Long Jack

The Slender Man meme reminds me of a story my great-grandmother (who we used to call tiny grandma, since she was Yoda-ish) used to tell about a monster named Long Jack. I know Slender Man was started on Something Awful, but certain images and aspects remind me of that old ghost story.

I should caution that I didn't actually hear the story first-hand. When I was little, we lived for a while at my grandmother's house while my parents were sorting out a divorce. My great-grandmother lived down the road. The power would reliably go out during big winter storms in those days, and tiny grandma would come over and we'd sit in the fire and wait it out.

The old folks would tell stories and read books. I was only four or five, so tiny grandma would only tell the story of Long Jack after I fell asleep. My older brother and cousins would tell it to me later.

Now, tiny grandma and the rest of us live in the Pacific Northwest, way out in the boonies. She herself was an infant when her parents brought her out west. They were homesteaders.

There's an old dageurrotype of her as a child, standing with the rest of her class in front of a one-room log schoolhouse. There are huge, old growth trees behind her and lots of dark shadows. It's still very gloomy in the winter months in the PNW, even though the trees are much thinner these days.

Long Jack, whatever he is now, was originally a person. I don't know his real name. In that time in history, families lived by themselves in the woods, miles away from each other. However, there were a lot of people coming and going (other homesteaders, people looking for logging jobs, prospectors on the way to a gold rush, etc.).

There weren't hotels except in the bigger cities, either. When you slept, it was either in your own camp or some courteous homesteader would give you a place to sleep. Maybe violent crime wasn't an issue back then, or maybe people were more naive, but the guy who would become Long Jack was a murderer.

There had been a great string of murders in the region; whole families were slaughtered. Sometimes Native Americans would be blamed, as there were still some isolated Indian wars going on, but it didn't really look like that. It looked like people were inviting someone in and he ended up murdering them in their sleep.

Obviously, detective work wasn't big back then. In any case, sometimes it would be weeks or months before they discovered the bodies. The killer would be long gone by then.

I don't know if this one guy, Long Jack or whatever his name was, killed all of them. He did kill at least one family, though, and was caught (literally) red handed near the town of Bellingham, where my family is from.

They used to lynch people in those days. Usually it was black people. In the PNW, where there weren't a lot of black people, it was more often Chinese or East Indian men. Occasionally they lynched white men, even though they had a proper court system at the time.

It was risky to do and the vigilatntes did risk some blowback, especially for lynching white men. The local sheriff, John Larrabee, led the murderer out of his cell at night and took him out of town with a posse to some cliffs a couple miles outside the south side of town. They built a primitive gallows with an extra long rope, with the intent to hang him off the cliff extra high.

The hangman that day was a local eccentric by the name of Dan Harris. They picked him because he was a retiard sailor and knew everything there was to know about ropes and knots. He volunteered for the job, too. As a sailor, he had specifally been a whaler and had a morbid fascination with flesh and how to disassemble and render it.

If the posse had known that, they probably wouldn't have taken him on for the job. Dan Harris didn't just put a noose around the condemned man's neck. He put small nooses made of cord around each of his fingers and at the end of each cord was a heavy lead weight.,/p>

Around each wrist was a length of rope with a heavy stone. At each ankle was a rope attached to even heavier shoes. The posse watched Harris do all this, but they did not know what he was doing. Even Larrabee didn't have the forethought to object.

It came time to hang the man and somebody in the posse finally pushed. The man fell quickly to his doom. The posse expected to hear the sharp crack of a breaking neck, but all they heard was the sound of counting, in Harris' low voice. He had tied the noose to strange, not break. 1...2...3...4...

They heard a loud crack, almost like a shot. 7...8...9...10... Then they heard another. It wasn't the man's neck, but his legs dislocating from his hip. 14...15...16... They heard more pops and cracks. His shoulders dislocating, then his elbows followed by his ankles.

21...22...23... Then his fingers dislocated at each knuckle, sounding a bit like popcorn. Choking grunts could still be heard coming from the man; he was still alive and conscious throughout this. 36...37...38... Harris' voice became louder as his audience became more enraptured in the spectacle.

When he came to 43, there was the loudest crack of all. The makeshift gibbet broke and the murderer, all the weights, and rope went tumbling down the cliff face. His neck and limbs twisted and flailed into impossible angles. In the darkness, they could barely make out his corpse at the bottom. It was a horrific sight.

His limbs had all been stretched to awful, fantastical lengths, all intertwined with the ropes and each other. It was too dark to retrieve the body and, by the next day, animals had gotten to it and carried it away.

This is where my great-grandmother comes in. They used to tell her the ghost of Long Jack haunted those woods, abducting defenseless people if they so much as set foot there. They said that he would count as he stalked up behind you.

1...2...3...4... She heard him once, as she walked the long distance home from school one fall afternoon. 14...15...16... According to the story, you couldn't look back or he'd get you. You had to run as fast as you could, and ran she did.

21...22...23... The counting continued. It was like he was whispering, but it was still getting louder and it seemed he was right behind her. 27...28... She could hear his footfalls; his pace was much longer than her's - longer than any adult's.

She could tell from the rhythm that his legs were impossibly long. His arms and legs must be bending in some unnatural motion. She got to the door of their cabin...37...38...and slammed the door shut. Silence. She knew that if Long Jack had gotten to 43, she would have died.

There were other kids that got lost in those woods those days and they were never found. None of the adults ever mentioned Long Jack, but she had her thoughts to herself.

So that's the story of Long Jack, as my great-grandmother told it...or at least as my brother and cousins re-told it. I don't believe in ghosts myself, but I always liked the story. I haven't found any mention of such a murderer in the local archives but, then again, I wouldn't really expect to. Some of the other historic names, though, do check out...

39...40...41...

Paintings

There's a bum that lives in our neighborhood in Queens. He used to beg for change, but started painting one day. He went to a recycle place and collected old paint cans. Most of them still have a little paint left in them, but God knows where he got the brush.

He started painting on whatever garbage he could find - cardboard, paper, whatever provided a flat surface. He was really good, too. It was weird. He did landscapes, paintings of the places in the neighborhood, dogs, some cool-looking fantasy stuff...

This guy was the damn Michelangelo of bums. He'd sell them for fifty cents or a buck, then used the money to buy some booze and drink himself into a coma. He was a typical artist.

He eventually started offering to do portraits. No one liked them and I don't know why. I talked to a neighbor about it and they didn't really seem comfortable talking about it at all. She had one done by him and said it disgusted her and didn't look a thing like her.

I asked to see it. It was beautiful. It was amazingly lifelike and I told her as much. She responded by slapping me pretty hard and telling me to get the fuck out of her house. She stopped talking to me after that.

Nevertheless, I was so impressed that I asked the bum to do one of me. He said it would be two bucks and I paid him in advance. He said it would be done the next day. I passed his usual spot the next day, anxious to see it, but he wans't there.

I was pissed for a moment and thought he ripped me off until I noticed down the side of the building was my portrait, covered, with my name and a note on it. The note said, simply, "Good luck."

I uncovered the painting and was horrified. I looked distorted, misshapen...sickly twisted in ways that made my eyes hurt. I was clearly dying in the portrait, if not already dead. Bugs and crows were feeding on me.

I hadn't noticed one of the other neighbors behind me until he said, "Hey, looks good. I ought to get one too."

He said it as he was passing and continued to walk on, but not before I got a glimpse of him. He was twisted and misshapen, walking with a distorted gait. Crows and bugs trailed him, feeding from him. I looked around.

Everyone and everything looked the way I did in the painting now. Everything I see makes my eyes water. Everything is horrible and ugly...and everyone tells me how beautiful my portrait is. No matter what I do, I can't convince them that they shouldn't get one themselves.

Ringing

If you ever are in an area of absolute quiet, still your breathing and move not a muscle. After a few seconds, you will notice the silence has a sort of "sound" of its own, a kind of ringing tone. This is nothing unique; everyone will hear this, given the proper setting.

An informed person will tell you that your brain is trying to interpret the lack of stimuli to your hearing so it creates a bit of a filler sound. This ringing sound actually serves a more arcane purpose: it covers a noise we are not meant to hear.

This noise is not impossible to hear. If you are persistent, you can effectively "break" the cover-up sound. The next time you are silent and hear the ringing, shout at the top of your lungs for about half a minute then be abruptly silent.

It will be different for everyone. Some will hear nothing different for dozens of times. Others might pick up soft murmuring. A special few auditory heroes might clearly make it out on the first attempt. What you hear is a voice that relays an account of events about to happen in the immediate future.

It's like a sportscaster relaying the events occuring ten seconds into the future. As time goes on, you will be able to make out this voice under increasingly noisy circumstances, to the point that it can be heard at any time just by concentrating.

Such ability would doubtlessly be invaluable, no? You will be able to react to any immediate danger and relate to people around you with greater ease. No one would ever surprise you. Now, of course, you are wondering what sort of horrible catch this ability entails.

Perhaps the tone of voice is so horrible that it will drive you mad, or maybe the voice will only predict your death over and over again. Of course, this isn't the case. it's a normal voice and your ears receive it no matter what. It's simply a matter of noticing. However, there is a danger, for you see..where there is a voice, there is a body. Just like you notice new sounds, so shall you notice new sights.

More importantly, you'll be noticed.

We Danced

Footsteps aren't an uncommon thing to hear when you're sitting in a basement, so I tihnk nothing of it when I hear quiet thuds coming from the upstairs hallway. I just assume it was my brother and continue whatever little pointless thing I was doing at the time.

They go on for another couple minutes and I'm starting to get pissed off. They keep getting louder and louder. I sigh, wondering what the hell my brother's doing this late at night. I sit there, since it's impossible to fcus with the racket. I mean, it sounds like someone's power walking all over the main floor.

I sit there and listen as the thumps get faster and wilder. They just keep going, almost starting to form a rhythm. They move even faster and wilder; they're thumping all over the main floor. I realize that whatever this is, it can't be human. No human can move like that.

"What the fuck?!" I finally yell. After that, all the noise stops. Everything is quiet for a moment and I hear calm, slow footsteps moving to the basement door. It's pushed open and the footsteps stop again. I listen to my breathing for the next three minutes then sigh, thinking it's over.

It turns out something else was listening, too. Suddenly, I hear it thudding down the stairs. I knock my chair over in my haste to stand up. I start to run toward the nearest closet just in time to see a grotesque, hairless, four-legged creature dancing toward me, tapping its swollen feet in an intoxicating rhythm.

I dive into the closet and slam the door shut. There's a half-second pause before I hear that same rhythm on the door. It keeps going and going with no pause, no rests, and no relief. He's been at it for hours, now, and I find myself tapping my fingers along with his song.

Then, just as suddenly as it began, it ended. I wait for a few moments and look out. It's gone. I flip on a light and fall into a chair. It's safe. I relax and think for a few moments, but then I notice my foot tapping. Maybe this song isn't so bad; I almost like it enough to dance to it.

So I drop down on my hands and feet, and I start.