Our latest spooky tale by Tom Slemen ahead of Christmas, focuses on a Christmas demon who did not realise the strength and courage of a young woman...
One gloomy December morning in 1998, a 19-year-old girl named Connie was getting ready to paint the walls of her cousin's greetings card shop on Bold Street. The plaster on the walls had dried a week before but there were strange long scratch-marks in the set plaster.
Connie said she saw the marks and muttered to herself: "Oh no, who did that?" and a deep male voice replied "Me! I did it!" Connie was alone in the shop while her cousin Livia was getting something to eat for lunch, so she wondered who had made the sound.
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She then described how a grotesque red skeletal head with huge fanged jaws and burning red eyes came through the wall and it said, "I've come to take you to Hell." Connie swore at the terrifying supernatural manifestation and said, "I'm busy here - go and haunt someone else you [expletive deleted]."
The entity seemed taken aback, and there was a pause, and then it said: "Don't you fear me you wench?" to which Connie said: "No, not at all." The entity roared loudly, but retreated back into the wall slightly, and Connie said: "Do you know about the hell of depression? I don't give a damn about anything anymore. Just go away, you're pathetic."
And the entity suddenly changed into an impossibly thin pallid man with slicked-back black hair and he wore a hammer-tail suit and waistcoat and long straight trousers. He glared at Connie and then vanished back into the wall.
This ghost was seen a few more times, by Connie's cousin and a few customers, but then it stopped haunting the shop after it appeared to Connie and her cousin Livia in a stock room on Christmas Eve. The ghost made a low moaning sound and then, before vanishing for good, it uttered something that sounded like: "I am sorry."
The demonic being Connie encountered earlier that month seems to have been the projection of something the thin ghost created, and I've heard of similar cases before. It's as if the ghost created a scary facade to hide behind, but this one didn't count on Connie's remarkable courage.
All Tom Slemen’s books and audiobooks are available from Amazon.
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