I know this is going to sound dumb as hell but... I think my pillow had something living inside of it. I get that that’s the strangest thing to say but I don’t really have any other way to explain what I’ve experienced to this point.
This all started a while ago on a normal school night. Nothing was really out of the ordinary save for some extra difficult homework. I had prepared for bed and as I laid down to sleep, I swore I could hear someone whispering to my immediate left. Of course, this scared the hell out of me and I jumped out of bed trying to determine who was in my room.
Strangely enough, as soon as I sat up, the whispering stopped. I turned on my light to search around and walking through my empty apartment I saw nothing. If I recall correctly, I don’t even think my neighbor, who was usually obnoxious late into the night, was making a sound.
I shrugged this off as a drowsy audio hallucination and tried to sleep but as soon as my head hit the pillow I could hear the voice again. This made me search my apartment for a second time just in case. This time I went as far as to thoroughly search under my bed and in my cabinets to make sure that no one was stowed away. But again, my search turned up nothing.
Once more I tried to sleep but for the third time I could clearly hear the whispering. But this time, I noticed something. As I put my head back down, the voice grew louder. It was at this point that I realized, the voice wasn’t just coming from from the house. It was coming from my pillow.
Admittedly, this next choice was... Stupid. I know. I should’ve thrown my pillow in the dumpster as soon as I started hearing fucking a voice coming from it but... I was curious. I wanted to know what it had to say. I’ve always had an interest in the macabre and this seemed too interesting to just give up on. But the voice told me such awful things. It detailed stories or murder and violence beyond anything I could’ve imagined. It was... sickening. But I just couldn’t seem to break away from it. I was so enthralled by the stories that I think I spent hours listening to it speak.
I think it was at around 3AM that I was ready to throw my pillow in the closet and call it a night but before I lifted my head up, it told me that it had one more secret. It told me that that day at school, I would see something horrible. Something that would burn an image into my mind that I would never be able to erase. And then... It went silent.
I didn’t get much sleep the rest of the night. Luckily, I had class at 10 and with a mixture of coffee and adderall I was able to drag myself out of bed and make my way to lecture. The day started off pretty normal. I only had two classes and as I made my way out of my second class to go home, I had all but forgotten what the voice inside my pillow said to me. Honestly, I was concerned with sleep more than anything.
But as I walked towards the parking lot, immediately a scream pierced the calm serenity of my small college. I looked to my immediate left and saw two guys fighting violently. A smaller boy no bigger than 5’6 was fighting for his life against a mountain of a man. The bigger man fought with such violence and rage that in my moment of shock, I had assumed the boy had done something horrible to set him off like that. I watched as two other students raced by me to try and subdue the large man but he shook them off with ease and began bashing the smaller boy’s head into the concrete and pulling at his neck. Despite the the two students trying to intervene, he just... he wouldn’t stop.
Immediately I snapped back to reality and ran over to help with more students jumping in and calling 9-1-1 to report the assault. I remember that even though it took roughly five of us to hold the man down, I looked at the unmoving body of the boy. His skull had punctured through the skin and I swear I saw brain matter among the the large pool of blood collecting on the concrete. What I could only assume to be teeth were also strewn about and I think... I think his neck was snapped backwards. I’m not sure on that last part because among all the other stuff, I think my mind just doesn’t want to believe it was in the position I saw it in.
The voice was right. It’s an image that I will never forget. All I can remember is the ambulance and police showing up. The boy was rushed to the hospital and from the rumors around school, he survived. Whatever that was worth. Apparently, he was in a vegetative state and there was no hope to bring him back. As for the man, from what we knew, he actually never even knew the boy. I don’t even think he was a student. From what his family and friends had said, the two weren’t even acquaintances. I’m not sure I believe that though. The attack was so... Violent. How could someone have that kind of hate towards a stranger?
This goes without saying but, that fucked me up for a few days. I remember going home the same night and wanting answers. Was this a strange coincidence? Did the voice living in my pillow know something? No. I knew deep inside that the voice wasn’t just guessing. It knew exactly what would happen.
I immediately found the pillow in my closet and tried to listen for the voice but it remained silent. I decided to wait until it got dark to hear what it had to say but for whatever reason, the voice refused to speak up. As far as I could tell, it was just a regular pillow.
I slept through the night with nothing of note happening and the next few days went by pretty normally. Of course, I had opted to skip class due to the mental trauma of what I had seen. It wasn’t until Monday of the next week that things started up again.
I had decided to go to sleep early and to my surprise, I heard the voice again. Catching me off guard, I popped up and examined my pillow. This time, the voice seemed... louder. I didn’t need to be laying directly on top of it to hear it this time. It repeated the horrors of what I saw in excruciating detail. I lived that moment again in my head as somehow the voice seemed to tell the story in a more vivid fashion than even my own mind could capture. And then it stopped. I picked up the pillow and it asked me if I wanted to know more.
At that moment I should’ve taken it, tied it to the heaviest thing I could find, and then throw it out to sea. But, I didn’t. Again, some strong morbid curiosity hit me and I simply told it that I wanted it to keep telling me things. I wanted to know of the horrors it somehow was aware of. That night it told me the story about how there would be something terrible found in my next door neighbor’s apartment.
Similar to the last time, it spent hours telling me the history behind this tragedy. There would often be nights of loud noises and weird smells coming from their home. And yes, they’ve gotten more than few angry knocks at the door and phone calls but Jesus Christ I would’ve called the fucking police if I knew what was really happening.
As soon as it told me, I rushed out of my room and booked a motel to stay at for the night. I knew that he would be found out soon but I was so freaked out by what it had said that there was no way in hell I could stay around to be part of it.
Lo and behold, the next morning, I got about fifteen text messages from friends, family, and my landlord about what had happened. I began to stream the news and the tears started flowing down my face. Bags of frozen and decomposing bodies were being taken out of his apartment. I saw my neighbor being taken away in handcuffs. An older man with grey hair, dark circles under his eyes, and a dead look in his face that made it seem as though he hadn’t slept in years.
Though all the details hadn’t come out, I knew enough. At least three dead bodies. DNA matched that of some kids that had gone missing throughout the area. I couldn’t tell if the voice was revealing the truth about these events so much as it was influencing them. Either way, I sprinted towards the bathroom and spent the next few minutes throwing up what little food I had in my stomach. I emailed my professors and they wholeheartedly understood why I had to take the next week or so off. After dealing with questions from police and the trauma of knowing what went down, school just wasn’t on the forefront of my mind.
I just... I knew he was strange. I knew he was obnoxious and had a bit of a creepy vibe. But... Consuming children? I... There were other parts to the story that I don’t feel comfortable sharing but trust me it was beyond evil what he did. I’m glad he got the death penalty for his crimes but it doesn’t erase what happened. It doesn’t erase the fact that I slept in the apartment over from those tragedies. It doesn’t erase that fact if I had knew, maybe I could’ve done something to save the someone. Maybe I could’ve prevented it from happening to the first kid... Maybe. I don’t know. I have a lot of thoughts on the matter. How could you not? I still think about it from time to time.
I think the thing that changed my life the most actually came a month later. My pillow had grown silent once more and frankly? I didn’t want it to ever speak again. The only reason I didn’t get rid of it was because I was scared. I was fearful of the notion that if someone else found it they would be drawn to it in the same way I would and maybe... Just maybe it would start to whisper terrible things about me.
What’s even stranger is that I used the damn thing. Every night I made it a point to sleep on that pillow. Whether I slept on the couch or had my girlfriend over, my priority was to make sure I could always hear the voice. I felt that if something else was going to happen, I needed to be the first to know.
Unfortunately, that day came. The day the voice spoke to me again, I got the worst news of all. It’s interesting. You always assume that the things in your life that would elicit the deepest and darkest reactions are the things of nightmare. A hungry bear catching you in its sights. A masked man with a chainsaw breaking into your log cabin. A clown with a knife scratching at your front door. Maybe a demonic entity stalking you while you’re alone. But those thoughts aren’t based in reality. They’re based on the fictional stories we hear or see on TV and in all likelihood, the average person won’t have to deal with any of those problems. No. We live in the real world. And in the real world, we have to deal with things that are much much worse.
My dad called to tell me he had cancer. He’d been a long time smoker and never one to really check up on his health. By the time he noticed real problems and went to the doctor for a checkup, it was too late. I broke down. Not because the shock of the moment hit me or because I didn’t think it was possible for someone like him to run into that problem at some point. I broke down because I knew the day before. I prayed to whatever bullshit God there is that the voice lied. I prayed that this was just an attempt to scare me or that it had the wrong person but deep down? I fucking knew. Part of me wishes the news came as a surprise. To have that thing tell me? It made it that much worse.
I was always close with my dad. Ever since my mom died when I was little we held a special bond. Me being his only kid, he gave me every ounce of love he had to give and then some. We spent so much time together and after I went off to college, I made it a point to call him at least two times a week. And yet, after just four short months he was gone.
I’m not gonna lie. I was suicidal. I drank a lot. I had meaningless sex with God knows who and did everything else under the sun to forget. After what I had dealt with I dropped out of school. I just couldn’t function. My dad was my rock. The man I could talk to and laugh with and rely on for support in any kind of way and now he was gone. Part of me questioned if it was my fault. Did I cause this by keeping the voice around? What if I had just gotten rid of it like any normal fucking person? To this day I still don’t know that answer. But what I do know is that even at that point. I still couldn’t get rid of it.
If before I was only slightly concerned about what the voice would do while not in my possession then I was terrified now. This time the voice grew bold. It spoke to me every night. It whispered horrible things about my dad, other people I knew, and complete strangers. It told me ways to look into things that all turned out to be true it... It consumed my life.
The only reason I didn’t end it all was because a small part of me felt I’d be free from it one day. That I could move past the voice and finally have my life back. At least, that was until the voice started talking about me.
At first it told me things as small as when I would get a bruise from stubbing my toe or when I would cut myself on an open nail or get sick. But then it evolved. I got a dog on a whim one day as a way of self-healing, only to come back from work one day to find its head nearly twisted off of it’s own body. But the one thing it said that made my blood run cold is a statement that’ll stick with my forever. It told me that a man would break into my home, bash my head with a rusty bat, drag my bloodied dazed body into my room, and then flay my chest and lungs open while pinning me against the wall with nails like a fucked up art display.
It didn’t give me a timeframe. I stayed up all night staring blankly at my wall waiting for death while the voice spoke from my pillow at a volume louder than I could speak myself. Only about an hour from sunrise, a knock came at my door. I realized this was it. I stayed in my room and the knock turned into a pounding. At this point, the voice began laughing. We both knew what would happen.
Tears started streaming down my face and I wailed with the knowledge of what was about to come next. I could hear the door starting to give way as the large figure used its massive body to barrel in the door. I contemplated calling the police but I knew they wouldn’t get here in time. This was how I was meant to go.
I could hear the door start to break from its hinges and knowing it was only one or two good smashes from giving way, something snapped. I realized that if I was going to die, then that wretched voice wouldn't be allowed to live either. I quickly searched my room for my lighter and just as I heard the door break down and a large man stumble through breathing heavily, I reached for the pillow. It began screaming which gave the man my position. I immediately locked the door to buy myself some time.
I could hear him fumbling for the door knob and then using his weight to smash his way through. Quickly, I grabbed the half empty vodka bottle next to my bed and poured it all over the pillow, then I lit a flame to the thing. Another scream erupted from deep inside. It was blood curdling and ear piercing. It sounded like a man in the worst kind of agony that one could ever experience. It didn’t curse me or beg for its life. All I could hear was the damn screaming.
I fell to the floor with my hands covering my ears, hoping and praying that it would all stop. And after what felt like an eternity, it did. All that remained were the burned remnants of my pillow and when I inspect my apartment, the man seemed to be gone.
At this point, I broke down. I swear I’m not as much of a crier as I’m making myself out to be but given what I had just gone through for more than half a year, everything just kinda came out.
The police came by but all I could really tell them was that I think someone tried to rob me and that was the end of it. Therapy and getting a new dog helped a lot. I’m on a new diet and I’ve taken up hiking and some other activities to try and clear my mind a bit.
I moved apartments shortly thereafter and I must’ve had spiritual cleansing done by ten different types of religions along with my many other smaller spiritual rituals I found online. For a while things worked great and life returned to normal but last night... I think I heard a voice coming from my walls. It spoke of such awful things.
Submitted April 24, 2019 at 05:22AM by bryany97 http://bit.ly/2KYylQT
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