Very Eccentric Nightmare

Just last night/this morning, I had the most odd dream I can ever recall having - and I've had some doozies. I'm going to do my best to describe what I can remember in as much detail as I can. I would almost liken this dream to a video game in the survival horror series...games like the old Resident Evils, or Silent hill.

The dream started with me looking through the eyes of someone else. This man was not me, but it was almost as if I was inhabiting this individual's body and looking through his own eyes. There was a woman nearby that looked similar to my girlfriend, except older and it was not her. I do not recall her name, if it was even mentioned. She was a short redhead. There was another man also nearby; He was middle aged and had slicked back brown hair. I do not recall his name, either. I do remember him addressing the man in which I was seeing through as "Phil"(My name is not Phil).

Apparently something bad was happening, but I can't remember any speech from this portion of the dream. I remember the other man telling Phil that they needed something, but I can't remember what it was. So, Phil (hereby referred to as myself) went off down an old dirt path. It was dusk and the area was very isolated in the county. Eventually, I came upon a small market and went inside. It looked like any old country store aside from the blood and dead bodies. A shaken man behind the counter told me to just take what he needed. I cannot remember what it was that was grabbed, but it was small and wrapped in a plastic bag.

When I went back outside, a rusty blue truck slid to a stop nearby. The man from earlier was driving it and the woman was with him. He reached over and opened her door for her, then knocked her out into the dirt. He then stepped out, holding a gun, and cocked it. The gun was very odd looking; it resembled a Famas, but had polished wood features not usually found on a rifle of that sort.

I can't remember exactly how, but I was on the ground, looking at the woman. It became obvious that this female was Phil's significant other of some sort. The man walked over with the rifle and asked me something. I cannot recall what exactly was said, but it had something to do with me dying, and everyone except for the girl dying with him or the girl dying and everyone else being temporarily spared. I don't understand that at all. Anyway, the woman gave me a nod, and after I answered, she was shot once in the head with the rifle and I was kicked in the head and knocked unconscious.

When I finally awoke, it was dusk again, apparently the next day. I began traveling down another dirt path and eventually came upon a field of goats. There was a tin barrel in the corner of the pasture with something in it. I decided to check it out. I found the woman from before in it, decaying far faster than a normal body would. It had only been a day, but it looked as if it had been a week.

Continuing on my way, I eventually found a school building and there was screaming inside. For whatever reason, I went inside. Again, there were dead bodies and blood everywhere. Children ran around screaming, strange shadow-like being with scythes for hands dismembering them. It was very gruesome and difficult to describe. For some reason, I just stood there as all of this went on. Eventually, things quieted and I decided to explore this facility.

As I passed the girl's bathroom I heard crying coming from inside and cautiously went in. I'm surprised I didn't awake at this moment feeling sick. Though not as bloody as the main halls, this room was also bloody and a little girl was huddled in the corner, having vomited on and around the toilet. It was very realistic looking and hard to bear. The little girl addressed me, "Phil! You found me!". I never found out who this child was. She was never seen again, and I just sort of left the school. The whole event seemed very unnecessary.

As I continued on my way, things shifted to a different perspective. I was now looking at two individuals from a 3rd person view. One was the man from before, except he had glowing, black wings that seemed to be made of shadow, or some type of aura. He was discussing something with an older gentleman who looked like a scientist of sorts.

Again, I can't remember much of what was said (I can't remember anything about the detail of the room, either), but I do remember the winged one saying "Is that all you care about?!" in an angered voice. Eventually, a white glowing aura made a circle on an area of the floor and the scientist instructed the wigned man to step into it. The man obeyed as if he were a puppet. When he stepped inside, there was a blinding light and screaming. When vision returned, the man had been transformed. He was now three times the size of a normal man and dressed in all black, including a sort or armored helmet than seemed to have a crows beak or sorts. This enigmatic creature had a mournful bellow and crushed the scientist into bits, literally.

After that, I was back looking through Phil's eyes. I had come upon a quaint country property. Oddly, it was my real life great grandmother's home.

I'm going to try to describe the layout of my great grandmother's home for you to more clearly understand what's to come. When you first enter the back door, you are in a sort of porch/foyer. Though another door, you are inside the kitchen. In a corner of the kitchen, there are two doors. One leads to a hallway, the other to the living room. The living room has another door leading to a bedroom, which has another door leading into the hallway you can enter from the kitchen, forming a loop. In the hallway there is a door midway down that leads to a storage room, and at the end there is another bedroom and a bathroom. There is also a set of stairs. Upstairs, there is one large story area and one bedroom.

I stepped inside the house. There was no blood, gore, or bodies, but apparently no one was home. I went though the kitchen and into the hallway. Just as I neared the middle door, that dreadful creature burst from the door with that same mournful bellow. He was so big, he had to crawl on his knees in order to fit in the house, which made him kind of slow.

I turned around and ran into the kitchen, and then into the living room. I went around the loop and up the stairs, but the creature sluggishly continued on the route I had taken. Upstairs, I entered the bedroom and apparently pulled out chains and locks from nowhere and heavily secured the door. I felt safe here. It was peaceful. For whatever reason, I found three rocks on the nightstand and looked at the window. I had a plan! Break the window, and escape to the roof. I threw one rock, and then another. They did nothing but crack and mar the window. The third broke through, but only a small hole. It would appear I was trapped.

Frustrated, I paced around the bedroom. When I neared the door, the dreadful, mourning call was heard again and the door shook violently as this creature apparently rammed it. I leaned against the door as the creature rammed it again. The door loosened a little and I fell backwards and apparently, so did the monster on the other side. Little red numbers appeared and could be seen through the door as if around the monster, almost as if they were characters in some game and had taken damage. I felt very fatigued as I struggled to stand. Once on my feet, the monster broke the door in with another one of these dreadful cries, and ripped my right arm off. I was again seeing from a 3rd person perspective as Phil fell dead and his body was thrown out of the window. With another bellow, I awoke. I felt depressed all morning until about 11:30 a.m.

Also, the entire dream was accompanied at various arts by piano music. All of it was very saddening, maybe even frightening, and most songs were dirges that I've heard before. When nothing in particular was going on, however, there was this very haunting melody that I cannot remember ever hearing anywhere before and though I can play it back even now in my mind, I cannot describe it. It is a very unnerving tune.

(This story is credited to a person called SuperGamecube64.)

Jessie Mack

In late June/early July, I came to be living in an apartment with my old smoking buddy Matt. Matt ran this squat he called “the weigh station”. Nowadays though it was less for the squatters and more for Matt’s buddies from his job at Burger King. It was a pretty fun place to be, we had house parties every night.

About a week after I moved in a couple of my buddies came over to watch the game, and during a commercial I went out for a smoke. While I was out on the porch this punk kid came up and sat down next to me. He introduced himself as Nate, and we exchanged conversation for a few minutes, until he told me that he was supposed to be moving into the squat. Matt never told me anything regarding who was living there anymore.

Nate and I ended up getting along great. Don’t get me wrong, Matt’s a great guy and all, but you can’t have any kind of meaningful conversation with him. Nate was the opposite. I mean, at parties he was awkward as fuck but when it was just two or three of us we would talk for hours about anything and everything. Nate had come from South Boston to visit his girlfriend, who apparently lived about a block from the squat, though no one had ever seen her before. I later found out that this was because she went to a local prep school and was like, insane smart. They met on some dating site for people who love Star Wars and crime shows and all that geeky shit. He was always over at her place and he didn’t take up much space here, so no one really noticed when he was gone.

On the off chance that he was at the squat, we had discussions regarding politics, religion, drugs, anything under the sun. Eventually, during one of our religion convos, I asked him if he believed in the paranormal. He replied that he did. For a little backstory, I’ve been going into haunted houses since as long as I can remember. I’ve always been into ghosts and demons and shit. We talked about this for a while before I decide to pop the question.

“So, has anything paranormal ever happened to you? Like, just anything weird that you just can’t explain?”

Nate looked at his feet.

“I have to go meet my girlfriend. I’ll catch you later bro.”

Even now I regret asking that question.

About three weeks later Nate’s girlfriend broke up with him for reasons I still don’t quite understand. Apparently she was a lesbian or something. You’d have to ask him, I didn’t have the heart to. I came home from a smoke session to find him on the kitchen floor in a crumpled position next to an empty bottle of oxycontin pills. He groggily raised his head when I came into the room.

“Guess I didn’t take enough…”

I kicked him in the stomach. Hard. Hard enough to make him vomit up the remains of whatever was in there. I was livid but at the same time, sympathetic. I’ve been that far down before, and it ain’t fun. I gave him a pen and paper and told him to write down everything he wanted to accomplish in life, sort of like a bucket list. Told him no one would ever see it but him, and made him promise that he would stay alive until he had completed everything on the list. Nate hastily scribbled down a few notes, then put the paper in his pocket and stumbled into the living room where he collapsed on a couch in a drug-induced stupor.

As I sat in the chair next to him, I suddenly became aware of an intense curiosity. I had to know what he had written on that paper. I mean, I was fucking baked at the time. But at the same time, his cryptic answer to the paranormal question a few weeks back had been eating away at me, so I decided to give it a quick look to see if it had any clues. Just one look, then I’d put it back in his pocket. He’d never even know. Letting my curiosity get the better of me, I did just that. The paper read:

To The People Who Matter Most

1. My brother.

2. My mentor.

3. Jessie Mack.

Okay, so it was just paranoia. It was a completely average bucket list, and I was just baked out of my mind. I slipped the note back into his pocket and turned on the TV. Still, there was something that struck me as odd about that last one. “Jessie Mack” sounded familiar, like something out of my childhood that I couldn’t quite put my finger on.

I never told Matt what happened. Nate was still asleep when he got home from work. We watched a few movies, including this really strange one called Being John Malkovich, which was Matt’s favorite for reasons I didn’t really understand. About halfway through the movie I looked over at Matt.

‘Hey, remember Jessie Mack?”

Matt started cracking up. “The fuck kinda parent names their kid Jessie Mack?”

I smiled back. “Some parents in Boston, I guess.”

Matt couldn’t stop laughing. “I mean, are you fucking serious? Jessie Mack. Jessie fucking Mack. Hey everyone, I’m Jessie Mack, and I’m from Dorchester!”

He was shouting in a faux-Boston accent now. It was pretty hilarious. At the same time, there was something slightly eerie about it, and I started feeling guilty about taking the note from Nate’s pocket.

Nate started to wake up sometime later. He was in a lot of pain, but he managed to grin at me while attempting to sit up. Matt was in another part of the apartment, shouting at himself, which was actually pretty normal.

A few hours later we were all just sitting together watching the South Park Movie. We watch a lot of movies here. Every few minutes Nate had a little nervous spasm, but nowhere near as bad as he’d been. Matt turned to him.

“So about this Jessie Mack. I need to meet this person, she sounds so freakin hot.”

There’s no way I could have predicted what was about to happen. In a fraction of a second, Nate jumped out of the couch, backed himself into a corner, whipped out his pocket knife, and pointed it straight at Matt.

He was shaking all over. In a barely audible whisper that sounded as if he was gasping for air, he mouthed: “Don’t you fucking come near me you have no idea NO idea what you’re doing no FUCKING clue don’t ever fucking mention her name again.”

And with that, Nate vomited all over the carpet and passed out on the floor again.

What happened after that was pretty much a blur. I was trying to find a job at the time so I didn’t get to spend as much time at the house. Nate became extremely paranoid, especially around Matt. He would hole up in his room with a terrified expression on his face, pointing this little bb pistol he had at anything that moved. And knowing Nate, this was odd. Nate was about as big as a bear with facial hair to match and an unusually laid back disposition before all this went down.

Matt, on the other hand, was manic all the time.

He’d run around the kitchen screaming “My name is Jessie! Jessie Mack!” at the top of his lungs in his obnoxious fake Boston accent, though it was clearly making Nate’s condition worse. At one point I woke up in the night and heard part of a conversation between Nate and his ex on our porch. He was begging her to stay with him or something, but when she refused, his tone turned from sadness to terror, like the terror of one who has seen too much.

She left, telling him he was talking like a crazy person.

Matt kept having strange people over, whom I’d never seen before. Eventually whenever someone I didn’t know came over, Nate and I would go for a walk down the avenue until they left. I never heard much of what they talked about, but at several different times I heard a few people in the living room mutter “Jessie fuckin’ Mack. Holy shit.” Or something to that effect.

This was clearly upsetting to Nate, and every time he heard the name he’d revert to his paranoid, vomiting state. In late August he decided to leave here for good. He was so sick he could barely stand up, so I ended up carrying most of his luggage to the bus station with him. On our way there everyone was staring at us. I mean, I don’t blame them. You don’t see too many punk teenagers carrying suitcases through some bumfuck town in New Jersey.

As we passed the railroad bridge, a man in a truck threw some kind of gang sign at a group of kids in their early 20s. As he drove by he shouted “Jessie Fuckin Mack!” And everyone in the group started pumping their fists in the air. Nate emptied his stomach on the ground next to the bridge. We kept running into gangs on the way to the bus station, almost like they knew we’d be out today. Gangs that had been fighting each other for decades, standing out in the open, chest bumping, fist pumping, as if they were unifying against some unseen force. All shouting. “Jessie Mack!”

By the time we got to the bus station, Nate was in real bad shape. I hugged him goodbye, and told him to go find a new place to live, one in which no one knew anything about him or Jessie Mack.

He smiled back at me, then managed a laugh. “Funny”, he said. “That’s exactly what they told me back in Boston.”

That was the last time I saw him before October.

After that I moved back in with my dad, in this little town about an hour from Matt’s apartment. I got a real job, bought a junk car, the whole works. I even started dating this girl I really liked back in high school. Three months in Matt’s house made me feel like I had aged ten years, but I was finally stepping out into the light. I doubted I would ever see either of them again.

At some point in September, Matt put up some website with some weird mp3 loop of him and a bunch of other people screaming: “I am Jessie Mack! Jessie Fucking Mack!” Just that, over and over again. Someone told me that Matt was signing his work checks as ‘Jessie Mack’ now. None of his old friends really hang out with him anymore, so it’s hard to verify anything I hear about him these days.

The next time I saw Nate it was mid October. He had apparently come back to NJ to try to reason with Matt, to tell him to shut down the web page. The web page itself had gathered over fifty thousand hits, which was an alright count for the shittiest music in the world. Matt was also selling ‘Jessie Mack’ clothing, which was selling more rapidly than any other local product I’d ever seen.

Nate only stayed for three days, and I was at work for the first two. When I finally saw him, he was standing outside in Matt’s driveway in the pouring rain, looking about as bad off as when I left him the last time. After about 20 minutes of trying to reason with him, we went inside. I didn’t even recognize the place. In the foyer, two of the walls were bashed in. It had always been a dirty apartment, but now it looked as if no one had lived there in years.

All over the house, walls were punched in. Any space that still had a wall had writing on it. Most of the writing was in Gaelic so I don’t know what the fuck it said, but there were several references to Jessie Mack being the name of an ancient Gaelic entity and that the English translation of the name was “the descendant of the dark one”. Nate nodded solemnly as if he had known this all along.

There was an old couple, shooting heroin on one of the couches. The woman looked up at her boyfriend, saying “I want to get closer. You don’t even understand. I want to get closer to Jessie Mack.”

The man looked up at us. “Matt’ll be home in a few hours. He’s going to play guitar and put on a show for us.” He gestured toward a guitar in the corner, with a broken neck, three working strings, and the words “Jessie Mack” crudely carved across the bottom panel.

Nate ran out of the house screaming.

I cornered him in an alleyway. Rain streamed down his face but nonetheless I could tell he was sobbing.

“You’re not even fucking real!” he shouted at me. “You live in my head, none of this is real, it’s all just a fucking joke.” I tried to comfort him but he wasn’t taking it.

“I know, I know. I’m a fucking crazy person. That’s what everyone says.”

We sat together for a few hours and he calmed down a bit, as did the rain.

“I’m done.” He finally said. “I’m done with this. You have no idea how DONE I am with this. I’m going back. I’m gonna be a good person this time. I’m gonna be a vegan, just like Jess…just like this kid I used to know told me to. I’ll go back to school I’ll do anything just someone please make this fucking go away.”

He left the next morning. I never saw him again.

Condemned House

It was April or May of 2009. My friend (let's call him Vinnie) was in from out-of-town and we decided to drink at about noon. We went to a party store and bought some 40s and just walked around town brown-bagging it. We got a call from another friend (Justin) that he and his girlfriend (Kim) were going to drop by. By now, it was the early afternoon and we made it back to my place.

I had mentioned to Vinnie that the house next door was condemned; it had a bright pink sign on the front door with CONDEMNED written on it because the garage behind the house was collapsing. I had never seen anyone go in or out of the house in the two years I had been living next door to it. I had just assumed it was abounded or got foreclosed upon.

As kids, we'd always love exploring the woods and looking for random things. It only seemed fitting that we go into the house and have a look around. We were pretty drunk at this point and just thought, 'fuck it, let's do this.' We wentin behind the house, through the partially collapsing garage. The door that went from the garage to the house was locked, but after a while we were able to force it open. To our immediate right was the basement, so we decided to go down there first. We were amazed by the amount of stuff down there; there were so many tools and hardware supplies. In the back of the basement, in its own room, was a large train track set-up. It was creepy.

While we were in the basement, we got a call from Justin and Kim saying that they had arrived at my house. We came back out through the garage again and I grabbed my Nikon. Kim and Justin were pretty pumped about going in and what we discovered, so we went back in and showed them the basement. After looking around, we went back upstairs to the kitchen. Again, there was a lot of stuff in there. A table in the corner of the room was full of bottles and cans, which we planned on taking after looking around the restof the house (there is a ten-cent deposit for cans here).

We took some time poking around the kitchen, too. It, of course, smelled bad in there, but it wasn't overwhelming. The smell was just that of a musty house. I made the mistake of looking in the refrigerator and the smell of THAT overwhelmed me from the rotting food thats' smell was being contained until I opened it.

There was a door that separated the kitchen from the living room and I was the first to open it. It was a swinging door and when I opened it I caught a glance of a figure sitting in a chair facing away from me. All I knew is that someone was in the house and we were trespassing. I quickly turned around and while walking towards the back door, I told my friends in a whisper, "Shit, there's somebody here," and we all ran out. We went into my backyard and I told them that I saw someone sitting in a chair in the living room.

My friend Vinnie, who was most likely more drunk than I was, said, "Fuck it, man. He has no more of a right to be there than us. It's probably a junkie." I was not as excited to go back into confront a squatting junkie, but I was convinced when Justin informed me that he was most likely high as fuck and wouldn't be able to do shit. We ended up going back in through the back again, but more quietly this time. When we made it to the kitchen, Vinnie was the first, this time, to open the door to the living room. The rest of us stood back and watched him watch the figure in the chair.

Vinnie swung the door shut, looked at us, and said, "That's a dead body." We all looked at him in shock, but it was obvious that he was serious. We all trickled into the living room and gathered around the body. His skin was black (even though we found out later he was white) and was sitting in a chair facing the front of the house. It was obvious that he had been there for a while. The smell near the body was almost unbearable; we needed to cover our mouths and noses with our shirts like respirators. This made Vinnie and I sober up really quick. There was a complete silence between our group of four while we observed the body. Nobody said a word.

I can't really tell you what happened next, as it gets kind of foggy from there. The effect of seeing a dead body is a kind of surreal experience. We looked around the rest of the house, upstairs and in other rooms on the ground floor, and eventually found a journal next to the body. We flipped through the journal and every day he listed what he ate, the temperature, and how much money he made in returning cans that day (which I found strange, considering there was at least $50 worth of cans sitting around in the house).

I took some more pictures of the house and of the body (although, at the time, Vinnie was very opposed to doing this) and we left to go to the bar. At some point, Kim left and it was just us three, but I remember her taking in the experience quite well and was not as disturbed by it as much as other girls would have been (some people don't even want to hear the story, let alone see the pictures).

We went to the bar that night, sat in the back, and just quietly talked about what had happened. After the bar, drunk again, Justin and I went back in the house to check it out one more time. I took more pictures and Vinnie and Justin left for the night. I told my roommates about it and one of them told his girlfriend. She was so disturbed she said she refused to come over until the body was gone. She said if I didn't call the cops, then she would.

The next morning, hung over, I decided that I better call the police. I called my friends to let them know and they made me hold off on doing it until they came over. I waited and called an anonymous tip line when they arrived.

when I called the tip line, I simply said that I found a dead body. The operator seemed frazzled and told me to hold the line. She told me multiple times not to hang up. I held the line and we were put on with a detective for our city. I explained what happened and what the address was. He asked me my name, but I told him he had to be fucking insane if he thought I would be giving my name to him.

Right after hanging up, we all went to the front porch to wait for the cops to come. Not even a full minute after hanging up the phone, I saw a cop car round the corner with its lights on. We were really surprised by the response time, but it ended up driving by the house. A few minutes later, a few cop cars rolled up and asked us if we had seen anyone in or out of the house lately. I told him that I saw nobody near the house in the last two years I had been living there.

The police went in for a while and a white van showed up. Eventually, some girls that lived across the street came over wondering what was going on. The police said they found a body and we, of course, acted shocked. They took out the body covered on a stretcher (they must have had a hell of a time prying him from the chair and also took out a gun that was in the house (the gun was an old-style rifle that had been leaning against a wall in the living room). I talked to one of the cops and he said that the guy's family would have them check up on the guy from time to time to make sure he was doing alright (apparently, he wanted nothing to do with his family) but they stopped doing so. He just wanted to be left alone.

The only thing that we took from the house was the journal he kept. There is a bunch of nice handwriting in it, and it with addresses and such. The first entry was on January 21st, stating that the notebook was found in a dumpster. There is also an entry talking about when the power was turned out and notes to buy oil (there were a bunch of oil-burning lamps in the house). The last entry in the journal, May 3rd, says, "Sick - very flu 4 cans. Sick as heck flu can't eat." It is eerie. The date matched up with the most current newspaper he had in a pile in the living room.

We decided not to take anything else, out of respect for him and his family. I know that certain things were worth a lot of money, but I'm not about to be the type of person that loots a dead guy's house. I figured that the family would come and get the stuff, but they never did. The house ended up being sold and I saw the people who bought it bring out boxes filled with sheet music, toy trains, etc. The house has since been fixed up and it's being rented out. I could find no information on either the house or the guy who died, even over a year later.

I am posting this just to share my experience. This happened in 2009, but I am just now deciding to share it with everyone. I am not trying to make jokes or act like it is a funny story. This guy died alone in his house and was found by strangers over a year afterhis death. Make jokes if you want, but this guy was alone and obviously had some problems.

R.I.P. Jeff