Spoons

My name's Jasper. I'm 19 years old, and I live in Statesville, North Carolina.
About a year or so ago a bunch of random spoons went missing from the cabinets in my house. My mother was accusative of my brother and I, and said we were throwing spoons away without thinking about it. I don't exactly have the best attention span, so at the time I thought she might be right. I can be a little bit of a conspirator at times so I suspected some ghost was stealing things... However, the truth was much, much worse.
Let me explain an important piece of the puzzle. Ever since we moved into this house, I had been hearing noises in the attic. I heard boxes moving, people running, and knocks. Sometimes, I would even hear footsteps around the house when I was home alone.
On one particular occasion, I sat horrified as I heard someone violently run down the staircase. The sound stopped right as it reached the bottom of the staircase. It scared me so badly that I called for my dad to come home and check the house. We didn't find anything.
My parents thought that these experiences were your typical childhood ghosts with rational explanations. Even I thought so at the time because I knew my imagination had always been too active. I scared myself over nothing, thinking that there was a monster around every corner that wanted to devour my soul.
One detail, however, deterred my originally held belief that these “ghosts” were all in my head.
Every time my parents would go up into the attic, they would find a charred, smokey residue on everything. That discovery concerned me. My parents had an exterminator take a look at the place to see if it was perhaps animal related. The exterminator couldn't identify the substance.
I thought the substance was in some way related to the noises, but my parents (predictably) didn't think so. See, most of the time, the parents are right when they say that the stuff you hear is part of your imagination. Most of the time. It's that small percentage of parents that are incorrect which results in the unfortunate death or disappearance of a child. The kind of death where the child is found barely intact. The kind of disappearance where there's absolutely no evidence, clues, or tips as to where the child might be.
The spoons started disappearing at an alarming rate and then suddenly stopped. My dad (who by the way isn't exactly tech savvy) had a company install a security camera which he hid on top of the refrigerator. I digress, I think getting a security system would have been much better. I mean, a security camera would've been useful too, but an alarm would've scared any intruder and they'd run away from the house.
About a week before installing the camera, my mom had a squad of private investigators come over and search the house for anything criminally suspicious. They checked everywhere except for the crawlspace because there's no way someone could have gotten in there. See, the crawlspace entry is inside of a closet on the lower level of our house. There's too much cleaning supplies (mops, brooms, buckets, etc) as well as some old guns my dad kept from his childhood. The investigators found nothing.
For a period of about 6 months, nothing else unusual happened. The noises stopped. No spoons went missing. Even the black residue in the attic stopped appearing. I thought everything was back to normal and there was a rational explanation as to what was going on... but I was so wrong.
One day, I was looking for the salt and pepper because I wanted to put some on my sandwich for lunch. My mom said she hadn't seen the shakers anywhere aside from their usual place. A weird instinct caused me to look on top of the refrigerator (next to the camera) and they were sitting there – without the salt and pepper inside of them.
I checked the camera footage (which recorded to my laptop). It revealed nothing. I was frustrated. The salt and pepper shakers were on top of the refrigerator next to the camera for the love of crap. It was as if someone intentionally did that to mock us.
The next day, I was home alone. My parents had gone somewhere for business purposes (I don't remember where they went) so I drove home from school and spent the afternoon alone.
I had a chat with my neighbor's mother Cadence when I went out for a walk. She told me that they were having random objects disappear from their house such as silverware, pillows, tablecloths, candles, and various other things. She also told me that three other houses in the neighborhood had had random items go missing as well. I became pretty suspicious after hearing that but I kept my thoughts to myself.
I came back inside when I finished my walk. After playing Skyrim for a little while, I thought it'd be a good idea to throw something on the stove for dinner. I opened the cabinet and all of the silverware was gone. Not just the spoons this time, but all of it. There was a heavy, black residue in the cabinet as well.
I rushed downstairs to check my laptop. I scrolled through the first couple hours of the morning and saw nothing. I scrolled a little bit more and I was horrified at what I saw.
The footage showed that about an hour before I got home, a man came into the kitchen. I staggered back from the computer. The man was naked and looked like he had been severely burned. Every bit of his flesh was black and charred. He proceeded to take the silverware out of the cabinet and leave the room.
I picked up my phone immediately and called 911 (though not expecting them to believe me.) I told them what I had just seen and they said they'd send three officers over right away.
I was extremely tired and I was so disturbed and confused that I couldn't function. A staggering realization hit me. The footage never showed the man entering or leaving. I swore under my breath, frantically rushed up the stairs, and grabbed a huge steak knife before bolting out the door. When the police arrived, I gave them the newest details before they searched the house.
Two of them searched the house while the other one stayed outside with me. Two gunshots rang off. The officer pulled his gun out and prepared for the worst.
Three minutes later, the other two officers came back out and called for a forensic team. After the team arrived, they brought the repulsive body (the one I captured on camera) out on a stretcher and put it into their van.
Three days later, my parents informed me as to what the authorities had told them. The officers found the man inside of the crawlspace. The man attacked them and the officers were forced to shoot. It appeared that the man had dug an underground tunnel system (somehow with his bare hands) which lead to four other houses in the neighborhood.
The tunnels entered the houses in various (out of sight) places such as the crawlspaces, attics, basements, and even air conditioning vents. There were also tunnels dug inside of the walls of the houses in some cases. The monster dug a tunnel from our crawlspace to our attic. One of the tunnels (which appeared to be the first tunnel and the entrance) was inside of Cadence's shed and lead to the rest of the tunnel system.
All of the tunnels lead from the houses to one, very large, very littered room. It looked like the man had been building his own personal living space. The stolen pillows and blankets were in one corner and formed a bed. The stolen candles were lit up around the room.
This large room had one more tunnel that leads to a smaller, final room. Inside of the room were the disfigured bodies of 6 people who had gone missing in the past 8 months. Two of the people were from Statesville, and the rest of them were from various parts of Virginia.
He had been using the stolen silverware to slowly eat the people...
The origin of the man was never determined.
Category:Items/Objects