Estimated reading time — 9 minutes

I’ve been a police officer for a long time, and there are certain things you learn to ignore if you want to sleep at night. This is not one of those things. I’m writing this anonymously because I was involved in a case back in 2019, and despite everything we told the family, despite everything we wrote in the reports, none of us ever found a logical explanation for what happened.

In February of 2019, a married couple, Sean and Renee, were fast asleep in bed. It was the first time in a long while that they were able to get a somewhat decent night’s sleep after their son’s body had been found in the woods not far from where they lived. Martin was fourteen years old and his corpse was sitting in a morgue until the investigation into his death was complete.

At around two, Renee later told us she had been locked in a dream. She was twenty-nine again, with dry grass beneath her and a tiny hand in hers. Martin hated wearing shoes, up until he was ten, so he was so happy that his mother let him go barefoot. After a while he let go of her hand and began running towards the sun. Renee noticed how much brighter it was getting, to the point where everybody else at the park had already left. She could smell the burning leaves from the trees around her, but somehow, wasn’t feeling anything. It was getting so bright, in fact, that she had lost sight of Martin and had to squint just to see him.

With a hand shadowing her eyes, she called out to him. Martin called out back. Renee walked ahead, hoping to find her son nearby but he wasn’t there. She called out for him again, only to be met with silence. The sun’s brightness was swallowing the blue from the sky and her eyes were watering. Just as Renee felt like she was about to go blind, she was awoken from her dream by a guttural scream.

She told us she sat up in bed for a moment, and assured herself that it hadn’t come from inside the house. Her ear tingled for a moment, and she turned towards the direction of the window. It had definitely come from outside. She pushed up the window and stuck her head outside, and after a few seconds of letting the breeze hit her face, she heard the scream again. This time, Sean heard it as well. His white tank top shone in the moonlight as he groggily sat up.

“What was that?” he groaned. “Do you see something?”

“No. I can’t tell where it’s coming from but someone’s definitely in trouble.”

“Maybe some boys are messing around with each other. Oh wait, no, it’s a school morning. No boys are gonna be up that late.”

“I’ve heard the same scream twice, now. Should I go out and check?”

“Check what? Are you the police? Just come back to bed.”

Renee told us she shut the window, rolled down the blinds, and was about to crawl into bed, when the distant scream sounded once more, pleading for God. With adrenaline filling their bodies, they flew down the stairs, while fitting in their home robes, and stopped in the middle of the darkened street around them. The grey houses around them were deep in slumber, and in that moment, the strip of road they were standing on stretched into oblivion. They stood still, unsure where to follow the noise. The scream could’ve been miles away, probably from another neighborhood altogether. They waited, and after a while of not hearing anything, they decided to go back inside the house.

“It’s probably…” Renee said, but didn’t know how to finish it.

“Yeah, probably,” Sean replied. “It may be exactly what we think it is or maybe it isn’t.”

*23rd January, 2019*

Everything I’m about to describe here is based on what we recovered, and what I saw myself when I went through Martin’s room.

Martin finally plucked up the courage to sneak out of his bedroom window. Granted, both his parents were asleep and it was eleven o’clock at night, but he was still nervous, not at the thought of getting caught but of what he would encounter after he left.

The ritual was simple. The website he’d stumbled across the day before out of boredom, stated that the first step was to visit a graveyard, spend fifteen minutes alone amongst the tombstones, then come back with a dead person’s name.

‘Grandma’s place’, as Martin liked to call it, was the name he gave to the graveyard his grandmother was buried in, and he knew exactly what name he was going to come back with. It felt odd how convenient the instructions on the website were. The graveyard was close by. He had all the items he needed for the ritual, half of which he hadn’t noticed or thought of using, and it was boredom that led him to discover the site in the first place. It all fitted together perfectly.

The walk was twenty minutes long, and despite looking straight ahead, his footsteps made him feel like he wasn’t alone. Of course, it was dark and the website told him not to look back while walking. Not even when he heard high-pitched cackling from far behind him. Not even when he saw a head peering at him from behind a parked car. Not even when the ground shuddered as bare feet ran towards him and his spine tingled, as he realized that no one had passed him. Martin had to be brave.

A few convenience stores were still open, which made him feel a bit better, but the graveyard was drawing near and the spiked iron gate was in his sight. He pushed it open and it cried as he did. Why the gate hadn’t been locked, I have no idea, but based on everything else in this case, that’s the least concerning detail. He had already convinced himself during his walk that he wasn’t going to let himself get distracted.

Martin didn’t have to wander at all, as he already knew where her tombstone was. A graveyard at night, as if the home of the dead was less disturbing during the day. Now I understand why people in paranormal movies move so slowly. The grip of the unknown freezes your nerves.

Martin ran straight for his grandmother and sat beside her, checking the time. Fifteen minutes was all he needed, and in pure childish fashion, he buried his head in his knees to protect himself from the overwhelming darkness and gloom. He was sitting over dozens of dead bodies, how could anyone enjoy that. How ironic was it, that his grandma, who used to read him ghost stories, had now become a ghost. What made things worse was that after she left his room, he would get nightmares about those exact stories. He didn’t miss THAT part about her.

Fifteen minutes later, he lifted his head and stood up. Cars roared in the distance and he wished he was anywhere but there. So, he took a deep breath, made himself angry about something that happened in his past, and ran back home.

He returned to his room with muddy jeans and his face drenched in sweat. Despite the state he was in, he didn’t bother to change into clean clothes. Instead, he opened his laptop and re-read the items he needed. The website was ominous; the layout looked like something straight out of 2007. We tried to recover the page later, but it was gone. No history, no cache, nothing.

With the items in his head, he reached under his bed and pulled back a large wooden box. In this box was a purple candle and a lighter. All he needed was a mirror to complete the ritual.

Now, from what I could gather, Martin was deadly afraid of the dark, and had a fear that hadn’t escaped his childhood, and what he was about to do sent him into such a state of panic that he abandoned the box on the floor, hopped into bed with his dirty clothes and tucked his knees into his body the same way he did at the graveyard. There were indentations on the mattress that suggested exactly that.

To make matters worse, he had left his bedroom window open after he came in, but that was apparently part of the ritual. I don’t know how something like that spreads online, or who writes those things, but I’ve seen enough to know that people will follow instructions if they’re written convincingly enough.

Martin watched as the curtain sheers ruffled, revealing a stretch of silent houses on a dark, empty street.

The sight of it must have unsettled him, but after a while, he seemed to calm down. Just as he was about to start the ritual, something creaked inside his bedroom. There were no signs of forced entry, no broken hinges, nothing out of place that would suggest someone had physically entered that room.

At some point, he pressed his back against the wooden headboard. We found faint scuff marks there, like he had shifted his weight repeatedly without getting up. He stayed that way for several minutes. Then, according to the sequence we pieced together, he got up, retrieved a clean set of nightwear from his wardrobe, changed, and attempted to go to sleep.

Martin was exhausted from his walk. That much is obvious. The window was still half open, and his laptop was still on.

What happened next is something I can’t explain, and I’m not going to pretend that I can.

Based on the condition of the laptop, and what we later observed, something appeared on the screen. The hardware itself was partially damaged, but not in a way I’ve ever seen before. The internal components showed signs of heat exposure, but there was no external burn pattern to justify it.

At some point, Martin tried to shut the laptop. We know this because the hinge was strained, as if it had been repeatedly forced shut. It didn’t close properly anymore.

Then he stepped back.

There were drag marks on the floor, subtle but visible under the right light, suggesting he lost his footing or stumbled.

We also found partial fingerprints on the window frame, as if he had tried to force it open further. The window, however, was stuck at the exact same position it had been found in when his parents checked the room later.

There was evidence of strain in his shoulder area, though not enough to classify as injury. Likely from forcing himself through the gap and failing. At some point, he must have turned toward the closet. Both closet doors were wide open when we entered the room. There was a single impact mark on the floor nearby. Something heavy had either fallen or struck the surface with force.

After that, the sequence becomes… difficult to reconstruct. The candle had been lit. We found wax residue on the floor and faint traces on his fingertips. He had been standing in front of the mirror. That much was clear from the angle of the wax drips and the positioning of the box. Then, for reasons unknown, he abandoned the ritual midway.

The laptop had been turned around. Completely. Facing the wall. The curtain rods showed signs of stress, as if they had been rattling violently. There were no signs of wind damage elsewhere in the room. And then there was the smell. I didn’t include that in the official report.

When we first entered, there was a lingering odor in the room. Not decay. Not gas. Something sour, damp, and wrong in a way that’s difficult to describe. It faded quickly, but it was there.

Martin was found later that night. His body was discovered by the security guard on duty at the cemetery. Police were quickly dispatched to the scene. I was one of the officers present.

I crouched down beside him, closely examining him without saying a word. The others began circling around me, waiting for some kind of assessment. I remember saying, without really thinking about it, that in twenty years of being a police officer, Martin’s body was by far the healthiest corpse I had ever seen.

There were no signs of blunt force trauma, no soft tissue damage, not even a bruise. Just chalk-white skin, giving the appearance of a sleeping boy untouched by death.

Martin’s parents demanded an autopsy, hoping to gain some explanation as to who or what had caused their son’s death. We didn’t have anything to give them.

Then one morning, I received a phone call from his father. He told me about a horrific scream he and his wife had heard during the night. I told him to let me know if it happened again. At the time, I treated it as unrelated. I shouldn’t have.

I visited them the following day. Sean led me into the kitchen where his wife sat with her laptop and phone on the table. Her eyes were hollow. She hadn’t slept. I apologized, told them we were doing everything we could. It sounded empty even as I said it.

I asked if I could search Martin’s room again. They agreed. Sean took me upstairs.

What we found in that room the second time is not in any official documentation. There were two footprints in the dust above Martin’s closet. Not on the floor. Not on a surface someone could reasonably stand on. Above it.

They were large. Abnormally so. And positioned in a way that suggested whoever, or whatever, had made them was crouching. Facing outward. Looking down.

Sean saw them at the same time I did. Neither of us said anything for a while.

I decided not to report it. There are things that complicate a case beyond recovery if you put them on paper. I took the laptop with me instead. I didn’t ask him about the melted keys. I already knew I didn’t want the answer.

When Sean came back downstairs, his wife immediately noticed something was wrong. He told her everything was fine. It wasn’t a convincing lie, but she didn’t press him.

Instead, she handed him her phone. Her inbox was flooded with emails. Different senders every time. Random strings of letters, numbers, symbols. No pattern. Every single one contained the same message: “Do not perform the autopsy.”

We discussed informing someone. In the end, we didn’t. We wanted answers first.

On the day of the autopsy, I called Sean. I told him to step away from his wife before I said anything. He sounded tired. Irritated. I told him to brace himself. I told him I knew where the screams had come from.

There was a pause on the line. He asked me what I meant. I told him to turn on the news.

There had been an incident at the morgue. Staff collapsing. Some of them running out of the building. Others refusing to go back inside. He asked me what that had to do with his son.

I told him the truth.

That the screams he and his wife had heard, were coming from Martin’s freezer.

Credit: MarsSalvador