r/scaryeddie

Two hundred years.

For two hundred years, the village of Kalos prayed every single night to keep the creature beneath their mountain asleep.

Every night. Without fail. Every priest, every generation, every child old enough to form the words — they prayed. They taught the prayer to their sons. Their sons taught it to their sons. No one questioned it. No one skipped a night. No one dared.

And for two hundred years, the mountain was silent.

They believed the prayer was working.

On the night young Damon finally translated the oldest scroll — the original prayer, carved before the copies were made — he found one word had been changed. A single syllable, swapped in the very first generation, copied wrong, then copied wrong again, passed down through every priest who ever lived in Kalos, for two hundred years.

He read the original word.

Then he read what they had been saying instead.

He set the scroll down very carefully on the altar stone.

Then he put his hand flat on the floor.

And felt something enormous breathing directly beneath him.

The village of Kalos had no festivals after dark. No fires burned past dusk. No laughter carried into the night. And every evening without exception, when the last light left the sky, the people walked in silence to the stone temple built against the mountain's base and prayed.

They had done this longer than memory reached. The elders said the prayer predated the village itself — that the first settlers had arrived to find the temple already standing, ancient and perfectly formed, with instructions carved into the altar in a script so old that no man could fully read it. They had done their best. They had transcribed what they could, taught the words to their children, and trusted that they had gotten it right.

For two hundred years, the mountain had been quiet.

So they believed they had.

Damon was twenty-three when the High Priest Alexios died, leaving him the only priest in Kalos — and the only man in the village who had ever seriously studied ancient scripts. He had never been permitted near the original altar stone while Alexios lived. The old priest had kept him away from it with a quiet, immovable insistence that Damon had always found strange. Alexios never raised his voice about it. He simply placed himself between Damon and the altar whenever curiosity brought the young man too close, and changed the subject, and never explained.

The night after Alexios was buried, Damon finally understood why.

He stood alone in the torchlit temple, the original altar stone before him, and read the fourth line — the line the village said three times in succession every single night.

The original word was hypnos.

Sleep.

The word in every transcription — the word hanging on the temple wall, the word Damon's father had taught him, the word Damon had spoken every night of his life — was erchou.

Come.

He stood absolutely still for a long moment.

Then he became aware of something he had never noticed before. Something beneath the noise of his own breathing, beneath the flutter of the torch, beneath the deep silence of the temple at night.

A sound.

Slow. Rhythmic. Vast.

He lowered himself to one knee and pressed his palm flat against the stone floor. The exhale, when it came, lasted nearly thirty seconds. The torch flame bent sideways. The dust on the altar stone drifted. And beneath his hand, so deep it was more sensation than sound, the floor pulsed — slow and rolling and immense, like a heartbeat the size of the mountain itself.

It had been doing this every night.

Every night for two hundred years, while they knelt above it and called to it, it had been breathing. Moving. Answering.

Damon pulled his hand from the floor as if the stone had burned him. He stood. He looked at the altar. He looked at the word carved there — hypnos — and then at the transcription on the wall — erchou — and the full weight of what two hundred years of the wrong prayer had done settled over him like cold water filling a room.

He ran.

He woke every elder in the village, hammering on doors until his knuckles bled. They gathered in the square wrapped in cloaks, torchless at his insistence, squinting at him in the darkness while he held the scroll up and told them what he had found. His voice did not crack. He kept it flat and even because he understood that if he let the panic in his chest reach his voice, the village would collapse before anything beneath the mountain had to do a thing.

When he finished, no one spoke.

Then old Mira — the oldest woman in Kalos, who had outlived four High Priests and buried two of her own children — sat down slowly in the dirt. Not from weakness. From the particular exhaustion of a person who has been carrying a secret and has just watched someone else uncover it.

"Alexios knew," she said.

The square went very still.

"He found the error thirty years ago. He came to me that same night — shaking, barely able to speak. He had gone to the altar alone and read what you read." She paused. "And then he did what you are thinking of doing. He said the correct word."

Damon's breath caught. "It worked?"

"It began to work." Her voice was hollow. Precise. Like someone reciting something they had memorized so they would never have to feel it again. "The walls responded. The stone around the altar shifted inward — sealing, the way a door seals when the bolt slides home. And from beneath the floor, the breathing stopped."

"Then we have to —"

"Then it screamed," Mira said.

Nobody moved.

"For six hours it screamed from beneath the mountain. The kind of sound that does not come from a throat. It came through the stone, through the floor, through the walls of every house in Kalos. Children woke weeping without knowing why. Three men went deaf before dawn." She looked at her hands in her lap. "And when it finally fell silent, Alexios went back to measure the crack in the mountain's face — the crack that has been there since before anyone now living was born."

She looked up at Damon.

"It was deeper," she said. "After one correct word — after six hours of its screaming — it was closer than thirty years of the wrong prayer had brought it. Alexios understood then. The correct prayer does not simply close the door. It provokes the thing into forcing the door. And a thing that size, forcing a door from the inside —" She did not finish the sentence. She did not need to.

Damon stared at her. "So we can't say the right word."

"You cannot say it from outside the temple," Mira said carefully.

A silence stretched between them, cold and specific.

"The stone responds," Damon said slowly. He was working it out as he spoke, feeling his way toward something terrible. "When the correct word is spoken, the walls move inward. The door seals." He looked toward the dark shape of the temple at the mountain's base. "Alexios ran before it finished closing."

"Yes."

"And if someone stayed —"

"The seal would complete." Mira's voice was just above a whisper. "Alexios believed so. He spent thirty years believing so, and thirty years unable to do it himself. So he kept saying the wrong word. Kept the thing moving slowly rather than furiously." Her eyes found his. "A patient thing that is still far away is survivable. A provoked thing that is nearly here is not."

The ground moved.

No violence in it — no chaos or crumbling. Just a single, vast shift of weight from somewhere deep below, like a sleeper adjusting in the dark. Three houses at the mountain's edge groaned. A crack split the temple steps from top to bottom. And then, drifting up through the stone and the soil and the two hundred years of wrong prayers piled on top of it like a debt finally called in, came the exhale — longer than before, and warmer, and closer.

Much closer.

Damon looked at the scroll in his hands. At the word hypnos. He thought about Alexios, who had known for thirty years and could not make himself do it. He thought about every priest before Alexios, copying the wrong word faithfully, never knowing. He thought about the settlers who had first arrived and found the temple standing and had tried their best with a language they didn't fully understand — who had made a single small error and then sealed it into every generation that came after them.

He thought about the child he had been, kneeling in this square every night, saying a word that meant come and believing it meant sleep.

He set the scroll down in the dirt beside Mira's feet.

"Don't let anyone follow me," he said.

She said nothing. She had already known, he realized. She had known since the moment he knocked on her door. She had told him everything with the precision of a woman passing a torch to the only person left who could carry it.

He walked toward the temple. Behind him he heard nothing — no voices, no weeping, no one calling his name. The village of Kalos understood what it was watching. They had the dignity to let him go in silence.

He stepped through the temple doors.

He walked to the altar stone.

He placed both hands flat on its cold surface and felt the thing beneath — the vast slow pulse of it, the patience of two centuries of crawling toward this exact moment, the immensity of something that had been called and called and called and was now, finally, almost home.

He breathed in.

He breathed out.

And in a voice that did not shake, the last priest of Kalos spoke the correct word.

The walls moved immediately. The stone responded the way the bolt of a great lock responds — not with violence, but with the terrible certainty of a mechanism fulfilling its purpose. The floor pressed upward. The ceiling pressed down. From beneath came the sound Mira had described — the scream that was not a scream, the fury of something that had nearly reached the door and felt it closing — and the mountain shook, and the village square cracked from end to end, and every person standing there fell to their knees and covered their ears and prayed the new prayer Mira would write for them before morning.

It screamed for three hours this time.

Then it stopped.

The mountain has been still ever since.

The villagers sealed the temple doors with stone and pitch. They built a wall around it, twice the height of a man. They carved a warning above the gate in plain script, in the language everyone could read, so that no settler arriving in the future could claim they did not know.

And in the prayer Mira wrote that same night — the prayer the village said every evening from that day forward — there was one line that no one questioned and no one changed, passed down through every generation that came after, all the way to the last record ever found in the ruins of Kalos centuries later:

Do not disturb the priest.

He is still holding the door.

"The darkness doesn't end here. Find us at Nightmare Hub — the link is in the profile. New horrors arrive every week. Stay afraid."

Made me piss myself

The Passenger”

My GPS said the drive would take four hours.
It took six.
And I didn’t make it alone.

It was November. Late.
I was driving back from my sister’s wedding.
Empty highway. Rain on the windshield.
The kind of night where you turn the radio up…
Just to feel less alone.
I was somewhere in the middle of nowhere…
When I saw him.
A man on the side of the road.
No car. No umbrella.
Just standing there in the rain…
Thumb out.
I don’t pick up hitchhikers.
I never pick up hitchhikers.
I kept driving.

Five minutes later…
I pulled over.
I still don’t know why.
Something just… made me stop.
He walked to the car slowly.
Opened the passenger door.
Got in without a word.
He was soaked through.
Maybe forty years old. Grey jacket. Dark eyes.
He smelled like rain and something else…
Something I couldn’t name.
“Where are you headed?” I asked.
He looked straight ahead at the road.
“Same place as you,” he said.

I told myself that was a normal answer.
Maybe he just meant… down the highway.
We drove in silence for twenty minutes.
The rain got heavier.
I turned the radio on.
Static.
I turned it off.
“Long night,” I said.
He didn’t answer.
I glanced over at him.
He was staring out the side window.
His reflection in the glass…
Was facing me.

I looked again.
His body was turned away.
Looking out the window.
But his reflection…
Was looking directly at me.
Smiling.
I gripped the steering wheel.
Told myself it was the rain. The darkness.
My tired eyes playing tricks.
I focused on the road.
I didn’t look at him again.

An hour passed.
Maybe more.
I needed gas.
I pulled into a small station off the highway.
Single pump. Flickering light. No attendant.
“I’m stopping for gas,” I said.
He nodded slowly.
I got out.
The rain had stopped.
Everything was very quiet.
I pumped the gas…
And looked through the windshield at him.
He was sitting perfectly still.
Staring straight ahead.
Then my phone rang.
My sister.
“Hey,” she said. “Are you okay?”
“Fine,” I said. “Just stopped for gas.”
“Are you alone?” she asked.
Strange question.
“I picked up a hitchhiker,” I said quietly.
“He’s in the car now.”
Long silence.
“What does he look like?” she asked.
Her voice was different now.
Careful. Slow.
“Grey jacket,” I said. “Dark eyes. Maybe forty.”
Another silence.
“Pull away from the car,” she said.
“What?”
“Step away from the car right now.”
“Why—”
“Just do it.”

I walked to the edge of the lot.
“Okay,” I said. “I’m away from the car. What’s going on?”
“There was an accident,” she said.
“On Route 9. Tonight. Around 8PM.”
Route 9.
The road I had been driving.
The road where I had picked him up.
“A man was hit by a car,” she said quietly.
“He was walking on the side of the road.”
“Grey jacket. Dark eyes.”
“They couldn’t identify him.”
“He didn’t make it.”

I looked at my car.
He was still there.
Sitting in the passenger seat.
Still as stone.
Staring straight ahead.
“That’s not possible,” I whispered.
“He’s sitting in my car right now.”
“He got in. He spoke to me.”
My sister didn’t say anything for a long moment.
Then…
“What did he say?”
I thought back.
Only two things.
Same place as you.
“Same place as you,” I said slowly.
The line went quiet.
“Get back in your car,” she said finally.
“Drive to the nearest town.”
“Don’t talk to him.”
“Don’t look at him.”
“And whatever you do…”
“Don’t ask him where he’s going.”

I walked back to the car.
Opened the door.
Sat down.
He didn’t move.
Didn’t acknowledge me at all.
I started the engine.
Pulled back onto the highway.
Twenty minutes of silence.
The longest twenty minutes of my life.
Then I saw the lights of a town ahead.
I exhaled slowly.
Almost there.
I slowed down as I reached the first street.
And I heard his voice.
Quiet. Calm.
“You can let me out here.”
I stopped the car.
He opened the door.
Got out.
Didn’t look back.
I watched him in the mirror…
Walk down the street…
And turn the corner.
I waited.
One minute.
Two.
I drove to the corner and looked.
The street was empty.
No footprints in the wet pavement.
Nothing.
Like he had never been there at all.

I called my sister back.
Told her what happened.
She was quiet for a long time.
Then she said something I’ve never forgotten.
“Route 9 goes through Millfield.”
“That’s where he was from.”
“That’s where they were going to bury him.”
“You didn’t give him a ride…”
She paused.
“You gave him a way home.”

I still drive that highway sometimes.
I always check the passenger seat…
Before I get in.
And I never…
Ever…
Pick up hitchhikers.
But sometimes late at night…
When the rain is heavy and the road is empty…
I see someone on the side of the road.
Standing very still.
Thumb out.
And I think about what my sister said.
You gave him a way home.
And I wonder…
How many of them are still trying to get there.

This has been Void Stories.
Lock your doors.
And sleep well.

They found Robert Voss forty feet up a white oak tree in the Ochala National Forest. No rope. No climbing gear. No broken branches below him. The coroner said he'd been up there for three days before anyone spotted him. But here's what the official report never mentioned — what the sheriff sealed and what took a Freedom of Information request to drag into the light. Robert's boots were on the ground at the base of the tree. Placed side by side. Laces still tied. And Robert himself was sitting with his back straight against the trunk, hands folded neatly in his lap, like a man who had simply decided to rest. Like someone had carried him up there, arranged him carefully, and taken their time doing it.

Whatever put him there wasn't finished after Robert.

It came back.

Robert Voss went missing on a Thursday night in October, sometime between ten-thirty and dawn.

His wife Sandra fell asleep beside him at ten-thirty. She remembered it clearly — the television still murmuring in the background, Robert's breathing slow and even next to her, the particular weight of him on the mattress that she had slept beside for nineteen years. When she woke at six-fifteen his side of the bed was cold. Not cooling. Cold. Like he had been gone for hours.

His truck was in the driveway. His wallet was on the dresser. His phone was on the kitchen counter, screen dark, seventeen unread messages from Sandra stacked up like a slow record of her panic building hour by hour through the night. His keys were on the hook by the door.

Only his boots were missing.

The Ochala County Sheriff's Department told her these things resolved themselves. They were right. Seventy-two hours later, a deer hunter named Cal Pruett was working a trail two miles into the forest preserve off Route 9 when something made him stop walking. Not a sound. Not a movement. Just a feeling — the specific, wordless dread that lives in the back of the human brain and has been keeping people alive since before we had language for it.

He looked up.

Robert Voss was forty feet up in the canopy of a white oak, back straight against the trunk, hands folded in his lap, chin slightly bowed. Perfectly still. Perfectly arranged. Cal stood beneath him for a long time before he understood what he was looking at. Then he sat down in the leaves, called 911, and did not move again until he heard sirens.

The first deputies on the scene assumed suicide. It was the easiest explanation and in Ochala County, easiest usually won. But the details kept refusing to cooperate.

Robert's boots were at the base of the tree. Placed side by side, parallel, laces neatly tied — as though he had removed them before stepping inside a house. There was no climbing equipment anywhere in the forest within a half-mile radius. The white oak's lowest branch was twenty-two feet from the ground and its bark showed nothing — no stripped patches, no scuff marks, no gouges consistent with a rope or a body ascending it. The tree had not been climbed. Not by any method anyone could account for.

The medical examiner ruled the cause of death as cardiac arrest. Massive, instantaneous — the kind that kills a man before he can raise his hands to stop himself from falling. Which meant Robert Voss had been dead before he ever left the ground. Something had carried a dead man two miles into the forest, climbed forty feet up a tree in the dark, and seated him against the trunk with his hands folded in his lap.

That detail — seated, hands folded — appeared in the internal report and was quietly removed from every public-facing document before release. Sandra only learned about it because a deputy who couldn't sleep sent her an anonymous email eight months later.

He didn't sign it. He didn't need to.

Sandra hired Dean Purcell six weeks after the funeral. Former state police, methodical, not a man who reached for dramatic conclusions. He spent the first two weeks in Ochala reviewing every file, every photograph, every scrap of official paperwork. He drove Route 9 four times. He walked the trail to the white oak and stood beneath it for nearly an hour, just looking up at the branch where Robert had been found, trying to make the geometry of it work in his head.

It wouldn't work. Nothing about it would work.

In his third week he found the camera.

A hunting club had mounted a motion-triggered trail camera on a pine tree approximately two hundred yards from the white oak. It had been angled to capture a deer trail running east through the hardwood. On the night Robert disappeared — at 2:14 AM, four hours after Sandra fell asleep beside him — the camera triggered.

Dean watched the footage eleven times before he called Sandra.

What the camera captured crossed the frame in eleven seconds. It was tall — six and a half feet, perhaps more, difficult to judge in the dark — and it moved with a slowness that was not the slowness of something cautious or tired. It was the slowness of something that had no reason to hurry. No reason to hide. It moved between the trees with a kind of absolute, unhurried ownership, the way a person walks through their own home in the dark. Under its arm, hanging limp and pale, was the shape of a man.

It did not look at the camera.

It didn't need to. It already knew.

Dean drove to the white oak the morning after he found the footage. He brought a tape measure and a flashlight and he circled the base of the tree slowly, crouching, running the light along the bark at ground level. He found it after twenty minutes — low on the trunk, half-covered by a skirt of moss that had grown over it in the months since October.

Handprints. Both of them. Pressed into the bark with such force that the wood had fractured inward, the grain of it splintered like something had leaned its full weight against the tree from below. The shape was unmistakable. Not the grip of someone climbing — these were flat palms, fingers spread, pressed into the bark as if something had planted one hand against the tree to brace itself while the other arm held something heavy alongside its body.

Dean measured the span of the right handprint three times because he didn't trust the first two measurements.

Fourteen inches across. Palm to outer finger.

He photographed everything. He drove back to his motel on Route 9, uploaded the photographs and the trail camera footage to a cloud drive, and called Sandra. He told her what he had found. He told her he was going to the sheriff the following morning with all of it.

He checked out of the motel at seven AM.

His car was found two hours later on the shoulder of Route 9, engine running, driver's door standing open. His phone was on the passenger seat. His camera and his files and his notebook were undisturbed on the back seat.

The cloud drive was empty. Every file deleted. The account access log showed a login from an unregistered device at 6:58 AM — thirteen minutes before he checked out.

Dean Purcell has not been found.

Sandra still lives in the same house. She has not slept in a bed since October. She sleeps in the living room recliner with every light on and the television running, not because the noise comforts her but because she cannot bear what she hears in the silence. She told this to the one journalist who would listen, and then she told him something else.

She told him about the night Robert disappeared.

She had woken once, she said. Briefly — that shallow, half-conscious moment where you're aware of the room without being fully in it. She didn't know what woke her. She lay still with her eyes barely open and looked toward the window, the way you do when something has pulled you up out of sleep without telling you why.

There was something standing at the tree line.

At the far edge of their yard where the lawn met the woods, perfectly still, facing the house. Too tall. Too still. Not moving at all — not swaying, not shifting its weight — just standing in the darkness between the trees with the particular stillness of something that has been there for a long time and intends to be there for longer.

She thought she was dreaming.

She closed her eyes.

By morning Robert was gone, and she has spent every night since then wondering whether it saw her looking. Whether it registered the pale shape of her face behind the glass. Whether that moment — those three seconds of her watching it and it standing there in the dark at the edge of her yard — whether that was the moment it chose her husband and not her.

Whether it is keeping that decision in mind.

The white oak is still standing. The handprints at its base have weathered now, the bark slowly reclaiming the fractured wood, soft and pale like a scar closing over something the tree would rather forget.

No one goes into that section of the preserve anymore. Not since the following spring, when a trail maintenance crew working a path eighty yards east of the white oak found something on a pine tree and called the sheriff without fully understanding why their hands were shaking when they did it.

Handprints. Same fractured bark. Same impossible span. But these ones were thirty feet up the trunk.

And they were facing outward.

Facing the road.

Facing the house at the end of the tree line where Sandra Voss sleeps with all the lights on and the television running and the curtains pulled tight against the window that looks out toward the yard.

The yard where the grass at the far edge — right where the lawn meets the woods — has stopped growing.

In the shape of two feet.

Side by side.

Like something has been standing there so long the ground beneath it has given up.

Weirdly enough the most fun part of making this was forcing myself to take weapons I never use!
Normally I run an assault rifle, but the Mosin with a Sagia was pretty refreshing! Even more fun with them both being unsuppressed so clearing the area to record was... fun.

Let me know what you think of the video. It's my attempt at a horror told through audio logs. Only 15min too.