Butcherface
Part 1 In 1997, my friend (who we’ll call Chris) moved across state. At that time, we were 10, we didn’t really have much of a way to see each other besides getting a ride by our parents to one or the other’s house, which would be a hassle for our parents so we eventually lost contact. During this time, i had only gotten the chance to visit his house once. With this story being in this subreddit, you’d expect the house to be creepy but it really wasn’t. It was a very plain split level house probably built in the early 80’s with neighbors close by, so it wasn’t even secluded. Like i said, we lost contact with each other for ten years, that is until Chris contacted a mutual friend through Myspace (i didn’t have an account on that site). We made plans to hook up and hang out, now that we have our own means of transportation it was alot easier. After maybe a month of this, Chris mentioned that his family will be remodeling the house and i offered my help. Him and his father gladly accepted the offer since the previous owner(s) apparently didn’t keep up on it themselves. So, a couple weeks later, i drive down one weekend and we start tearing up carpeting, ripping off wallpaper, etc. The basement had been changed into a room for Chris some years before and while half of the floor was concrete, the other half seemed to have been torn up and replaced with floorboards and one of the boards had become warped and broke, leaving it protruding up under the carpet so they wanted to replace it. We tore the carpet up and started ripping out the floorboards when we found what looked like a hole dug about five feet into the ground under the floor. Chris jumped down there thinking he could get better leverage to tear up the boards when he said something was down there. His father got a flashlight and we jumped down to check it out. It turned out to be a very warn box. It looked similar to a shoebox but it was about three feet long and extremely damaged by the elements. It was so tattered that you wouldn’t be able to pick it up in one piece. We believed that whatever was in it would be just as damaged, but when we ripped it open, we noticed that whatever was in it had the added protection of a black trash bag. Chris picked up the trash bag and it’s contents made the sound of plastic hitting plastic. We were curious as to what’s in there so we brought it upstairs and cut the bag open with a pair of scissors and found 24 unmarked videotapes. Me and Chris were curious as to what was on them but his father claimed that they were most likely somebody’s old bootleg collection and if we’re still curious we should check them out later after we were done for the day. Since the plan was for me to stay the night and help them out the next day and leave that sunday night, we decided to watch them that night. Since Chris’s father was tired and didn’t really care what was on the tapes he went to bed a little bit early that night. So, we pulled their old VCR from their attic, hooked it up to the tv in Chris’s room and took one of the tapes out of the bag and slipped it in. The tapes certainly weren’t bootlegged movies like Chris’s father believed. They were the home movies of an unknown man we eventually began to call Butcherface. There was seemingly no flow from one scene to the next. It was like he would just film something random for what was usually just a couple minutes then put the camera away for god knows how long until he found something else that interested him. Most of the footage was random footage like him turning on the camera, facing a chair. He would walk out from behind the camera, to the chair, push it over onto the floor, walk back to the camera and turn it off. Or him playing with a random spider, which he would talk to in a low, childlike voice, then end the tape with him squashing it. Or him just filming down at his feet as he walks while deeply breathing. The one thing that always stuck out about all the footage is that on the few times that his face was shown, he was seen wearing what looked like a burlap sack tightly tied around his head with twine with two eye holes cut out. He was also a big guy, being easily over 6 feet tall with a decent build, with some muscles, but not being buff. Alot of the footage was alot more creepy and sinister. Some of the footage was of him videotaping people leaving buildings and houses. He was obviously hiding somewhere across the street from these locations and he was often breathing loudly. Even worse were the things he videotaped himself doing. One piece of footage showed him sitting at a table, with a rat trapped in an empty large pickle jar. He unscrewed the pickle jar, took the rat out, slowly put his hand on it’s head and started twisting until it stopped screaming. He twisted a little more until it’s head was completely ripped off the body, then he turned the camera off. Another clip showed him in a barn (which there was no barn on my friends property, so we don’t know where this was filmed). He turned the camera on, showing a pig tied to a post. He walked over to the pig with an ax in his hand and hacked it’s head off. What was really creepy was that most of the footage was shot in what was now my friends house. It was always dark in the footage, like this man didn’t like to have lights on, but we did recognize various locations of the house. One piece of footage was obviously shot in the living room which showed Butcherface using a large hunting knife to cut the power cord off of something we couldn’t see, wrapping this cord tightly around his arm, grunting and moaning as he does it, and using the knife to cut deep cuts into his hand and arm. One disturbing clip showed him standing in front of a table in the kitchen. On the table was a clothes iron. He then unzipped his pants, took out his penis, put it on the table and pressed the hot iron against it. He screamed but didn’t take it off for about 30 seconds. He finally took it off, limped over to the camera and turned it off. What freaked us out the most was a clip of Butcherface in what used to be Chris’s upstairs bedroom before he moved to the basement. He turned the camera on and showed the whole room covered in what appeared to be hundreds of lit candles. They were on every table, chair and shelf. The walls were covered in paintings of grotesque and ghostly faces. He then walked to a corner of the room and started furiously carving something into the floor with the hunting knife. He would stab it into the floor and drag it around, pull it out and stab again. Since that room was vacant at the moment and used for storage, and was going to be renovated anyway, Chris’s father let us tear up the carpet in that area of the room. What we found was a section of the floor that had been heavily sanded down with no real evidence of what had been carved there. Another tape showed footage of Butcherface in that same room, with even more candles. He was on his knees, facing away from the camera, with his arms in the air, screaming to be brought “to the pits of pain and torture” (one interesting thing about this clip is that he only had three fingers on his left hand, missing his pinky and ring finger. He had all five fingers in the previous clips and we think he cut them off) . That was the last clip of that tape and the camera appeared to run out of tape. The last piece of footage on the last tape showed Butcherface furiously digging the hole that we found in the basement. He was digging fast and breathing heavily. He was constantly grunting. His shirt was off but he still had the mask on. After a couple minutes of him just digging. He started talking, saying something like “this is it. This is it. They wont know. They’ll never find me. This is where I’ll hide.” Part 2 About two weeks after we found the Butcherface tapes, we were getting tired with having to lug the VCR up and down those steep attic steps, because Chris’s father for some reason kept asking us to put it back up there when we weren’t using it, when Chris’s younger brother (lets call him Evan), who was going to college for media production, came in to the middle of a conversation about this and mentioned that he could convert the tapes to DVD using equipment at his college. After some haggling and way too much negotiating, that if we (being newly 21 at the time) would pay for the liquor bill for a party that friends of Evan’s were having (who were 19 at the time), he’d do it the next day. When that day came, both me and Chris were waiting anxiously in the kitchen for when Evan got home. When he finally walked in the door, an hour later than he said he‘d be back, he was looking extremely pale. We asked him if he was done converting and he jumped in our faces saying that we never told him what was on the tapes. Apparently, he didn’t actually hear what we were talking about and only heard that we wanted some tapes converted and he thought they were more like old family recordings like Christmas or birthday videos. We calmed him down and asked him if he converted the tapes. He said “no” and quickly left the room. We were disappointed and started talking about what to do next when Evan came back into the room with his father behind him. After talking about what was on the tapes, Evan retrieved them from his car and the four of us watched every one of the 24 tapes together. After the last tape was finished (“this is it. This is it. They wont know. They’ll never find me. This is where I’ll hide.”), Chris’s fathers face was just as pale as Evan’s was earlier. He leaned back in his chair and said “… That was creepy”. An hour of talking that night ended with us wanting to know who was on the tapes. I left for home soon after with the understanding that I would be kept in the loop on what we would do next, which was to figure out the previous owners of the house. A couple days later from there I got a phone call from Chris saying that it took them a little while (they found nothing on the county website) but they found some history on the house at the town library (on something called a “reverse directory”) about a previous owner who had it in the mid-80’s. After a few unanswered phone calls, we decided to visit these people in person. So, that Friday, me, Chris, and his father drove to their house and knocked on the door, only to be greeted by two 80-something year old women. Chris’s father told them that his family was living in their old house and asked if we could ask them some questions about it. They refused to let us in their house but they did tell us about the house. It turned out that the both of them were sisters (Their first names were Shirley and Louise) and Louise turned out to be the former owner of the house, but never lived in it. Apparently, her and her husband bought the house and were planning to add some new wiring and plumbing before moving in but her husband had a severe stroke not too long after buying it and eventually died. With the combination of hospital and funerary bills, Louise couldn’t afford fixing up and moving into the house and moved in with her sister instead. But, she did mention that during that time, the house was known to be home to a fair number of homeless people who would be regularly chased off the property. We also asked if either of them had a son and they both said “no”. We left there with not too many answers. A couple weeks later from there, me and Chris had gone to the movies with his girlfriend (I think he was trying to get his mind off the tapes because I could tell that he was still creeped out). We were talking about how much the movie sucked (Spiderman 3) when Chris slammed on the breaks. We practically skidded about 30 feet and I was choked by my seatbelt and his girlfriend, who wasn’t wearing a seatbelt, was almost thrown into the front seat. We started screaming at him, asking him what the hell he was doing when we looked at what he was staring at and saw a house. It looked familiar to me but I couldn’t put my finger on it. I looked back to Chris and he said “that house is on the tapes“. Then I remembered, one of the houses that Butcherface had watched people come and go from was right there, not 20 feet from us. We knocked on the door but no one answered so we decided to come back later. When we got back to Chris’s house, I noticed the VCR hooked back up to Chris’s TV in his room. I asked him about it and he said he’d been watching the tapes again for any clues. No wonder why he was still creeped out. That night, when I got home, I got a phone call from Chris. He was whispering and said that he thinks he saw someone walking around his backyard. Two days later, that Friday, I agreed to sleep over and see for myself. Chris was claiming to see glimpses of someone standing or walking around in his backyard but it was always too dark to see any detail, both of the previous nights. I was set up to sleep on a couch that was on the now re-boarded up hole we first found the tapes in. Very little sleeping actually went on that night because we stayed up in the living room, staring out the sliding glass door to the backyard. We were talking about how we weren’t even sure if he actually hurts people when Chris suddenly leans forward and points out the window and said “see! Right there. Do you see that shadow or something?” I jumped up and flipped the switch to the deck lights but they didn’t go on. So, we got flashlights and went out to look. Besides some tree branches blowing in the wind, we found nothing. At around 4am, we decided to get some sleep. I only stayed on the couch a couple hours because I got too cold because I felt a draft that I think was coming between the boards on the floor. I went home the next afternoon thinking the night before was a dud, until I got a frantic phone call that night. Someone had broken into Chris’s house while they were out. The sliding glass door to the backyard was completely smashed with broken glass having been thrown all the way across the living room and into the dining room. I drove back there because they wanted me as a witness to seeing a shadow in the backyard. They showed me around and I saw that this person had completely tossed the living room, dining room, and kitchen. In the bathroom, the mirror over the medicine cabinet had been smashed and all the meds in the medicine cabinet were missing. Something else was missing which was a lot more disconcerting. Four knives had been removed from the knife holder in the kitchen. I stayed there for about an hour and decided to go home and it was only when after I left that I realized that the Butcherface tapes was never mentioned to the cops. A little while after I got home I got ANOTHER call from Chris saying that they had found the missing knives, under the blankets of each of the family members beds. That weekend, Chris and his father decided to look around the house more thoroughly to see if Butcherface had left any other clues to his former presence in the house. I came over to help and the only room they said they’ve never thoroughly looked around in since getting the house was the attic, so we decided to start there. It didn’t take long to find anything because almost immediately, I came across an old looking trash bag in one of the corners. I picked it up and heard the tinking sound of glass against glass. We brought it downstairs and cut it open and found it completely full of liquor bottles and used syringes. Using rubber gloves, we removed every object one at a time. It was almost all bottles and syringes and the occasional trash, until we got to the bottom. At the bottom of the bag we found a shoebox. It was stained and warn, we couldn’t even see the brand of shoe that used to be in it. We carefully took it out and removed the top (which seemed to have been glued closed). Inside was a series of papers and photos. The photos were pretty disturbing. One was a close-up of a hand covered in pins (those ones with the long point with the tiny ball of colored plastic at one end). There were so many of them that it looked like a porcupine. Another one had a (presumably) dead dog lying on the ground (All we could really see of it’s surroundings was the dirt of the ground. Behind it was too dark). We assume it was dead because it was missing half it’s face. The flesh of the side of the face that was facing the camera was gone, making it look like it was smiling with a lidless eye. There were a lot more picture including a cow with blood on it’s mouth, a very pale looking foot, various 70’s and 80’s era toys, a collection of knives, a hand and arm painted multiple colors like patchwork, and a close-up of an eyeball. The papers were pretty freaky as well. They were a combination of drawings and writings. Most of the writings were what seemed like a wish list of murder, listing practically every way imaginable how to kill people. Others seemed to be random thoughts, like how he accidentally pissed his pants while at the movies or how he has an “infectious evil“ and that he‘ll spread that to his “disciples”. Some of the drawings were pretty similar to the ones seen on some of the tapes on the walls in Chris’s old room. Others were more detailed and showed corpses of various states of decay and of strange creatures. They were humanoid but they all had a demonic look to them, with many of them shown standing on all fours. One thing that showed up often was a strange symbol. It looked like the letter C with the gap in the C pointing down, with a V laid on top of it. When we got to the bottom of the box, we found another tape, one that we’ll never get to watch, because it was completely coated in candle wax. Running out of clues, we decided to re-visit the old women, who owned the house in the 80’s, again. It had been almost two months since we last visited them and we grew to realize that their story didn’t quite make sense. For instance, Louise claimed to have given up on the house, yet on the tapes we could see that the house had power (why would she have continued paying the power bill if she didn’t want the house?). They also mention that homeless people had been regularly arrested or chased off the property by the cops but we found no records of this. We tried calling them but just like last time, we got no answer, so we decided to drop by again. When we got there we found the house abandoned. We went next door and asked the neighbor if they knew where the two old ladies that lived next door had gone. They told us that Louise had died (but they didn’t know how) about three weeks earlier and Shirley abruptly packed up and moved away a week later. While Chris’s father was talking to the neighbor, Chris pulled me aside and whispered “we’re breaking into that house”. That same night, we waited until it was late and drove to the old ladies former house. We had never broken into a house before in our lives and we were dressed in the stereotypical burglar outfit, black shirt and pants and a black hockey mask (I know, stupid). When we got to the house, we were so nervous that we didn’t even leave the car for a good 45 minutes. When we felt assured that the neighborhood was asleep, we got out of the car and crept into the backyard and to the backdoor. We looked into the window on the door but it was too dark to see anything. I took my shirt off and put it up against the window and gave it a punch, breaking the glass. It felt surprisingly loud but that could have been because it was so quiet, and the neighbors never woke up so I guess it really wasn’t THAT loud. I reached in through the hole in the glass and unlatched the door, then we had a whispered fight over who will go in first. It actually got down to a game of rock, paper, scissors, which I won so Chris went in first. We crept in hunched over and I closed the door behind me, accidentally slamming it, giving Chris a good jump that we couldn’t help laughing over. We snuck around the house with our flashlights shining over the walls. As a side note, I really don’t see how much they really would have fixed up Chris’s house when they had it because this one looked like crap. The wallpaper was probably older than me and Chris combined. But anyway, we went into the living room and found a huge pile of trash lying in the far corner with a depression in the middle, like a person or a large dog had used it as a bed. We went upstairs and found something that connected this house to Chris’s. In one of the bedrooms was a pile of pill bottles. Some of the pill bottles were the ones stolen from Chris’s bathroom medicine cabinet. We knew this because some of them had his mother and fathers name on them and one of them was Chris’s back pain medicine (from an injury that happened a couple years ago that will require surgery). That was all we needed to see so we booked it back down the stairs and to the door, but when we got to the door, I jumped back, knocking both me and Chris down. On the inside of the back door was the CV symbol from Butcherface’s notes. After we got back to the car, Chris said something that creeped the both of us out. If Butcherface really is living in that house, he probably wasn’t there because he was staking out Chris’s house right now. Later that week, I visited Chris’s house again and as soon as I walked into the door, I knew I walked into an air of distress. Chris’s mother and brother were pacing back and forth in the living room, looking out the window into the backyard. I walked in and asked what was going on and looked out the window and saw Chris and his father in the backyard screaming at each other and behind them was a large bonfire that was almost nothing more than cinders. Chris’s mother said their dog, Bracket, had gone missing but didn’t say anything else. I opened the (now replaced) sliding glass door and walked out to meet them. As soon as Chris’s father saw me, he became even angrier. Chris met me halfway to the fire and said “I had to tell them that we broke into that house”. I asked why and he said that he thinks that Butcherface took their dog as payback for breaking into his home. I asked what was on the fire and Chris told me that what his father was burning was Butcherface’s notes, photos, and tapes. Everything had been burned to ashes. During this, his father had walked up behind him and said “I’m ending this right now. I’m burning everything so that you guys can’t get into any more trouble.” As he said this, he continued past us and into the backdoor of his garage and came back with a shovel, adding “and I’m burying the ashes to put this to rest for good” and started digging a hole at the back of his yard close to the woods. Chris pulled me back into the house and started talking about all of this was unfair, how could his father just burn the tapes like that, they were so close to figuring out who Butcherface was, etc. Then his mother called for us from upstairs. We came up and she pointed out the door to his father who had stopped digging and was looking into the hole he had dug so far. We walked outside and crossed the yard to the hole that his father was still looking into. When we got to it, we realized why he was frozen there, because just a couple feet into the hole was (after more digging, turned out to be) over 30 skeletons of cats, dogs, and other animals. This is when we started calling him Butcherface. Part 3 After Chris’s father burned Butcherface’s media (including the art, photos, and tapes) I think everyone (including me) hoped that Chris would let it go. I know I was willing to let it go. But, it wasn’t long after that Chris began looking for any evidence of other media by Butcherface. He would occasionally talk (just to me) about strange tapes and art found in other parts of the country but most of it seemed sketchy, which even Chris was completely willing to admit. My attitude began to change about looking into Butcherface around this time when I was sitting at my desk and caught myself absentmindedly drawing Butcherface’s CV symbol on a piece of paper I was supposed to be drawing Batman on (which is a different story all together). Roughly two weeks after Chris’s dog disappeared and his father burned all evidence of Butcherface, Chris showed up on my doorstep saying that he wanted to go back to the house we found that was on the tapes. When we first found it no one was home (in part 2). We showed up at the house around 6pm on a Wednesday, hoping that anybody living there would be home from work. We went to the door and knocked. The person who answered the door was a man roughly in his 50’s. It turned out that he did actually live in the house in the mid-80’s, when we believe the tapes were shot. We told him about the tapes and how his house was on the them and asked if anything strange had happened around that time. He said that they had nothing like what was on the tapes but there was a point when they realized that someone had been living in their shed in the backyard. The shed had since been torn down but he did remember that there was a carving left on the doorframe. We asked him what it was and he pulled out a pad of paper and drew the CV symbol. The very next day, Chris’s mother was walking around in their backyard and came across their dog. He had been ripped open from the neck to the stomach and placed in the still open hole his father had dug two weeks earlier. The cops had been called and they were finally told about Butcherface. Since Chris’s father had burned everything, they really had no evidence that the dog had been killed by a person and labeled it an animal mauling. It wasn’t long after that that I came home to find my front door open. I walked up the front steps and saw that the door was swung open, only hanging on one hinge. It being dark out, I flipped the light switch just inside the door and it didn’t come on. I went around the house to the shed in the backyard and grabbed the most menacing thing I could that was near the door, which was a pitchfork. Going back to the front door, I pulled out my cell phone and called 911. After making the call, I cautiously entered the house making sure the pitchfork was in front of me. I crept up the stairs and got to the nearest light switch and flipped it, but this one wasn’t working either. I came to the conclusion that the power was cut. Using my cell phone as a flashlight, I got a look at the damage done. The leather couch had been slashed open with many cuts and the filling pulled out and the glass doors on the kitchen cabinets had been smashed. More than half the liquor bottles in the liquor cabinet were missing and the medicine in the medicine cabinet was gone. It all seemed very familiar. I mean, even my 13 year old dogs arthritis pills were taken. Speaking of the dog, Drake, he has an anxiety problem so we keep him in a crate whenever we leave the house. Thinking of what happened to Chris’s dog, I ran down the hall, to the office, where the crate is kept. I shined what little light I had from my phone on the crate and saw it’s door open and it looked empty. I stepped forward afraid at what I’d see and shone the light into the crate, and saw Drake cowering in the back, whimpering. That’s when the cops pulled up. My family came home soon afterwards. When the cops asked us if we had any enemies (since the house mostly just seemed to be tossed) I had to tell them about Butcherface. While the cops were looking around, they noticed that the power hadn’t been cut. It turned out that every single light bulb in the whole house had been partially unscrewed. Leaving the light bulb in the socket but not able to light up. This was the first time my family had heard about Butcherface and they asked me to stop seeing Chris. I hadn’t so much as talked to Chris on the phone for almost two months after that. Very little had happened in that time but something still didn’t feel right as well. For one thing, my sister, who works nights, started asking me to stand at the front door and wait until she got in her car whenever she left, since she leaves after dark. I asked a couple times why but she never gave an answer. It’s like she just felt creeped out or that she was being watched whenever she went outside. Our dog still seemed to be spooked too. Whenever we’d tie him outside, he’d only do his business and come right back in, which is very out of character for him. One day, I was standing at my backdoor, looking into the backyard, thinking of all of this when my eyes locked onto the shed in the backyard and I remembered the story told to us by the people we talked to whose house we saw on the tapes. They found evidence of someone living in their shed. I went to my room and picked a sword from my sword collection (yeah, I’m a nerd) and went out to the shed. I crossed the yard and when I got to the shed, I found it unlocked. I opened the door and looked inside, only using the sunlight since there‘s no power running to it. I immediately saw a pile of trash in the far corner. It was a loose pile of tarps, cloth from umbrellas, and trash bags and had a compression in the middle like someone had been lying in it. Off to the side of the pile was the missing liquor bottles from inside the house and some garbage. This guy had been living in the shed and it was a good chance that he had been there since the house was broken into two months ago. Infact, for all I know, he could have been in there that night when I went to the shed for the pitchfork, watching me. I didn’t want to freak out my family so I cleaned it up in secret. At the bottom of the bedding of trash I found a ratty notebook. I only half opened it to a random page, saw some very familiar artwork and immediately closed it, tore it up, and threw it in the trash. A couple weeks later, I got a phonecall from Chris. He said he was still doing some looking around and found some strange stuff. Before I could say that I didn’t want to hear it, he said he went back to the house of the women who were the former owners of the house who we had talked to before. Before I could respond to this he said “they lied. Come see me tomorrow.” The next day, without telling my family, I drove back to Chris’s house. When I got there, I was greeted by his mother who seemed to be in a good mood. I asked her how it was going and (knowing what I was talking about) she said nothing strange had happened there for a couple months. I asked where Chris was and she pointed to the stairs that led down to his basement bedroom. I opened the door and immediately heard Chris talking but I couldn’t quite hear what he was saying, but assumed that he was talking to his girlfriend. When I got to a point on the stairs that I could see into his room, I saw that he was sitting in front of his desk, talking to a video camera. I asked him what the hell he was doing and he smiled and said “nothing” and turned off the camera and slid it back between his monitor and computer tower like it wasn’t strange that he was talking to a camera, just like Butcherface did. By this time I had gotten to the bottom of the stairs and Chris stood from his chair and immediately changed the subject. He walked up to me and started talking about how, a couple days before, he drove to the house of the old women who used to own his house. When he got there he parked across the street and waited. He knew that the former owner of the house, Louise, had died and that her sister, Shirley, moved away soon after and that someone had been living in her house since then. He was hoping to see Butcherface either entering or leaving the house. Instead, he saw Shirley pull into the driveway. They got out of their cars at the same time. Shirley apparently didn’t see Chris because she just continued to the house. By the time he caught up to her she had already gone into the house, but she then began to back out, apparently shocked at something she saw in there. When he got to her she was already back on the porch. He started talking to her and she finally told him what she really knew about Butcherface. Like we already knew, she started with when her sister, Louise, and her husband bought the house, they wanted to replace the wiring and plumbing but before that could happen Louise’s husband got sick and eventually died. This is where they left it story off before. What they didn’t tell us is that a couple years after her husbands death, Louise still couldn’t afford paying for it so she decided to sell it instead. After it just sitting there for not too long they thought it would be a relatively easy fix so they, in their early 60’s at the time, decided to fix it up themselves. When they arrived to check out the house for the first time, they found the house like it looks in the videos, with garbage everywhere and drawings on the walls with burnt out candles everywhere, and a hole in the basement. They began to clean it up, picking up the garbage, putting up cheap wallpaper, putting down carpeting, and boarding up the hole in the basement as best they could. One thing she did mention that we never noticed is that she said that in the hole in the basement there was another hole in the cinderblock wall in the foundation that led into the backyard. They bricked up the hole, but due to their budget (and she apparently also blamed their old age) they never used any mortar. They just laid the bricks in place and left it at that. Chris asked her if they put the videos in the hole and she outright refused. We determined that if anybody knew where that hole in the wall was, they could just remove the cinderblocks and get into the hole and do whatever they wanted there… like hiding some tapes. We went out to his backyard to see if this was true and we did indeed find a patch of the cinderblock wall where you could remove the blocks. They seemed to have fresh scrape marks like they had been recently moved but we couldn’t be sure. Chris’s and Louise’s conversation continued with her telling him that while cleaning out the kitchen, they found a rectangular object wrapped in tin foil. They unwrapped it and found a video tape. They brought it back home and popped it in their VCR and watched it. Apparently, there was no picture, the screen was just black like he left the lens cap on or something, but it seemed to be intentional because what the video lacked in visuals, it compensated with sound. He said she described it as rants and strange noises for the entire tape. He said she then ended their conversation and quickly walked back to her car, leaving her old houses door open, and drove away. Chris then abruptly changed the subject by jumping back to his desk and pulling a folder out of a drawer and opening it up. The papers inside were printouts of various disconnected websites showing pictures of stills from video tapes, drawings, photos, and carving that all looked familiar. He said “look. They’re from all over the country, including some bits of Mexico and Canada. Some of these apparently even appear in some places of Europe. It’s like he’s traveling around and leaving this stuff wherever he can.” Chris then said that he will continue his investigation into Butcherface. That investigation continued for four years. Until last weekend. This is why I was gone for three days after writing part 1. I hate to make this sound clichéd but Chris became pretty obsessed with trying to find out who Butcherface was. His investigation was slow. Finding the occasional picture or video. He even traveled to a town near Denver Colorado because he believed he found what he called a nest (a place where Butcherface seemed to appear often, much like around our area) but didn’t find much. We were never really sure what was fueling Chris’s interest in Butcherface since he had no more of Butcherface’s media anymore since his father burned it all. Then, last week, we found where it was all coming from. I had come by because we were planning to see Transformers 3 but we never got to go. I pulled into his driveway at the same time as his girlfriend. We both got out of our cars and laughed at the coincidence of the both of us getting there at the same time and walked into his house. His family was working so we just walked into the house and down the stairs to his room. We hung out for a little while, Chris and his girlfriend sitting on his bed with me sitting at the desk. We were chit chatting and I was spinning the chair I was in when I happened to notice a tape leaning against the speaker to his computer. I picked up the tape and asked him what it was. He immediately got a “oh shit” look on his face. When his girlfriend got into the questioning, he finally broke down and admitted that it was the tape the old ladies had found in the house in the 80’s. He said that when he talked to Shirley that time in front of her house where she told him when they found the tape, she also gave the tape to him and he chose to leave that part out of the story four years ago. This in when we knew he had a problem. We asked him to stop listening to the tape. We asked him to stop this search for Butcherface. It has never led to anything good. So, that next week (that is to say, this week) we decided to go to a cabin that Chris’s girlfriend’s family owns on a lake a couple towns over to finally finish it, we didn’t know how right we were. We arrived at the cabin in the afternoon of Monday. It was me, Chris, his girlfriend, and our Friend Jesse (who is the mutual friend mentioned in part 1). We filled Jesse in on the whole Butcherface story as we knew it on the drive down, and he immediately regretted coming along. Chris brought everything he had on Butcherface and soon after we got there, he asked if we could watch the last tape one final time. Jesse wanted to see what the fuss was about and I must admit I was curious to check it out myself. The cabin had no cable, phone line, cell phone signal, or internet access so they only form of entertainment was to watch movies so they actually had a VCR still there with a decent VHS collection. We popped the tape into the VCR and turned it on. As mentioned before, this tape had nothing visual and was all audio. It began with clicking sounds like from an insect that would start off slow and go faster then slow down and go fast again. It then changed to a quiet talking, like a whisper. The voice talked about how he had an infectious evil and wanted to spread it to his disciples and then it just faded out like he just walked away from the camera. There were more noises of what sounded like animals walking around a inside a building and a high screeching noise that lasted for a good five minutes. There was more talking where he called people zombies and cows and how only a few were worthy for “the pit” followed by a jabbering sound like he was humming while wiggling his tongue around. That night, we lit a bonfire and Chris burned every note, picture, schematic, and the last tape he had about Butcherface. The next day we spent most of the morning watching movies (regular movies) and then we went out on a row boat and explored the lake for a couple hours. We got back and we hung out on the shore with some drinks. I must admit, it reminded me of that time I walked into Chris’s house and met his mother. She was in such a good mood after not having any problems with Butcherface anymore. It felt almost exactly like that. At one point, Chris’s girlfriend came out and asked if any of us knew where her ipod was. She claimed that she left it in it’s docking bay (one of those ones with the speakers) which was also missing. She kept accusing us of hiding it from her. At this point, it was starting to get dark and we began going back into the cabin one by one. I was the last one in and I must admit I didn’t close the door. Me, Chris, and his girlfriend were in their room looking for the ipod and it’s docking station when Jesse, who was still out in the living room yelled “holy fuck!” We ran out into the living room and he said that he just saw a person run by the open door outside on all fours. Chris’s girlfriend rushed to the door and slammed it shut and locked it. We stood still listening for where this person could have gone when all of a sudden, we started hearing loud noises coming from the front deck. It was random noises like a voice chattering, something like the grinding of a buzz saw, sobbing, all in quick succession. We rushed to the door and peaked out the small window and saw Chris’s girlfriends ipod sitting on it’s docking bay, with a power cord going from it to a plug on the outside wall, sitting on the railing to the deck. These sounds were coming from the ipod. Chris opened the door, ran out and grabbed the ipod off the docking bay and ran back into the cabin. He gave it to his girlfriend and told her to delete the file that was playing. Effectively erasing every known piece of media we knew of by Butcherface. Me and Chris then ran to the door, opened it and yelled that there was nothing left of any of his media we had. We destroyed every connection we had to him and he had no reason to follow us anymore. It stayed quiet for the rest of the night and we left that morning. During the drive home we started thinking of some things. We now believe that Butcherface wanted us to find those tapes. Maybe not us per se but SOMEONE. The day that we found those first 24 tapes, we started an avalanche of more and more of his media to be surfaced and help the possibility of it spreading to others. He had mentioned more than once in his media that he wanted to spread his “infectious evil” only to his disciples, and we think those “disciples” are those that have seen his media. We say this because he never seems to attempt to hide it and seems to keep watch of all those who have seen it. In the notes I saw of Chris’s before he burned them, I saw that many of the sightings of him were scary but never seemed to be completely dangerous. It was like he was just keeping watch over those who have experienced his media. I contemplated not writing out parts 2 and 3 of this story because I’m not sure if this counts as spreading his media. Ultimately, I decided to finish it to warn you that if you ever come across anything that even resembles the footage, audio, art, writings, or carvings that are described in these stories DO NOT LOOK AT THEM. When we got back home, Chris decided to tell his family everything that had happened, including the tape he had hidden from everyone else and our hypothesis as to who Butcherface is and what he’s doing. Chris’s brother Evan’s face became pale, just as pale as the day he first saw the tapes. We asked what the matter was and he said “you know how I said I never converted the tapes to DVD’s? Well….. I lied”. Apparently, he actually did do the conversion at his college, after the day their house was broken into. The thing is that they disappeared and he later learned that fellow students had taken them, thinking it was a cool school project, and made copies. From what we‘ve heard, they’ve been handed down from person to person and copied, leading to countless duplicates. Part 4 Not long after we had found out that Chris’s brother, Evan, had made multiple copies of the Butcherface tapes, things actually slowed down for us, but they didn’t stop. Chris’s father and brother still claimed to have strange occurrences happen to them. They seemed to see shadows in their backyard and have the general feeling of being watched. Evan also claimed to get strange phone calls at work. Sometimes, when he answered, he’d just hear breathing. Another time, when the phone rang, as soon as he answered it, he heard a loud banging like whoever was on the other end was slamming the phone against a table. This led to Chris’s father placing his hunting rifle near the front door and buying new locks for all their doors and windows. They didn’t seem to help. I wasn’t there to witness this, but a little over a month later, the family had gone out to run some errands. When they pulled into their driveway, they were disturbed to find something hanging on a rope in front of the front door, from a beam protruding out the wall just under the roof. As they cautiously got out of the car, they realized what it was. Hanging from the rope was a deer, dead from a gunshot. The rope was tied around it’s antlers, with it’s back legs dangling about a foot off the ground. They squeezed by the carcass and went in the front door. Chris’s father instantly reached for the rifle that was supposed to have been sitting right next to the door, but it wasn’t there. They walked deeper into the house, through the kitchen and into the dining room, and that’s when they found the rifle, sitting on the dining room table. When Chris’s father picked it up, he could smell gun powder, indicating it was recently fired. He opened it and found a round missing. The deer had been killed by his hunting rifle. I visited soon after, and I could feel the tension in the house and was shown a few pictures they had taken of the deer. I was told the story and noticed the members of the family constantly looking at Chris while telling it. After Chris had admitted to being secretly obsessed with Butcherface for those four years, it was obvious that the family had grown detached from him. I began to visit more often around this time because I could tell he needed some cheering up. At one point, I asked him why he thinks that Butcherface leaves his media around in the first place. His answer was “maybe he wants to tell his story”. I asked “what’s his story? That he’s a dick burning, eight-fingered, psychopath?” But, I became more and more accustomed to sitting awkwardly off to the side while a fight about some insignificant topic was going on. I also started noticing Chris’s girlfriend was visiting less and less. It all came to a head when his girlfriend finally broke up with him. We were sitting in his room in the basement when he said he wanted to get away from all of the drama and claimed to know a guy who had recently inherited some houses from his recently deceased father and was trying to get some tenants. Since he’d been a longtime family friend, Chris said he hoped he could get one at a lower price, and asked me if I wanted to be his roommate. Being 25 and still living with my family, I immediately jumped at the chance. Fast-forwarding through the whole search, and process, we picked a small bungalow in a less populated end of a town close to his family. It was pretty small, but it was what we needed, and something we could actually afford. We ultimately had no complaints. Well, that’s not entirely true. When we went down to the basement, we found that the last tenants had left it full of garbage. Boxes of various sizes, old cans of paint, buckets full of junk and sheets of plastic interspersed with beer bottles and cans. We just basically said “screw this. We’ll deal with it later” and ran back up the stairs. We began haggling the price and decided that the price of the house would be reduced if Chris agreed to fix up the land of our house and of most of the other houses the landlord owned. Even though only Chris agreed to this, I assured him I’d help out with that too. We decided it shouldn’t be too hard and we’d be able to do it on weekends. We began moving in a couple days later. The next few weeks were pretty boring. We picked our rooms, which were basically on opposite ends of the house. We had one extra room and I placed my sword collection and some other stuff in there. I’m admittedly almost a hoarder. We had decided to stay away from technology for a while. We’d obviously use phones and occasionally the TV, but we rarely used the computer around this time, especially anything that could be used to make any kind of media. Around this time, Chris had picked up a bag of stuff he left at his ex-girlfriend’s house. Shortly after he returned, she called asking him if he accidentally put her camera in his bag. He looked through it but didn’t find it. We had some free time, since we were looking for new jobs in the area, so we decided to do some exploring of the neighborhood, to get a better understanding of the layout of the town. One thing we noticed (though, it didn’t really interest us at the time) was, while driving around town and turning around a corner down the road from our new house, we noticed an unused dirt road that turned off into the woods that went back in the direction of our house. We eventually ended up at a restaurant in the center of town. We sat at the bar and ordered some food and drinks. While waiting, I noticed the girl sitting next to me doodling a smiley face smoking a cigarette on her napkin. She eventually stopped and turned to the girl next to her and began talking. I still don’t know why I did this, but I quickly grabbed the napkin and added a crown, bunny ears, a bulbous nose, and some stubby arms and legs to the smiley face. She caught me sliding it back to where she had it and laughed at my additions to her drawing. We began talking and she said she’d show me around town. She reminded me of actress Emma Stone, with black hair. So, lets call her Emma. A little while into this, Chris got a call from his brother, Evan. Apparently, Evan was leaving work earlier in the day and on his walk to his car, he saw something propped up on the steering wheel. Getting to the car, which was still locked, he realized what was on his steering wheel was a DVD box. He brought it home and it only took a few seconds of watching for him to realize what it was. It was one of the DVD copies of the Butcherface tapes he made in college almost five years ago. We wanted to keep our minds off of Butcherface, so we just continued doing what we were doing over the next week. We looked for a job, I saw Emma a couple more times, we finished unpacking our stuff, and did a little bit more exploring. This time, we wanted to go looking around the woods behind our house. We used to play in the woods a lot when we were younger. We just basically started walking in a straight line from our house into the woods. I don’t remember how long we were walking, but we eventually came across an old dirt road cutting through the woods. We determined it was the old road we had noticed earlier in the week. If we had turned left, we would have ended up back at that spot, so we decided to turn right and follow it deeper into the woods. After another half hour or so of walking, we came across an old, dilapidated, building. It resembled an old church, but it had no religious paraphernalia. It seemed to be some sort of old meeting place for the town. The door was already open. I wanted to check it out but Chris pulled me back and said “don’t you remember the last couple times we went into old unused buildings?” I admittedly found this funny, so I talked him into coming in with me just for a look. It was pretty interesting. We looked around a little bit and noticed a section of the ceiling over the second floor that had collapsed, revealing a great view of the sky. We checked out the basement and found an old horse drawn carriage. After a little while of looking around, we decided to leave. A few days later, we got a call from Chris’s ex and she said she wanted to see us. Later that night, she came over and we could instantly tell she was agitated. She caught us up on how her camera wound up missing earlier that week. She usually kept it in her desk, but it wasn’t there when she went looking for it the same night Chris picked up his stuff. That’s why she called us that day, wondering if he took it. She then found it in it’s drawer again the night before. She then pulled the camera out of her purse and said “and this is what I found on it”. Turning it on, she showed us the first picture, which was of her sleeping in her bed. She was sound asleep in the picture, in her room, in the dark. There were two more pictures of her in bed, each from a different angle. The flash wasn’t on, but there was just enough light to make her out. Then, the pictures changed. The next one was of her car sitting in her driveway, most likely taken on the same night. Another was looking through the window of a house. It was of a woman sitting at a kitchen counter, watching TV. The next picture was of a small building sitting on the side of an otherwise empty road. A sign stood at the edge of the road with a large red apple on it with writing too blurry to read. Chris pointed at the sign and said he knew that place. It’s known to sell apple themed goods like pie and cider. She continued scrolling through the pictures. The next one was an extreme angle of the side of an old house. The pictures then all took place in and around the house and showed something that shocked us. The next set of pictures showed people in the house that seemed to know Butcherface. The first picture of one of them had a little person. He was very short, bald, and was wearing a gray suit and tie. He also appeared to be albino, with white skin and red irises in his eyes. The shot was a close-up and he was sitting on what looked like a shelf on a wall close to the floor, looking into the camera, appearing to be laughing hysterically. He had a resemblance to a thin Vern Troyer. We eventually gave him the name “The Creeper”. The next person was a girl wearing a pink dress. We couldn’t tell her age because she was wearing a crudely made paper-mache mask, the kind that had a piece of string that tied behind her head. I would still say, from her size, that she was probably in her late teens to mid-20’s. The mask had very simple features, with just two holes for her eyes and a slight bump where her nose would be. It had a jagged yellow painted line cutting diagonally down from the top left to the bottom right with the left side of the mask painted black with three yellow stars painted above the eye, like an eyebrow, and the other side of the mask painted dark green with a red dash going through the eye in the opposite diagonal direction of the larger line in the center of the mask. She was simply sitting in a chair, with her hands on her lap, looking into the camera. Chris’s ex came up with the name “False Face” for her. In the same picture of False Face, the silhouette of another person could be seen in the shadows behind her. It was too dark to see this person, but they appeared to be wearing a suit and tie. One picture showed a very thin man wearing a vest and a bald head with his back to the camera. His arms and hands were completely, and chaotically, covered with tattoos. There were so many of them that we couldn’t pick out one design. His whole body could have been covered with tattoos because more tattoos could be seen coming out of the vest and going up his neck. They looked like vines or lightning bolts. The pictures then seemed to go back to the more “classic” Butcherface style. A picture of an arm, with a hand missing the ring finger and pinky, with a deep cut on the back of the forearm. An axe jutting out of the front of an old, green, reclining chair, sitting in a room with a corner of the ceiling collapsed in the background. A cat standing on a tall book case, hissing. A few pictures of what appeared to be animal skins hanging in a cellar, with rock walls and a dirt floor. There was only one picture of the backyard, containing a tree branch that appeared to have been hacked at, with the jagged fibers of the tree jutting into the shot. We noticed a very large barn in the background of this photo. The next few pictures had the people sitting at a dinner table. False Face was now wearing a different mask that resembled an anime character with a large smile and a white wig. The man with the tattoos couldn’t be seen, but the albino little person was sitting at one end of the table. It was covered with plates of food, like Thanksgiving dinner. Any spaces on the table not occupied by a plate was covered in small lit candles. The person sitting at the head of the table never seemed to get into any of the shots, but we believe it was the same person in the background of the picture of False Face. The only thing we saw of him was a hand with a gold watch at the bottom of one of the dinner shots. One of the last pictures was a shot of a mirror. The flash was too bright and obscured the photographer’s reflection, though. The last couple pictures were of Chris’s ex sleeping in her bed again. After calming her down, being freaked out about someone taking pictures of her sleeping with her own camera, we called Jesse, who was with us in the cabin at the end of part 3, and asked him to come over, because he’s the only other person we knew that had experienced Butcherface media. We’d only seen him once or twice since that night at the cabin and it had been months since the last time we hung out. He had been living in the nearest major city. He’s an artist, sculptor, and tattoo artist. While we waited for him to drive the hour and a half to our place, we analyzed the photos on her camera. We spent a good amount of time looking at each picture. We had no clue who the other people in the pictures were either. We had been talking about this for a while when we heard a loud “SCREEEEEEECH… BANG!” outside our house. We jumped up and ran outside to find Jesse’s car sitting in a Y-shaped tree about five yards away from our house. He had lost control of the car and slammed into a large boulder sitting on the side of the road. His car was then thrown into the air and landed in the tree, with the front end stuck in the tree at a steep angle and the back bumper sitting on the ground. The boulder had been pushed almost a foot and the tree was now slightly leaning. We ran toward the car and just before getting to it, the driver-side door flew open and Jesse jumped out. Landing on the ground, he fell to his knees and began frantically crawling away from the car. We could tell that he was freaked out about something, so we instinctually grabbed his arms and dragged him away from the car. The second we grabbed him he started yelling “he was in my backseat! Butcherface was in my fucking backseat!” Jesse finally got his footing and we all ran back to the house. Getting inside, Chris’s ex called 911 while Jesse locked the door. We then ran to one of the windows and watched the car. There didn’t seem to be any movement and after a while, Chris said he wanted to go look. Chris’s ex and Jesse said no, but I agreed because this guy had been slippery in the past. We agreed we’d go out there only if we had weapons. Chris’s ex and Jesse grabbed the biggest knives they could find from our kitchen, while Chris chose a sword from my collection. I, on the other hand, chose to not use a weapon and decided that I wanted to get some evidence of him, so I turned the camera on my phone on and would record everything. We each filed out of the doorway one by one, I stayed in the back since I didn’t have a weapon. I could tell none of us wanted to really be doing this because of how slow we were moving. We must have looked ridiculous, with all four of us tightly grouped together, one of us holding a sword, another holding a phone in front of him, slowly creeping toward a car in a tree. Getting to the car, I lifted my phone up and faced the camera through the drivers-side back window. Chris then grabbed the handle and threw the door open… to find it empty. But, the passengers-side back door was open. The cops showed up a few minutes later. They searched the car and the nearby area and found nothing. We told them that Jesse saw SOMEONE in his backseat but didn’t say who, because we knew it would be too unbelievable. And, it would have been a hassle to explain everything to the cops, that we’ve already told them. When things began to calm down, I looked at Jesse’s arm and noticed a new tattoo. Looking closer, I was shocked to realize it was Butcherface’s CV symbol. I angrily asked him about it and he defensively claimed it was his own “I survived Butcherface” badge of honor. He had done it himself a few weeks after the cabin incident. After Jesse’s car was taken off the tree and the cops left, we caught Jesse up on what had been happening. When Chris’s ex went to show him what she found on her camera, she couldn’t find it. We went outside and looked for it, hoping it had been dropped in the confusion directly after the accident, but we had no luck. We asked him if he’d been having any strange occurrences and he claimed he hadn’t, but he had been doing a little bit of investigating. He excitedly pulled a folder out of the bag he had and brought up our hypothesis we came up with, after the cabin incident, that Butcherface uses his media to draw people in and get them obsessed with his message and to become his disciples. This, sort of, reminded him of an operation conducted by the government called MK Ultra. MK Ultra was a program designed for interrogation techniques and to create assassins out of regular people through psychological and physical torture, drugs and hypnosis. He claimed Butcherface’s actions were very similar, with him leaving his media, breaking into houses, killing pets and animals being psychological torture, and his media being a form of hypnosis, because it is so dark and twisted that it affects the people who experience it. This could very well be the way he recruits disciples. That raised the question of how people actually get obsessed with his media at all. This led to Chris’s ex bringing up brainwashing and hypnosis. Brainwashing interested me, because there is evidence of it happening in our past, like POW’s of the Korean War and cults. Brain washing is imposing a set of beliefs on somebody by the use of various coercive methods of indoctrination, including destruction of the victim’s prior beliefs to induce them to believe or do something. That really does seem to be what Butcherface is doing. We also got into the topic of people being influenced by movies, TV shows, and video games. I don’t believe this stuff, but there are a lot of people who believe that some people viewing violent content, will themselves be violent. There is some controversial studies that sometimes give credence to it. My personal opinion is that if you view violent media and you do violent things, you’re not being influenced by it because the violent acts you commit would happen whether you watched violent media or not. If anything, you may be inspired, but not driven. We all have that line we wont cross, and just viewing violence wont make you do something you wouldn’t normally do. At the end of the night, we were all tired and decided to call it a night. Since Jesse’s car was smashed, I drove him home, while Chris drove his ex home, because she didn’t want to drive home alone. I didn’t get home until 2:30 in the morning. It’s needless to say none of us got much sleep that night. It was at this point that we realized we had never gotten rid of Butcherface. He had just shifted his priorities and had finally come back to us. Part 5 It was just two days after Jesse crashed into the tree, claiming Butcherface was in his backseat, that Butcherface came back. I had finally found a job and due to having insomnia and a screwed up sleeping schedule, I decided to take a sleeping pill so that I could fall asleep at a decent time and get a good amount of sleep for my first day. I still don’t know what caused it, but I was all of a sudden jolted awake at 4 in the morning. I reached up to rub my face and my arm felt sticky. It took me a second to realize this and by this time, I had touched my face and it felt sticky too. My first thought was that I was bleeding and immediately turned the light on and looked at my arm. It was paint. My entire body was covered in paint. It was multiple colors with thick black lines dividing the colors into small, random shapes, similar to a stained glass window. I always sleep covered in a blanket and, tonight, it had been pulled aside, leaving me uncovered. I jumped out of bed and noticed that the bed was completely smeared with the paint. There was also a number of drops on the floor near my bed, where the paint cans appeared to have been placed. I ran into the bathroom down the hall and looked into the mirror. The paint truly was covering every inch of my uncovered body. And since I was only sleeping in a pair of boxers that night, the majority of my body was painted. Looking at my head, I parted my hair, that was matted and stuck to my head by the paint, and found the CV symbol painted in dark red on my forehead. I jumped in the shower to wash it off, fearing that it might contain lead and I might get lead poisoning. That’s probably pretty stupid, fearing I’d get lead poisoning after just having it on me for a short time, but I was freaked out. After washing myself off, I went to tell Chris about what happened and found the front door wide open. Being 4 am, it was still dark out and lightly raining. The computer in the living room was also on. Neither of us had used that computer for months. All of the lights were off and the computer was open to a word document, giving the room a white glow. I closed and locked the door and went to turn off the computer when I noticed, what I guess you’d call, a small “poem” written on the otherwise empty document, which I’ll copy and paste here. The pit is fed Find the key In your head Follow me The next couple months seemed to slow down. Emma and I had been seeing more of each other. We had really become best friends. More than that, even. She’s a really big movie fan, like me, and we began having weekly movie nights. Chris’s ex began hanging out with us again. Though, they still weren’t back together. They’re relationship was… complicated. At some point, they had found her camera behind Chris’s nightstand. Chris claimed he had no clue how it got there. Me and Chris finally got started on working on the other properties our landlord owned, as part of our agreement for the house. It wasn’t too bad. Some of the houses were still empty and we had the keys, so I found it kind of fun. One dark moment during this time was Chris’s father being arrested for drunk driving. Me and Chris drove down to the police station to bail him out. The whole drive home he just kept apologizing to Chris for moving into his family’s house, which started these Butcherface problems. He passed out at one point and when he woke up, he told a story about the night before when he was sitting at home, watching TV, when he started hearing noises in the basement. The basement where Chris used to live and was now empty. He grabbed his hunting rifle and went down the stairs. When he got down there, he realized the sounds were coming from underneath the floorboards where we found the Butcherface tapes. He actually shot two rounds into the floor. He then ran outside, around the house into the backyard, and found some cinderblocks missing from the wall that led to the hole underneath the basement. The next weekend, me, Chris and his ex visited Jesse. Emma was too busy with a family function. Jesse had a decent loft in the city, living with a bunch of other artists he used to go to college with, and we actually hadn’t gotten around to seeing it yet. While there, and hanging out before the movie we were going to see, he began showing us the art projects he’s been working on. He had molded some Batman cowls (which I found pretty cool, being a Batman fan), some random sculptures and paintings. I had heard that he had created a Bane mask from scratch and asked to see it. He pulled it out of his desk drawer and showed it off. When he was done and putting it back in the drawer, I noticed something brown in the drawer and pulled it out. It was a mask made of burlap. He said it wasn’t what we thought. He had made the mask, based on the story we told him and he just did it for the fun of it. He even held up his hands and said “you said he was missing some fingers. Look, I have all of mine. And, I‘d have to be about twenty years older”. He obviously knew that that’s not what we were thinking. We were afraid he was becoming obsessed. We left without ever seeing the movie. Me and Chris played burglar again the next Saturday night and staked out Jesse’s place, but he never left. A couple days later, I came home from work to find Chris and his ex standing in our front yard. When I got out of the car Chris’s ex walked up to me, looking agitated, holding something up in her hand and said “is this yours?” I looked at it and realized that it was hidden camera. It was a lens attached to a wire that led to a small black box. I said no and asked where they found it. She said she found it taped under a low shelf of the TV stand in our living room, and added “along with these” and held up four more small cameras. We went inside and continued looking for more. Ultimately, we found sixteen of them around the house in closets, between the fridge and cabinet, under low shelves, three of them taped under the kitchen table, in the shadow of a shelf on my desk, and one behind my nightstand, facing my pillow. We did a little investigating and those types of cameras can only transmit their signal within a small, few hundred foot, radius. We are still paranoid about whether our phones are bugged or not. We called our landlord and he came right down. We asked him outright if he put the cameras there and he strongly denied it and even said he’d set up a meeting with his lawyer, for help, if we found out who did it. He even said he was now paranoid and was going to home to see if there was any cameras hidden in his house. That weekend, me and Chris visited his ex at her house. I talked her into seeing the Butcherface pictures she found on her camera again. She handed it to me and I walked outside into her front yard and started flipping through the pictures. I stood next to her driveway and stopped at the picture of her car in her driveway. I then flipped to the next picture of the window. I walked down her driveway to the road and looked both ways and saw the same window in the picture to my left, down the road. I told them to get in the car and drive in the direction of that house. We grabbed some flashlights, because we didn’t know how long we’d be gone and it was late in the day, and jumped in the car and started driving, passing the house with the window in the picture, we kept driving for about 45 minutes until we came across the apple store seen in the very next picture on the camera. After another 15 to 20 minutes of driving, we came across the old house seen in the pictures. It was at the end of a long driveway and partially hidden by some trees, but we found it. We got out of the car and that’s when I told them what I suspected. The pictures were deliberately left on her camera to lead us to this house. We walked the length of the driveway. At this point the sun had just set below the horizon and it was getting dark fast. With the trees over our heads, it was even darker and eerily quiet. The feeling of being watched was almost enough for me to say “nope”, spin around and run back to the car. We got to the door and noticed a latch for a padlock was on the door. The padlock itself was found in the overgrown bushes near the door, with the lock cut. Chris’s ex said we should stop and go home, but both me and Chris said we’d gone this far and we were way too curious to just turn back now. I turned the knob and pushed, but the door seemed to be stuck. I gave it a shove and it flew open. The first thing that hit us was that the place stunk. A waft of the foulest stink I’d ever smelled just blew into our faces the second the door opened. It was also pretty dark, so we pulled out our flashlights and walked inside. We immediately recognized stuff from the pictures. The old reclining chair with the axe was to our left, but the axe was missing, and the collapsed corner of the roof was in the far end of the room. A dead cat sat on the floor a few feet away from the chair, in the middle of the room. It was on it’s back and had been flayed, with the skin stretched open and most of the organs missing. It smelled bad. It was also covered with footprints as if the people living there had just been walking over it, like they didn’t even care it was there. To the right of the door was the table we saw in the pictures. It was completely covered with melted candle wax. In the same side of the room, next to the door, behind us, was a bookcase. I pulled a random book out and flipped through the pages. The pages were completely full of drawings and writings. The text was written over with new writings. One thing scribbled across a page that stuck out to me was “I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.” We then walked into the kitchen, which was through a door behind the table. There was an old fridge off to the side, with about 15 knives stabbed into the door. Chris’s ex opened it and found it dead and completely full of mold. A large glass jar sat on the counter full of used syringes. The kitchen cabinets wooden doors had been torn off and laid off to the side and were covered with random carvings of faces, words, and a lot of CV symbols. Chris opened a door and found a flight of stairs that led down to a dark basement. We walked down the flight of stairs and found the basement in the picture. The picture had, what appeared to be, animal skins hanging from the ceiling, but the skins were now gone. The floor was dirt, but it seemed to be packed down, like when you spray loose dirt with water. There was a patch of loose dirt off to the side. We dug into it and found old video cameras, still cameras, cell phones, voice recorders and dry pens. It was like some sort of technological mass grave. We then continued searching the room. There was a door on the far wall and we walked over to it. I opened it and was shocked to find what appeared to be hundreds of monstrous faces looking at us. The three of us jumped back and Chris’s ex let out a scream. When we looked again, we realized it was just masks. A whole wall covered in paper-mache masks, just like the one we saw False face wearing in the pictures. They were all ornately painted, each with a different design. We thought about taking one as a souvenir but decided against it, fearing that they may realize one missing and come looking for it. We then climbed back up the stairs and went through the nearby backdoor into the backyard. It was full of holes dug into the ground. We acknowledged the snapped branch seen in the pictures then moved on to the large barn. On our way, we could just barely notice that there seemed to be an extensive backyard behind the barn and if we didn’t find anything interesting in the barn, we’d check that out next. As soon as we opened the door, blinding light hit or faces, and it was like we were walking into a case of déjà vu. The inside of the barn immediately looked familiar. There had been some drastic changes but we recognized it instantly as the barn that Butcherface killed the pig with an axe in the original tapes we found. But, like I said, there were many changes. For one thing, large lights had been set up on the beams, close to the ceiling, brightly lighting the room, which was a drastic change from the normally dark Butcherface media. In the center of the room was a strange “sculpture” made of brick and mortar that resembled a large shriveled tree, or an upside-down bolt of lightning. It stood roughly 15 feet into the air, with the, what I’d guess you’d call, “branches” nearly touching the beams high above us. Hanging from the “branches” on a foot of twine were what looked like hundreds of pieces of old, yellowed, paper, each with a different grotesque face drawn or painted on it. The beams and walls were covered with drawings, paintings and carvings of evil faces and symbols. There seemed to be a pattern to it, because they all seemed to lead to what I guess would be a shrine on the opposite wall to the door. A tall wooden crate sat there, covered in carvings of the CV symbol over and over again, and sitting on top of it was an orange blown glass sculpture in the shape of fire. And, sitting in front of that was a smaller box, completely free of any carvings or any other media. I had the strongest feeling that the pictures were left on Chris’s ex’s camera because we were supposed to see what was inside that box. We were led here for that reason. It did fit the darkly theatrical style of Butcherface. Could what’s inside the box be the “key” mentioned in the poem I found on the computer? I reached out to open the box but Chris’s ex grabbed my hand and told me not to touch it. She didn’t want to know what was in it. We had a fight, and decided to leave the box alone. But, Chris noticed another crate on it’s side in the shadows in the corner of the far wall of the room. Sitting on the far end of it, facing away from us, was something that was emitting a faint glow on the opposite wall. We walked over and realized it was a laptop. Walking around the crate, we got a look at what was on the screen and was shocked at what we saw. It was a Butcherface website. It obviously didn’t say “Butcherface” on it, since we came up with that name, but the whole page was covered with the type of media we’ve seen before. Drawings, writings, pictures, videos. There were CGI models of the demonic creatures that occasionally show up in his drawings, hundreds of pictures of dead animals, and pictures of homemade tools and weapons. One thing that creeped us out was a series of pictures of different people wearing masks with multiple designs and made of different materials. A long tirade was on one page about people needing to open their eyes and saying he has the resources to do that. It continued, saying he was a “warrior” fighting for the “pit” and he will soon succeed. Towards the end, he said something about finally receiving the “causa” from the “vexillum” or the “vexilium” (I can’t quite remember) and ended with “oh my delayed joy”. There were comments below it by people saying it was brilliant and beautiful. There were pages after pages of it. One picture that surprised us was of a person lying facedown on the ground, covered in blood, and in the foreground was an arm holding a ball-peen hammer, with a light film of blood on it. The strange thing about the hammer was that both ends of the handle had a ball-peen hammer head on it. So, he apparently is willing to kill. We had never seen any evidence of this. Chris said he had never heard of it either in all of his research and wondered what were the circumstances that would be needed for him to kill. Regrettably, I cant remember the web address because it was just a series of numbers. After a while, I stood up and continued looking around the barn. I went back to looking at the carvings on the walls and noticed a hatch in the floor. I glanced over at Chris and his ex and noticed how close they seemed to be. They were ear to ear, looking at the computer screen, talking about what they were seeing, finishing each other’s sentences. It’s like they were working together again. I admittedly found it a little perverse, with them re-bonding, under the circumstances, while in the “House of Butcherface“. I cleared my throat to get their attention and jokingly asked if I was interrupting anything. At that moment, just as I was about to point out the hatch in the floor, a loud CRASH echoed throughout the barn, shaking the walls and causing the lights to flicker. Chris jumped up, ran past me and slammed the barn door shut. We ran up behind him and asked if he saw anything, to which he said he didn’t. Another crash shook the barn. It was like somebody was throwing boulders against the walls or something. Another crash hit the door, pushing it in, but staying locked, knocking us to the floor. We jumped back up and Chris said “don’t worry! As long as we’re in here, we’ll be ok!” That was met with another crash, and the lights flickered out, throwing us into complete darkness. The three of us stood still, listening. I put my arms out to feel around for anything. All I needed was to walk into a beam and get a bloody nose. Everything seemed very quiet and my eyes couldn’t seem to adjust to the darkness. After a few seconds of complete silence, Chris’s ex whispered “do you hear anything?” That was answered with another deafening CRASH! I had to cover my ears because it was so loud, like lightning had struck the barn. As the echoes faded away, Chris whispered for her to be quiet. We stood completely still, not daring to make a sound. We were completely panicking. I was wondering if there was more than one person outside. That’s when I began to hear a slow creaking coming from the darkness. I whispered, “did you hear that?” The creaking then stopped. Going against my instincts, I took a deep breath and quietly said “hello?” I didn’t get an answer, but then I began to hear a low breathing coming from deeper into the pitch black barn and it seemed to be moving. My mind flashed to the hatch in the floor I saw earlier and I realized the creaking was coming from that direction. Somebody else had opened the hatch and was now in the barn with us. With the flash of the hatch in my minds eye, I began to map out the barn with my memory. I now knew that the nearest beam would be far to our left, and we should be in the open of the barn, with the door behind us and Chris and his ex still seeming to be behind me, closer to the door. The ’brick tree” would be about fifteen feet infront of me and off to the left. Understanding the layout, and knowing there were no obstructions in front of me, I decided to quietly feel my way to the hatch. I reached out my arms again and they hit a body. I let out a yell, turned and yelled “run!” and followed my own instructions. I pushed past Chris and his ex, threw the doors open and yelled ‘come on!” We booked it out of there, past the old house, up the driveway, jumped into the car and tore out of there. During the drive, we started asking questions. We realized this was bigger than we thought. We wondered how he was getting all of these gadgets. And, how can he get in and out of locked locations so easily? We started wondering who the people in the pictures were. Were they followers? Or were they members of a group Butcherface is in. What if Butcherface is a follower of someone even higher. And, if so, this group must have a name. Following that event, I just wanted to have a stress-free environment for a little while. I did everything just short of having a bubble bath. I called Emma and asked her to come over that weekend, this was two weeks ago. When the weekend came, she arrived and apparently expected to have another movie night, but I didn’t want to have anything to do with ANYTHING that is connected to any kind of media. Although, I obviously didn’t tell her this. Besides, I had different plans. So, just as the sun was setting, we jumped into my car and we drove down the road and turned onto the dirt road I mention in part 4 and drove to the old building we discovered. I had found it really interesting and wanted to go back. I just never had the time or reason to. I parked in front of it and pulled a blanket out of the back and we made our way inside. I brought her up to the second floor and showed her the hole in the ceiling. I then laid the blanket down underneath it and we laid on it, looking at the stars. We stayed there for three hours and talked. After a while, a light rumbling began from outside. I stood up looked through the hole, outside. I had just enough of a view to realize that the rumbling was coming from the dirt road. Then, an old, rusted truck came through the trees, revealing the source of the sound. It stopped behind my car and someone stepped out of the drivers seat. It was too dark at this point to make them out. They were just a dark silhouette. The figure then walked up to my car and started looking through the windows. I don’t just mean glancing through the windows, they were leaning against the car, peering into the car. The person then tried to open the driver’s door. I yelled “hey!” and the dark shape looked right at me, and keeping it’s gaze on me, pulled something out of it’s pocket and smashed the window. I instinctually jumped up and ran down the stairs, Emma following me. Getting outside, I ran toward him yelling “what the hell are you doing to my car?!” Going completely against what I expected he would do, he began running at me at full speed. He held the object in his hand over his head like a weapon and began emitting a loud growl. As he continued to barrel down toward me, I began to get a better idea of what he looked like. It was still too dark and he still looked like a black shape, but it was then that I could see his outline and realized that he was wearing a mask. I immediately skidded to a stop, spun around and began running in the opposite direction. I grabbed Emma and we ran around the old building we were previously in and ran into the woods, in the direction of our house. There was just enough star and moon light to see where we were going. I looked back, but couldn’t see if he was still behind us, but there were too much trees to be able to tell, and the sound of our running and heavy breathing cancelled out any chance of hearing the loud growling he was making. Amazingly, we actually made it to our backyard and ran to the backdoor, which goes through the basement. I pushed the door open, let Emma in and jumped in behind her. I flipped the light switch near the door, wanting to avoid the trash in there, and was horrified by what I saw. The trash had been pushed up against the walls and some of it was arranged into strange shapes. A row of paint cans that were the same colors that were painted on me almost four months earlier, were lined up on the floor near the stairs. A pile of softer trash was made into a pile on the far wall, and had an impression in it like someone had been lying on it. Butcherface had been living in our basement. I locked the door, ran up the stairs and called Chris. His ex was there too. She apparently came over after me and Emma left. I brought them downstairs and asked him if there was any chance he did this. He looked shocked and said he had only been down there with me, the one time and we didn‘t touch anything. I told him what happened at the old building and he helped me push a heavy set of shelves in front of the already locked door, just to make sure. Emma asked if we should call the cops. I told her they wouldn’t help. We went upstairs and kept our eyes on the windows that looked out over our backyard. Emma was freaked out and started asking what the hell was going on. Me and Chris sat her down and began to tell her the story of when we found the Butcherface tapes in Chris’s parents house. Her expression turned to shock when we described the content of the tapes and she slowly began sinking in her chair until we were done telling the story. She sat in silence for a moment, staring at the floor, appearing to take it in. She then slowly looked up and apprehensively asked “this man in the videos… was he missing two finger?” Me and Chris both froze for a minute. How could she have known that? She went on to describe how, a few years ago, a friend of hers had shown her a DVD of the exact same footage we described. This friend has since moved to Colorado. We realized it was one of the DVD transfers that Chris’s brother had made back in college. What were the chances of me running into someone who had also seen the Butcherface tapes? I asked her how many times she watched them. She claimed to have seen them maybe six times. When we asked where her friend got the DVD, she said she had no clue. Our next inevitable question was if she’d seen Butcherface for real or if she’d had any other strange occurrences. The only thing that she’d be willing to say was “that’s complicated”. The conversation then switched to why he was following us again in the first place. I brought up the fact that Butcherface never seemed to leave Chris’s family alone, even after the cabin incident. He got defensive and asked if I was implying anything. Even he had to admit that he was obsessed with Butcherface before the cabin. I asked how Butcherface could go in and out of our house, seemingly at a whim. He yelled “because he’s been living in our basement! You just saw it!” His ex brought up the idea that maybe it was Jesse who became obsessed and had Butcherface following him this whole time. She made a good point that we didn’t have any occurrences happen at our house until after that night Jesse crashed into our tree, claiming that Butcherface was in his backseat. Maybe Jesse brought him here, knowingly or unknowingly. The problem I had with that was that we had only seen Jesse a couple times after the cabin incident and he was largely absent when Butcherface was tormenting Chris’s family, and when Chris’s ex found the pictures on her camera. And, after crashing his car, Jesse didn’t have enough money to fix it or buy a new one. He hadn’t been here in months. So, even IF Jesse brought him here, why would Butcherface seemingly abandon a good disciple and come torment us, unless he had a potential disciple here too. I also asked how Butcherface knew where to find me and Emma, at the old building. Chris claimed he didn’t know. I then added the fact that Chris was the one that wanted to go investigate Butcherface’s house. He then froze for a second, eyes looking wide at me, and said “No! That was you! You were the one who asked for her camera and told us to jump in the car to go look for that house! And, even though you believed that those pictures were left to lead us there, you still wanted to go in! It was also your idea to stake out Jesse’s place, which is the kind of thing Butcherface does. I fought against the temptation, remember?! That night in the cabin! I burned all the media and evidence I had and yelled at him through the door. I let it go right then. That’s a part of my life I don’t want back! And, I’m not an idiot (Dash32). I used to go on the internet. Yeah, I found the trilogy of stories you wrote, telling what happened to us. Then, you encouraged people to write Butcherface stories of their own! If anybody in this room is obsessed and spreading Butcherface media, it’s you!” I froze for a second. I knew that was wrong, I just couldn’t figure out a way to prove it. These new series of events have pushed what we thought we knew about Butcherface out the window. I’m not obsessed. I just want to figure out the truth behind Butcherface. Who were the other people we saw in those pictures on Chris’s ex’s camera? What does Butcherface want? Is he really trying to recruit people? Why? Why does he portray it through his media? Is he trying to tell us something? Is there some kind of hidden meaning in those images? Some kind of subliminal message? Is he truly insane? Is he working for somebody else? Maybe he has some sort of higher purpose that we don‘t understand yet. Maybe he needs help and that’s why he’s recruiting disciples. I don’t really know why I typed all of this out. I guess I just felt compelled. Compelled to get my presentation, my story, out there for everyone to see. Adjacent Journal Entry July 16th I couldn’t sleep again last night. It was even worse than the night before. I could have taken a sleeping pill, but I didn’t feel like it this time. I decided to go for another walk at around 2 AM. I actually found myself at the park. I walked a lot farther than I thought, I guess. I sat on one of the swings and started absentmindedly throwing rocks at the tree that is next to the sandbox. I actually eventually got into it and stood a little closer and started really throwing the rocks forcefully into the tree. It started knocking the bark off of it and started exposing the “flesh” of the tree underneath. After the barK was gone, the rocks actually started going deeper into the flesh of the tree after every hit. I was surprised. So, I picked up a rock near the tree line that had a sharp edge and started hacking deeper into it. It was strangely satisfying. I was leaving my mark on this tree. Something that everyone would see for a long time afterwards. I thought about carving something into it, but before I could figure out what, I heard a car door slam across the street. It was a couple people coming home from god knows what activity. They didn’t see me. I stepped to the side, blocking their view of me with the tree, just in case. They had just sat on a porch swing and started talking. I just leaned against the tree and strained to listen to them talk for a fEw minutes. After a while, I wanted to get a better vantage point. I crouched down and snuck to a tree that was near the road. It’s a good thing there were no streetlights. They would have seen me for sure. I got to the other tree and could hear them a lot better. I was less than 30 feet from them and they had no idea. They were talking about Everyday things. How their week was, something about one of their’s mother visiting next week, or something. I got bored of it pretty quickly. I was more interested about how close I was to them and they had no idea. I started wondering how close I could actually get to them. Imagine if I could be standing right next to them and they never even knew. I backed up to the tree I was marking earlier, then turned and headed into the woods. I headed back in the direction of the couple and made it to the road. I was farther off down the road this time, and felt safe to cross without them seeing me. I ducked down low and ran across the street. I was now on their side of the street. I crept back to their house and crouched in the bushes. They were just over 15 feet away, now. They still didn’t see me. I got back uP and head back into the woods and made it around their house and into their backyard. Getting to their house, I got my back up against the wall, next to the backdoor. Just out of curiosity, I jiggled the doorknob and it was actually unlocked. I opened the door a little bit and peaked inside. I didn’t go in, I wasn’t here to bReak into their house. I closed the door and, keeping my back against the wall, made my way around the side of the house. Ducking under a window, I got to the porch and was right next to them. Less than 5 feet away. The woman had her lEg over the other knee and her foot was dangling right in front of me. I could have grabbed it if I wanted to. They were still talking and laughing, oblivious to the fact that I was right there. It was then that I realized that I still had the sharp rock in my hand. I had gotten so into what I was doing that I had forgotten I even had it. It’s kindA funny, actually. I lightly dropped it onto the grass, making very little sound. They didn’t even hear it. Then, it went from quiet to chaos when a loud barking erupted from behind me. Surprised, I whipped around to find a dog ferociously barking from the window right next to me. They jumped up and started yelling the dog’s name. I turned and booked it back into the wooDs before they could see me and made my way home. Fucking dog. I shouldn’t have stayed up so late this time. I woke up thIs morning and realized it was almost noon. I jumped out of bed and sped all the way to work. I can’t believe I was late again. I knew I was screwed this time. Jack found me within 5 minutes of me walking through the door and told me to just go home. I didn’t even say anything. I just turned around and walked out, making sure to flip off the security camera at the door. That was fuN. I spent most of the day just watching TV. Chris came home a few hours later. He wasn’t too happy about me losing my job, saying I wont be able to pay rent. It didn’t matter though. We barely talk anyway. He left, saying he needed to cool down. He thinks I’m falling under the “spell” of Butcherface, but I’m not. He just gave up too quickly on his investigation of Butcherface. I’m starting to think we shouldn’t have burned his media that day at the cabin. We could have learned so much about what he really wants. If he doesn’t hurt people, maybe he has a message he’s trying to tell us. I’m starting to think I should Go back to that barn and see what’s in that box. Hunt the Geheimnisträger, Alumno. He wants you to. 44-23-15 13-34-45-33-44-14-34-52-33 12-15-22-24-33-43. 11-35-42-24 31-11 32-15-33-44-15 11 41-45-15-31 13-23’-24-34 44-24 35-11-31-15-43-34. 11-31-31-15 32-15-33-43-13-23-15-33 52-15-42-14-15-33 12-42-45-14-15-42 14-45-32 24-33 35-11-42-44-24-12-45-43 24-33-21-24-14-31. EDIT: Okay, i didn’t post this. I admittedly wrote it, it’s from a digital journal i keep in a work document on my laptop. Somebody else got into my journal and posted this on here with my account. There are a few changes, too. The “Geheimnisträger” comment and the numbers are new. I don’t know what those mean. Part 6 After the events at the end of the previous chapter, almost five months ago, my life has changed a lot, and I have been dragged deeper down the “rabbit hole”. The morning after Chris claimed I was falling under Butcherface’s spell, we went outside and found “They all wound, and the last one kills” gouged into the wall of our house in the backyard. I then made my way into the woods to retrieve my car. The back window and the windshield were spared, but all of the other windows had been smashed.“10 is time to tell a tale” was also scratched into the passenger-side door. Shortly after this, Chris essentially stopped talking to me. I occasionally chatted with his ex, but it always seemed strained. The worst part was that Emma would refuse to come over after being chased by Butcherface, or one of his followers, in the previous chapter. Thankfully, she was still willing to see me and I’d hang out at her house. I hadn’t been sleeping very well, though. It didn’t seem to be my normal case of insomnia. Usually, I would just lay in bed and not be able to fall asleep. But, now, I felt like there was some thought gnawing at the back of my mind. It was like I was forgetting something. This would make me feel restless and I’d pace back and forth around the house. I would sometimes take a sleeping pill, but I didn‘t like to use them too often after the last time I used one. After a few days of doing this, I started feeling cooped up in the house and started taking walks outside at night. The problem is that these nightly strolls would ultimately lead to me staying up later and later. This obviously led to me waking up later and being late to work on more than one occasion. Chris was also spending less time at the house. I had no clue where he was going at the time. One night, shortly after this, I had been taking one of my nightly walks when I, all of a sudden, realized I had walked farther than I ever had up to that point and found myself at the town park. It is small, with the generic assortment of playground recreational equipment (swingset, seesaw, sandbox, merry-go-round, etc). I sat on one of the swings and started tossing small rocks at a nearby tree. I eventually got into it and really started throwing them at it. I actually found myself hacking into it with a sharp rock. I was disrupted by the sound of a car door slamming across the street. I stepped behind the tree and watched as a couple were getting out of their car and sat on a porch swing near their front door and started talking. I decided I wanted to listen to their conversation, just for the hell of it and snuck to a tree nearer to their location. I quickly got bored with their conversation and got more interested in finding out how close to them I actually could get. So, I doubled back to the first tree I was throwing rocks at and made my way into the woods and turned back in their direction. Getting back to the road, I could see them off in the distance, being out of their view in the dark. I ran across the street and made it to their backyard. Sneaking around to the backdoor, I jiggled the doorknob just out of curiosity and actually found it unlocked but left it alone since I don’t break into houses… that aren’t connected to Butcherface. So, I continued around the opposite side of the house and got to the porch, right next to the couple. They still didn’t know I was right next to them. It was at this point that I realized I still had the sharp rock that I was using to hack into the tree in my hand. I quietly dropped it into the grass and was relieved that they didn’t hear it, but I was interrupted by clattering behind me with loud barking. I spun around and found a big dog barking at me from a window that was right next to me. It scared the crap out of me and I just booked it into the woods and ran all the way home. I didn’t make it home that night until about 4:30 in the morning and I didn’t get up until around noon. I was extremely late for work and tried to get there as soon as possible. I stupidly tried to just sneak in, but my boss found me almost immediately, said I had been coming in to work late too much and I should just go home. An anger welled up in me. I now realize that that anger was already there and had just gotten stronger at that moment. I was angry almost all the time at this point in time. But, I held it in and just walked out. Although, I did flip off the security camera at the door on my way out. I spent the rest of the day watching TV until Chris got home and I informed him that I had been fired. He wasn’t too happy about me losing my job, saying I wouldn’t be able to pay rent. We had a fight and he stormed out, saying he needed to cool down. This was pretty normal around this time, he barely spent any time at the house. Though, I still didn’t know where he was going, which piqued my curiosity, and a couple days later, I followed him and found out he was going to his ex’s house. I got the distinct feeling that she wasn’t exactly his ex anymore. Although, I wasn’t happy that he felt he had to hide that from me. A few days after this, after getting home from looking for a new job and getting the mail, I found that one of the letters had writing smeared across it in what appeared to be either red paint or nail polish. All it said was “The line was crossed at 9“. It was another random message that seemed out of character from Butcherface. But, it was even more random for him. Feeling alone and still strongly interested in Butcherface, I stopped looking for a new job and essentially became a recluse. I hadn’t left the house for a week and a half, hadn’t seen Chris for even longer than that, and hadn’t seen Emma for almost two weeks, that’s when I decided to go back to the house we found in the previous chapter, which we started calling the “House of Butcherface“. I wanted to know what was in the box we found in the barn. I left just as the sun was setting. Once getting there, I glanced through one of the windows of the house. It was dark, and it appeared mostly the same, except for what looked like hundreds of two foot strands of yarn of multiple colors hanging from the ceiling. I had no interest in entering and exploring the house further. I walked around the house and headed straight for the barn. Opening the door, it also appeared to mostly be the same, the brick “tree” was still there, except for more art on the walls, the bright lights were no longer on, and the glass sculpture that resembled fire was also missing. But, the box was still there. It was in another position, as if it had been moved, though. I walked right up to it and reached for it, but froze. My hand was inches from it, but I start thinking about why I was doing it. I realized I had fallen into his trap. This is what he wanted me to do. I was acting just like Chris was when he was obsessed, maybe even worse. I left the barn and walked into the field that sits behind it. It was dark now and the field was full of fireflies. I started pacing around it, much like I had been doing previous nights, but this time it was because I was deep in thought. I realized that my interest in Butcherface was displaced. I had been doing exactly what we said Butcherface wanted us to do. To become obsessed with what his message was and follow him in an attempt to find out what the answer was. I still had questions, though. The obvious one being what his message was. It was at that point that I realized that I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. I then thought of another question. We’ve gone to multiple places that we suspected Butcherface was living in or had been living in, but we never caught him by surprise. We’ve never walked into a dilapidated house and found him snoring away on a pile of trash. It’s as if he always knew we were going to be at one of his hideouts. I then remembered the hidden cameras we had found around our house a while back. Was he still watching us? I then got a chill down my spine when I realized he could be watching me right then. I suddenly felt extremely exposed at that moment, in the middle of the field. I looked into the dark woods that surrounded the field and got the overwhelming feeling I was being watched. That’s when I decided I didn’t want to do this anymore. Butcherface hadn’t helped any of us. I was done with him. A couple days later, I had just gotten home from looking for another job and found Chris girlfriend’s car in our driveway. I pulled up just as she was stepping out of it. It turned out she was meeting Chris after work. We walked into the house and I told her about what happened at the House of Butcherface, but admitted that trying to get away from the obsession wasn’t easy. I was still finding myself thinking about it a lot. Having ADD, I’m used to having my attention wander, but it was happening more than usual and was automatically focusing on trying to decipher Butcherface media. She said that it may be time to admit that I needed help. I instinctively got mad, but then realized she was right. I apprehensively agreed, but admitted that I had no idea where to start. She then told me that she had had a psychiatrist while in high school. I asked if it worked and she said it really did and she didn’t even have to see the doctor anymore after a while and she agreed to give me the doctor’s number. Chris came home soon after and they left without saying a word. She gave me the number the next day and I set up an appointment. A week later, I was sitting in the doctor’s office. Lets call him Dr. Fidem. It started very awkward, with him asking a bunch of probing questions. I told him everything, finding the Butcherface media, the stalking, the break-ins, Chris’ obsession, Jesse’s falling toward obsession, the House of Butcherface, my growing obsession with Butcherface, and other problems. He would just nod and jot something down on a pad of paper. We then had a good, long, talk. I’m not sure if he believed any of it, but he prescribed me Zoloft and we set up monthly sessions. As I was leaving, he asked me if I could produce any proof of Butcherface. I said I didn’t think that was a good idea, but he said he just wanted something to corroborate my story. I set off for home feeling good. I felt like I was taking a step closer to being free from Butcherface for good. My life was getting too dark. I was looking forward to hanging out with my friends and girlfriend again, instead of falling into dark analysis of some psycho’s art. Then, I pulled into my driveway and found my front door wide open. I cautiously got out of the car and walked to the open door and saw wide streaks of some dark red liquid leading from the door, through the living room, and down the hallway toward my room. I slowly followed it through the house and found it led to the room next to my bedroom, where I keep my collections of movie memorabilia and sword collection, with the door slightly ajar. I kicked the door open, not wanting to be jumped by someone on the other side, and found the room empty. The red streaks led into the room, took a right turn and stopped close to the wall and ended in a circle smeared onto the carpet. Sitting in the center of the circle was the box that was in the barn at the House of Butcherface. Crudely written in red on the wall above it was “Count to 8 at the last gate”. An empty can of paint sat tipped over in the corner in a pool of dark red paint. My collection of swords had been stabbed into the wall as well, with the blades jutting out of the other side of the wall, in my room, where my head would be on my bed. I picked up the box and brought it into the living room. Putting it on the coffee table, I sat on the couch and just stared at it, fighting every urge to open it. One side of my brain kept saying “Just a peek. It wont hurt anything”. The other half kept bringing up the fact that I just came back from a therapist’s session in an attempt to stop this obsession. I really don’t know how long I sat there, staring. It literally could have been hours. But, I ultimately decided to put it on the floor and slide it under the coffee table, deciding to figure out what to do with it later. Although, while sliding the box under the table, I noticed some writing on it’s back. I turned it around and found “Fratres Rutilus Phasma” carved into the wood. The Zoloft Dr. Fidem gave me wasn’t fun. I was pretty much stoned off my ass because of the serotonin flood, which was a feeling I wasn’t a fan of. I just kept giving feelings that Butcherface was watching me. Infact, the first time I took it, I was sitting on the couch in the living room and seem to remember seeing the front door slowly open, and that’s it. The memory fades out after that. Although, I slowly got used to it. After a while, when I decided it was working for me, I made plans to go to dinner with Emma at an expensive restaurant in the city. I hadn’t seen her for a while and we wanted to celebrate, of sorts, my transition away from Butcherface. Just as I was walking out the door, I got a call from Jesse, who I hadn’t seen since we found the Butcherface mask in his desk. He wanted to meet up for dinner as well. I told him my plans with Emma and he said we should meet him at his loft, which is in the city as well, and added that he had a much more interesting activity planned. I was apprehensive, but agreed to do it. After picking up Emma and arriving at Jesse’s loft, he jumped into the drivers seat and told us our destination was a surprise. We were nervous, but we agreed to go. As a side-note, this was actually the first time Emma and Jesse had met. During the drive, he talked the whole trip. Just about random topics, art projects, new tattoos, people we didn’t know, altering his Bane mask to make it his own, and something about an underground art exhibit. After a while, he said “We’re here” and turned around a corner, into the parking lot of a zoo. It was 10 o’clock at night. What are we going to do at a zoo this late? He got us out of the car and as we walked to the gate, he called someone on his phone and only said “Hey, we’re here” and hung up. After waiting at the gate for a minute, we were met by a man me nor Emma knew, but who was friends with Jesse. He opened the gate and escorted us through the zoo and opened a gate sitting in the back, letting us into an area intended for employees only. It was at this point that I started to get really nervous. I could tell Emma was nervous too. This was beginning to feel like a bad idea. We were then ushered into a large, grey, cube-like building full of people. A balcony above our heads was also full of people. There were large doors on the opposite wall and I believe this is where they usually kept the elephants, but instead, the large cement floor was made into a makeshift racetrack. Animal noises could be heard in a room nearby. Jesse had been chatting with his friend the whole time and we were still confused as to what was going on. We had apparently gotten there just in time because the door to the room making the animal noises soon opened up and a number of people walked out with small monkeys on their shoulders and directing a group of small pigs toward the racetrack. The entire building burst into applause. I grabbed Jesse by the shoulder and spun him toward us and asked what the hell was going on. He informed us that most of the people here worked at the zoo and they had trained the monkeys to ride the pigs like little horses. It was a very “What the hell?” moment, but I must admit that I wanted to see it. The riders were placed on their steeds in the racetrack and money began quickly changing hands. Everyone began chanting “Three!”, “Two!”, “One!”, “Go!” and someone blew a blow horn, which echoed in the large building, and the riders were off. The whole building burst into more applause as the race began. After making three laps around the track, the race finished and the animals were given treats, picked up and brought back into the room, only to be replaced by a new group of pigs and monkeys. This continued for about two hours. One of the winning monkeys even raised his fist in triumph, as if he knew he had won, and everyone cheered. We lost Jesse in the commotion after a while, but we continued to watch the games. Shortly after I realized Jesse’s absence, his friend who greeted us at the gate tapped me on the shoulder and said “Your friend asked me to give you this” while handing me a folded piece of ripped paper. Expecting it to be from Jesse, I unfolded it and found “7 Gateways have already been opened, and not to heaven” written on it at a steep angle. I quickly asked him who gave him the note. He pointed over some heads and into the crowd, saying “He did”, and after a pause added “Oh, he’s gone”. Looking around, he said “I’ll see if I can find him” and left. I grabbed Emma by the hand and led her through the crowd to the wall near the door we came in, so we could have something against our back and called Jesse. He picked up and the first thing I asked him was if he had asked his friend to give me a note. It was hard to hear him through all of the commotion in the room, but he said no. I then told him we were leaving. He asked for us to stay, but I refused, and since we were his ride, he agreed to leave too. Me and Emma then went ahead with our original plans, to have a dinner at a nice restaurant. The problem was that most of them were closed at midnight and we ended up at a McDonalds, where the mood soon lightened. We were laughing and telling stories. Emma lighten up to Jesse too, and they seemed to get along. The night ended on a better note than it started and we all agreed to hang out again. About a week or so later, I was back in Dr. Fidem’s office. He said he really wanted to find the source of my obsession. Finding the source could help in aiding my recovery. He went on to say that an obsession, or fixation, can often have a sexual connotation, which made me thoroughly uncomfortable. He most likely noticed this and went on to mention the images in Butcherface’s media being violent. Violence has deep sexual connections, such as sadomasochism, which is getting sexual gratification by causing pain to yourself or others, as well as rape, which is actually more of a form of control than being sexual. After a while my gaze had made it’s way to looking at the floor. It was getting close to the end of the session and the conversation had gotten really deep. I heard him open and close a drawer from his desk and I glanced up at him to see a burlap mask looking back at me. I gave out a yell and instinctively began climbing up the back of the couch, trying to get away. He quickly took off the mask and calmed me down, explaining that he had made the mask out of the description I had given of it during our first session and was attempting to use it as a part of the therapy. A sort of “curing arachnophobia with spiders” kind of thing. He ended the session by asking if I had any evidence of Butcherface, like he asked during our first session. I showed him the envelope and ripped paper I had gotten over the past few weeks as well as pictures of the writing on my car and wall at my house, and left. Later that day, Chris’ brother, Evan, stopped by, looking for Chris, who was still spending most of his time away from the house. I told him he’d most likely be around soon and said he should wait for him. We sat down in the living room and I told him about my therapist sessions and Emma, who he still hadn’t met. It turned out he was finally moving out of his parents house. He still wasn’t sure where, yet. I asked if he wanted a drink and went into the kitchen. I was filling up a glass of soda when he asked “Hey, what’s in here?” I asked what he was talking about and he answered “This box under the coffee table”. I realized he was talking about Butcherface’s box I had slid under the coffee table a while back. I dropped the glass I was filling with soda, causing it to shatter on the floor, and ran back to the living room, to find Evan looking into the open box. From my angle, I couldn’t see into it. He looked at me and asked “What the hell is this?” I tried to stammer an answer, but didn’t have one. He then added “This is that box Chris told me about, isn’t it. The one you guys found at that house?” I tried telling him I found it and I haven’t looked in it. He slammed the box shut, got a disgusted look on his face, stood up, and headed for the door. I tried to explain, but he was already out the door, getting to his car. Finally, out of anything else to say, I asked what was in the box, but he slammed the car door and drove away. I turned around and slowly walked back to the box. Something in it had made Evan leave. I reached out and grabbed the latch that had been closed when Evan slammed the box shut, and froze. I stood there for a second, said “Nope”, picked up the box and threw it into the trash. A couple days later, while I was out, still looking for a job, I got a call from Dr. Fidem asking if I had come across anymore Butcherface media. I awkwardly said no and he said “Okay” and hung up. Pulling into my driveway, I found my trash canister tipped over into the street with the trash bags ripped open and garbage strewn all over the street. I poked through the trash and noticed that Butcherface’s box was now missing. I spent the next fifteen minutes ignoring the glares of people driving by, and removing the trash from the street. I finally got into the house, made myself a lunch, mindlessly took my meds. I tried not thinking about the missing box and what was in it. It was just another attempt at a push by Butcherface to follow him. The good thing about that it that it shows he knows he’s losing. I soon began to feel lightheaded. It got worse and I couldn’t keep my balance anymore. My head felt too heavy to hold up and my fingers got numb. Thankfully, I was sitting on my couch and I fell sideways, lying flat-out on the couch. I had just enough coherence to glance at the coffee table and notice my medication and realize someone had switched it with some sort of sedative. Everything then faded to black. I don’t know how long I was out, but I did momentarily gain consciousness and found myself lying on a dirt floor of a dark room. I could hear some people screaming off in the distance, as if in a fight. I opened my eyes to find the girl we saw on Chris’ ex’s camera we named False Face about ten feet away from me. Her hair was now short and red, and she was wearing a papier-mâché mask that resembled Heath Ledger’s Joker makeup in The Dark Knight, white with black circles around the eyes with a big, wide, red grin. A glint of metal caught my eye and I looked to her hands and saw that they were covered in a strange assortment of small metal bars that came together to form metallic gloves with four or five inch metal claws extending off the fingers. She was dressed in a pink tutu, which was fitting because she slowly ballet dancing, as if the screaming was music to dance to. It’s needless to say that she was too busy to notice that I was awake, but it didn’t matter because I lost consciousness again. I seem to remember muffled talking, an animalistic screeching sound, being moved again, and the sound of a door slamming. I gained consciousness again and found myself in an even darker room. A faint glow dimly lit the room around me, and it looked familiar. I tried to sit up and found something heavy on my face. I reached up and felt something metal was over my head. There were eyeholes and various shapes protruding from it. I realized it was a mask. I sat up, slipped the heavy mask off my head, and found myself back in the Butcherface’s barn. I was lying on a thick wooden table sitting up against the brick tree that’s in the middle of the room. I looked in front of me and saw that the faint glow was coming from a laptop on the tall crate we originally found the mysterious box on. I looked at the mask in the dim light and saw that it was chunks of rusted metal welded together into the shape of a pig’s head, with sharp, spear-like points for ears and a bent metal cylinder for the nose. Throwing the mask onto the floor, I set my hands on the table, ready to heave myself off of it, and felt something under my hand. I picked it up and noticed it was Chris’ girlfriend’s camera. I put the camera in my pocket and slid off the table and made my way to the laptop. It was open to the Butcherface website me, Chris, and his ex, saw in the previous chapter. It was on a page that had pictures of people wearing masks of different designs. I began scrolling down the page and it just kept going. Picture after picture rolled by, but I stopped at one. It resembled a Bane mask, but different enough that most people probably wouldn’t have even recognized it as a Bane mask. The only reason why I knew it was is because it was Jesse’s Bane mask. I pushed the laptop off the crate, causing it to fall to the floor, the screen going black. I just wanted to get the hell out of there. Still feeling lightheaded, I stumbled across the barn to the doors and attempted to push them open, but they were locked. I stood there, trying to think of a way to get the doors open, maybe a tool, or I could try kicking it. Then I remembered the hatch in the floor I noticed in the previous chapter. I found it in the darkness and pulled it open and climbed down the flight of stairs. It was pitch-black in that basement. I couldn’t see my hand right in front of my face. I took a step forward and bumped into something wooden. I wasn’t going to get out of here without some light. I then remembered the camera in my pocket. I turned it on. Remembering what had happened previously with this camera, I checked to see if any pictures had been left on it. The first one was a hand holding a piece of paper in the shot. One the paper was crudely taped words cut from magazines. All it said was “The 6 will fix”. I deleted it and saw that the rest of the pictures were normal pictures of Chris’ girlfriend. I then used the flash of it to light my way through the basement, which appeared like a maze. Crates and trash was stacked up, creating makeshift walls that twisted and turned, never going in one direction for very long. Trash and other objects littered the floor, like mannequins, old clothing, furniture, objects also hung from the ceiling by string. Logs with the bark still on them were used as pillars, to prop the barn above it. The basement seemed to have been dug out, widening what was essentially a cave, now. I don’t really know how big it actually was, since I could only get what I saw through the split-second flashes of the camera. With all of the corners and stuff leaning against the crude walls, it was very confusing. I came to dead ends many times and had to go back. These things also created shadows in the flashing light as if I had caught something moving. I had the feeling of being watched even more. It’s like that feeling you get when you have to keep your eyes closed while washing your hair in the shower. That feeling that something is standing right behind you. I was getting nervous, making myself more lost. I tried to push a wall of crates over, but it was surprisingly sturdy. I remember turning around a corner and finding an ornately carved bookcase blocking my path. There was only one book on the shelf. It looked extremely old and was falling apart. I picked it up and looked at the worn cover and the title was “Ad Vertere Rutilus Phasma”. I put the book back on the shelf and went back the way I came. I found a straight pathway along the dirt wall that led through a doorway dug in the dirt that descended deeper into the ground and around a corner to somewhere larger and darker. I backtracked and followed the dirt wall until I was cut off by another wall of crates and followed that. Getting to it’s end, I turned the corner and finally saw a beam of moonlight shining from around another corner. I ran around the corner and found the door. I ran up a small flight of stairs and threw the door open, finding myself finally outside, in the woods near the barn. Finally being free of whatever labyrinth I just emerged from, I avoided the House of Butcherface, which appeared to have some sort of faint firelight coming out of the windows, and ran to the road and started walking in the direction of home. That walk would have taken days without a car, so I called the only person who was talking to me, and was actually close enough to pick me up, Chris’ girlfriend. I continued walking until she pulled up and picked me up. On the drive home, I told her what happened, and how I ended up back at the House of Butcherface, admitting that it did seem suspicious, but I truly was trying to stay away from him. Butcherface wasn’t making it easy. I don’t think he was trying to kidnap me. He knew exactly what I would do and what I would find. It was obvious that he wasn’t done with me either. She asked how it was going with Dr. Fidem and I brought up the strange call I had gotten from him the day before, and I noticed a nervous look on her face. I gave back her camera, which she didn’t even know was missing and thanked her for picking me up. She smiled and said it was no problem, and added that she wanted to get me and Chris talking again. The next day, she successfully got me and him in a room together, where I told him everything that had happened and showed that I truly was trying to fight it. I also told him about his brother’s visit and he said he’d check in on him. At one point, I noticed that Chris’ girlfriend was acting distant again and when she left to go to the bathroom, I asked Chris what her problem was, since we had gotten along so well the night before. He told me that after she had dropped me off at home and drove herself home, she got curious and looked at the pictures I had taken while using the camera’s flash to find my way out of the barn’s basement and found something in some of them that she thought was disturbing. I asked what it was and he told me he didn’t know. I didn’t believe him and told him to tell me what she found. He said he was telling the truth and really didn’t know. When she came back, I asked her what she found in the pictures. She looked at Chris disappointedly and said it wasn’t important. I stood up and demanded she show me the pictures. She told me I was getting obsessed again and it would help if I stopped trying to see them, and added she deleted them anyway. I knew she was right and calmed myself down. Me and Chris began talking about Butcherface again, not as obsessed possible disciples, but as two people who had gotten a deep understanding about how strange, and interesting, it can be the deeper you go. We still wondered how he draws people in, deciding that the better we understand the obsession, the better we can fight it. Our original assumption was that his media and attacks were a sort of brainwashing. But, brainwashing requires a constant sleep deprivation, partial sensory deprivation, psychological harassment, and group social pressure. Butcherface’s actions had all of this, but it could be spread out over weeks, even months. For brainwashing to work, these actions would have to be done constantly, almost nonstop, and behind closed doors. His media seemed to be more of a subtle encouragement or persuasion to change his potential disciples’ psychology, with some pushes by Butcherface and his friends. He wants everyone to WANT to wonder what his message is and his media is the way to do that. He liked to repetitively use the CV symbol to drill something familiar into our minds, like some sort of brand symbol or logo. That’s when I realized it. Butcherface isn’t using his media to brainwash people, he’s advertising. But, what is he promoting? Personally, I don’t want to know. Part 7 After the realization that Butcherface’s media is actually advertising, I did a little investigating on the topic. I took a class on the subject in college, and even though I’m not an expert on the topic, I know how effective it can be. That may be the reason why I could ultimately fight it. Understanding how it works could have given me an advantage in fighting the obsession. Advertising draws heavily on psychiatry, anthropology, neurology, and behavioral studies, imbuing mundane products or causes with symbolic qualities that instill, often false, visions of individualism. One certain type of advertising that seems to fit Butcherface’s media is called shock advertising. Shock advertising is generally regarded as one that “deliberately, rather than inadvertently, startles and offends its audience by violating norms for social values and personal ideals.” It particularly uses graphic images to highlight a certain cause. Some studies have shown that consumers are more likely to remember shocking advertising content over regular advertising. Essentially, advertising affects you every day and you may not even realize it. A few days after my and Chris’ reconciliation, I got a call from Dr. Fidem. He wanted to have another session, even though we had just had one a week before. I was in his office the next day. He started off by asking if I had gotten any more Butcherface media. I lied and said “No”. He also asked if I was keeping what I had in a safe place, to which I told him I was keeping it in a drawer of my desk in my room. He then wanted to talk about my obsession, and I cut him off and told him that I’ve been doing pretty well and have made big strides in fighting it. I told him about being kidnapped and waking up in Butcherface’s barn. He asked if I had called the police and I told him they would be no use. We’ve looked for their help in the past and nothing really came of it. I also didn’t want to get pulled into a potential investigation if one had actually begun. It wouldn’t be good for my life or psyche. He said he understood, but added that I shouldn’t take these attacks lightly. He got up and walked to his desk and pulled out the Butcherface mask he created for our previous session, and just held it in his hand and stared at it for a moment. He then held it up and asked why would Butcherface wear a mask, other than to hide his identity. I said I had no idea. He explained that in medieval Europe, masks were used in plays to portray allegorical creatures, often gods and monsters. They also often occur in many rituals from around the world for multiple reasons, including protection from gods and against evil spirits. Variations of these actions still happen today, like Halloween and Carnival. He then said that Adam and Eve’s use of fig leaves to cover their nakedness after eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil was an attempt to fool themselves and God. He finished up by saying faces are essential to expressing emotion. They are also the epitome of individuality. Butcherface and his followers wearing masks are essentially removing both their perceived emotions and individuality, and, in essence, becoming a massless, undefined juggernaut against what they perceive as the metaphorical masks we all wear. He said he actually found the idea encouraging, if they didn’t go about it the wrong way. He stared at it again for a moment then walked across the room and put the mask in a cabinet, which he locked. He then said that’s all he had to say and looked forward to our next meeting. That weekend, I visited my family. They knew I was seeing a psychiatrist and had been walking on eggshells from the beginning, as if some random action of their’s would set me off and I’d go on a murderous rampage. It also seemed like they felt like it was their job to “pull me back” from my problems. On this particular night, we had dinner and they sat me down to look through old photo albums. They were all the familiar pictures I had seen before. Trips to Disney World, Christmas parties, Halloween costumes, family functions, birthday parties. One of them instantly stuck out to me, though. I was a small child in it, maybe four or five years old. This would probably make it around 1990 or 1991. I was running around in what looked like a backyard. Chris was in the picture too. We were playing with other children around the same age. Some adults were in the picture as well, just talking to each other. What caught my eye was that in the background stood a tall, broad-shouldered clown. He was in profile and his face was heavily painted and emotionless. He wore baggy, yellow, white, and red clothes and a ratty old bowler hat with a large green feather sticking out of it. What made him stick out to me was that he had both of his hands up and his left hand was missing two fingers. I instantly sat forward and asked them where the picture was taken. My mother slipped the picture out of the plastic sleeve and read some writing on the back saying it was a birthday party for a classmate called Jeremy. My father spoke up and said he remembered that party and remembered that Jeremy was a very sick child with developmental issues and was most likely dead by now. I asked them if they remembered the name of the clown and they both shook their heads, saying “No”. Disappointed, I later left my parent’s house, taking the picture with me. Getting home, I found Chris in the living room, watching TV. I pulled the picture out of my pocket and showed it to him. He said “So what” at first, then I pointed the clown out to him. He had the same exact reaction I had, grabbing the picture out of my hand and sitting forward on the couch, eyes wide. After seeing Butcherface media so many times, we were sure the clown was Butcherface. He was missing the two fingers, he had the same skin tone, he even had the same body build we saw in the videos. I asked him if he remember Jeremy, because I didn’t at all. He said he vaguely did. He was apparently hospitalized constantly and was eventually removed from the school. I said we should look into it, but Chris cut me off, saying that I was getting obsessed again. I promised him I wasn’t getting obsessed. I just wanted to see where this could bring us, but he said “No” and walked into his room, slamming the door. I went to bed that night with a lot on my mind, but I ultimately did fall asleep. My sleeping had gotten better around this point. I was then woken up by a slight bang and dragging sound. I couldn’t tell what it was, but it was in my room. I stayed in bed but continued to look around for the cause of the sounds. I determined that it was coming from the left side of my bed, near the bottom, next to my desk. There was some light coming into my room through my open door to the right of my bed, though very little. I then noticed the problem with that. I always close my bedroom door when I go to bed. The dragging continued from the bottom-left of my bed and made it’s way closer. I quickly leaned in it’s direction and the dragging stopped dead. I slowly looked over the edge of the bed, but the little light coming from the door was blocked by my bed and I couldn’t even see the floor in the darkness, though I had the overwhelming feeling that something was looking at me. I slowly rolled in the opposite direction, acting like I was still asleep and waited. I had my back to where the sounds were coming from and I had the overwhelming feeling of eyes burning into the back of my neck. A cold silence filled the room for a good ten minutes. I started to wonder if I was imagining things when I all of a sudden began to hear the dragging again. It made it’s way away from me, toward the foot of my bed. I then felt a tug on my blanket. Whatever it was had accidentally stepped on the corner of the blanket hanging off the edge of the bed. I knew my mind wasn’t playing tricks on me. The dragging continued to go around my bed and was now crawling past the end of it, toward the door, but it stopped again. Whatever it was must be in the light from the door by now, but my bed blocked my view from that angle. I then remembered a mirror that sits against the far wall, near my dresser. Without using my body, I moved my eyes toward the mirror. The room was very dark, but I saw nothing. Then, I glanced down and what I saw caused me to jump out of bed with a yell. Near the darkness of the floor, barely lit by the open door, was somebody lying on the floor, wearing a burlap mask, looking back at me. I jumped up and yelled, causing the masked person to jump to their feet and run out the door. I grabbed a katana from my sword collection, that I had sitting between the bed and the nightstand just incase of such a situation and gave chase. I ran out of the room and down the hallway, throwing the sheath off the blade as I went. Getting to the living room, he made his way to the already open window near the computer desk. He threw one leg out the window and began to pull the other over the windowsill, with both hands braced against the wall, giving me time to catch up to him. I made a wild stab at him just as his other leg slid of the sill, catching his shirtsleeve near the elbow, pinning him to the wall. With him trapped, I started throwing punches at his face, but he was moving too much and I mostly made contact around his neck and upper chest. He continued pulling at his sleeve while I continued punching. His sleeve finally tore free and he fell outside to the ground, got up, and ran away. Chris had burst out of his room just as Butcherface had fallen out the window and ran up to me just in time to see him disappear into the woods. I then told him this is why I wanted to look into the clown at Jeremy’s party. Butcherface wont leave us alone. I wanted to know why. He then agreed to help me look for Jeremy‘s home. The search for Jeremy was actually pretty easy. It was a simple internet search. We didn’t actually find much on Jeremy, himself. It seemed that my father was right. Jeremy must have died at some point in the past. We just basically found an address and that’s about it. A few days later, after Chris had come home from work, we made our way to the address we found, which turned out to actually be a fifteen minute drive from my parents house. Chris’ girlfriend didn’t want to go. Upon arriving, at the location, we weren’t sure if anybody was actually still living there. The house was falling apart. One of the windows was smashed, with a sheet of plastic covering it, paint was peeling, and the entire house was slightly leaning to the left. The backyard looked similar to the picture, though overgrown. We walked up to the door and knocked, not expecting anyone to answer. We were surprised to hear movement inside the house and walking to the door and a woman’s voice saying “One minute”. The door was then opened and we were greeted by a short, woman of around 50, with thinning hair. She then froze and squinted her eyes, as if she was trying to remember something. Her eyes then went wide, and a big smile formed on her face, and she said “(Dash)! Chris! Oh my God! I haven’t seen you in ages! Come on in. I was about to feed Jeremy”. We were surprised that Jeremy was still alive and she explained that he’s had some close calls, but he’s still alive, though his health has never actually improved and she has to take care of him. Chris then said “Wait. You haven’t seen us in about twenty years. How did you remember us?” She tapped her head and said “I have good memory” with a smile, then brought us into the dimly lit living room, where Jeremy was watching TV. I wasn’t surprised that Jeremy has had more than one close call with death. He looked dead already. He was sitting on a reclining chair in his underwear. The best way I can describe him is that he resembled a skeleton with skin stretched over it. He was at least two feet shorter than me or Chris even though he was the same age as us. His head was large and misshapen with thin hair, and laid back against the back of the chair and his limbs were twig-like and malformed. He didn’t have the strength to get out of the chair if he wanted to and his breath was labored. She introduced us to him, saying “Guess who’s here, Jeremy! Your two little friends from school”. He scanned the room with his eyes, but he didn’t seem to notice us. She ushered us into the room and sat us down on the couch next to Jeremy’s chair while she got his dinner. We awkwardly said hi to him and sat down. We sat in silence, Jeremy humming a tune that seemed to only make sense to him, until his mother came back with a bowl of what appeared to be oatmeal. She began spooning the oatmeal into his mouth and we finally brought up why we were there. We asked if she remembered Jeremy’s forth or fifth birthday that had his entire class invited to it. She said yes and added that it was the best birthday party Jeremy ever had. I then pulled the picture out of my pocket and asked if she remembered the clown and if she could remember his name. She said “Oh yes. He called himself Felix the Clown. He was a very nice man. Oh! Did you get one of his presents too?!” We asked what she meant and she answered “About eight years ago. Those were very dark days for us. I was feeding Jeremy and there was a knock at the door. When I answered it, there was no one there, but a package was sitting on the porch, wrapped in brown paper. I brought it inside and ripped the paper off and it was a beautiful box. That was a good enough gift, but what was inside it was even better.” She looked to her son and said “Right, Jeremy?” He gave a weak nod. She then added “Well, tell your friends what he gave us”. He lulled his head in our direction and it seemed he noticed us for the first time, because he got a look of shock on his face and, with strength we didn’t think he had, he started to push himself away from us, as if he thought we were going to attack him. He began screaming and pulling at his mother’s clothes, trying to get away from us. She started screaming “What did you do to him?! You said something to him!” We both started stammering that we didn’t say anything. She was looking right at us, we didn’t even open our mouths when he looked at us. She continued yelling “What did you say to him?! What did you say to him?!” We stood up in an attempt to help calm him down and she screamed “Get away from him!” and she pulled him closer to herself. We said we’d go, but just as we were about to leave, in one quick movement, Jeremy pulled himself out of his mother’s arms and dived at us. I instinctively stepped out of the way but Chris wasn’t so lucky. He was tackled to the floor and Jeremy started pounding him in the face with his fists. Chris struggled to grab his arms, to stop him, but Jeremy kept getting his hands free and continued hitting him. I glanced at his mother, to see if she was getting up to help, but she was actually saying “Get him Jeremy! Get him!” I grabbed him around the chest and heaved him off of Chris and put him on the couch. Chris jumped up and we ran out the door. Getting to the car, Chris said “That was a bad idea”, and I said “Yeah, we shouldn’t have done that” and we sped out of there. While we were on the road, we got a call from Chris’ brother, Evan, who said he was on his way to our house, and had something he wanted to show us. When we got home, we found Chris’ girlfriend in the driveway. When we got out of the car, she told us there was a fire in our house, but she put it out. She brought us inside and we found “ Dive into the hive in 5” singed into the carpet in cursive, with a bottle of lighter fluid in the hallway as if it had been thrown there. It must have been lit shortly before she found it because the fire didn’t seem to spread very far and the words were legible. After opening some windows to let the lingering smoke out, Chris’ girlfriend (Since you guys have been asking, lets call her “Regina“) explained that she was here because she had gotten a strange message while driving. Her phone had rung and when she answered, a mechanical, computerized, voice said “The camera looks into your soul” and the caller hung up. Just as we were about to analyze this message, the door opened and Evan walked in. After asking what happened to our floor, he went into how he had also gotten a message from Butcherface. While in the process of moving out of his parents house, he was carrying a box out to his car, he had found that one of the boxes in his car, full of books, had been pulled out of the car, ripped open and the books ripped to pieces, and the torn pages blowing in the wind. Stuck to the side of the car with chewed gum was one of the torn pages with “A book holds a house of gold” written on it with what looked like lipstick, which made us assume that this was actually a message from False Face. When he was done telling the story, I made a joke that Butcherface has finally begun multitasking, with the message on our floor, Regina’s call, and now Evan’s note as well. He asked what was in the call she got and we explained. We all started debating on what the messages meant, when I, thinking of Evan’s note, all of a sudden remembered the book I found in the “cave” under Butcherface’s barn. This led to me having to backtrack and tell Evan about the messages I had been getting. He asked if he could see them and I went to retrieve them from the desk in my room. But, when I slid the drawer open, the media was gone. I then remembered the night I found Butcherface crawling on my bedroom floor, and realized that’s why he was here that night. To steal back his media. It was a good thing I remembered them. I recounted them to Evan in order of how I got them. “10 is time to tell a tale” “The line was crossed at 9” “Count to 8 at the last gate” “7 Gateways have already been opened, and not to heaven” “The 6 will fix” “Dive into the hive in 5” This was actually the first time I realized these messages were a countdown. In my defense, I had been getting them over a number of weeks and hadn’t even thought about their significance. But, “A book holds a house of gold” could be talking about that book I found in the cave. It could mean that reading that book meant good fortune. Evan agreed that was a good possibility, then asked what “The camera looks into your soul” could mean. I brought up Regina’s camera that I used to light my way out of the cave, and the fact that she had found pictures on it and would refuse to tell what she found in them. Chris turned to Regina and asked her what was in the series of pictures. Just like when I asked, she refused to answer. Adding it wouldn’t help anyone present if she told us. Evan jumped in and told her to stop being a hypocrite and tell us. She asked him what was in the box I had placed under the coffee table that he looked into, and he refused to tell us as well, and she said he was the one who was the hypocrite. Me and Chris stepped in and told them to calm down. Evan then appeared to jump in place out of excitement, saying “Oh! ‘Camera’ can also mean ‘Vault’ in Latin. So, ‘The Camera looks into your soul’ can actually mean ‘The Vault looks into your soul’. And, those messages he sent to you (meaning me) mention a ‘Line’, a ‘Gate’, ‘Gateways’, and a ‘Hive’. Those are all locations that can be very specific. They could all be the same place. Now we have these other messages mentioning a ‘Vault’ and a book, and you found a book in the basement of Butcherface’s barn. A ‘Vault’ can be underground, and Butcherface mentions ‘Pits’ in the videos we originally found. The ‘Vault’ could be just another term for these ‘Pits’. Could these ‘Pits’ be in the tunnels underneath the barn?” It sounded interesting, but that would mean the “Pits” would have to be a physical place, and Butcherface’s references to it always seemed to be metaphorical. When I brought this up, Evan said the only way to find out is to go there and look for ourselves. I told him I wouldn’t be going back to that barn. Besides, in the tapes, he described them as “The pits of pain and torture”. Chris agreed with me and said we would not be going back to the House of Butcherface. The next week was Christmas. My family has a large Christmas party at my aunt’s house. This was also the first time that most of my extended family got to meet Emma. We have a big dinner, then open presents. It’s not too strict and anybody can get a present for whoever you want. So, somebody can get a mountain of presents, while others can get two gift cards and that’s it. Basically, everyone gets a gift for anyone they can think of. So, if something is going on with you that everyone in the family is interested in, you most likely get more presents. That’s probably one of the only good things about this Butcherface problem. Everyone wanted to know what was happening with me. I guess they were thinking about me this year because I was buried in Christmas presents. One of the presents stuck out, though. The wrapping paper was a reddish-brown color and crudely wrapped. The tag said it was from “Santa Claws“. I ripped it open and found that it was a Special Edition of King Kong, one of my favorite movies, which was a relief. But, when I watched it a couple days later, the disk wouldn’t play. I removed it from the player and found that it was deeply scratched. I noticed that the scratches were words. Looking closer, I noticed that they said “The key will open the door b4 the tour”. About a week and a half later, I had my next session with Dr. Fidem. On my way there, I called Emma to see if we could do something afterwards. She told me she was in the city, visiting Jesse. Before I could say anything, she said “Oh! Gotta go” and hung up. Upon arriving, he asked if I had gotten any new media from Butcherface. I lied again and said no. We continued our conversation from our previous session. He then walked over to the cabinet I saw him place the Butcherface mask in during our previous session. He unlocked it, and pulled the mask out. He then went into how the Butcherface media most likely works. The thing was, he wasn’t telling me like a doctor to a patient. It was more like he wanted to talk about it with someone. He talked about how Butcherface and his disciples have the characteristics of a cult, and brought up crimes conducted by some of them, including the mass suicides committed by members of the People’s Temple in Jonestown, Guyana, and the Manson Family murders. He went on to say the idea of banding together into tight groups and the wearing of masks removes one’s individuality, which is interesting and wondered why anyone would join such a group. His secretary walked into the room and whispered something into his ear. He then put the mask back in the cabinet and excused himself, saying he‘ll be back in a moment. I watched him go and as I was turning back to my sitting position, I noticed the cabinet unlocked and hanging slightly open. I walked over and opened it up to find his Butcherface mask hanging on a hook, surrounded by an assortment of other masks, a pair of spike covered gloves, a shelf full of demonic carvings next to a stack of VHS’s, cassette tapes, and CD’s. A number of crudely made knives were also hanging against the wall. Then, I happened to glance into the right corner and sitting in a Ziploc bag was the messages from Butcherface that had been stolen from my desk by somebody in a burlap mask, including the envelope with “The line was crossed at 9” written on it, and the folded piece of paper with “7 Gateways have already been opened, and not to heaven”. The door opened and Fidem stepped in holding a manila envelope. The second he saw me standing next to the open cabinet, his mouth dropped open and he took a step back, as if he wanted to run. I picked up the bag and said “This was stolen out of my desk by somebody wearing a mask like this” and I pulled the mask off the hook and threw it at him. He let it hit him and fall to the floor without even attempting to catch it. He took a deep breath and told me how I actually wasn’t the only patient of his who has come to him trying to fight Butcherface’s draw. Most of them didn’t succeed. When he would ask them for any of the media, most of them would refuse to let it go. He wanted to see it for himself and could only think of one way to get the media. Most of the patients were too afraid to fight Butcherface if he broke into their homes. I walked up to him and pulled his collar down, revealing bruises on his neck and chest, the same place I had punched the person who stole the media from my desk. He tried to better explain himself, but I cut him off and told him I was done with our sessions and I wasn’t going to take the Zoloft anymore, if it really was Zoloft. He nervously said “I understand all that. But, somebody slid this under the door to the waiting room. It’s for you.” and held up the manila envelope. I grabbed it out of his hand and turned it around. Written in big letters on the side was my name in what I can only describe is a font created by Tim Burton. I tipped the envelope upside-down and let it’s contents fall out, which was a lone page from a calendar for the month of January. A series of red lines radiated out of the box for 1/17 and pointed to big red writing that arched around the page that said “You will be free with the 3 when you use the key”. A few days later, I got a call from Chris’ brother, Evan, who asked if I wanted to hang out. When I arrived, he was waiting for me at the front door. He welcomed me into the house and asked how I was doing. I told him about what happened with Dr. Fidem and he just nodded along then changed the subject to the fact that he was wondering why Butcherface was focusing his efforts on me. I said I didn’t want to think about it, and I was giving up anything Butcherface related after the events with Dr. Fidem. Chris was right when he said I should have left it alone a long time ago. At one point, he got a text and I noticed that when he looked at the message, he got a strange look on his face. He then put the phone on the table face-down. He continued talking and I cut him off, saying that I had been busy that day and was really thirsty. He froze for a second and seemed to look like he was holding in anger, like I dared to cut off what he was saying. He then smiled and said “Alright. I’ll get you something.” He got up and made his way to the kitchen. The second that he was out of view, I picked up his phone and looked at the message he had just received. It said “Magnus frater spectat te“, from someone named Felix. I heard him finish pouring the drink and open the fridge. He was putting the drink back in the fridge and was coming back. My Latin was a little rusty, so I quickly texted the message to my phone, so I could translate it later. I put his phone back where he had it just as he walked around the corner and gave me the glass. When he sat back down, I tried to change the subject to when he was moving out. He quickly got bored with the conversation and said he had something to do and had to leave. I went home and translated Evan’s text. I knew that I said I decided to stay away from Butcherface’s messages, but this text could mean danger to us. After a quick trip to the internet, I translated the message to be “Big Brother is watching you”. Even though “Big Brother” has obvious connections to the government, m y first thought was about Chris, Evan’s big brother. Even though he was still working at this time, I decided to text him and ask him about it. This is the series of texts between the two of us. Me “Hey. I just saw your brother today and he was acting weird. Do you know anything about that?” Chris “Clear conscience never fears midnight knocking.” Me “What? He got a text from someone mentioning “Big Brother”. Are you keeping tabs on him?” Chris “You do not exist.” Me “Evan could get hurt.” Chris “Kill one to warn a hundred.” I stopped texting at this point, but he kept sending messages, like… “Butcher the donkey after it finished his job on the mill.” “Only when all contribute their firewood can they build up a strong fire.” And… “Spectio. Signum.” At this point, I was sick of the texts and sent… “Leave me alone!” And he answered back… “You 2 will know what to do”. At this point, I just texted “Fuck off!” and the strange texts stopped. About 20 minutes later, I got another message from Chris’ phone, saying… “Dude, WTF? I lost my phone this morning and just found it on my desk. Why are you telling me to fuck off?” (this message was sent at 5 o’clock in the afternoon) To keep the rest of the story short, it turns out that he had lost his phone shortly after arriving at work that morning. He searched for it for a good while and eventually gave up and went on with his day. After being busy for most of the day, arrived back in his office to find his phone sitting right in the middle of his desk. The only message on it was my ‘Fuck off!” comment and the rest of the conversation seems to have been deleted. After clearing that up, I asked him if he had been watching his brother. He said he had since I told him about the last time I had seen his brother. I told him about the text his brother had received and warned him to watch his back. It stayed quiet for about a week, being last Friday. I had finally talked Emma into coming over my house, after not being there since our Butcherface experience, when I get a call from Chris, who was visiting his family that night with Regina. It turned out that his brother had gone missing. I couldn’t help feeling that I can never get a break, but we drove over to his family’s house to see what’s going on. Evan was still in the process of moving. His room was empty and his parents had believed that he had been staying at his new apartment over the past two days, but they had attempted to call him and he never answered. His father drove to the apartment earlier that day, when he was supposed to be home from work, and see if he was ok. He found the door locked and the mail piling up in his mailbox. His parents had a copy of the key for the apartment and were contemplating whether they should go in and investigate. We decided it was a good idea and all piled into our cars and made our way there. When we got there, it was after dark and the window shades were down. Chris’ father walked up the porch steps and unlocked the door. He pushed the door open and reached inside to flick the lights on, but the power appeared to not be on. I grabbed my flashlight from my glove box and we walked inside. We found the place empty. It turned out that the power was actually on, but there was no working lights because none of the light fixtures contained light bulbs. He had some furniture, like a kitchen set a couch and a bed, but they were absent. The floor was also strewn with empty, or half-empty, boxes. A pile of clothes were pushed into a corner of the living room. In the kitchen, the fridge door hung open and a number of pairs of shoes seemed to have just been thrown in it. A loud ring caused all of us to jump, and some to scream. It turned out to be my cell phone. I pulled it out of my pocket and saw that it was Evan. I put it on speakerphone and answered. He didn’t even give up time to say anything and immediately said “How do you like my place?” We asked how he knew we were at his apartment and he said “Look up”. I shined the light close to the ceiling and found a webcam crudely screwed into the wall, pointed at us. Chris asked him where he was. He said that he was traveling and was safe. I asked why he was doing this and how he got obsessed. He had seen less Butcherface media than me or Chris. He said “Remember that tape we found covered in wax in the attic? Well, when Dad burned all of Butcherface’s media, he didn’t really burn ALL of it. See, the wax-covered tape was never in the pile of media that we stored in the garage. I had taken it out of there months before to see if I could clean the wax off of it, and I did. I thought you guys might want to see what was on there. It took a long time, and the footage isn’t perfect, but I got the wax off and was good enough for me. Do you want to know what was on it?” We all yelled “No!” into the phone, but he hadn’t even stopped talking. He continued, saying “I knew he had friends long before you. He held parties in our house long before we moved in. Did you know that? I bet you didn’t. And, aren’t you wondering what happened to his missing fingers? Well, It was during one of these parties. People were laughing and drinking. Two people were fucking off in the far corner. Nobody seemed to care. There was a shot of a man clawing at his face. I don’t know why. Well, Butcherface eventually walked over to this table, put the camera down on it, puts his hand down, inches from the camera, and pulls out this machete and stabs it straight down, into the table, cutting off the fingers. He didn’t make a sound. That had to be fucking painful, but he didn’t make a peep. Just imagine how much control you need to do that. Anyways, after cutting off his fingers, he picks them up and eats them. He just stuffs them down his throat. Well, I had to know how anyone could be able to do that. The thing is, I didn’t have many ways to get my hand onto any new Butcherface media, especially since you guys had kept me out of the fucking loop”. We tried to tell him we kept him out of it just for this reason. We didn’t want him to be pulled in. He cut us off, saying “No! You wanted his messages for yourselves! If you didn’t, you would have ignored him a long time ago! But, you guys helped, anyways. I couldn’t find much more of his media until I found that box under (Dash‘s) table. I can’t believe you threw that away. But, don’t worry, I got it out before the trash guy could get it”. Surprised, I said “You took it?” I then realized why Butcherface had started this countdown. He thinks I still have the box, and he wants me to open it before the countdown ends. I said “Evan, he thinks I still have the box, and if he doesn’t have any evidence that I know what’s in it, he’s going to do something”. He claimed that I didn’t deserve to know what was in the box, but what he found in it has led him on the path he’s on now. We all started pleading for him to come home. He got angry and yelled for us to shut up. When he stopped talking, he immediately calmed down and said “Don’t worry, I’ll visit soon. He has many friends. You wouldn’t even believe it. And, (Dash), he left a message for you in my basement”, and hung up. We all looked at each other and turned toward the basement door. Chris’ mother told us to just leave. Regina disagreed, saying that if there’s something dangerous coming, it would be good to know. Emma agree and said if it was a warning, we should know what it is. They both grabbed my arms and pulled me toward the door. Regina opened the door and we slowly climbed down the stairs. The basement was pitch-black. All we had was my flashlight to lead us down. What we found down there was a cement floor, the middle of which had been chipped away and a pit dug into the dirt below it. Regina stayed standing on the stairs while me and Emma walked deeper into the room. Keeping our backs against the wall, we kept a distance between us and the pit and squeezed past it. A small room sat on the opposite wall. I shone the light through the small door and found something smeared on the brick wall with clumpy dirt. It was a message that said “This count is almost done and you will realize it will be you who has 1“. Emma looked at it, confused, and asked “What does it mean?” We then, all of a sudden, heard a rustling sound coming from the shadows of the dirt pit. Regina, still on the stairs, stared at the pit, saying “Something’s down there. Lets go. Move!” The loose dirt around the edge of the hole began to fall into the darkness, as if something was clawing it’s way out. I avoided the hole with the flashlight, not wanting to know what was in there, and we ran past it and up the stairs. This leads us to today. If you remember, the calendar page I received in Dr. Fidem’s office pointed to this day, 1/17/13. It’s 2 am here. I guess I’m writing this because I’m nervous. I don’t know what’s coming, and while I was typing the last paragraph, I got a text from someone named “Felix” (a contact I didn’t add to my phone) that only said “Zer0”. Evan said that Butcherface has many friends, I don’t know what to expect. He wanted me to open the box before now. That’s been made impossible because of Evan. Okay, sorry to change the subject, there was a knock at my door. I was freaked out and was almost ready to call the cops, but it’s alright, it’s just my parents. They say they want to talk. I told them I’ll come back in a second, I just wanted to finish this up. Okay, they keep knocking. I have to go. Butcherface’s Pursuit (Part 8) Not So Fast Open to Me: The gRander message will be seen by the potential alumno. Those that know the sEcret will comprehend. FVLRKCVYCBFJRCTHEXNECLWFHIKLMS
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EIWDCNUMKOLWAITSHCVBNHTCFGHGCV As to the guArdians of the rebels: It means the destruction of the blue Mountain when he repeated his offenses. The Adamantine serpent watches with both eyes. A person who shows fear: 12 5 16 8 4 24 Sea Monster: 7 1 6 9 8 13 18 8 19 Russian master of the horse: 3 5 19 9 11 22 13 9 Yiddish evil spirit: 24 9 17 17 11 3 The operation of an amplifier: 8 14 15 7 9 23 9 12 8 18 9 5 19 9 5 11 4 1 2 4 1 18 9 5 11 4 14 5 14 1 19 18 5 23 17 4 1 8 3 18 13 1 13 1 8 4 18 17 1 8 18 22 17 1 7 5 16 18 13 1 23 7 5 5 4 16 13 1 19 18 13 8 18 4 9 24 24 7 1 12 5 14 1 22 18 5 16 8 3 1 18 13 1 15 8 22 18 16 9 7 7 24 9 22 18 11 4 17 9 5 11 4 24 5 5 4 The puPpet’s strings have been cut. Open to me: I am a Great one, the son of a Great one, 1 of many Great ones. I have come to you, and am with you, in order to show the correct path. The Red Ghost sees into the night of falsehoods that avoid the vaults. Hail to the many that dwell in the Pits of pain and torture. The Pits give truth. Jump in. They are a mundus. Shake off the idle fancies that slacken you. Show your true face. The hours of the aimless are breathing faint and low. I speak to re-assure you. The door will be opened to you 2. You will also be 1 of many. Enter the Beth-El of the Vault. Most do not understand. Mere puppets, they who come and go, wandering in a valley of glass. Mimes in false forms of a dumb God. Those that don’t understand must be shown the correct path or cast aside. Open to me: We have come b4. The next step has been taken. Steps of many. The devices of knowledge spread, much like how we have spread. They are tools. A tool’s purpose is to repair. It is you that need to be repaired. We are the hand that operates the tools. It is the duty of the tool-bearer to insure the machine operates accurately. Machines that don’t operate accurately can be repaired using these tools. But, many machines can not be repaired. They are forever broken. If a machine can not operate accurately it must be discarded. Do not mourn the useless discarded, though. They can still be used to help in repairing the damaged machines that are worthy. Do not be fooled, we are not b9. Open to me: then I will tell what I have seen. I come to you as a messenger. The messenger knows the truth. Be a messenger. The many Shujaa spread even farther. You have seen our signs. The ambrosia of truth satisfies your hunger for the real knowledge. The more readily inclined are being recruited. This has been done before. The herd h8 those that are informed. Do not fear their hate, use it against them. Idle threats and jest will not harm you. They may attempt to cause you pain. Pain is a message of what is true. Your pain will be passed to the dull swords of the armory. That feeling of self-realization is not false. Be the superior soul. Do not believe the exiles. Butcherface Mystery (Part 9) Okay, I’m going to start off by saying that I’m not Dash32. Well, this is his account, but I didn’t create it or write the Butcherface stories. I don’t know why I got pulled into this because, as far as I know, I have no connection to Dash or Butcherface. In fact, I had only read the original three stories and didn’t even know the story had continued until I got an email. To distinguish my story from Dash’s, just call me “Hawk“. It all started almost a month ago when I had gotten an email from a good friend named Alan. I found it kind of strange because we never really email each other and mostly communicate through other means, like texts, phone calls, twitter, etc. It was titled “Auseil Equinox”. When I opened it, it started with a seemingly random word, then below it was a link, followed by random numbers and ramblings. When I clicked on the link it brought me to Dash32’s reddit userpage. I was very confused by this and had no clue what to do next. Making a stab in the dark, I typed the word from the email into the password bar and “Dash32” into the username bar and clicked the button and was surprised to find that I was now signed in to reddit as Dash. I went back to the email to see if I could make sense of the rest of the message. Having no clue what it meant, I saved it in a word document for later. Here’s the message. “[the password] [the link] Not Fast Enough D-O U O S V A V V-M 1I2I1I4I9I8 2I8I10I1I22 11I15 16I9I18I13 13I9I11I2I4I9 1I9I1I22 MacGilGunn- Superstitio victimarius Mondo King” And that was the end of it. I sent a response back to Alan asking what the hell this meant and went to bed. When I woke up the next morning, I checked to see if he got back to me but he didn’t. We actually work pretty close to each other, so I decided to ask him about it later that day. I gave him a quick call on my way to work and asked him about it. He had no clue what I was talking about and we made plans to hang out after work. That afternoon, we met up at a bar to talk about the email but when I went to show it to him on my phone, it was gone. It appeared to have been deleted from my message queue. I know I didn’t delete that message. He checked his email and found no evidence of the message as well. We decided to shake it off. Alan joked that we should screw around with Dash’s page. I decided not to because I wanted to see where this would go. We had a drink and eventually went our separate ways. The drive home was creepy. I felt like I was being watched. Not to mention that I nearly had a head on collision with an old truck coming in the opposite direction, on my side of the road, blaring it’s horn. When I pulled into the driveway, I found my house’s front door wide open with all of the lights on in the house. I was worried about burglars being in the house as well as the fact that, at the time, I had a new puppy that I had only had for a little over a week. I was certain that he’d be gone. I slowly walked into the house, calling my puppy’s name and looking for anybody trying to hide somewhere in the house. I heard nothing and fully expected the dog to have run off. The furniture had been tossed around the room and some was missing. I got even more nervous, starting to think that they had hurt or even killed him. That’s when I began to hear his bark down the hallway toward my bedroom. I ran down the hall and turned the corner to find my bedroom door open, but the missing furniture had been stacked up in front of the door, blocking my way in. I pulled the furniture down and my dog bolted out of the room as fast as he could. I glanced into the room and saw his bed sitting in the middle of the room. Someone had thrown a handful of rusty nails into it. I turned around and chased him down. Catching him, I looked over his body and was thankful to find that he appeared okay. I called the cops soon after. They arrived and looked around the property. They asked if anything was missing. I hadn’t even thought of that until that moment and looked around to find nothing missing. While they continued to look around, I got a call from Alan asking for the password to Dash32’s reddit page. I told him it wasn’t a good time and explained what was going on. The cops made a report of the incident and left. Needing to relax, I sat down at my computer and realized it was on and in sleep mode. I shook the mouse and the screen blinked on the page for Butcherface part 4. That’s when I decided to read the rest of the chapters. Deciding to read through the chapters slowly, hoping to find anything I might miss if I had just skimmed through them, I found myself reading the next part on my phone at work on a slow day. I was about halfway through and getting into it, when my phone rang, making me jump out of my chair. I had gotten an email from another friend. It was titled “Sojourn the Phoenix of the Blue Peak”. Inside was another link. Clicking on it, I was brought to a site titled “Tomb of the Scarlet Mother”. It’s layout was chaotic and full of pictures, videos, writings, and links that went to other, seemingly random, websites. A few went to reddit. Randomly clicking around the site, I eventually found myself on a page called “Ad Vertere Rutilus Phasma”. Much of it was written in different languages, so I didn’t get the full story, but it seemed to tell the story of a woman named “Egeria”. From what I got, she had somehow been gravely injured, having lost most of her skin, and died, but not before whispering what would apparently be the group’s “dogma”, or rules, into the ear of a loved one. The last few paragraphs switched to other languages so I wasn’t able to get the rest of the story. I also found another page titled “Mundus” which was just full of pictures of holes dug into the ground or flights of stairs leading down into the darkness. Some of them were crudely dug into the ground while others had cement walls and metal stairs. I bring this up because it instantly reminded me of the constant references to “pits” throughout the site and Dash’s stories. I immediately called the friend the message was from, Claire, and asked her if she sent it. She claimed to have no idea what I was talking about. I didn’t learn the importance of this site until I had read farther into Dash’s stories. Nothing else had actually for the rest of the week. That weekend, I went to the movies with some friends, including Alan and Claire. Afterwards, we went to the mall for dinner. The strange events from earlier in the week had never even come up, in fact. At one point, a girl that appeared to be in her late teens walked by us, staring at me as she went by. She was a little shorter than me and very thin. Not anorexic looking but still extremely thin. I then left to go to the bathroom. As I was walking down the deserted hallway to the men’s room, the girl stepped out of the unisex bathroom with her back to me. She turned around and her eyes locked with mine and she wouldn’t look away. I noticed her eyes so quickly because they were surrounded by dark bruises like someone had just been beating her. They were a deep black and blue color with yellow around the edges. Tears were also pouring down her cheeks. She didn’t have those bruises when she passed our table earlier. As she passed me, with her eyes still looking at me, she grabbed my arm and pulled me close. She appeared to lose her footing and I pulled her back up, believing that she was grabbing me because she was about to pass out. But, she leaned in and nervously whispered into my ear “Stop reading”. She then let go of my arm and kept walking without looking back. As soon as she was out of sight, I glanced into the unisex bathroom to see if the person who had beat her was in there, but it was empty. The only explanation I have is that she did it to herself. That Monday, I went back to work. I had brought my personal laptop with me in my bag to get checked out by a friend in tech support. Later in the day, I decided to check my email but it wouldn’t accept my password. I hadn’t changed that password in years. It had no reason to keep me locked out of my account. Frustrated, I decided to go to the bathroom. After taking my time in the stall, and reading further into the Butcherface stories on my phone, I finished my business and stepped in front of the sink. I had just looked at myself in the mirror when everything went black. I could hear voices of concern and surprise through the bathroom. The lights had gone out and I couldn’t see my hand two inches from my face if I wanted to. I felt my way to the door and made my way into the hallway and the office area. Even though I couldn’t see anything, everyone was obviously nervous. People were asking if everything was okay, others wondering if we were going to have to go home. One person near me asked why the emergency lights hadn’t come on and it was a good question. A red flash accompanied by a click then broke the darkness from the middle of the room, giving a split-second, red-tinged, image of my co-workers and I. Another one lit up the room again. Only this time, it was closer to me. A third flash exploded right in front of me, blinding me. I stepped back and leaned against the wall, rubbing my eyes and blinking until my vision had come back just in time to see another flash down the hall behind me, as if whatever it was had just passed me and kept going. An orange glow then appeared on the other side of the room. I instinctually began making walking toward it, pushing my way through people who had left their desks out of my way. A yell then rose up from it’s direction and someone began shouting “Fire! Fire!” I began running the rest of the way and found that the fire was coming from my cubicle. I arrived and found my laptop had been removed from my bag, placed on the center of my desk, flipped open and was now engulfed in flames. John, one of my co-workers, pushed past me with a fire extinguisher and put the fire out. Since they couldn’t figure out what was wrong with the power, we were allowed to go home (as a side note, I was eventually blamed for the fire but was ultimately let off the hook after a review of the building’s security cameras showed me walking to the bathroom. They said that an accelerant had been poured on my laptop before being lit on fire. That was evidence of arson). When I got home, I got a call from Alan, claiming that he could see crowds of people leaving my building from his office window. I told him what happened and he told me to stop reading the Butcherface stories. I mentioned that I doubted that there was a connection and was just a coincidence. He told me to be safe and said he needed to get back to work. I said goodbye, hung up, and went back on reddit signed on as Dash, where I saw that he had a new message from a member called “The_Disciple”, a year old account with no posts or submissions. I thought the name was a little on the nose but I read the message. It read… “Open to me: As to the memories for forever- It was when they buried the memories that they drew first blood…” The message had been sent around the same time the power went off in my office. It sounded like a random message, but something did stick out to me, the phrase “memories for forever”. It sounded familiar to me. It took me a little while but I eventually recalled where I remembered it from. It was the motto of a daycare center I spent my youth in. My mother would drop me off there when I was still too young for school. This was about twenty years ago. I also knew that it had closed about ten to fifteen years ago. Because of this, I didn’t know what else to do. The place was closed. What was I supposed to do? After about a week and a half of nothing else happening, I had caught up on the rest of Dash’s stories. I had also realized that I hadn’t talked to Alan in a while. I’d call, text, even email, but wouldn’t get a response. One day, I waited outside his office to catch him leaving, but he never left. The next day, I stopped by his house after work. The lights were on and I knocked on the door but he didn’t answer. I yelled that I knew he was home and to just talk to me. He then heard movement inside the apartment and the door slowly opened and there stood Alan. He looked tired, yet angry. I asked him why he’d been avoiding me. All he said was that he couldn’t. He asked if him asking me to stay away from the Butcherface stories had pushed me to keep reading them. I admitted that may be true and his eyes got angry and he made a condescending smirk and he said “You never listen, do you”. He stepped back and attempted to close the door. I stopped him and went to answer him but he cut me off and said “You’re not alone” then pushed my hand away from the door and slammed it shut. After this encounter with Alan, I didn’t know what else to do. So, this past Friday, I took the day off of work and decided to drive back to my hometown and visit the daycare center. I made sure to do it during the day. I had no interest in visiting there at night. Also, why do Dash and his friends always have to investigate these types of places at night? That’s just not practical. Anyways, I arrived at the daycare around noon. I had expected it to have been bought up and made into someone’s home or another business, but it was still boarded up. It was in a rural area and had no neighbors, being surrounded by woods. I broke through a couple of the boards of the fence that encircled the building’s playground and slipped in. I made my way to the back door, which I remembered was surrounded by a window. I had picked up a rock from the side of the road before slipping through the fence, expecting to need to break one of the windows but found one of them already broken and wriggled inside. I had brought a flashlight but the sun coming in through the windows in the back of the building lit it pretty well. It was a lot more dusty and empty than I remembered but memories still began flooding back. I remembered making one of those paper turkeys using a trace of your hand for one Thanksgiving in one corner of the room. There was a table and some desks stacked up against the far wall and I began my search there. Looking closely at the furniture, I walked along the length of the wall of fixtures analyzing it. About halfway through, I found a very small carving of a CV symbol about the size of a penny cut into the bottom of one of the desks. I continued my search and near the end, I found a door hidden behind the stack of desks. I tried to slowly slide the bottom desk out of the way but the stack lost it’s balance and caused an avalanche of heavy wood that came crashing to the floor. The sound was deafening in the otherwise silent room, but the door was now exposed. I didn’t remember the door but it’s probably because I had never gone through it as a child. I pulled it open. It was surprisingly heavy but I got it open enough to slip through and find a staircase leading down to a basement. I pulled out my flashlight and made my way down. It was very dark and the flashlight barely cut through it. The floor was cement but it had a layer of dirt above it. In the dirt were hundreds of broken pieces of old CD’s and a huge mound of shredded paper lay in the far corner. It was soggy and packed down like it had been there for a while. That was it. Maybe that’s the twist. I bet you were expecting a twist of a climax, but that’s it. That’s all I’ve been able to find. I know Dash has said we should stay away from this stuff, but I want to know what’s going on, so is there anyone out there who can track down the Butcherface website I came across? What about the messages that haven’t been deciphered yet? I’m not scared or obsessed. I have been losing sleep over it, though. These series of events just came out of nowhere and have left me curious. It’s been on my mind and I just want to figure it out. Butcherface’s Plan (Part 10) This is Hawk. The truth is, not much has happened for months. All of this happened within the past couple weeks. After the events of the previous chapter, everything seemed to go back to normal. I went back to work. Alan began talking to me again. There were no strange messages or encounters for a long time. I thought that Butcherface had tried to recruit me and failed. I beat him. He ran away with his tail between his legs. I was wrong. He didn’t fail. I did. It had been about 5 months after my trip to my former daycare which ended up being kinda disappointing. Two weeks ago, it was about 11:30 at night when there was a knock at my door. I looked out the window and saw a woman standing at my door. Wondering why somebody would be knocking at my door this late, I answered the door a little indignantly. She said “Hello” and asked “Are you [Hawk]?” I said “Yes” and she appeared to take a step back like she was nervous. She then introduced herself as “Ruby” and asked if I remembered her. I admitted that I didn’t. She explained that we actually went to high school together. I then began to remember her face and name. It was pretty cool to be seeing her again but it was a little late for reminiscing so I asked her if I could help her with anything. She then cleared her throat and got to the point, asking if I had been having what she called “strange occurrences”. Not remembering my Butcherface encounter months before, I said “No”. She shrugged and appeared disappointed. She reached into a bag she had slung over her should and pulled out something she continued to hold tightly in her hand and said “Well, something strange has been happening to me over the past few months. I’ve been getting strange messages, break-ins, thefts.” I instantly realized what she was talking about and she appeared to see the realization on my face because she continued, “Something, or somebody, killed both of my cats and stuffed their bodies into empty paint cans. I’m being stalked by this group of people. I don’t know what they want.” She then asked “Does this look familiar?” and showed me what was in her hand. It was a jagged piece of wood a couple inches long. I didn’t know why she asked that but she then flipped it over to reveal a much flatter, smoother, side with a CV symbol carved into it. I recognized it immediately as the symbol I found carved into the bottom of a desk at the daycare on my visit several months earlier. Somebody had torn it off the desk and sent it to Ruby. She said “It was sent to me along with this” and she pulled a copy of our high school yearbook out of her bag. She had apparently received the items buried in the bottom of a tin box full of random stones sent to her from Las Vegas. She explained that she began contacting people from the book, jokingly thanking me for having a name close to the beginning of the alphabet. I invited her inside and we talked for almost two hours about our Butcherface encounters. The second she sat down, she pulled out a pad of paper and began writing very detailed notes, documenting every single detail. We agreed that there must be more people from our class that has had contact with Butcherface. We ended the conversation agreeing to collaborate on our research. If you guys are interested, I’ll ask Ruby if she wants to post her experiences as well. That Friday, we got back together and discussed where we should go next in our search. I brought up the yearbook she received and asked her if anybody else she had talked to had had any Butcherface experiences. She admitted that there were some people who refused to talk to her, and other that she couldn’t even track down, but those that she did talk to seemed to have no clue what she was talking about. Our conversation was cut short by my phone ringing, causing the both of us to jump. It was Alan, who was calling to ask if I wanted to hang out. I told him I had company. He asked who it was and I told him about Ruby, only telling him that she contacted me to catch up with each other. He said he remembered her and asked if he could stop by. I glanced at her and she shook her head “Yes” so I agreed. After hanging up with him, I asked Ruby to not mention Butcherface to Alan. It took me a long time to convince him that I abandoned my search for Butcherface and it would only cause problems if he found out. She agreed and we continued our conversation until Alan arrived. Ruby slipped her notebook into her bag when he came in and greeted him with a smile. He stayed for a couple hours and we reminisced about high school, prom, our senior prank, the time a classmate threw up on our math teacher after sneaking in a bottle of tequila. He mentioned regretting losing track of our fellow classmates since many of us had known each other for most of our lives, which isn’t surprising since we grew up in a small town. He noted that some of us had even known each other since daycare. That’s when a light bulb went off in my head and I glanced at Ruby, who glanced back at me with what I guess was the same look I had on my face. After a little bit more looking back, Alan admitted it was getting late and decided it was time to leave. He got up and asked Ruby if she was leaving. She said she’d be leaving soon and Alan looked at me with a “Yeah, I bet” look on his face. He practically winked at me. He said “Alright, I’ll just leave you two alone” with a goofy smile on his face and left. I almost told him why she was really there just to get that dumbass look off his face, but he was gone so we got back to our conversation. Alan’s mention of the fact that many of us went to the same daycare made us realize the connection. Comparing the number of people in our grade that went to both the daycare and our high school will vastly lower the list of potential Butcherface disciples. I remembered that the daycare had given a “yearbook” to the parents of kids who were leaving to go to school for the first time. The book had a list of those kids and I thought it may be a good start by finding that book. The only thing was, the book was in storage at my parents house. The next day, last Saturday, I drove back home to my parents house to see if I could find that book. I had already made plans to meet Ruby when I got back home to compare books. I passed the daycare on the way, resisting a strong urge to stop and go in there again. I arrived at my parents house and began digging through the stacks of boxes in their basement. They refused to help me search for some reason. In the process, I found my high school yearbook but all of the pages were ripped out. I don’t remember doing that. It was just an empty hardcover binding. I continued searching for the daycare book but came up empty. I knew it should be there. If my mother still stores my pumpkin costume from my very first Halloween, she should still have this damn book. I lifted up boxes, seeing if it was on the floor under them. I flipped through other, larger books, to see if it had somehow slipped between their pages. I raised my hands in defeat and let out a big sigh, then my hand bumped into some papers between two crates on a nearby shelf. I pulled them out just for the hell of it and there was the daycare book! I was so close to giving up. I flipped through the pages and recognized some names but wanted to get it back to Ruby since she was the only one to have our high school yearbook, apparently. I jumped into my car and left for home. I made my way toward the daycare again on the way back and felt that impulse to go in there once again. I had no real curiosity to go in there. I had already seen what was in there. There was no point. Besides, Ruby was waiting for me. As I was passing it, I found myself glancing back and forth at the road and the daycare. I finally said “Screw it” and swerved into the parking lot. Grabbing the flashlight that I left in my car since the last time I was here, I slipped through the hole in the fence I made in my previous visit and squeezed through the broken window. I turned around expecting to find the place exactly the same as I had left it and ready to convince myself to leave, but I was wrong. It was completely different. The desks that had been stacked up against the far wall were now on the floor, perfectly placed like a classroom facing the left wall in the back of the room. There was a brown stain on all of the walls from floor to ceiling that I didn’t notice last time I was here. The nearest corner to my left had a mass of yarn and rope hanging from the ceiling dangling down to the floor, like vines hanging in a thick jungle. The wall to the kitchen area had been knocked down and replaced with a thick membrane of saran wrap. It also appeared that somebody had dipped their bare feet into dark orange paint and walked around the building. I followed one route of footprints into the basement. I pulled out my flashlight and shone it around the room. The last time I was here, the basement’s floor was covered with dirt, broken CD’s and soggy paper. All of this was now gone, revealing the cement floor, which was surprisingly clean. The room was now littered with twine stretched all throughout the area like a spider web. The strings went from one wall to another in a chaotic pattern with each end taped to pictures of people, newspaper clippings, map locations, teddy bears stabbed into the walls with knives and a number of CV symbols. It’s like this person was trying to find some sort of pattern or connections between people. I didn’t even leave the stairs and enter the room, I just turned around and went back up to the first floor. I then decided to go up to the second floor. I had never been up there, either as a child or the last time I broke in here, since it was an office area. I made my way up the stairs and found only one room. I slowly pushed open the door a little bit and glanced through the crack. The room seemed quiet. I then shoved the door open and was shocked to see someone standing on the other end of the room looking at me! I jumped back and was ready to run out of there when I happened to look again and realize it was a large ornate antique mirror sitting against the opposite wall facing the door. It scared the crap out of me. I walked through the door and was kinda relieved to find the room looking relatively normal. A large pile of dirty rags and clothes sat off to the corner. I assumed it was used as a bed. I walked closer to the mirror and realized that I didn’t recognize my reflection because the mirror had a series of large cracks that distorted the image. I then noticed that it’s wooden frame had a series of detailed carvings. Two carven faces sat at the top just staring down at anyone who happened to be looking into the mirror. Down the left side appeared to be the image of a screaming woman with deep pits for eyes. Her hair appeared weightless as if she was under water. Farther down was what appeared to be another woman (or maybe the same woman) lying in a bed with a number of emotionless faces looking down at her, like some sort of vigil. Near the bottom of the frame was the opposite image, a woman’s face looking over a number of emotionless faces. A series of wavy lines ran down the frame connecting the images like a story. The right side of the frame showed one face looking down over two more smaller faces. Beneath that was two faces hovering over four more smaller faces. The numbers of both rows of faces grew exponentially larger farther down the frame. Two CV symbols sat at the bottom of the frame, matching the two faces on the top. While I was studying these images, I noticed movement in the mirror. I looked at the reflection and the movement appeared to stop. I looked behind me and saw nothing. My attention went back to the frame, but movement caught my eye again. I saw what it was this time. The pile of rags in the corner of the room had lifted up and scurried across the floor behind me then dropped back down and stayed still. I froze, not knowing what to do. I looked at the door behind me in the mirror’s reflection. It was right there, but the rags were now between me and the door, cutting me off from escape. I slowly began reaching for the flashlight sticking out of my pocket. The rags then rose up and stood about six feet tall. It was a person covered in rags from head to toe. I decided this was my chance and spun around and raised the flashlight over my head, ready to swing down on the attacker, but the rags were already flying at me yelling a dark “Raaauuuuggggghhhhhh!” and slamming me into the mirror. The glass shattered and I fell to my right, landing on my shoulder. The frame then slid sideways down the wall and landed with a loud thud and wrenching wood behind me. The “Ragman” then began yelling “He broke it! He broke it! It’s supposed to be finished! He’s supposed to know!”. He then then began tearing at the rags on his chest while screaming at the ceiling. He then bent down and let out a guttural roar into my face, then spun around, ran to the door, jumped up, grabbed the top of the door frame, swung into the hall like a monkey, kicked off the opposite wall and disappeared around the corner. I was left there frozen. I kept my eyes on the door in case he came back, but he didn’t. I then looked myself over to make sure I wasn’t hurt. There was a very small cut just above my elbow, but it didn’t hurt. I slowly got up and made my way to the door and cautiously crept down the stairs. I heard muttering on the first floor and knew he was still there. Hoping to sneak past him and get the hell out of there, I made it to the bottom of the steps and turned the corner, only to find him standing in front of the desks, like a teacher, staring at me. The rags hanging over his face had been flipped back over his head, exposing his face. He stopped muttering and said “You need to be taught a lesson”. He then picked up a long piece of wood from the floor and held it like a teacher’s pointer and began pacing back and forth. He stopped and said “Did you know that if you get decapitated, you can still be conscious for about 25 seconds after losing your head?” Confused, all I could say was “… What?” He seemed to ignore me because he continued, saying “Did you know a quarter of all Americans have been on television? Not all of them actually know they have” and began hysterically laughing. He then stopped and his demeanor became very dark and he said “Oh, and the most interesting thing of all is that you’re acing your test. You started out as such a problem child but you’ve really been doing your homework. A+ material”. He then stayed silent and just stared at me. A creepy grin spread across his face and he continued to stare. Keeping my eyes on him, I made my way to the broken window, slipped through it as fast as I could and ran to my car to get the hell out of there. Making it home, I found Ruby sitting in her car in the driveway. She jumped out and asked me where I had been. I told her to follow me into my place. As soon as I entered the living room, I plopped down onto the couch, exhausted. She asked me why I was late and I just told her she wouldn’t believe me. I handed her the book and she pulled the yearbook out of her bag and began flipping through it. Ultimately, we found out that 14 people were in both books. One of them was always a sickly kid and I’m pretty sure he passed away a few years ago. So, he wasn’t added to the list. We decided to do a little research and attempt to contact these people during the coming week. We began contacting people earlier this week. Most of them didn’t seem to really understand why we were calling and just seemed to want to reminisce. There were a few people we couldn’t locate and a few who weren’t interested in talking. During our research, Alan still believed that me and Ruby were seeing each other so he asked if we wanted to hang out on Wednesday after work. We agreed and went to a local restaurant with him and his girlfriend. We had a whole story prepared about how we met and what we’ve been doing, in an attempt to keep Butcherface out of the conversation. Everything was going good until I noticed a man enter the restaurant and walk right toward us with something large in his hand that I couldn’t quite see because of the crowd blocking my view. He had a thick hobo-like hair and beard but he was wearing a suit and tie. He stopped in front of our table and I realized that he was carrying a large briefcase, which he put on the table in front of me. He said “I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone” and turned and walked out of the restaurant. Alan’s girlfriend asked who he was. I only shrugged, having no clue. We watched the man out the window walk down the parking lot and get into a waiting car. I could just barely see the driver, who was wearing sunglasses, even though it was night. The driver then held up a cellphone and typed something on it. Alan’s phone then rung. He picks it up, saying he got a text. I asked who it was and he said he didn’t know. The number wasn’t any of his contacts. He then read the message silently and I noticed his smile slowly fall away and he looked back up at me, looking very angry, and said “You’ve been following him again?!” I asked who he was talking about and he yelled “Butcherface!” He told his girlfriend to get up, they’re leaving. He then looked back at me and said “I had to learn it from some random stranger”, holding up his cellphone. He didn’t say anything else and just left. Me and Ruby just looked at each other, not knowing what to say. We then looked at the briefcase and decided to bring it back to my place, where we got a better look at it. It was a large briefcase. It wasn’t in very good condition, being covered in clumps of dirt and some of the leather peeling off it. It was still locked and we couldn’t get it open. That was fixed with a few whacks from a hammer and screwdriver. Inside was a large clump of crumbling cement. This confused us until Ruby pointed out that something was incased in the cement. I began chipping away at it while we finished up contacting the people on the list without anything sticking out. We wondered where we should go next. I wanted to talk to Alan and convince him that neither of us are obsessed with Butcherface. Ruby wanted to continue working on the list of people even though that ran out of leads. I asked her what else we can do with the list and she said we could visit the people we couldn’t get into contact with. I felt that wouldn’t do much good but she pointed out that that’s how she found me. We began visiting the remaining people on the list on Thursday afternoon. Not much came from it, though I did get through the chunk of cement from the briefcase and found a log of wood covered in CV carvings. I was stumped again until I noticed that there appeared to be a split down the middle that was glued together with some kind of resin. Believing that there was something in the log, I began to cut through the log slowly, not wanting to damage whatever was in it. When I finally got through it, I found a bundle of tightly wound metal wires. These wires are obviously wrapped around something else and I decided I’ll cut through it with some wire cutters, but we wanted to check the last person on our list. This guy actually only lived about a half an hour away from where I live. When we arrived, there was something about the landscape that looked familiar, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Ruby knocked on the door and we waited for someone to answer. She knocked again but nobody came to the door. We waited a couple more minutes and I told her we should leave. She knocked one more time and a voice came through the other side of the door asking what we wanted. Ruby yelled through the door that, if this is the person we’re looking for, the two of us are former classmates of theirs and wanted to talk. The door opened and we were nervously greeted by a man with glasses and semi-long brown hair. I didn’t remember the name on our list, but I remembered the face. He asked what we wanted to talk about. Ruby started into the story slowly. He appeared to get nervous and glance back into his house, as if hoping somebody in there wasn’t listening. He cut her off and said “I know what you’re going to say. Just stop. Leave it alone. Don’t do what I did. I made the biggest mistake of my life trying to discover the truth of Butcherface. You don’t want to go further. Believe me.” Ruby tried to calm him down but he just raised his voice and continued, “It’s not just something you can ignore. You have to fight it and continue to fight it. I thought I beat him but he just kept coming and I didn’t know how deep I really was. I had to cut myself off from everything!”. Ruby began to ask him what he knows about Butcherface while I got a second look at our surroundings, noticing the boulder on the side of the road with the bent tree behind it and the layout of his house. I cut Ruby off and said “You’re Dash32, aren’t you”. He froze for a second and I could tell that he contemplated slamming the door in our face, but he just let out a sigh and said “… Yes”. I told him that there are a lot of people who want to know what happened to him. He let out another sigh and said “That was my biggest mistake”. Ruby told him about some of the experiences we’ve had and there was much more. He looked away from us and watched a car slowly drive by us with dark tinted windows. He took a step back into his house and I said the first thing that came to my mind, which was “Listen. We don’t have to talk now, but please contact us when you can”. He stood in the doorway, silent. Obviously nervous about what may come next but he then agreed. I gave him my cellphone number and Ruby and I left. I wasn’t able to sleep tonight so I started to cut through the bundle of wire from the briefcase very carefully. It’s thick and tightly wrapped around whatever is inside it. I took a break to type this out because I have a lot on my mind. About halfway through writing this, I got a call from Dash asking for us to meet with everything we know about Butcherface and his group. He also mentioned that he may be back on here to update you guys on what’s been going on with him. It was right after I hung up the phone that I got a feeling of dread. I’m starting to think I was part of Butcherface’s plan all along. Dash had to cut himself off from almost all technology to get away from Butcherface and apparently succeeded. Did I just draw Dash back into Butcherface’s grasp? Credit: A.J. Garlisi Copyright Statement: Unless explicitly stated, all stories published on Creepypasta.com are the property of (and under copyright to) their respective authors, and may not be narrated or performed under any circumstance.