Earphones

Throughout the year of 2008, there had been reports of missing teenagers in a small village titled Maltby. The village is located in the South Yorkshire county in the UK. Nobody knew why this was happening, or how it was happening, until in late 2016, a torn and worn out journal was found by a lake, a couple hundred yards away from the St Bartholomew's Cathedral.
Despite the journal being so old and destroyed, specialists were able to conclude that the contents inside were related to the missing teenagers case.
The journal explains how a single pair of earphones have been used by all of the teenagers that have gone missing. It sounds ridiculous that something as simple as using a pair of earphones could correlate to one's disappearance; however, its connection is indeed shocking to many people.
The owner's name of the journal was never mentioned, but his brother, called Samuel, was contained in his logs, how he found an excellent pair of earphones on the floor, and decided to use them. Not long after Samuel's discovery of the earphones, he was reported missing, but before his brother's disappearance, he noticed that Samuel was acting very strange, turning his back on all of his friends, ignoring his parents, and was found with a number of bruises and cuts on his arms and legs. The journal's owner grew concerned, and suggested him to go see mental help, subtle due to his recent actions; he refused in a threatening manner. After a couple of weeks, nobody ever bothered to ask what was wrong. Samuel gave off an eerie presence, that not even his parents would approach him. Then, a week later, he disappeared, never to be seen again.
The journal owner couldn't live this down, as he exclaimed in his logs, so he became dedicated to uncover this baffling mystery, so he could stop these disappearances, in favour of his brother, and the rest of the teens in the village.
After spending hours of research into all the missing cases, the parents and the siblings have described how they found a pair of earphones, and that they worked so well despite finding them on the floor. This statement was very surprising to discover for the anonymous journal logger, as he recalled his brother saying the same thing. In addition to this, the witnesses described similar symptoms as to what his brother had. Therefore, anonymous jumped straight to the conclusion that the pair of earphones were the culprit. He attempted to explain this new discovery to his parents and his friends, but they denied his accusations and ridiculed it; however, their opinions didn't faze him. He felt that he discovered the truth, and so his desire to prove it grew stronger.
On a Tuesday evening, his ordinary walk home from school differed from the rest, as he walked down a small snicket to find a black pair of earphones; reflecting in the dark, overgrown grass by a lamp post. He described his heart skipping a beat, and without hesitating, he snatched up the earphones and took them home. He plugged the earphones into his mobile device and played one of his songs. To his surprise, the earphones' quality was outstanding for a cheap-looking pair. No side-effects or any strange happenings occurred through the past few days of using them, in which he disbelieved that these were the same pair of earphones that caused the disappearances, including his brother's.
In the journal, there was a gap between the logs, jumping from April 22nd to the 5th of May, as he started to log again after experiencing some strange happenings with the mobile peripheral. Anonymous described that the earphones lost their audio quality, as his songs grew distorted and unsatisfying to hear. As the days passed by, the quality of the music grew more discomforting. He described that the quality got so bad that it started to creep him out. However, with no excuse, he felt a continuous urge to carry on using them, even though the playback scared him. Fortunately, the horrific audio didn't stop him from logging his experiences with the earphones. After three days of logging, he described how he gained a constant feeling of paranoia, and coming down with various mental illnesses; such as depression, bipolar and schizophrenia in such a short amount of time. Unfortunately, this didn't stop here; this type of paranormal activity was growing at a fast rate, getting worse by the minute. His schizophrenia would kick in every day, seeing shadow figures in his room and hearing voices in his head. After the past explained logs, a huge amount of pages were torn out; some had traces of blood imprinted onto the paper. At the very back of the journal, there was one last log, dated on the 27th of March, with the words: "I couldn't stop listening to it, the voice flows like water, I must endure it. But I can't let it continue, it shall be drowned and silenced for the living, but heard like music for the dead."
Researchers discovered that a week after the last log, the owner of the journal was reported missing. His name was identified to be Justin Gray. He was last seen by his friend, Kyle Handley, on the 4th of June, walking down the St Bartholomew's Cathedral pathway that leads to an empty field with a lake, surrounded by trees.
Kyle retraced Justin's footsteps, but he was never to be found.
Category:Items/Objects
Category:Mental Illness
Category:Diary/Journal
Category:Disappearances