When me and my girlfriend Jenna moved into this new apartment, we were high in hopes of making it big in the youtuber world. Our paranormal investigations channel had grown to ten thousand subscribers in a matter of a few months, and we were hopeful we could turn it into a hundred thousand very soon. We moved into this new place because of the numerous haunting locations nearby that we could film and investigate. The town was filled with ghost stories told by interesting people who claimed them to be real.
“I already love this place.” Jenna said settling into the spooky vibes of the new world we found ourselves in.
“Me too babe” I replied looking out of the window, taking in the view of the town soaked in musical rain. What I didn’t know at the time was that my wish for finding proof and belief in the paranormal was soon going to come true, but in a way that was too personal to be safe.
We worked late that night, excitedly preparing lists of places we would go to for shooting our videos and setting our targets for the youtube channel. After we had scheduled our work for the entire month, we simply took a breath of satisfaction and went to bed. We however were not fated to an entire night of sleep, and were disturbed by a noise coming outside our bedroom door.
“What the fuck…” I blurted out as I heard the soft wailing coming from the living room. I pushed my girlfriend awake, and just as she was about to ask me why I woke her up- she heard it too. We both sat up on the beds and stared at our bedroom door for a few minutes while I decided my next move.
“Let me check it. It’s probably nothing.” I said and got up calmly, even though my heart sounded like a drum beating against my chest. There was no object I could pick up as a weapon in the room so I just knocked on the door.
“Is anyone there?” I asked in a bold voice.
“We should call the cops.” Jenna said clearly sensing this wasn’t nothing.
I brushed her off and opened the door slightly and took a peak… and my heart stopped. What I was staring at made absolutely no sense. Through the moonlight coming from the windows, I could make out a tall man standing in our kitchen, wailing and hitting his arms on our fridge. I stared at him for a few long minutes, the questions of my girlfriend failing to register in my head. And then I noticed it…
The man had no head… and no hands. He kept crying and hitting his handless arms on the fridge again and again and again while I stared at it absolutely numb and terrified at the same time.
“What the hell is wrong with you!” Jenna said with gritted teeth and pulled me back into the bedroom with a jerk and closed the door. “What did you see? Are we in danger?”
“I… I don’t know.” I said simply and calmly, the words not justifying the array of terrifying emotions I felt at the time. It was hard to breathe and my eyes were now lined with tears. Jenna was visibly concerned and wanted a signal to call for help- but I shook my head.
“Just sleep.” I told her and got back into the sheets. And I slept. That night for me hosted a very long nightmare in which I kept asking into the void just one thing- “If he had no mouth, how was he wailing?”
The next morning I was woken up by Jenna who brought me toasted bread and boiled eggs.
“Honey what happened last night?” She asked, concerned. “I checked outside in the morning. Nothing has been stolen. Please tell me what you saw.”
I just sighed and told her about what I saw last night.
“I went numb, I am sorry. We should've called for help.” I said. She held me tight and comforted me. She then handed me my breakfast and went to the other side of the bed, put down her laptop and started typing away. I ate my breakfast while she worked for around ten minutes, and then she screamed “WHAT?”
I looked at her suddenly trying to figure out what happened, she turned to me and smiled the biggest smile I’ve seen on her face. She brought her laptop to me and showed me what she had been doing. She had put a post on social media asking if anyone knows anything about a headless man from our town and got a lot of replies, which were all mostly bullshit- but then she received an email. The person who sent the email claimed to have lived in the town and mentioned the address he used to live at- and it was ours. He lived at our house. I stared at my girlfriend in disbelief while she pointed at me to continue reading. The rest of the email said how he got visited by the headless man daily and the only thing you can do against him is to ignore him by just opening your fridge. The email claimed that the headless man was there… to get a midnight snack.
“What the hell.” I whispered as I finished reading the email. “I mean, let’s see if the solution works but why are you so giddy we are being haunted by a creepy guy?”
Jenna just made a disappointed face and said “We will record him! We have been going here and there trying to script fake paranormal events, but this is the real deal. This is what will make us famous. Someone else has dealt with this too, so we can as well.”
I was a bit skeptical but if I am being honest, I was excited too. I know it is weird and hard to explain how being haunted by a man with no head could lead to us being happy and cheerful, but you have to remember we have worked our entire lives with horror. Once we got a bit used to this new truth, it was easy to ignore the dangers of it. So we set up the cameras in our kitchen and opened the fridge door at 10am before retiring to bed. We both took shifts sleeping with one person staying guard for when the man returns… but he didn’t.
A month passed by and we didn’t get any work done. Our subscribers were complaining about us not posting any content and we had started losing subscribers who thought we had killed the channel. But we were hopeful that one day the man would return. And he did.
That night I had stayed awake till 2am and then could not hold off my sleep for any longer so I woke up Jenna and took my turn to sleep. And then I woke up in the morning, with Jenna nowhere in the room.
My instincts jumped into place suddenly and I called for Jenna. I ran outside and saw that the kitchen door was now closed and everything looked normal. I called Jenna on her phone but found it in the bathroom. She was nowhere to be seen. And so I did what I feared I would have to do to find the truth, see the camera recording.
The camera recorded nothing strange until 2:53am, but then the camera flashed all white and when it showed our kitchen again, the man was there. The man wailed with no head and kept banging his arms on the fridge even though the door was open. If he was here for the snack, why wasn’t he taking it. Jenna must have asked the same question I imagine, because I saw her head peeking out of the bedroom door.
For some reason I will never know, she decided to walk outside, her feet trying to hold her back because of the terror I’m sure she must have felt. She walked to the kitchen and simply stood in front of the man, not saying or doing anything. The man… no… the monster took notice of her and even though he had no eyes to see, I know he saw her. And what happened next has crushed my soul forever.
Jenna must have come to her senses after a while and started backing away into the bedroom, but as she made it halfway through the figure let out a piercing scream and hopped weirdly to Jenna, his arms flailing around in every direction. He pinned her down, the camera flashed, and when it came back there was no man… and no Jenna.
I know I am to blame for what happened to us. I know I am to blame for what happened to Jenna. I slept that night knowing the dangers. I let us do this even though it was dangerous. My heart is broken now, but I find some comfort in the hope that this story reaches someone who needs to hear it- and understands that the headless man is there for a midnight snack, but the snack is not in the fridge- the snack is you.