this was all lies. You knew that you weren’t a witch. You were born and raised the daughter of a baker who had unfortunately passed on now. You were born human, raised human, and if you had not been met with this untimely incident, you would remain human for as long as you lived. Now, you would remain dead.

It was strange how the human brain worked though. You were dying and it was obvious. Your skin was slowly burning and you could smell yourself, like an unappealing meal being cooked at the homeless shelters. Your hair was at your chin and as the flames rose, it was slowly being burned off as well. However, no matter how much pain you were in, you still managed to cry. Screams still managed to leave your mouth. Even at the point where you should have accepted the inevitable, your body rejected it. And your mind rejected it. You were begging for help, praying and hoping that someone–anyone–would come save you. You were lucky the gods felt generous today.

Your savior, or future savior rather, was in the crowd. He stood among them as a human because that’s what he looked like. Hanging from one ear was a long earring that nearly reached his shoulder, an infinity charm dangling from it. On his other ear was two piercings, both simple crystals though a little higher up was a cuff that looked like a dragon. He wore a cloak. An odd attire for this part of the world. And crawling up his neck was another image that looked suspiciously like the dragon on his earring. On his face, he wore a mask of disgust. But not disgust at you. Disgust at them.

No matter what you had done, this was unwarranted punishment. It was cruel and disgusting to treat a human like they were an animal. In fact, your savior didn’t even think humans would treat animals this cruelly.

At first he had wanted to walk away. He was a busy person and he was just passing through town. He had somewhere else to be. He was going home after a several month trip but he had arrived here when they began tying you to the stake and he had stayed to see what they would do. He was not disappointed.

A sigh left his lips as his brows furrowed with trouble. Should he save you? The answer was yes. But did he want to? Also a yes. So the obvious conclusion was…

A dark mass suddenly covered the sun. The people of the town looked up as a heavy storm doused the flames. In the commotion, the young man stepped up to the stake. You weakly turned your head over to him, barely able to focus. You were able to take in his impish features for a moment and registered he was slashing your bondages with…with nothing, before you fell from the stake and slumped against him, losing your consciousness.

The townspeople all gasped in terror and moved back at the sight of this young man. He turned menacingly towards them as the clouds began to gather further.

“Because of a stupid accusation, you were going to kill a human girl,” the young man said.

“She’s a witch!” the girl who had been envious of you proclaimed.

The young man turned towards her and she suddenly felt her limbs freeze up. “Shut it, girl. I know a witch when I see one and she is definitely not. If she had been, do you think she would have allowed you to tie her up?”

There was a murmur through the crowd. The young man turned back towards you, carefully lifting your chin up so he could see you clearer. You poor thing. The young man turned back to the crowd, “I will take her back to my town. Await your punishment from the Heavens.”

And with that, he was gone–a black Chinese dragon taking his place.

“I can’t believe you brought a human into the Witch’s Den. Of all people, Minghao, I thought you were the sensible one.”

Minghao turned to glare at his friend who stood, lazily slumped against the doorway to his room. “I didn’t ask for your opinion, Soonyoung.”

Soonyoung shrugged, shifting against the frame and resting his head against it. “Many people don’t. I give it anyway.”

“Can you leave?”

“No, I came to look at the girl,” Soonyoung pushed himself off the frame and walked over, his arms still crossed across his chest. He clicked his tongue, “Look at those burns…do you think you can heal them?”

“If I can’t, then I’ll just ask Jun,” Minghao murmured.

Soonyoung nodded, “Good idea. Except Jun is out of town.”

“She’ll be fine until then. He’s coming back tonight anyway,” Minghao sighed, sitting back down and getting off his knees.

“Why’d you rescue here? Or rather, where?”

Minghao glanced up at Soonyoung and sighed, folding up his cloak and his jacket. “I passed by that one town–the one that vilifies witches. And I saw her being burned.”

“They burn witches there?”

“It’s an excuse, I think,” Minghao reached over, carefully brushing your hair away from your face. “Someone was just trying to kill her.”

“She’s not even a witch.”

“Exactly.”

Soonyoung shook his head. He nudged Minghao, “So, what are you going to do?”

“They’re going to have a taste of Divine Punishment.”

Soonyoung raised an eyebrow and then tugged at the collar of Minghao’s shirt, looking down until Minghao swatted him away. “Is that why your dragon isn’t here? Did you leave it in that town?”

Minghao nodded. “And it won’t leave until the place is flooded.”

Soonyoung shook his head, shuddering, “I never want to make an enemy of you.”

“Then get out of my room right now.”

Soonyoung jokingly saluted and marched out, closing the door behind him.

Minghao turned back to you with a sigh and a frown. He was afraid to touch you. Healing magic had never been his strong suit and he didn’t want to forever scar your appearance. If he waited for Junhui, he’d be able to do something. He would be able to fix you better than he ever could. But if Minghao messed up now, the effects would be irreversible. It was just a matter of what to do with you before Junhui came back. If you woke now, there would be panic for sure. He would have to put you into a coma. Not that you would really need his help but just in case…

At least you were safe now, Minghao thought as he watched you breathing softly. But what you would do after this, he wasn’t sure. Would you be willing to live with a bunch of witches if they allowed it? Being raised in that community, would probably be against it–thinking that they were agents of the Devil…Minghao found himself worrying about you. It was odd to think he hadn’t even exchanged a word with you, yet he was fretting over your wellbeing. Was it because you were pretty?

Minghao chuckled to himself. Maybe you were an enchantress like they had claimed.

It wasn’t long before Minghao was beginning to nod off, his hand holding yours as if to reassure you that you were fine now even if you couldn’t feel him.

Junhui came home later that night. He was greeted by several people, all telling him that Minghao needed his expertise. This was new. Minghao needed him? Minghao hadn’t needed him since he acquired his dragon, why would he need him now?

Nonetheless, Junhui rushed up the stairs to Minghao’s room and knocked once. When no answer came, he knocked again and then one more time for good measure before he entered on his own. The sight surprised Junhui more than the request for help. Minghao sat beside his bed, his hand holding some random girl’s and this random girl looked charred. Her skin had splotches of scarred tissue and it shocked Junhui to the point he couldn’t move for a second. It wasn’t until Minghao groaned in his sleep that Junhui moved forward, shaking him awake and the first thing Minghao heard was “Who is this?”

Minghao sat up immediately and turned to look at Junhui. He stood, removing his hand from yours, and stepped aside. He nudged Junhui forward, “Can you save her?”

“I mean, yeah, obviously,” Junhui nodded. He vaguely waved a hand, “This sort of thing is a piece of cake. I wouldn’t even need to use my phoenix.”

“Then can you,” Minghao gestured towards you.

“Alright,” Junhui shooed him further to the side and held out his hands over you.

Minghao turned away as a quiet chant began to come from Junhui’s lips. It wasn’t even a minute before the chanting stopped and Junhui mumbled a “See? Easy.”

Minghao turned back around and he couldn’t help the smile that came to his face. Junhui glanced at him, “Um, we might have to give her a haircut but other than that she’ll be fine…she should have woken up though.”

“Oh, I put her in a coma,” Minghao waved a hand over you and turned back to Junhui, “Thank you.”

Junhui nodded, “No problem. No problem…is she your girlfriend–”

“Please leave.”

“Okay,” Junhui turned, leaving without an answer.

Minghao turned back to you and sat down next to his bed again. He watched you silently and noticed your breathing even out. He smiled a little to himself again until you shifted, your eyes fluttering open.

“You’re awake?”

“Am I dead?”

Minghao laughed and your eyes drifted towards him. He shook his head, “No, you aren’t. I managed to save you before any damage was really done.”

“You saved me?”

Minghao nodded.

“You…” you remembered the vague outline of a young man standing beside you as soon as the fire was put out. “Who are you?”

“Xu Minghao,” he said with a smile. “I’m a witch.”

“A witch?”

Minghao smiled, seeing the fear in your eyes. “I’m not going to do anything bad to you.”

“Of course not,” your voice trailed off despite yourself. “You saved me. I should be thankful.”

Minghao nodded and then he reconsidered before he shrugged. “I did save you but Junhui was the one that restored your body. I’ll take you to go thank him once you’re feeling better.”

You nodded shyly.

Minghao shifted on the ground, “What’s your name?”

“Huh?”

“Your name,” Minghao smiled. “What is it?”

“Y/N.”

“Y/N,” Minghao murmured under his breath. He smiled and held out his hand, “It’s nice to meet you.”

You shook his hand timidly and then turned to him, “Where am I?”

“You’re at the Diamond Witch Den,” Minghao replied. “You can stay with us for as long as you want. You can’t really go back home, can you?”

You pursed your lips. That was true. You were accused of being a witch and then you were subsequently saved by one.

“It’s fine,” Minghao reassured you. His cheerful tone made you look up. “This place can be your home now.”

You felt your cheeks warm and your heart flutter. You nodded, a smile lightly gracing your lips. Maybe this place wasn’t going to be so bad.

[himbowelsh]

Winnix 54 or 65? (If you're not too swamped with other requests.) Thank you! Your writing really inspires me! :)

prompt away with me (ACCEPTING)

54. “She’s 6, how can she scare you?”

65. “I fucked up.”

Dick Winters is the very proud big brother of a younger sister.

He was thirteen when Ann was born, and she was pretty much everything he thought a sister would be. He spent much of his childhood reading stories about characters with siblings. He knew how they’d bicker, how they’d play together, how they always had each others’ backs. When his mother announced she was pregnant the first time, Dick spent nine months suspended in anticipation. When she lost the baby minutes after birth, he felt a piece of his heart break. The birth of his second sister, Ann, came a few years later, and finally he was able to be a real big brother. Of all the things he’d ever read about little sisters, Ann seemed like the perfect example.

She was small. She was spunky. She could be annoying, but she always had good intentions. She was very energetic. When she wanted something, she could be hard to say no to. Most importantly, she adored her big brother.

He and Ann were far apart in age, so they were never too close. Dick didn’t have much of a hand in raising her through childhood. By the time Ann was entering kindergarten, Dick was already headed off to college, but he saw enough of her growing up for them to form a healthy bond. He watched her grow from a gummy baby, to a bouncing preeten, to the fine young woman she is today. He couldn’t be prouder to call himself Ann’s brother.He is a big brother. He is a big brother. He can do this.This is the mantra he repeats to himself the entire drive to the train station.“I fucked up,” was the first thing Nix said to him when he jumped out of bed this morning. Dick, who’d barely even taken a sip of his coffee and was unused to see Nix up so early, only raised his eyebrows. “I fucked up, Dick, shit, I fucked up so hard, Kathy’s going to murder me –”If Nix’s ex-wife tried to kill him Dick would be more than willing to fight for his life, but he figured that’s a given. “Slow down,” he said instead. “What’s going on?”Nix turned to him with very wide eyes and spat out one word that sent an icy jolt  down Dick’s spine. “Maddie.”Oh, thought Dick; then, with dawning horror, oh. Nix had mentioned that Kathy was planning a vacation with no room for her daughter to come along, and had asked Nix to take the little girl for a few weeks. It would be a big adjustment for Nix (who only had contact with his daughter on occasional visits to New York). She’s never visited her father at his home before, and Nix’s daughter (and Kathy by extension) definitely doesn’t know he’s living with another man.Nix had asked Dick how he felt about Maddie coming to stay with him. Of course, Dick told him that he was fine with it. She’s Nix’s daughter, which makes her as much Dick’s family as Nix himself. If Madeline has to stay with them for a while, that’s alright with Dick.The biggest problem is how little warning he received. Nix mentioned Maddie might be coming soon, but he never gave an exact date. At no time in the past few days has he been building up to his daughter’s visit. Nix was, apparently, as oblivious as Dick until the moment he woke up this morning and remembered that Maddie’s train is coming in today. The same day he has a large business meeting with his father than that will keep him occupied for most of the afternoon.Dick didn’t miss a beat before volunteering to take off work to pick up Maddie. Leaving a child to ride a train across several states by herself and then sending an unfamiliar chauffeur to pick her up at the airport is such a Nixon thing to do. Nix, who looks back on his own childhood with melancholy-tinged distaste, should never treat his kid the same way. Dick is willing to make sure of that in any way he can.The other small problem is that Dick has no clue how he’s going to handle a little girl for hours, but he’ll cross that bridge when he comes to it.He’s not nervous about meeting Madeline. He’s not anxious, and he’s definitely not frightened.(“She’s six years old, how can she scare you?” Nix demanded when he noticed how shaky-looking Dick appeared while on his way out the door. “Compliment her dress, give her a new stuffed animal. She’ll be fine.”Dick has a sneaking suspicion this is Nix’s go-to for handling all women.)Dick has stared down Nazis. He’s jumped hundreds of feet into enemy-infested territory. He’s faced the frigid Winters of Bastogne. He confessed his love to his best friend. He may be many things, but a fearful man is not one of them. He is not afraid of Nix’s daughter.He’s able to convince himself of this right up to the moment the little girl steps off the train.Madeline Nixon is, in many ways, an echo of her father. She has the same olive-toned skin and thick brows. Dark hair falls in ringlets past her shoulders, framing even darker eyes. Her face is heart-shaped, her nose broader, a tiny scar intersecting the end of her left eyebrow, but she is undoubtedly a Nixon child. She’s Nix’s child, through and through.Her eyes are not drawn to where Dick stands on the platform. She scans the crowds for a moment, not looking like she’s expecting to see anyone, before she takes a step further off the train. Her suitcase is almost as big as her; she lugs it behind her with no small amount of difficulty. Immediately, Dick moves forward to help.When he seizes the back of the suitcase, the girl’s gaze snaps towards him. She might be her father’s daughter, but her stare is all Kathy’s. (Dick remembers that exact same look trained on him when he would have dinner with the Nixon’s during officer’s training, before Toccoa. He always felt as if Kathy could see through him, pick out secrets he never even knew he was harboring. Now he has a better idea of what they were.)He swallows back the lump of unease in his throat. There’s nothing to be nervous about. “Are you Maddie?” he asks. “Madeline Nixon?”Something shifts in the girl’s eyes, from suspicion to understanding. She nods her head. “You’re my driver,” she says without preamble.“Umm… no.” The answer is awkward, but Dick doesn’t know what else to say. He wasn’t prepared for such a blunt assumption. “I’m your dad’s friend. He wants me to show you around for a little while. My name’s Dick.”He offers the girl his hand. She has to let go of her end of the suitcase in order to shake it, but it seems like she appreciates the gesture. She also doesn’t protest when Dick hefts the heavy case up onto his own shoulders (once again, typical Nixon).Dick leads her to the car. Maddie doesn’t say much of anything until she’s sliding into the back seat, and Dick is securing the luggage next to her. When he reaches over to help her with her belt, she shakes her head. “I can do it.”“Oh. Okay.” He steps back and lets the child do her work. When it’s obvious she doesn’t need help, she climbs into the front seat.Even as they begin to drive, Maddie doesn’t say anything. She stares out the side of the car, watching the industrial streets of Nixon roll by. The soft sound of her humming drifts through Dick’s ears. As much as he isn’t a chauffeur, he sure feels like one.“So, you’re here for a few weeks,” he finally says. “That’s going to be fun.”Maddie hums. She doesn’t spare him more than a glance. “My mother wanted to go to Maro Lago. I would have been a hind-rance–” (this word she pronounces with awkwardness, clearly echoing someone else) “– on the trip. So I came here instead.”Dick might not know children well, but he’s always been good at reading people. “You don’t think you’ll have a nice time here.”The little girl shrugs, folding her hands in her lap. She’s still staring out the window, as if watching something very fascinating that only she can see. “I’m here because no one knew what to do with me,” she replies. The words sound unbearably sad coming from a six year old’s mouth.Dick thinks of the guest room in their home, which Nix has spent the past few weeks decorating with toys and stuffed animals. He bought a dollhouse. He turned the bed into a (shabby) canopy bed, for pete’s sake, hiring a carpenter and everything. Maddie may have been sent here as an afterthought, but she won’t be treated that way.“I think you’re going to have a very nice time,” he tells her. “In fact, you can count on it. I live with your dad, so I’ll be seeing the two of you a lot. Hopefully we can all become friends.”Maddie finally looks at him. She doesn’t look enthused, but she also doesn’t look discouraged by the possibility. She looks like she does not quite dare to hope. “Yeah,” she says. “That would be nice.”

Dick learns a lot about little girls in the following week.

He’s busy working through most of the day, from early morning until late afternoon, so he doesn’t get to seen much of Nix and Maddie’s morning routine. According to Nix, Maddie likes waffles more than pancakes, and will only drink orange juice if it’s been thoroughly drained of pulp. She always picks out her own dress for the day, but needs help tying her shoes. She has several dolls, of varying degrees of creepiness, and likes to carry one at all times. (Her favorite is Linda. This one seems to unnerve Nix the most, probably because it looks uncannily like his ex-wife.)

Then, just after five o’clock, Dick comes home from work, and he gets time with Maddie and Nix firsthand.

Dick learns how to tell when Maddie doesn’t like something for dinner, just from the way she pushes it on her plate. He learns to give each character a funny voice while reading bedtime stories. He learns to brush Maddie’s hair without pulling, at the same time that she very determinedly combs through her doll’s own. He learns how to have tea parties.

“You have to stick your pinky out,” Maddie tells them. “It’s polite.”

Dick and Nix exchange glances before, in unison, sticking their pinkies out.

“Good,” Maddie beams, and takes a sip of her (cold) tea. Dick and Nix do the same.

Dick is in charge of getting Maddie to bed, which is an easier task than she’d let on. She sulks about bedtime, but never tries to escape it, and she gets a thrill out of being hauled into Dick’s arms and carried up the stairs. She only requires one story (which she could by all means read herself, but it’s the principal of the thing) and a night light (which she can not sleep without – as they discovered the first night she was here, sending Nix on a frantic late night search for some source of glow). Dick has taken to brushing his hand over the top of her head at night. She probably doesn’t need this, either, but it feels like the least Dick can do. It’s less than a kiss (they’re far from ready for that) but it shows Maddie that she’s cared for here.

“Sweet dreams,” he says, and closes Maddie’s bedroom door.

He’s never seen Nix so tired as these recent nights. Nix has always been a night owl; but after Maddie gets to bed, it’s not uncommon for Dick to head up to their own bedroom to find Nix splayed out across the bed, half asleep already.

“I don’t know how she does it,” Nix grumbles into the sheets. It takes Dick a few seconds to realize he’s referring to his ex-wife. “Full-time. All day, every day. Oh wait, I do – nannies. That’s all Maddie ever talks about. Nanny Dee says this, Nanny Kate says that. Her mother never says anything to her, ever.”

Dick isn’t sure what to say. “We… could get a nanny.”

“We’re not getting a nanny,” Nix says, so bluntly that Dick’s mouth clicks shut. “I think we are the nannies here, Dick. Both of us. This is what we’ve become.”

Dick is unsure whether this is a bad thing or not, so he settles for running hand hand across the planes of Nix’s back. His lover lets out a soft groan before melting into the sheets.

He can’t recall if he’s ever seen Nix this devoted before. From someone who usually avoids hard work whenever possible, seeing him so determined to give his daughter the best is a revelation. It reveals a new side of Nix that Dick had never realized existed.

He’s trying so hard, and Dick couldn’t be prouder of him.

He leans in, close enough for his words to brush the crest of Nix’s ear, and whispers, “You’re doing good, Lew. You’re doing real good.”

It’s hardly the most he could have said, but somehow it’s just what Nix needed to hear. He turns his head to look at Dick, eyes soft and thoughtful. Not even a second later, his arms loop around Dick’s neck and he pulls him down.

“So are you,” he mutters against Dick’s lips. “Thank you so much.”

Dick knows it’s the least he could do.

[myhauntedsalem]

13 True Horror Stories from the Psychiatric Ward that Will Give You the Creeps

Death, illness and tragedy have long been part of the history of insane asylums, and for as long as they have existed, so too have the scary stories associated with them. From haunted hospitals to sadistic doctors and nurses, psychiatric wards have been the inspiration for many of our favorite horror movies and books. Yet, the true stories told by the psych ward workers below far surpass any horrors that we might have seen at the cinema or read in a book.

Without further ado, here are thirteen of some of the creepiest psych ward stories on the internet that have been shared by health care professionals.

1. HOLDING HER OWN EYES

My mom told me this story from her time at a neuropsychiatric ward while she was in grad school. She was making her routine room checks and happened upon the most horrific scene I’ve ever heard.

This was during the night shift, and generally, all the patients’ bedroom doors should be closed. So my mom turned a corner and noticed an open door. She saw a staff member’s legs on the floor, halfway out the doorway.

When she looked into the room, she saw the patient, a woman with a severe postpartum psychiatric disorder, who had just gouged both of her own eyes out with her bare hands. She was sitting cross-legged on the floor, holding her eyes in her hands.

The first staff member to witness the scene, who was now lying face down on the floor, had a heart attack when he first witnessed the woman while he was making his rounds.

My mom screamed for help and frantically tried to perform CPR on the staff member. All the while, the woman just sat rather calmly, holding her own eyes.

2. THE SAW

I work as a psychotherapist in a hospital system. My definition of creepy is probably quite a bit different from other medical professionals.

The one that got to me the most was a patient who came to us after attempting suicide by sawing both his arms off at the forearm with a table saw. His arms were reattached, fairly successfully too, with only limited impairments in mobility. All I could think was how bad it would have to be to live in his head that sawing his arms off seemed better than that.

He has since completed suicide.

3. JANE?

We had a young lady in our custody with quite a few issues. We’ll call her Jane. Jane’s first night at our facility staff doing a bed check found Jane in a puddle of blood. Turns out Jane had been slicing the skin around her shin with her finger nails and was pulling her skin up her leg, essentially de-gloving her calf.

Jane also had a ritual she performed every night before bed. While in her room she would run between walls in her room touching them in a crucifix pattern. After doing this for a few hours she would sit on her bed and go to sleep. This particular night Jane was frantic in her pace, practically running between walls. Our night staff observed the entire interaction and reported Jane screaming late into the night. When the staff went to check on Jane she reported Jane standing in the doorway smiling. The staff asked what was wrong and Jane replied, “what makes you think you are speaking to Jane?”

4. THE VAMPIRE

My mom worked in mental institutions in her younger years (and actually worked at a large, well-known asylum before it was shut down.)

There was one woman there that thought she was a vampire of sorts. She was only allowed out one hour a day, and they had to use safety precautions. She had already attacked and killed at least one hospital worker before these were enacted.

When my Mom asked about her, it was revealed that she had killed at least two of her children, wounded another as well as her husband because she had some sort of physical condition called Porphyria, which apparently made her crave blood.

By the time that they discovered there was something physically wrong with her, she already had lost her mind from guilt and grief.

5. THE SPITTER

I’m not a psychologist but my friend is. She told me about a patient of hers who was HIV positive and a paranoid schizophrenic. He thought that the nurses who worked at the hospital he was in were trying to kill him, so he would frequently bite his tongue, and spit HIV positive blood into their faces/mouths. When they had to come into contact with him, they were required to wear full masks and gloves.

6. THE ONLY ONE

I once knew a woman who had spent part of her residency at a psychiatric hospital for people with severe mental conditions. Apparently, the grounds had a lovely, enclosed greenhouse. One day, one of their schizophrenic patients was sitting on a bench, smoking a cigarette, as a heron frantically flew around. It had found its way in and, not being able to escape, it was smashing into the large panes of glass. The man just sat there watching.

Finally, my counselor asked him if the bird was bothering him and he kind of sighed and said, “Thank god, I thought I was the only one seeing that.”

7. FAMILY PHOTOGRAPHS

My sister is the director of a psychiatric hospital. There was recently a lady there who would cut her arms, legs and torso open and place photographs of her family under her skin.

8. UNDER THE BED

Once, a fellow female patient told me she found writings under her bed. They were just old, small wooden bed frames with hard mattresses that would make all kinds of noises when you rolled over, but I still wondered what exactly she was doing lying under her bed to find these writings.

When she first told me, I thought it was a joke. But sure enough, one day during group we managed to sneak away, and she showed me. Indeed, there were stories written under her bed. After that, we had everyone check under their own beds, and there was more writing under every single bed.

They were stories of patients who had stayed here before, or ways they were planning on killing themselves, or who the good and bad nurses were. It creeped me out.

9. TIME OF DEATH

Well, my mother was a nurse that specialized in geriatrics, and she worked for several hospice hospitals for many years. She often described situations at her work with several of the patients. She would say that each person tends to have a very similar “checklist” that they follow right before death. This checklist often ended in a very similar way. They would get caught talking to someone that wasn’t there. When asked who they (otherwise lucid people) were talking to, they would describe an individual who was already dead. When asked what they were talking about, they would say that their relative wanted to know if they were ready to move on. A pretty common response would be, “Yeah, he/she said that she will take me tomorrow at 3:00.” Well, it would often happen that they would die at the exact time their relatives quoted.

10. THE TEST SUBJECT

I had an hour-long conversion with a delusional guy who was confined to a mental health facility, and who was probably smarter than I am. Lots of these folks believe that somebody – often the CIA – is either beaming thoughts into their heads, or has implanted a microchip in their brains for this purpose. This guy was offering a very thoughtful argument as to why such claims should not be so quickly dismissed.

“It’s precisely because such delusions are so common that mental patients make the best test subjects,” he said. There he was, confined and protected, constantly observed, his health and behavior documented, and there is zero chance that anyone would ever take his concerns seriously. How else would you test and improve such technology? Does the government not have a strong motivation and a plausible ability to create such a device?

“You can see I’m not irrational,” the man said. “I’m just straight-up telling you that they are doing this to me. I know just how unbelievable it sounds, and yet, here I am.”

11. THE BOY WHO LOVED KNIVES

As a tech in psych years ago, there was a 7-year-old kid sent to the floor because the mom didn’t know what to do with him. Sadly, common thing to happen, even if the kids don’t have psych issues. Anyway, the mom was shaking and crying, and they had to take the kid into another room. She was genuinely afraid of her own son. She had suspected something was wrong when she kept finding mutilated animals in the backyard, but never heard or saw coyotes or anything around. The neighbors smaller pets started disappearing. The boy had an obsession with knives, hiding them around the house. Denying anything when the mom confronted him. Then when the two started getting into arguments, he would get really violent and hit her, push her down and kick her, threaten to kill her. On multiple occasions she woke up in the middle of the night with him standing beside her bed, staring her in the face. She put extra locks on her bedroom door to feel safe while she slept. The last straw was when she lifted up his mattress and found 50+ knives of all shapes and sizes under there. So she brought him to us.

I remember talking to him, treating him like he was just any other kid that came through. He seemed remarkably normal, until you spoke directly to him. He had this way of looking right through you, or maybe like he didn’t see you at all while you were speaking.

He would respond like a robot, like he was just saying words because that’s what we wanted to hear. And he would always put on this creepy, dead-looking smile. Like all mouth and no eye involvement in the smile. Especially when he would get away with something, like taking another kid’s markers and they couldn’t figure it out. Still gives me chills laying here thinking about him.

I believe I met a 7-year-old psychopath.

12. THE NEW MOM

I was a pharmacy technician at a hospital with a psych ward for some time. We would have to go around with a cart and dispense the patients’ medications, and being a 5’2″ girl, a security guard or male nurse would accompany me, just as a precaution. I never had any real issues other than the occasional death grip onto my arm or manic outbursts, but there was one boy who was entirely different.

His chart said he was nine and he had pale skin, dark hair, and huge bright, green eyes. He always greeted me in the most polite way, asked how I was doing, and always found something different to compliment me on every time. He was extremely well-spoken and mature for his age, so I began looking forward to seeing him, as normal small talk is definitely cherished in that setting. If he saw me outside of his room in the halls, he made sure to say hello and always called me “Miss Jones” or “ma’am.”

One day, a couple of our female nurses saw me pause to chat with him in the hallway, and waved me over to ask if I was out of my mind. Apparently, when he was in kindergarten, he grew an intense attachment to his young female teacher.

This escalated to the point of him calling her “Mom” and leaving notes for her about how he wished he were her son. He had a normal home-life with both parents, and the teacher tried to explain to him that she couldn’t be his mom because that would hurt his real mother’s feelings, and that she already had that job covered.

So, he went home and, killed his own mother in her sleep by cutting her throat, so his teacher could be his mom. The female staff had a general rule of not interacting with him excessively to prevent any kind of attachment from forming.

13. BUGS

Nothing I can say can possibly describe the year I worked in Psychiatric Intensive Care. Creepy isn’t the thing that comes to mind when I think back on it…more heartbreaking and horrifying. But creepiness was a part of it. Especially evening and night shifts, naturally.

There is always something disturbing about watching someone while they hallucinate. You can tell it is 100% real to them, and something about that makes you believe it, on some level. A lot of stories end with, “and of course, I had to look over my shoulder to make sure”. You see the emotions it brings out.

There was a woman that came in and sat down across the table from me for her admission interview. She had bandages all over her arms and scotch tape over her mouth and ears. She looked very uncomfortable and wouldn’t really sit still. When the nurse would ask her a question, she would peel the corner of the tape back and answer, then stick the tape back on really fast.

We eventually found out that she saw and felt bugs crawling all over her, and they were trying to get inside her body. The tape was to keep the bugs out. The bandages were because some bugs got in and she had to dig them out. She couldn’t sit still because she felt the bugs all over her even while we sat and talked. The worst part was, she had some idea that it was her mind playing tricks on her. Can you imagine going through your life, feeling like someone is continuously dumping buckets of cockroaches on your head, feeling like they’re all over you and getting inside of you to the point that you’re digging chunks out of your flesh in a panic, all while knowing intellectually that none of it is real?

[roraewrites]

two - anticipation

Glass Heart Rating: M And he was in the darkness, so darkness he became.

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The cool cloth against her skin refreshes her body, her soul, resets her mind and rids the negative thoughts.

Her lips are still chapped, sore from scabs that she chews at on her bottom lip, but she's no longer shacked, hanging from the ceiling. Instead, she's put in her own cell behind closed bars. Sakura finds that staying here is getting old, and while she knows she can break out at any given time, she wouldn't make it far with him still wandering the halls.

Especially at night.

She senses him wandering, his soul lost to the darkness, trying to find it but he can't.

It's during the latest hours at night when she senses him nearby, his dark aura sending shivers down her spine, making her fingers tremble. Sakura fears that he'll come to her in the dark again, his ominous blood red eyes staring right through her and to the soul of her very body.

As Sakura runs the cloth down the side of her face, she presses it to her temple, letting her pores soak the soothing liquid within her skin. The air in this chamber is musty, smells of death and rotting flesh. The breeze that brushes across the ground is also cool and when it's late at night, brings shivers to Sakura's sleeping form.

She knew that Kabuto would be coming soon, to deliver the small ration of food that they allowed her to eat. Every time he stopped by, she grew quiet, refused to answer his jabbing insults or interrogative sentences. He was like the spec of dirt that gets caught under a finger nail, or a piece of meat that gets stuck between teeth; annoying and unnecessary.

On queue, she can hear his sandals smack against the stone tiles as he makes his way towards her. Sakura puts the cloth down, hiding it from his view. She had ripped part of her shirt off, forming it into a make shift cloth to clean her wounds and her face from any dirt, blood, bile, or whatever else she had on her face and body.

"Good morning, Sakura."

His greeting is anything but kind, his voice monotone as he tilts his chin down and peers at her over the frames of his glasses. The dark eyes that look at her hold a menacing look, threatening her in every way possible, but Sakura shoulders the look and continues to stare at him with crossed arms.

He places the small plate by the bars, kicking it through the tight space, but only to have it clatter against the iron and topple over.

Her food for the day now spoiled, but she doesn't mind. Sakura has lost her appetite due to the high stress levels in her mind, the anxiety furrowing in her body, the very core of her a nervous wreck.

The next item that Kabuto places against the dirty ground is a small cup of water, enough to last her a day if she uses it responsibly. He doesn't move from his spot though, only stares at Sakura with clouded eyes and a makeshift smile.

Sakura's emerald green eyes fall to the cup on the ground, sitting patiently as it awaits her to approach and pick it up; that's what she does. She tries to rid Kabuto's appearance, his presence, by blanking him out and forgetting him one hundred percent. As she reaches for the tin cup, it's too late. Kabuto's hand reaches through the bars and grasps her shirt, pulling her and smacking her chest and knees roughly against the iron.

"I said good morning."

Sakura can feel her nostrils flaring, her heart thudding against her chest and all she can do is narrow her evergreen eyes at him. The angrier she looks, the closer Kabuto inches to her face, until their noses are only centimeters apart.

She can smell iron wafting off of his skin, probably from the experiments that him and Orochimaru work on while she stays put in her cell, counting the seconds, minutes, days that she's been here.

"Fuck off," she spits out, along with the saliva that catapults from her throat and sails through the air and onto his cheek. He throws her back abruptly and pushes away from the bars, wiping at his face furiously.

Sakura, falling to her rear and rolling into a defensive stance, stares at him like a crazed animal, a tiger being closed bars. Her eyes glowing in the light that entered her cell and narrowing in on Kabuto once more.

"You're so going to regret that!" His yell rips through the cell, echoing off the walls and sounding through the corridor. His dark eyes are even more clouded now, glossed over from the demon inside him, hungry for her blood. But once their staring match is over, he exits the room on his heel, turning to glance at Sakura from over his shoulder.

She smirks, another victory and aimless threat from the white haired medic. To add to her victory, her cup of water still stood its ground in between iron bars. Sakura's lips turned to a smile, cracking the dried skin and scabs and the instant taste of copper entered her mouth.

After one quick sip, Sakura sighed a low, short sigh. She could feel her days growing shorter, her life here on Earth would soon end. She needed to escape, find a way out or to send a message, but down here, she was powerless, useless almost like back in her genin days.

"Naruto... Sasuke..." The words came out a small whisper, barely audible. She then walked back to the corner of her cell, placing the tin cup on the floor and resting her back against the wall as she thought back to her previous days.

Those days filled with warmth, laughter and fun. The bittersweet memories brought Sakura to a sitting stance, her knees curling up to her chest and her arms hugging them tighter, willing herself to curl up into a ball.

She had to escape, somehow, someway.

She would escape.

-

His eyes searched the room, following the thin lines that outlined the stones that formed the walls. He knew every turn, every degree that each line took because this had been his room for three years.

Sleepless nights brought his eyes to wander the textured walls of his room, but even when he grew bored of that, he strolled the halls, hoping his mind would settle.

It never did, though.

Memories of Itachi, his clan members lying face first against the ground, bleeding out. The memory that haunted him the most were the bodies of his parents lying lifelessly in front of his traitor of a brother. The vision always made his throat tight, cutting the air off from his lungs.

But he refused to be weak, let his mind get lost in an important time like this. Anything was better than letting his thoughts think back to Sakura, though.

Sasuke hated that she was here, but he knew exactly why Kabuto brought her here and that fed his desire to kill the bastard even more. He hated that ridiculous guy; cocky smile, disgusting eyes, ridiculous voice.

Fucking hated him.

Especially when Sasuke knew that Kabuto was near Sakura, whispering words of hate and blatantly doing stuff to further her misery. He could tell that Sakura was near death when they first brought her here, even after three days of being here, her chakra was still a small flame; a faint wisp that could barely feed off the air that she was supplied.

Sasuke knew he shouldn't have went to see her the first night they brought her here, but curiosity killed the cat and sure as shit, he was perched in front of her beaten and dying body.

She reeked of sweat and blood, the poor girl couldn't even keep the vomit down in her body as soon she woke up. Sasuke knew that it wasn't fair to bring her here, especially when she wasn't involved with any plans that Orochimaru or Kabuto had, but a hostage is a hostage, and he knew that his mentor was up to something. He couldn't get over how grown up she looked, how matured her face was. Through the dirt and blood, he noticed her cheeks weren't as round, her jawline was stunning; eyes that looked into his shimmered a darker green than when she was younger. Cherry blossom hair framed her face, bringing out her neck, and when he looked to her body, he noticed that she had filled out more.

When he closed his eyes, he felt his Sharingan activate upon opening again, engraving the memory of how she looked now, compared to when she was young.

Sasuke hadn't realized that he was now standing in front of Sakura's cell, looking down on her sleeping form while she was curled around herself, huddled up in the corner. She looked miserable, her bruised arms, cut legs, rose quartz hair matted in dried crimson chunks, yet her face looked peaceful while she slept.

The Uchiha felt his heart lurch forward, the need to protect growing strong but he simply scoffed. A smirk graced his lips as he began to walk away from the sleeping girl; he's done this before, three years ago to be exact.

"She spit in my fucking face."

Sasuke could hear the bitching of Kabuto all the way through the hall, another smirk pulling at his lips. He had heard that Sakura had grown into a fighter, a kunoichi of excellent skill, possessing super human strength. But to spit in Kabuto's face, he found it humerus.

"Orochimaru," Sasuke entered the man's quarters, looking from the snake sannin to Kabuto, the Uchiha's emotionless face showing nothing of sorts now.

"Ah, Sasuke, my dear child."

Sasuke simply ignored Orochimaru's last three words, knowing that he wasn't the snake's 'dear child'.

"Why is she here?" He finally asked the question that he'd been waiting to ask the entire time that Sakura had been here. Her presence only made him eager, knowing all too well that she would get in the way of his plans when it came time.

"Why do you ask?"

"She's useless," the lie fell from his lips. She was anything but useless anymore.

Kabuto spoke up now, his dark eyes narrowing into Sasuke obsidian eyes. "That's what you think."

Sasuke refused to give the medic-nin the time of day, ignoring his statement entirely and continued to wait for Orochimaru's reply. Instead, the snake sannin only hissed, obviously annoyed with Kabuto as well.

"You'll see soon enough. Now go, you've got training to do."

He felt his temper rising, curse mark hot against his skin, but he did as told and exited the room. His walk was short lived as he entered the training room, the dummies looking at him with straight faces and all Sasuke could do was brood. He inhaled deeply before concentrating his chakra.

He was sick of being here, sick of taking orders from a man that would be dead soon.

His hand began to heat up, the chirping of birds filled the room and before another target could give him that blank stare, he slammed his fist to the ground. Each target exploded from his Chidori Stream, tufts of hay and wood flying in every direction, leaving the room in a thick sheet of dust and fog.

Sasuke could only clench his teeth, feel the anger sore through his body and boil in his blood.

The time to kill his mentor and Kabuto was coming soon enough, but with Sakura in the hideout now, he would need to reevaluate his plan and see to it that she leaves with him as well.

"She's so annoying," his low voice fills the empty, dirty room as he collapses to his knees and falls to his side. "So damn annoying."

Emotions burst through the floodgates, filling his mind with whole thoughts of his days in Konoha, driving him to the brink of going insane inside his own mind. He can't shake the thoughts no matter how hard he tries, even the demon within him is quiet, feeding on Sasuke's earlier days.

Darkness is your only salvation, he tells himself repeatedly. As much as he wants to forget, cut the ties and break the bonds, they're still there, haunting his memories.

-

Sakura awakes the next day (or was it the same day as before?), her neck aching from lying against the stones and dirt and her back needing a serious rub down. She feels her body flowing with chakra and the sensation is weird at first, but she feels more alive than she had when she first arrived.

She closes her dirty hand around the tin cup and takes a small sip, letting the water run down her tongue, her throat, feeling the cool liquid enter her stomach and quench part of her thirst. The liquid burns against her chapped lips as she drags her dry tongue across them, lapping up and excess water that perched on her lower lip.

When she pushed her body back into a sitting position, she could hear the sandals of Kabuto entering the room, slow but surely, she knew it was him. Her evergreen eyes already narrowing, lips pulling into a firm line. When their eyes made contact, she felt her throat dry out and tighten. The only sound that could be heard was the blood rushing through her ears and the pounding of her heart against her chest.

His eyes are beautiful, as dark as spilled ink, his face emotionless.

Sakura gulped, her eyebrows raising towards the center, her lips parting. When she felt his wandering eyes slip down her neck, past her chest and rest on her torn shirt, she could've sworn that she saw fire blaze from behind black irises. He didn't move his face an inch, but she could tell that he disapproved of something.

"Sakura."

She jumps at her name, shivers crawling through her skin when he rolls the 'a' of her name off his tongue. Sakura finds herself pushing up from the stone, her mind lost in a jumble of thoughts and her fingers shaking. Once she's standing and facing him from behind bars, he flips his hair from his eyes and inches closer towards her.

His face hadn't changed much from when he was younger, but he was taller now, muscles fine tuning his body. She couldn't help but drop her eyes to his chest, his pectorals hanging out from the slit in his long sleeve shirt, washboard abs visible as ever. He was clothed in far different clothes than before, she noticed. She also noticed his hand resting on the hilt of a sword that was attached to the rope that wound around his waist.

All thoughts aside, she found the will to speak.

"Why am I here?"

He raises a thin brow in reply, the skin on his outer cheek rising with the action. The pain that burdened her long ago, the fight to gather his attention, she felt it all coming back now, gathering in her stomach and working its way up her sternum, gathering in her chest where her heart lies.

He still hadn't answered her question, only slouches a bit and adjusts his hand further down the hilt of the sword. Sasuke's obsidian eyes had grown darker since the last time she looked into them, shadows dancing within the pupil. When he finally turns his face, Sakura jumps closer towards the iron cage before her fingers curl around the cool bars, her face peering through them.

"Wait!" The word echoes, stopping Sasuke in his tracks, yet he doesn't say a word. He doesn't move either, only waits to hear what she has to say next, but she doesn't speak, only grips the cold bars harder, squeezing them in her grasp.

"Be ready."

She frowns, knowing all too well that he wants her to know something, but he won't give her information that easily. Something is going to happen, and soon, but she doesn't know what. Only to be ready.

She nods before releasing her grip and steps back gingerly, looking to her dirty toes and skinned knees, blood dappling the dried skin there. Sakura hears him depart from the room, his steps slow and graceful until she can no longer hear him. She slowly crouches down against the wall until she's in a sitting position and grabs her cloth from the corner of the cell, pouring a small amount of water on it and begins to dab her knees softly.

She could heal them up quickly, but now that Sasuke has given her a warning, she knows better than to use her chakra on something useless. She pulls her knees to her chest and rests her forehead against the caps, her emerald eyes closing.

"I need out."

-

Sasuke finishes his training, finishes his rounds, only to end back up in his room and driving himself crazy over knowing Sakura is still here. He can't come up with a plan, knowing that she's here and if he leaves without her, she'll be trapped until someone finds her.

Or kills her.

The thought eats away at him, and instead of staying put, he begins walking towards her signature. She's like a magnet and Sasuke like metal, attracted to her in every way, yet he hides the true emotions under the darkness in his heart. It makes him sick knowing she's like a caged animal, but he doesn't dare release her, not yet. Once his plan begins, he'll free her. Leave this place behind and continue with his mission that he has his dark eyes set on.

To kill Itachi and end this torture once and for all. With his brother gone, he can live each day knowing that the weight has been lifted from his shoulders, but the pain of losing everyone he once loved will still burden his heart.

The darkness blankets him as he walks down the corridor once more that day, his legs taking him to Sakura. He can already sense her and knows she awake and moving around. A small smirk pulls at the corner of his lip when he enters the room, only to find her small face behind bars; body curled up against the wall, her blank face staring with dull green eyes.

He can see the rubber band snap behind her eyes, her lips parted slightly, the shock that overtakes her body. The smirk on his lips had already been erased, and they stare at each other for what seems like days, weeks, years, until she's pushing up from the ground.

She looks miserable from the way she walks, her eyes still staring at him until she's still once more. The way she trembles doesn't go unnoticed and when he slouches slightly, he finally speaks.

"Sakura."

The name brings bittersweet memories of their past back; a whirl of nostalgia crashing against his heart, rattling his brain. The way her eyes light up at her name pains him further. He knows he shouldn't be down here, confronting a prisoner, but she's his former teammate. A girl that holds a special place in his twisted heart. Sasuke bites down on the insides of his cheeks, refusing to speak anymore.

These memories are too much for him; pain, heartache, suffering. He wants it all to end.

Blood rushes to his ears, invading his head and catching him off guard. He sees Sakura move closer to the bars that separate them, her lips moving and panic washing over her features. He can't hear a single word that she says though, only slouches and flips the hair from his eyes.

When the wave of reality washes over him, he brings himself to his calm and collected demeanor, moving his body closer to the cell, to her. Her eyes widen.

"Be ready."

A frown pulls her eyebrows together, her eyes now a deep shade of jade. He can't make out ever seeing that expression on her face, not towards him at least. Sakura doesn't say a word though, just nods her head and backs away slightly.

When he turns his body and begins to leave, the pain in his heart appears once more, throbbing. Sasuke finds his body moving slowly at first, until he reaches the corridor and begins to move his legs faster, willing his body to get away from her and her presence.

She's intoxicating, enlightening, everything that he's ever wanted, craved. Sasuke can't think of her, not at a time like this.

Stop, the demon from within demands, searing his skin, his mind and his soul. Sasuke does as told and stops. Stops thinking, stops moving and it's when his body his still that he picks up on the rather ridiculous cackle. It's Kabuto.

"Seeing your girlfriend, were you?" Kabuto's sneers.

It takes everything to push the instinct to kill him right here and now. His heart says to kill him, his mind, but his body doesn't budge. Sasuke knows better. When he begins to push past him, Kabuto reaches for his shoulder. Sasuke snatches his hand from the air, whirling his face to Kabuto's, their noses nearly touching.

His Sharigan is blazing like a wildfire, electricity coursing through his body and his darkening aura casting through the hall.

"Stay the fuck away from her," his voice is treacherous, the most dangerous he's ever heard himself. Sasuke knows that it's himself talking, but the demon within amplifies it, strengthens his words much like he does his body.

Kabuto can only swallow his pride before ripping his hand from Sasuke's grip. He's no longer laughing or mocking the Uchiha, but his dark eyes show fear as he cowers beneath the Sharigan eyes. He steps back and begins to walk in the opposite direction of Sakura's cell and Sasuke can feel his body tensing up from the stress and pressure.

It's time, he hears the low voice in his mind, the pulsing in his stomach and clawing at his heart.

[rainbow-runners]

Chapter 1

The morning air was stale with the ceiling fan turned off. I did my best to concentrate on turning off my alarm from a sleep hazed vision. I knew the numbers weren't actually flashing at me but so many years with a traditional alarm clock makes the eyes go tricky once in a while, especially when you woke up with a headache that could easily slip into a migraine. Today was going to be too long if the throbbing didn't go away before school. Wonderful. After a minute or two of laying in my twin bed, denying it was time to get up, I managed to wiggle myself away from my nightly comfort zone. A protesting noise escaped my vocal cords, I got up to make my way to the bathroom, almost falling back into bed. How late had I stayed out last night? The barking started abruptly and I could tell each of our four dogs barks apart as they went crazy at the front door. Mom was home. I was brushing my teeth before she made it to my bedroom door. Knock, knock, knock- "You up sweetheart?" She was louder then she needed to be but with the dogs excitedly rustling about her feet and then occasionally barking- I guess it was understandable. At least she didn't bust in this time. Maybe you can teach an old dog new tricks. I spit, sighed, all the liveliness was making my head worse, "Yeah, mom" I replied with a convincing yawn in the middle of my words. "Alright, then the car keys are on the table and I'm going to bed." I didn't reply, she didn't open the door. I let out a breath that I didn't know I was holding. The last thing I needed her to see is that I had been out late with my friends while she was at work. I leaned down to rinse the tooth paste out of my mouth. My mouth was full of water that I started sloshing around as I rose to look at my reflection. "Good morning child," my reflection said with a smug smirk on it's face, arms were crossed and it was leaning to one side of the mirror frame. I jumped back the water in my mouth spraying out with surprise as my back hit the wall behind me. "What the fuck?!" I screamed staring at the mirror shaking my head a couple of times to see if what I was seeing was real. All it did was make my head worse. The me in the mirror laughed while holding it's gut at my startled-ness. It took me a moment to catch my breath before locking eyes on the mirror. "Great," I breathed out, scarcasiam dripping like a thick honey, moving back to the sink, "Man In The Mirror by Michel Jackson is the exact song I wanted to have stuck in my head this morning." I finished rinsing out my mouth, I hated the taste of toothpaste. "You could have something way worse stuck in your head," my reflection purred back at me winking. With that wink suddenly the music in my head shifted to Mad World. It was too early for this shit. I glared at my reflection, "Let me guess," my reflection was looking at me with the most amused lazy smile, "you came to check out the place and now you wanna stay?" "It looks like you have enough rooms from what I saw last night." They said to me and I finally heard their voice. It was male, maybe just after puberty but the accent was working very hard on cutting the s in his words short. I blinked at the free standing reflection I felt my face go pale, "you're the reason I have this headache and I'm so damn tired." That got me a wide spread grin while my lips sunk into a teeth grinding frown. "Let me see you and I might consider." We locked eyes and the reflection curtly nodded. Taking a deep breath, I sighed letting my eyes close. Most people that close their eyes only see the backs of their eyelids, and sometimes I did too. Most of the time though, I stood at an entrance to a long fluorescent hallway with white walls and little to no decor- depending on the day. Each side of the hall had doors lining them, most of them were plain ol' doors, and some were more personalized. For example the first door on the right looked like it had come right from 1800's England. I knew it was stained oak and heavy if you weren't ready for them to be authentic. The door parallel was modern, white, and adorned with a baby animal calandra that was actually being used and slightly a jar. Good to know I had at least one of them here to help me if things got out of hand. You got to the hallway by the blue, white, and gray swirling portal. It was the compromise when they all started to show up and after missing two weeks of school from migraines and basically doing nothing but sleep, we decided a magical portal that selectively let people in was better than the open door policy I started with. Part of it was my fault for wanting to help everyone who came along. Plus, if I got to caught up in them, I couldn't live my own life. The struggle is constantly real. A bowl cut blond head of hair popped through the swirling colors, "Can I come in?" It was the same voice from the mirror- soft, playful, young, and it seemed easier for him to talk now. The face matched the voice- round cheeks as if the baby fat hadn't fully slipped away into adulthood, something told me that wasn't going to change. His nose was slim and a little crooked which meant he was born with it like that or he had broken it at one point. His eyes didn't match though. His eyes were just the slightest bit up turned at the edges. They were pale green and yellow orbs staring at me blinking in the light air of the portal. When he blinked though...there was something wrong but I couldn't put my finger on it. Maybe he was just too far away. Besides that, his eyes looked nervous, tired, and far from young. "I don't know why you're asking. You've already invited yourself in." He was shaking his head, "I used your body but I haven't been in here yet." That made me frown harder and he sighed. "I'm good at sneaking around, now can I come in?" Excellent, our minds were already melding. My eyes never left him. You never know when a new person is going to be dangerous or not. They might not be directly dangerous to me, however it wasn't really me I was worried about. His skin looked touchable soft, like nothing had ever harmed that child like perfection. His skin was slightly darkened with just a touch of pink on his nose which made it a recent tan. "Then explain how you knew about the empty rooms." My arms were crossed over my chest and my tone was glaring. I didn't care. If you were going to startle me just after waking up, gift me a migraine, and give me the run around then this is the attitude you get. Buck up or leave. It was his turn to sigh, "I swear, I have never been in here before." I rolled my eyes and threw my hands up in the air, a frustrated yet furious gesture causing a flare of pain in my head, "Fuck!" My hands were instantly on my head. "Fine! Just get in here before I have a full blown migraine." It was hard to keep an eye on him when I was doubled over from the sharpe pain. If he was going to hurt me, now would have been the best time. He just nodded and moved the rest of his body in. I felt his power before I could get a good look at him. It made me drop to my knees as my head throbbed faster and harder. It felt like a heard of elephants using my head as a stamped ground. My body was shaking, and I was going to be sick. I didn't trust him not to do something I wouldn't approve of if I looked away, which I was doing right now. Great. There was more then one reason we put up safety nets for controlling who comes and goes. "Krade!" I yelled, while doing my best to take deep breaths even with how ragged they were. The stranger didn't say anything or advance, brownie point for him. "KRADE!" I screamed it this time sending a white wave over my vision while hearing a heavy thunk from behind the door on the left. He must have fallen off the bed. If everything wasn't awful at that moment, I would have laughed. Some groggy mumbling was coming from the room and I heard my name doused in sleep and a question mark at the end and then a "Holy shit!" Followed by scrambling. The door flung open, hitting the wall behind it causing me to shudder a bit from another wave of pain. Awesome, now the sounds in my head were bothering me just as much as the sounds outside of my head. Just what I needed. I knew exactly how he would look standing in the doorway. A startled, fohawk-adorned blond face, one baby blue eye and one deep red eye that looked like a cat's. Don't let his 6 feet of height and lean muscular stature bother you, he was a giant child after all. Let me clarify- by giant child I mean he's a stripper/construction worker and his spare time was spent getting high, playing pranks on people, and mindlessly striking his acoustic guitar. He liked getting reactions, but it was hard to stay mad at him when he gave you those puppy dog eyes- the worst part was he knew it. Half of his body was covered in what looked like burn scars, he wasn't awake enough yet to hide them with his glamour. They started around his red eye and you could see them continuing under the low sitting sweatpants he had just pulled on. I could hear a soft, long, low whistle come from the new comer at the sight of Krade. It wasn't a surprised whistle, no, it had way too much flavor in it for that. "Krade," I managed to call softly with another ragged breath, this time it was shallow and my throat began to burn. Shit. That's all it took though for him to be next to me. I think I vaguely heard him say hello to the new comer, that's Krade for you. "Why didn't you wake me before you let someone new in?" He asked frantically. I could feel his hands hovering, not sure if touching me will make it worse or better. My heartbeat had moved to my ears as he spoke and suddenly I was looking down at the bathroom sink. My stomach convulsed and I barely made it to the trashcan in time. Curse me for always putting the lid down on the toilet. When I was done retching what little I had in my stomach from the night before, I sat back trying to catch my breath and get the sweat to go away. My headache had suddenly reduced to a small thud. It wasn't gone, but it was a start. "Thanks." I breathed out shakily. Krade had been with me for so long most of the time he just knew what I needed without me asking. Unfortunately, he had just woken up and was never quick to action like I was when awoken by panic. "No problem." I heard him say. His voice sounded distant, like it was coming from a face time chat, even though I knew he was right next to me- well, sort of. That's how it always sounded when I was in my body and they were beyond the portal. "Sorry I didn't wake up when they first came in. It was a long night." I just nodded my head and he didn't say anything. The stranger was too new for me to speak with him like this. We would have to get his life energy under control first. I could feel Krade waiting for me to respond as if he was in the room directly next to me. I would have killed for that right now. "Who is that guy?" I said, eyes still closed. I didn't have the energy to get back there right this moment. Throwing up takes a lot out of ya. It was quiet for a moment then, "He says to call him Ekans." "You've gotta be fucking joking." I was rubbing my temples with both hands. It was still too early for this and my stomach was far too empty now. "He says that's the most relevant word in your vocabulary that he will accept being called." Krade's voice was matter of fact. I could tell Krade was awake now but serious. He may be a playful person, but he knew when to be serious, or act serious anyway. I rolled my eyes as I stopped rubbing my temples. The throbbing in my head was slowly fading, Krade must have been adjusting the new comers energy. I don't even have to give him orders. "So if I throw a Pokéball at him can I say I caught 'em all?" He chuckled and I could feel the tension he was carrying fade away, "Only if you catch the other 150 out there." I smiled at that, mostly cause he was right. My shoulders were relaxed as I sat on the bathroom floor. "I've got to keep getting ready for school. Talk to me as I go Krade." I felt him nod, "He's one of my co-workers at the strip club where I work and he's a were-snake." I was moving to re-brush my teeth and instantly annoyed, "you brought him here without warning? We've talked about this Krade!" His head was shaking back and forth, "No, no, no! I didn't willingly bring him here!" "Krade..." I knew he heard the warning in my voice at this point. Krade was one of my nearest and dearest but one of the reasons we had to put up safety nets in the portal was due to the number of people who kept finding him from past lives. Not only were there migraines involved with that but watching Krade go though quite a bit of heartbreak and drama. I was in high school and had plenty of that on my own. His voice came out fast, like he knew he had done something wrong and was ripping the bandaid off in hopes it wouldn't make the situation worse, "We talk at work and I've told him about this place because he asked where I lived and he wouldn't take 'it's complicated' for an answer. He's been hitting on me since I started. He followed me here after work last night and..." he trailed off. I was letting the dogs in before making food, "Krade!" The dogs jumped, oops. I don't have to talk out loud for them to hear me but it was easier from time to time, mostly in situations like this. I just didn't mean to outwardly yell his name when my mother was trying to sleep. He jumped too and quickly added, "He must have gotten past the first barrier, took your body for a joy ride last night, and then stuck around!" A frustrated sigh escaped my lips as I leaned my forehead against the recently shut fridge door. It was cool against my heated skin. "Damnit Krade." I could feel his sadness wash over me like the tide coming in on a full moon. I knew it wasn't an act, but damn sometimes I had to doubt it for just a second with how good it was- but that's how I knew it wasn't an act. Plus, Krade would much rather tell the truth and deal with the punishment than lie. That was a lesson he had learned the hard way. Another sigh came from my lips as I moved to make my breakfast, "We've talked about this Krade." It was his turn to sigh and I felt his shoulders slump with sadness, regret, and preparedness for whatever came next. "I know", he admitted, "it's just hard when someone asks me where I live so bluntly." "Can't you say you live with your wife?" I scolded as the pop tarts came out of the toaster. "Or just avoid the question all together? Just change the subject?" "It's not that easy...." he trailed off, his voice soft. He reminded me of a lost puppy dog most of the time and even though we had four dogs in my house, I still had no idea what to do emotionally for them. I took a deep breath as I swallowed my first bite of breakfast looking at the clock on the microwave. It read 6:45AM, I had 15 minutes to finish getting ready and head out the door. Why they started high school so damn early I will never understand. "He can stay." I finally said as I walked back to my room to get dressed. "But you are in charge of him Krade, and if there is even one - and I do mean ONE- outburst from him in my body at school today, it's your ass." The wave of sadness went away as fast as it had come and was replaced with a feeling of warmth, admiration, and a slight slyness. "Is that last part a promise?" He had that impish grin in place of the frown and his eye brows wiggled at me. I rolled my eyes but couldn't help but smile. He had that effect on most people. You could be shaking with anger at him and as soon as he smiles, grins, or smirks at you that emotion will just be dust in the wind. "You know what I mean Krade." There was a chuckle to my voice before becoming serious again. "Now get that shit under control and when I get home we can work on everything else. No more joy rides with my body either." I added that last part as a secondary thought. "He could have gotten me in serious trouble if something had happened and I don't want to be put in a mental institution." He shuddered at that. He hated doctors as much as I did, let alone being locked up in a building with them. "Yeah, no. None of that is going to happen. Even if I have to stay up 24-7." "Good boy." I said with my own grin while he frowned. Though he knew what he reminded me of, he didn't like the analogy very much. "Also, I need to know what he did in my body last night in case I have to cover my ass somewhere over the next couple of days. Have someone stationed at the portal for a bit until we get this sorted out." "Wouldn't it be easier for those memories to come back throughout the day?" His voice had confusion in it. My head was bobbing up and down in a yes motion, "They would if I let them but I have tests to get through today. I don't have time for distractions. I'll block them on my end, you tell me them from yours." "Ay, ay, captain." He saluted me with two fingers jerking away from his forehead while grinning. Occasionally it was hard to read exactly what that grin meant, but this time it was just light-hearted and eager to have a new/old friend around. I felt like that should still frustrate me. I felt like I should still be mad. Why wasn't I mad or at least a bit annoyed? "Have a good day then." I was packing my school bag, "and don't get anyone pregnant- especially me." He chuckled, "you know that's not how that works." The smile decorated his perfectly symmetrical face was lazy, boyish, and made him even more handsome somehow. He was one of those people that even with the scars, tattoos, piercings etc, he never looked unnatural. "It's always funny though." We shared another laugh. "Good luck today and" his voice moved to a sing song tone "call me beep me if you wanna reach me when you wanna page me, it's okay!" Another eye roll from me and a light hearted chuckle and he was gone with the song "Unwell" by Matchbox Twenty played in my head. I grabbed the keys and walked out the door to the car right in time to get to school with an almost migraine slowly fading away. Just your friendly neighborhood medium, or mental case, going to math class. Nothing to see here. I hoped.

[myhauntedsalem]

13 True Horror Stories from the Psychiatric Ward that Will Give You the Creeps

Death, illness and tragedy have long been part of the history of insane asylums, and for as long as they have existed, so too have the scary stories associated with them. From haunted hospitals to sadistic doctors and nurses, psychiatric wards have been the inspiration for many of our favorite horror movies and books. Yet, the true stories told by the psych ward workers below far surpass any horrors that we might have seen at the cinema or read in a book.

Without further ado, here are thirteen of some of the creepiest psych ward stories on the internet that have been shared by health care professionals.

1. Holding her own Eyes

My mom told me this story from her time at a neuropsychiatric ward while she was in grad school. She was making her routine room checks and happened upon the most horrific scene I’ve ever heard.

This was during the night shift, and generally, all the patients’ bedroom doors should be closed. So my mom turned a corner and noticed an open door. She saw a staff member’s legs on the floor, halfway out the doorway.

When she looked into the room, she saw the patient, a woman with a severe postpartum psychiatric disorder, who had just gouged both of her own eyes out with her bare hands. She was sitting cross-legged on the floor, holding her eyes in her hands.

The first staff member to witness the scene, who was now lying face down on the floor, had a heart attack when he first witnessed the woman while he was making his rounds.

My mom screamed for help and frantically tried to perform CPR on the staff member. All the while, the woman just sat rather calmly, holding her own eyes.

2. The Saw

I work as a psychotherapist in a hospital system. My definition of creepy is probably quite a bit different from other medical professionals.

The one that got to me the most was a patient who came to us after attempting suicide by sawing both his arms off at the forearm with a table saw. His arms were reattached, fairly successfully too, with only limited impairments in mobility. All I could think was how bad it would have to be to live in his head that sawing his arms off seemed better than that.

He has since completed suicide.

3. Jane?

We had a young lady in our custody with quite a few issues. We’ll call her Jane. Jane’s first night at our facility staff doing a bed check found Jane in a puddle of blood. Turns out Jane had been slicing the skin around her shin with her finger nails and was pulling her skin up her leg, essentially de-gloving her calf.

Jane also had a ritual she performed every night before bed. While in her room she would run between walls in her room touching them in a crucifix pattern. After doing this for a few hours she would sit on her bed and go to sleep. This particular night Jane was frantic in her pace, practically running between walls. Our night staff observed the entire interaction and reported Jane screaming late into the night. When the staff went to check on Jane she reported Jane standing in the doorway smiling. The staff asked what was wrong and Jane replied, “what makes you think you are speaking to Jane?”

4. The Vampire

My mom worked in mental institutions in her younger years (and actually worked at a large, well-known asylum before it was shut down.)

There was one woman there that thought she was a vampire of sorts. She was only allowed out one hour a day, and they had to use safety precautions. She had already attacked and killed at least one hospital worker before these were enacted.

When my Mom asked about her, it was revealed that she had killed at least two of her children, wounded another as well as her husband because she had some sort of physical condition called Porphyria, which apparently made her crave blood.

By the time that they discovered there was something physically wrong with her, she already had lost her mind from guilt and grief.

5. The Spitter

I’m not a psychologist but my friend is. She told me about a patient of hers who was HIV positive and a paranoid schizophrenic. He thought that the nurses who worked at the hospital he was in were trying to kill him, so he would frequently bite his tongue, and spit HIV positive blood into their faces/mouths. When they had to come into contact with him, they were required to wear full masks and gloves.

6. The Only One

I once knew a woman who had spent part of her residency at a psychiatric hospital for people with severe mental conditions. Apparently, the grounds had a lovely, enclosed greenhouse. One day, one of their schizophrenic patients was sitting on a bench, smoking a cigarette, as a heron frantically flew around. It had found its way in and, not being able to escape, it was smashing into the large panes of glass. The man just sat there watching.

Finally, my counselor asked him if the bird was bothering him and he kind of sighed and said, “Thank god, I thought I was the only one seeing that.”

7. Family Photographs

My sister is the director of a psychiatric hospital. There was recently a lady there who would cut her arms, legs and torso open and place photographs of her family under her skin.

8. Under the Bed

Once, a fellow female patient told me she found writings under her bed. They were just old, small wooden bed frames with hard mattresses that would make all kinds of noises when you rolled over, but I still wondered what exactly she was doing lying under her bed to find these writings.

When she first told me, I thought it was a joke. But sure enough, one day during group we managed to sneak away, and she showed me. Indeed, there were stories written under her bed. After that, we had everyone check under their own beds, and there was more writing under every single bed.

They were stories of patients who had stayed here before, or ways they were planning on killing themselves, or who the good and bad nurses were. It creeped me out.

9. Time of Death

Well, my mother was a nurse that specialized in geriatrics, and she worked for several hospice hospitals for many years. She often described situations at her work with several of the patients. She would say that each person tends to have a very similar “checklist” that they follow right before death. This checklist often ended in a very similar way.

They would get caught talking to someone that wasn’t there. When asked who they (otherwise lucid people) were talking to, they would describe an individual who was already dead. When asked what they were talking about, they would say that their relative wanted to know if they were ready to move on. A pretty common response would be, “Yeah, he/she said that she will take me tomorrow at 3:00.” Well, it would often happen that they would die at the exact time their relatives quoted.

10. The Test Subject

I had an hour-long conversion with a delusional guy who was confined to a mental health facility, and who was probably smarter than I am. Lots of these folks believe that somebody – often the CIA – is either beaming thoughts into their heads, or has implanted a microchip in their brains for this purpose. This guy was offering a very thoughtful argument as to why such claims should not be so quickly dismissed.

“It’s precisely because such delusions are so common that mental patients make the best test subjects,” he said. There he was, confined and protected, constantly observed, his health and behavior documented, and there is zero chance that anyone would ever take his concerns seriously. How else would you test and improve such technology? Does the government not have a strong motivation and a plausible ability to create such a device?

“You can see I’m not irrational,” the man said. “I’m just straight-up telling you that they are doing this to me. I know just how unbelievable it sounds, and yet, here I am.”

11. The Boy who Loved Knives

As a tech in psych years ago, there was a 7-year-old kid sent to the floor because the mom didn’t know what to do with him. Sadly, common thing to happen, even if the kids don’t have psych issues. Anyway, the mom was shaking and crying, and they had to take the kid into another room. She was genuinely afraid of her own son. She had suspected something was wrong when she kept finding mutilated animals in the backyard, but never heard or saw coyotes or anything around. The neighbors smaller pets started disappearing. The boy had an obsession with knives, hiding them around the house. Denying anything when the mom confronted him. Then when the two started getting into arguments, he would get really violent and hit her, push her down and kick her, threaten to kill her. On multiple occasions she woke up in the middle of the night with him standing beside her bed, staring her in the face. She put extra locks on her bedroom door to feel safe while she slept. The last straw was when she lifted up his mattress and found 50+ knives of all shapes and sizes under there. So she brought him to us.

I remember talking to him, treating him like he was just any other kid that came through. He seemed remarkably normal, until you spoke directly to him. He had this way of looking right through you, or maybe like he didn’t see you at all while you were speaking.

He would respond like a robot, like he was just saying words because that’s what we wanted to hear. And he would always put on this creepy, dead-looking smile. Like all mouth and no eye involvement in the smile. Especially when he would get away with something, like taking another kid’s markers and they couldn’t figure it out. Still gives me chills laying here thinking about him.

I believe I met a 7-year-old psychopath.

12. The New Mom

I was a pharmacy technician at a hospital with a psych ward for some time. We would have to go around with a cart and dispense the patients’ medications, and being a 5’2″ girl, a security guard or male nurse would accompany me, just as a precaution. I never had any real issues other than the occasional death grip onto my arm or manic outbursts, but there was one boy who was entirely different.

His chart said he was nine and he had pale skin, dark hair, and huge bright, green eyes. He always greeted me in the most polite way, asked how I was doing, and always found something different to compliment me on every time. He was extremely well-spoken and mature for his age, so I began looking forward to seeing him, as normal small talk is definitely cherished in that setting. If he saw me outside of his room in the halls, he made sure to say hello and always called me “Miss Jones” or “ma’am.”

One day, a couple of our female nurses saw me pause to chat with him in the hallway, and waved me over to ask if I was out of my mind. Apparently, when he was in kindergarten, he grew an intense attachment to his young female teacher.

This escalated to the point of him calling her “Mom” and leaving notes for her about how he wished he were her son. He had a normal home-life with both parents, and the teacher tried to explain to him that she couldn’t be his mom because that would hurt his real mother’s feelings, and that she already had that job covered.

So, he went home and, killed his own mother in her sleep by cutting her throat, so his teacher could be his mom. The female staff had a general rule of not interacting with him excessively to prevent any kind of attachment from forming.

13. Bugs

Nothing I can say can possibly describe the year I worked in Psychiatric Intensive Care. Creepy isn’t the thing that comes to mind when I think back on it…more heartbreaking and horrifying. But creepiness was a part of it. Especially evening and night shifts, naturally.

There is always something disturbing about watching someone while they hallucinate. You can tell it is 100% real to them, and something about that makes you believe it, on some level. A lot of stories end with, “and of course, I had to look over my shoulder to make sure”. You see the emotions it brings out.

There was a woman that came in and sat down across the table from me for her admission interview. She had bandages all over her arms and scotch tape over her mouth and ears. She looked very uncomfortable and wouldn’t really sit still. When the nurse would ask her a question, she would peel the corner of the tape back and answer, then stick the tape back on really fast.

We eventually found out that she saw and felt bugs crawling all over her, and they were trying to get inside her body. The tape was to keep the bugs out. The bandages were because some bugs got in and she had to dig them out. She couldn’t sit still because she felt the bugs all over her even while we sat and talked. The worst part was, she had some idea that it was her mind playing tricks on her. Can you imagine going through your life, feeling like someone is continuously dumping buckets of cockroaches on your head, feeling like they’re all over you and getting inside of you to the point that you’re digging chunks out of your flesh in a panic, all while knowing intellectually that none of it is real?

[myhauntedsalem]

13 True Horror Stories from the Psychiatric Ward that Will Give You the Creeps

Death, illness and tragedy have long been part of the history of insane asylums, and for as long as they have existed, so too have the scary stories associated with them. From haunted hospitals to sadistic doctors and nurses, psychiatric wards have been the inspiration for many of our favorite horror movies and books. Yet, the true stories told by the psych ward workers below far surpass any horrors that we might have seen at the cinema or read in a book.

Without further ado, here are thirteen of some of the creepiest psych ward stories on the internet that have been shared by health care professionals.

1. Holding her own Eyes My mom told me this story from her time at a neuropsychiatric ward while she was in grad school. She was making her routine room checks and happened upon the most horrific scene I’ve ever heard.

This was during the night shift, and generally, all the patients’ bedroom doors should be closed. So my mom turned a corner and noticed an open door. She saw a staff member’s legs on the floor, halfway out the doorway.

When she looked into the room, she saw the patient, a woman with a severe postpartum psychiatric disorder, who had just gouged both of her own eyes out with her bare hands. She was sitting cross-legged on the floor, holding her eyes in her hands.

The first staff member to witness the scene, who was now lying face down on the floor, had a heart attack when he first witnessed the woman while he was making his rounds.

My mom screamed for help and frantically tried to perform CPR on the staff member. All the while, the woman just sat rather calmly, holding her own eyes.

2. The Saw I work as a psychotherapist in a hospital system. My definition of creepy is probably quite a bit different from other medical professionals.

The one that got to me the most was a patient who came to us after attempting suicide by sawing both his arms off at the forearm with a table saw. His arms were reattached, fairly successfully too, with only limited impairments in mobility. All I could think was how bad it would have to be to live in his head that sawing his arms off seemed better than that.

He has since completed suicide.

3. Jane? We had a young lady in our custody with quite a few issues. We’ll call her Jane. Jane’s first night at our facility staff doing a bed check found Jane in a puddle of blood. Turns out Jane had been slicing the skin around her shin with her finger nails and was pulling her skin up her leg, essentially de-gloving her calf.

Jane also had a ritual she performed every night before bed. While in her room she would run between walls in her room touching them in a crucifix pattern. After doing this for a few hours she would sit on her bed and go to sleep. This particular night Jane was frantic in her pace, practically running between walls. Our night staff observed the entire interaction and reported Jane screaming late into the night. When the staff went to check on Jane she reported Jane standing in the doorway smiling. The staff asked what was wrong and Jane replied, “what makes you think you are speaking to Jane?”

4. The Vampire My mom worked in mental institutions in her younger years (and actually worked at a large, well-known asylum before it was shut down.)

There was one woman there that thought she was a vampire of sorts. She was only allowed out one hour a day, and they had to use safety precautions. She had already attacked and killed at least one hospital worker before these were enacted.

When my Mom asked about her, it was revealed that she had killed at least two of her children, wounded another as well as her husband because she had some sort of physical condition called Porphyria, which apparently made her crave blood.

By the time that they discovered there was something physically wrong with her, she already had lost her mind from guilt and grief.

5. The Spitter I’m not a psychologist but my friend is. She told me about a patient of hers who was HIV positive and a paranoid schizophrenic. He thought that the nurses who worked at the hospital he was in were trying to kill him, so he would frequently bite his tongue, and spit HIV positive blood into their faces/mouths. When they had to come into contact with him, they were required to wear full masks and gloves.

6. The Only One I once knew a woman who had spent part of her residency at a psychiatric hospital for people with severe mental conditions. Apparently, the grounds had a lovely, enclosed greenhouse. One day, one of their schizophrenic patients was sitting on a bench, smoking a cigarette, as a heron frantically flew around. It had found its way in and, not being able to escape, it was smashing into the large panes of glass. The man just sat there watching.

Finally, my counselor asked him if the bird was bothering him and he kind of sighed and said, “Thank god, I thought I was the only one seeing that.”

7. Family Photographs My sister is the director of a psychiatric hospital. There was recently a lady there who would cut her arms, legs and torso open and place photographs of her family under her skin.

8. Under the Bed Once, a fellow female patient told me she found writings under her bed. They were just old, small wooden bed frames with hard mattresses that would make all kinds of noises when you rolled over, but I still wondered what exactly she was doing lying under her bed to find these writings.

When she first told me, I thought it was a joke. But sure enough, one day during group we managed to sneak away, and she showed me. Indeed, there were stories written under her bed. After that, we had everyone check under their own beds, and there was more writing under every single bed.

They were stories of patients who had stayed here before, or ways they were planning on killing themselves, or who the good and bad nurses were. It creeped me out.

9. Time of Death Well, my mother was a nurse that specialized in geriatrics, and she worked for several hospice hospitals for many years. She often described situations at her work with several of the patients. She would say that each person tends to have a very similar “checklist” that they follow right before death. This checklist often ended in a very similar way. They would get caught talking to someone that wasn’t there. When asked who they (otherwise lucid people) were talking to, they would describe an individual who was already dead. When asked what they were talking about, they would say that their relative wanted to know if they were ready to move on. A pretty common response would be, “Yeah, he/she said that she will take me tomorrow at 3:00.” Well, it would often happen that they would die at the exact time their relatives quoted.

10. The Test Subject I had an hour-long conversion with a delusional guy who was confined to a mental health facility, and who was probably smarter than I am. Lots of these folks believe that somebody – often the CIA – is either beaming thoughts into their heads, or has implanted a microchip in their brains for this purpose. This guy was offering a very thoughtful argument as to why such claims should not be so quickly dismissed.

“It’s precisely because such delusions are so common that mental patients make the best test subjects,” he said. There he was, confined and protected, constantly observed, his health and behavior documented, and there is zero chance that anyone would ever take his concerns seriously. How else would you test and improve such technology? Does the government not have a strong motivation and a plausible ability to create such a device?

“You can see I’m not irrational,” the man said. “I’m just straight-up telling you that they are doing this to me. I know just how unbelievable it sounds, and yet, here I am.”

11. The Boy who Loved Knives As a tech in psych years ago, there was a 7-year-old kid sent to the floor because the mom didn’t know what to do with him. Sadly, common thing to happen, even if the kids don’t have psych issues. Anyway, the mom was shaking and crying, and they had to take the kid into another room. She was genuinely afraid of her own son. She had suspected something was wrong when she kept finding mutilated animals in the backyard, but never heard or saw coyotes or anything around. The neighbors smaller pets started disappearing. The boy had an obsession with knives, hiding them around the house. Denying anything when the mom confronted him. Then when the two started getting into arguments, he would get really violent and hit her, push her down and kick her, threaten to kill her. On multiple occasions she woke up in the middle of the night with him standing beside her bed, staring her in the face. She put extra locks on her bedroom door to feel safe while she slept. The last straw was when she lifted up his mattress and found 50+ knives of all shapes and sizes under there. So she brought him to us.

I remember talking to him, treating him like he was just any other kid that came through. He seemed remarkably normal, until you spoke directly to him. He had this way of looking right through you, or maybe like he didn’t see you at all while you were speaking.

He would respond like a robot, like he was just saying words because that’s what we wanted to hear. And he would always put on this creepy, dead-looking smile. Like all mouth and no eye involvement in the smile. Especially when he would get away with something, like taking another kid’s markers and they couldn’t figure it out. Still gives me chills laying here thinking about him.

I believe I met a 7-year-old psychopath.

12. The New Mom I was a pharmacy technician at a hospital with a psych ward for some time. We would have to go around with a cart and dispense the patients’ medications, and being a 5’2″ girl, a security guard or male nurse would accompany me, just as a precaution. I never had any real issues other than the occasional death grip onto my arm or manic outbursts, but there was one boy who was entirely different.

His chart said he was nine and he had pale skin, dark hair, and huge bright, green eyes. He always greeted me in the most polite way, asked how I was doing, and always found something different to compliment me on every time. He was extremely well-spoken and mature for his age, so I began looking forward to seeing him, as normal small talk is definitely cherished in that setting. If he saw me outside of his room in the halls, he made sure to say hello and always called me “Miss Jones” or “ma’am.”

One day, a couple of our female nurses saw me pause to chat with him in the hallway, and waved me over to ask if I was out of my mind. Apparently, when he was in kindergarten, he grew an intense attachment to his young female teacher.

This escalated to the point of him calling her “Mom” and leaving notes for her about how he wished he were her son. He had a normal home-life with both parents, and the teacher tried to explain to him that she couldn’t be his mom because that would hurt his real mother’s feelings, and that she already had that job covered.

So, he went home and, killed his own mother in her sleep by cutting her throat, so his teacher could be his mom. The female staff had a general rule of not interacting with him excessively to prevent any kind of attachment from forming.

13. Bugs Nothing I can say can possibly describe the year I worked in Psychiatric Intensive Care. Creepy isn’t the thing that comes to mind when I think back on it…more heartbreaking and horrifying. But creepiness was a part of it. Especially evening and night shifts, naturally.

There is always something disturbing about watching someone while they hallucinate. You can tell it is 100% real to them, and something about that makes you believe it, on some level. A lot of stories end with, “and of course, I had to look over my shoulder to make sure”. You see the emotions it brings out.

There was a woman that came in and sat down across the table from me for her admission interview. She had bandages all over her arms and scotch tape over her mouth and ears. She looked very uncomfortable and wouldn’t really sit still. When the nurse would ask her a question, she would peel the corner of the tape back and answer, then stick the tape back on really fast.

We eventually found out that she saw and felt bugs crawling all over her, and they were trying to get inside her body. The tape was to keep the bugs out. The bandages were because some bugs got in and she had to dig them out. She couldn’t sit still because she felt the bugs all over her even while we sat and talked. The worst part was, she had some idea that it was her mind playing tricks on her. Can you imagine going through your life, feeling like someone is continuously dumping buckets of cockroaches on your head, feeling like they’re all over you and getting inside of you to the point that you’re digging chunks out of your flesh in a panic, all while knowing intellectually that none of it is real?

[myhauntedsalem]

13 True Horror Stories from the Psychiatric Ward that Will Give You the Creeps

Death, illness and tragedy have long been part of the history of insane asylums, and for as long as they have existed, so too have the scary stories associated with them. From haunted hospitals to sadistic doctors and nurses, psychiatric wards have been the inspiration for many of our favorite horror movies and books. Yet, the true stories told by the psych ward workers below far surpass any horrors that we might have seen at the cinema or read in a book.

Without further ado, here are thirteen of some of the creepiest psych ward stories on the internet that have been shared by health care professionals.

1. Holding her own Eyes My mom told me this story from her time at a neuropsychiatric ward while she was in grad school. She was making her routine room checks and happened upon the most horrific scene I’ve ever heard.

This was during the night shift, and generally, all the patients’ bedroom doors should be closed. So my mom turned a corner and noticed an open door. She saw a staff member’s legs on the floor, halfway out the doorway.

When she looked into the room, she saw the patient, a woman with a severe postpartum psychiatric disorder, who had just gouged both of her own eyes out with her bare hands. She was sitting cross-legged on the floor, holding her eyes in her hands.

The first staff member to witness the scene, who was now lying face down on the floor, had a heart attack when he first witnessed the woman while he was making his rounds.

My mom screamed for help and frantically tried to perform CPR on the staff member. All the while, the woman just sat rather calmly, holding her own eyes.

2. The Saw I work as a psychotherapist in a hospital system. My definition of creepy is probably quite a bit different from other medical professionals.

The one that got to me the most was a patient who came to us after attempting suicide by sawing both his arms off at the forearm with a table saw. His arms were reattached, fairly successfully too, with only limited impairments in mobility. All I could think was how bad it would have to be to live in his head that sawing his arms off seemed better than that.

He has since completed suicide.

3. Jane? We had a young lady in our custody with quite a few issues. We’ll call her Jane. Jane’s first night at our facility staff doing a bed check found Jane in a puddle of blood. Turns out Jane had been slicing the skin around her shin with her finger nails and was pulling her skin up her leg, essentially de-gloving her calf.

Jane also had a ritual she performed every night before bed. While in her room she would run between walls in her room touching them in a crucifix pattern. After doing this for a few hours she would sit on her bed and go to sleep. This particular night Jane was frantic in her pace, practically running between walls. Our night staff observed the entire interaction and reported Jane screaming late into the night. When the staff went to check on Jane she reported Jane standing in the doorway smiling. The staff asked what was wrong and Jane replied, “what makes you think you are speaking to Jane?”

4. The Vampire My mom worked in mental institutions in her younger years (and actually worked at a large, well-known asylum before it was shut down.)

There was one woman there that thought she was a vampire of sorts. She was only allowed out one hour a day, and they had to use safety precautions. She had already attacked and killed at least one hospital worker before these were enacted.

When my Mom asked about her, it was revealed that she had killed at least two of her children, wounded another as well as her husband because she had some sort of physical condition called Porphyria, which apparently made her crave blood.

By the time that they discovered there was something physically wrong with her, she already had lost her mind from guilt and grief.

5. The Spitter I’m not a psychologist but my friend is. She told me about a patient of hers who was HIV positive and a paranoid schizophrenic. He thought that the nurses who worked at the hospital he was in were trying to kill him, so he would frequently bite his tongue, and spit HIV positive blood into their faces/mouths. When they had to come into contact with him, they were required to wear full masks and gloves.

6. The Only One I once knew a woman who had spent part of her residency at a psychiatric hospital for people with severe mental conditions. Apparently, the grounds had a lovely, enclosed greenhouse. One day, one of their schizophrenic patients was sitting on a bench, smoking a cigarette, as a heron frantically flew around. It had found its way in and, not being able to escape, it was smashing into the large panes of glass. The man just sat there watching.

Finally, my counselor asked him if the bird was bothering him and he kind of sighed and said, “Thank god, I thought I was the only one seeing that.”

7. Family Photographs My sister is the director of a psychiatric hospital. There was recently a lady there who would cut her arms, legs and torso open and place photographs of her family under her skin.

8. Under the Bed Once, a fellow female patient told me she found writings under her bed. They were just old, small wooden bed frames with hard mattresses that would make all kinds of noises when you rolled over, but I still wondered what exactly she was doing lying under her bed to find these writings.

When she first told me, I thought it was a joke. But sure enough, one day during group we managed to sneak away, and she showed me. Indeed, there were stories written under her bed. After that, we had everyone check under their own beds, and there was more writing under every single bed.

They were stories of patients who had stayed here before, or ways they were planning on killing themselves, or who the good and bad nurses were. It creeped me out.

9. Time of Death Well, my mother was a nurse that specialized in geriatrics, and she worked for several hospice hospitals for many years. She often described situations at her work with several of the patients. She would say that each person tends to have a very similar “checklist” that they follow right before death. This checklist often ended in a very similar way.

They would get caught talking to someone that wasn’t there. When asked who they (otherwise lucid people) were talking to, they would describe an individual who was already dead. When asked what they were talking about, they would say that their relative wanted to know if they were ready to move on. A pretty common response would be, “Yeah, he/she said that she will take me tomorrow at 3:00.” Well, it would often happen that they would die at the exact time their relatives quoted.

10. The Test Subject I had an hour-long conversion with a delusional guy who was confined to a mental health facility, and who was probably smarter than I am. Lots of these folks believe that somebody – often the CIA – is either beaming thoughts into their heads, or has implanted a microchip in their brains for this purpose. This guy was offering a very thoughtful argument as to why such claims should not be so quickly dismissed.

“It’s precisely because such delusions are so common that mental patients make the best test subjects,” he said. There he was, confined and protected, constantly observed, his health and behavior documented, and there is zero chance that anyone would ever take his concerns seriously. How else would you test and improve such technology? Does the government not have a strong motivation and a plausible ability to create such a device?

“You can see I’m not irrational,” the man said. “I’m just straight-up telling you that they are doing this to me. I know just how unbelievable it sounds, and yet, here I am.”

11. The Boy who Loved Knives As a tech in psych years ago, there was a 7-year-old kid sent to the floor because the mom didn’t know what to do with him. Sadly, common thing to happen, even if the kids don’t have psych issues. Anyway, the mom was shaking and crying, and they had to take the kid into another room. She was genuinely afraid of her own son. She had suspected something was wrong when she kept finding mutilated animals in the backyard, but never heard or saw coyotes or anything around. The neighbors smaller pets started disappearing. The boy had an obsession with knives, hiding them around the house. Denying anything when the mom confronted him. Then when the two started getting into arguments, he would get really violent and hit her, push her down and kick her, threaten to kill her. On multiple occasions she woke up in the middle of the night with him standing beside her bed, staring her in the face. She put extra locks on her bedroom door to feel safe while she slept. The last straw was when she lifted up his mattress and found 50+ knives of all shapes and sizes under there. So she brought him to us.

I remember talking to him, treating him like he was just any other kid that came through. He seemed remarkably normal, until you spoke directly to him. He had this way of looking right through you, or maybe like he didn’t see you at all while you were speaking.

He would respond like a robot, like he was just saying words because that’s what we wanted to hear. And he would always put on this creepy, dead-looking smile. Like all mouth and no eye involvement in the smile. Especially when he would get away with something, like taking another kid’s markers and they couldn’t figure it out. Still gives me chills laying here thinking about him.

I believe I met a 7-year-old psychopath.

12. The New Mom I was a pharmacy technician at a hospital with a psych ward for some time. We would have to go around with a cart and dispense the patients’ medications, and being a 5’2″ girl, a security guard or male nurse would accompany me, just as a precaution. I never had any real issues other than the occasional death grip onto my arm or manic outbursts, but there was one boy who was entirely different.

His chart said he was nine and he had pale skin, dark hair, and huge bright, green eyes. He always greeted me in the most polite way, asked how I was doing, and always found something different to compliment me on every time. He was extremely well-spoken and mature for his age, so I began looking forward to seeing him, as normal small talk is definitely cherished in that setting. If he saw me outside of his room in the halls, he made sure to say hello and always called me “Miss Jones” or “ma’am.”

One day, a couple of our female nurses saw me pause to chat with him in the hallway, and waved me over to ask if I was out of my mind. Apparently, when he was in kindergarten, he grew an intense attachment to his young female teacher.

This escalated to the point of him calling her “Mom” and leaving notes for her about how he wished he were her son. He had a normal home-life with both parents, and the teacher tried to explain to him that she couldn’t be his mom because that would hurt his real mother’s feelings, and that she already had that job covered.

So, he went home and, killed his own mother in her sleep by cutting her throat, so his teacher could be his mom. The female staff had a general rule of not interacting with him excessively to prevent any kind of attachment from forming.

13. Bugs Nothing I can say can possibly describe the year I worked in Psychiatric Intensive Care. Creepy isn’t the thing that comes to mind when I think back on it…more heartbreaking and horrifying. But creepiness was a part of it. Especially evening and night shifts, naturally.

There is always something disturbing about watching someone while they hallucinate. You can tell it is 100% real to them, and something about that makes you believe it, on some level. A lot of stories end with, “and of course, I had to look over my shoulder to make sure”. You see the emotions it brings out.

There was a woman that came in and sat down across the table from me for her admission interview. She had bandages all over her arms and scotch tape over her mouth and ears. She looked very uncomfortable and wouldn’t really sit still. When the nurse would ask her a question, she would peel the corner of the tape back and answer, then stick the tape back on really fast.

We eventually found out that she saw and felt bugs crawling all over her, and they were trying to get inside her body. The tape was to keep the bugs out. The bandages were because some bugs got in and she had to dig them out. She couldn’t sit still because she felt the bugs all over her even while we sat and talked. The worst part was, she had some idea that it was her mind playing tricks on her. Can you imagine going through your life, feeling like someone is continuously dumping buckets of cockroaches on your head, feeling like they’re all over you and getting inside of you to the point that you’re digging chunks out of your flesh in a panic, all while knowing intellectually that none of it is real?

[myhauntedsalem]

13 True Horror Stories from the Psychiatric Ward that Will Give You the Creeps

Death, illness and tragedy have long been part of the history of insane asylums, and for as long as they have existed, so too have the scary stories associated with them. From haunted hospitals to sadistic doctors and nurses, psychiatric wards have been the inspiration for many of our favorite horror movies and books. Yet, the true stories told by the psych ward workers below far surpass any horrors that we might have seen at the cinema or read in a book.

Without further ado, here are thirteen of some of the creepiest psych ward stories on the internet that have been shared by health care professionals.

1. Holding her own Eyes My mom told me this story from her time at a neuropsychiatric ward while she was in grad school. She was making her routine room checks and happened upon the most horrific scene I’ve ever heard.

This was during the night shift, and generally, all the patients’ bedroom doors should be closed. So my mom turned a corner and noticed an open door. She saw a staff member’s legs on the floor, halfway out the doorway.

When she looked into the room, she saw the patient, a woman with a severe postpartum psychiatric disorder, who had just gouged both of her own eyes out with her bare hands. She was sitting cross-legged on the floor, holding her eyes in her hands.

The first staff member to witness the scene, who was now lying face down on the floor, had a heart attack when he first witnessed the woman while he was making his rounds.

My mom screamed for help and frantically tried to perform CPR on the staff member. All the while, the woman just sat rather calmly, holding her own eyes.

2. The Saw I work as a psychotherapist in a hospital system. My definition of creepy is probably quite a bit different from other medical professionals.

The one that got to me the most was a patient who came to us after attempting suicide by sawing both his arms off at the forearm with a table saw. His arms were reattached, fairly successfully too, with only limited impairments in mobility. All I could think was how bad it would have to be to live in his head that sawing his arms off seemed better than that.

He has since completed suicide.

3. Jane? We had a young lady in our custody with quite a few issues. We’ll call her Jane. Jane’s first night at our facility staff doing a bed check found Jane in a puddle of blood. Turns out Jane had been slicing the skin around her shin with her finger nails and was pulling her skin up her leg, essentially de-gloving her calf.

Jane also had a ritual she performed every night before bed. While in her room she would run between walls in her room touching them in a crucifix pattern. After doing this for a few hours she would sit on her bed and go to sleep. This particular night Jane was frantic in her pace, practically running between walls. Our night staff observed the entire interaction and reported Jane screaming late into the night. When the staff went to check on Jane she reported Jane standing in the doorway smiling. The staff asked what was wrong and Jane replied, “what makes you think you are speaking to Jane?”

4. The Vampire My mom worked in mental institutions in her younger years (and actually worked at a large, well-known asylum before it was shut down.)

There was one woman there that thought she was a vampire of sorts. She was only allowed out one hour a day, and they had to use safety precautions. She had already attacked and killed at least one hospital worker before these were enacted.

When my Mom asked about her, it was revealed that she had killed at least two of her children, wounded another as well as her husband because she had some sort of physical condition called Porphyria, which apparently made her crave blood.

By the time that they discovered there was something physically wrong with her, she already had lost her mind from guilt and grief.

5. The Spitter I’m not a psychologist but my friend is. She told me about a patient of hers who was HIV positive and a paranoid schizophrenic. He thought that the nurses who worked at the hospital he was in were trying to kill him, so he would frequently bite his tongue, and spit HIV positive blood into their faces/mouths. When they had to come into contact with him, they were required to wear full masks and gloves.

6. The Only One I once knew a woman who had spent part of her residency at a psychiatric hospital for people with severe mental conditions. Apparently, the grounds had a lovely, enclosed greenhouse. One day, one of their schizophrenic patients was sitting on a bench, smoking a cigarette, as a heron frantically flew around. It had found its way in and, not being able to escape, it was smashing into the large panes of glass. The man just sat there watching.

Finally, my counselor asked him if the bird was bothering him and he kind of sighed and said, “Thank god, I thought I was the only one seeing that.”

7. Family Photographs My sister is the director of a psychiatric hospital. There was recently a lady there who would cut her arms, legs and torso open and place photographs of her family under her skin.

8. Under the Bed Once, a fellow female patient told me she found writings under her bed. They were just old, small wooden bed frames with hard mattresses that would make all kinds of noises when you rolled over, but I still wondered what exactly she was doing lying under her bed to find these writings.

When she first told me, I thought it was a joke. But sure enough, one day during group we managed to sneak away, and she showed me. Indeed, there were stories written under her bed. After that, we had everyone check under their own beds, and there was more writing under every single bed.

They were stories of patients who had stayed here before, or ways they were planning on killing themselves, or who the good and bad nurses were. It creeped me out.

9. Time of Death Well, my mother was a nurse that specialized in geriatrics, and she worked for several hospice hospitals for many years. She often described situations at her work with several of the patients. She would say that each person tends to have a very similar “checklist” that they follow right before death. This checklist often ended in a very similar way. They would get caught talking to someone that wasn’t there. When asked who they (otherwise lucid people) were talking to, they would describe an individual who was already dead. When asked what they were talking about, they would say that their relative wanted to know if they were ready to move on. A pretty common response would be, “Yeah, he/she said that she will take me tomorrow at 3:00.” Well, it would often happen that they would die at the exact time their relatives quoted.

10. The Test Subject I had an hour-long conversion with a delusional guy who was confined to a mental health facility, and who was probably smarter than I am. Lots of these folks believe that somebody – often the CIA – is either beaming thoughts into their heads, or has implanted a microchip in their brains for this purpose. This guy was offering a very thoughtful argument as to why such claims should not be so quickly dismissed.

“It’s precisely because such delusions are so common that mental patients make the best test subjects,” he said. There he was, confined and protected, constantly observed, his health and behavior documented, and there is zero chance that anyone would ever take his concerns seriously. How else would you test and improve such technology? Does the government not have a strong motivation and a plausible ability to create such a device?

“You can see I’m not irrational,” the man said. “I’m just straight-up telling you that they are doing this to me. I know just how unbelievable it sounds, and yet, here I am.”

11. The Boy who Loved Knives As a tech in psych years ago, there was a 7-year-old kid sent to the floor because the mom didn’t know what to do with him. Sadly, common thing to happen, even if the kids don’t have psych issues. Anyway, the mom was shaking and crying, and they had to take the kid into another room. She was genuinely afraid of her own son. She had suspected something was wrong when she kept finding mutilated animals in the backyard, but never heard or saw coyotes or anything around. The neighbors smaller pets started disappearing. The boy had an obsession with knives, hiding them around the house. Denying anything when the mom confronted him. Then when the two started getting into arguments, he would get really violent and hit her, push her down and kick her, threaten to kill her. On multiple occasions she woke up in the middle of the night with him standing beside her bed, staring her in the face. She put extra locks on her bedroom door to feel safe while she slept. The last straw was when she lifted up his mattress and found 50+ knives of all shapes and sizes under there. So she brought him to us.

I remember talking to him, treating him like he was just any other kid that came through. He seemed remarkably normal, until you spoke directly to him. He had this way of looking right through you, or maybe like he didn’t see you at all while you were speaking.

He would respond like a robot, like he was just saying words because that’s what we wanted to hear. And he would always put on this creepy, dead-looking smile. Like all mouth and no eye involvement in the smile. Especially when he would get away with something, like taking another kid’s markers and they couldn’t figure it out. Still gives me chills laying here thinking about him.

I believe I met a 7-year-old psychopath.

12. The New Mom I was a pharmacy technician at a hospital with a psych ward for some time. We would have to go around with a cart and dispense the patients’ medications, and being a 5’2″ girl, a security guard or male nurse would accompany me, just as a precaution. I never had any real issues other than the occasional death grip onto my arm or manic outbursts, but there was one boy who was entirely different.

His chart said he was nine and he had pale skin, dark hair, and huge bright, green eyes. He always greeted me in the most polite way, asked how I was doing, and always found something different to compliment me on every time. He was extremely well-spoken and mature for his age, so I began looking forward to seeing him, as normal small talk is definitely cherished in that setting. If he saw me outside of his room in the halls, he made sure to say hello and always called me “Miss Jones” or “ma’am.”

One day, a couple of our female nurses saw me pause to chat with him in the hallway, and waved me over to ask if I was out of my mind. Apparently, when he was in kindergarten, he grew an intense attachment to his young female teacher.

This escalated to the point of him calling her “Mom” and leaving notes for her about how he wished he were her son. He had a normal home-life with both parents, and the teacher tried to explain to him that she couldn’t be his mom because that would hurt his real mother’s feelings, and that she already had that job covered.

So, he went home and, killed his own mother in her sleep by cutting her throat, so his teacher could be his mom. The female staff had a general rule of not interacting with him excessively to prevent any kind of attachment from forming.

13. Bugs Nothing I can say can possibly describe the year I worked in Psychiatric Intensive Care. Creepy isn’t the thing that comes to mind when I think back on it…more heartbreaking and horrifying. But creepiness was a part of it. Especially evening and night shifts, naturally.

There is always something disturbing about watching someone while they hallucinate. You can tell it is 100% real to them, and something about that makes you believe it, on some level. A lot of stories end with, “and of course, I had to look over my shoulder to make sure”. You see the emotions it brings out.

There was a woman that came in and sat down across the table from me for her admission interview. She had bandages all over her arms and scotch tape over her mouth and ears. She looked very uncomfortable and wouldn’t really sit still. When the nurse would ask her a question, she would peel the corner of the tape back and answer, then stick the tape back on really fast.

We eventually found out that she saw and felt bugs crawling all over her, and they were trying to get inside her body. The tape was to keep the bugs out. The bandages were because some bugs got in and she had to dig them out. She couldn’t sit still because she felt the bugs all over her even while we sat and talked. The worst part was, she had some idea that it was her mind playing tricks on her. Can you imagine going through your life, feeling like someone is continuously dumping buckets of cockroaches on your head, feeling like they’re all over you and getting inside of you to the point that you’re digging chunks out of your flesh in a panic, all while knowing intellectually that none of it is real?