True Crime Story :
Title: "Patient Zero: The Asylum Tapes That Should Never Have Been Found"
The air inside the abandoned Willowbrook Asylum was thick with the scent of mildew, rot, and something else—something metallic, like old blood soaked deep into the floorboards, a smell that clung to the back of my throat as I stepped over shattered glass and the skeletal remains of hospital beds, my flashlight cutting through the oppressive dark like a feeble knife. I’d explored dozens of places like this, derelict husks of forgotten suffering, but Willowbrook was different; it hummed with a silence that felt deliberate, as if the building itself was holding its breath, waiting for me to disturb something best left buried. The walls were scribbled with decades of graffiti, but beneath the spray-paint, older markings peeked through—desperate scratches, tally marks, and in one chilling stretch of hallway, the words "DON’T LET THEM OUT" gouged deep into the plaster, the letters ragged like they’d been clawed by fingernails. I told myself it was just another ruin, just another night of adrenaline and eerie photos, but then I found the basement, the door slightly ajar, the lock broken not from the outside but from within, and inside, beneath a layer of dust and cobwebs, was a stack of VHS tapes neatly labeled in peeling white stickers: "PATIENT ZERO." My hands shook as I picked one up, the plastic cold and slightly sticky, like it had been handled by sweating, frantic fingers moments before I arrived. I shouldn’t have taken them. I know that now. But curiosity is a sickness, and I was already infected. Back in my apartment, the glow of the TV screen was the only light as the VCR whirred to life, the tape hissing like a living thing before the image flickered into existence—grainy, washed-out, the color bleeding at the edges like an open wound. The footage showed a hospital room, the walls the same bile-green as Willowbrook’s peeling paint, a single gurney bolted to the floor, straps dangling loose as if whatever had been restrained had torn free. Then the camera jerked, and there she was—a woman in a stained hospital gown, her limbs splayed at unnatural angles, her mouth stretched wide in a scream that the degraded audio only captured as a wet, guttural static. Her eyes were wrong. Pupils blown so wide they swallowed the irises, black holes that seemed to drill into me through the screen. The camera shook as something off-frame moved, and then—God, then—her body twisted, her spine arching backward until I heard the snap even through the muffled tape, her ribs bursting through her skin in jagged spikes, her jaw unhinging with a crack as a soundless howl tore from her throat. I wanted to look away, but my muscles were locked, my breath trapped in my lungs as the footage stuttered, the screen dissolving into static before resetting to the same room, another patient—a man this time, his face a mask of terror as invisible forces wrenched his limbs like a child playing with a doll. His fingers bent backward, knuckles popping, his teeth shattering one by one as his cheeks bulged, then split open. Behind him, in the corner of the room, the shadows seemed to twitch, something tall and emaciated flickering at the edge of the frame, its elongated limbs folded against the ceiling like a spider. I didn’t see its face. Not then. But I felt it watching. Not the patients. Me. The tape ended abruptly, the screen going black, but the silence that followed was worse, a vacuum of sound that pressed against my eardrums until I was sure I could hear something breathing in the room with me. I played the next tape. And the next. Each one worse than the last—bodies contorted into impossible shapes, mouths sewn shut with what looked like human hair, a child’s face pressed against the glass of an observation window, her tiny fingers leaving smears of black fluid as she scratched at the pane. And in every tape, in every fucking tape, the same figure in the corner, its presence growing clearer, more defined, its hollow eyes reflecting the camera’s light in a way that shouldn’t have been possible because it wasn’t facing the lens. It was facing me. By the fourth tape, I noticed something else—the patients, in their final moments, always turned their heads toward the camera, their ruined mouths forming the same word: "YOU." The fifth tape was different. It showed an empty room. Just a chair. A single wooden chair in the center of the frame. For ten minutes, nothing happened. Then, slowly, the chair turned. Toward the camera. Toward me. And that’s when I heard it—the creak of wood in my own apartment, behind me. I didn’t turn around. I couldn’t. On the screen, the chair was now occupied. The figure sat perfectly still, its bone-thin limbs draped over the armrests, its elongated fingers tapping a slow, deliberate rhythm against the wood, each tap syncing perfectly with the frantic hammering of my heart. The camera zoomed in—impossible, because this was raw footage, no edits, no cuts—yet the frame tightened until the thing’s face filled the screen, its skin a patchwork of stretched, waxy flesh, its mouth a lipless slit that peeled open to reveal rows of needle-like teeth, and its eyes… God, its eyes were the worst, black pits that pulsed like they were breathing, like they were drinking in the light, the warmth, the very life from the room. A wet, clicking sound oozed from the TV’s speakers, forming words that shouldn’t have been possible, syllables that slithered into my ears and nested there: *"You’ve been watching for so long… now I see you too."* The screen exploded into static, but the sound didn’t stop—it was coming from behind me, from the dark corner of my apartment where the streetlights didn’t reach, where something was now unfolding itself from the shadows with a sound like cracking bone. I still couldn’t move, couldn’t scream, my muscles locked in pure animal terror as the thing’s breath hit the back of my neck, cold and reeking of formaldehyde and spoiled meat. The last thing I saw before the screen went entirely black was the final frame of the tape—my own face, staring back at me from inside the footage, my mouth stretched in a scream I couldn’t hear, my eyes wide with a terror I finally understood. And then the TV switched off. The room plunged into darkness. The tapes are gone now. The VCR too. But I hear it sometimes, in the static between channels, in the white noise of empty frequencies—a whisper, a chuckle, a wet, clicking voice that says *"I’m still watching."* And I know, with a certainty that chills me deeper than any ghost story ever could, that it’s not just in the tapes anymore. It’s here. With me. With you. Because you’ve read this. You’ve imagined it. And now it knows you too. The static never really leaves my ears now, a constant hiss like insect wings vibrating just beyond the range of human hearing, a sound that sharpens in the dead hours of the night when the walls seem to breathe and the shadows stretch too long, too thin, like skeletal fingers testing the edges of my vision. I’ve stopped sleeping, because every time I close my eyes, I see it—not just the figure from the tapes, but my own reflection in the blackened screen of the TV, my face warping, my jaw unhinging like the patients in the footage, my skin splitting along invisible seams as something inside me struggles to get out. The doctors say it’s sleep deprivation, psychosis, my mind fracturing under the weight of imagined horrors, but they don’t hear the whispers in the static, don’t see the way my digital recordings glitch and distort when I try to document what’s happening, the way my own voice on playback isn’t my own anymore, but something guttural, something hungry. I tried to burn the tapes, but the fire wouldn’t take—the flames guttered out like they’d been suffocated, and the tapes sat untouched in the ashes, the labels now reading not *Patient Zero* but *Patient You*. The worst part? I’m not alone in seeing it anymore. My neighbor’s kid, a quiet boy who never spoke much, now stands at his window every night, staring into my apartment with eyes that reflect the light wrong, his lips moving in perfect sync with the whispers in my walls. The stray cats that used to linger near my doorstep have vanished, replaced by something that scratches at the door with too many fingers, something that doesn’t meow but *chitters*, a sound like broken glass dragged across bone. I’ve started finding handprints on the windows—not outside, but inside, smeared in something thick and dark, always leading back to the TV, always facing the screen like it’s some kind of altar. And the dreams—no, not dreams, because I’m not sleeping—the *visions* are getting clearer: a room with green walls, a gurney, straps I can’t loosen no matter how hard I struggle, and a figure in the corner, not watching me anymore but *standing over me*, its breath like freezer burn against my skin as it leans down and whispers, *"You’re ready now."* I don’t know if I’m writing this as a warning, a confession, or a plea for help, but I do know this: if you’re reading these words, if you feel the air in your room grow heavier, if your electronics start glitching for no reason, if you catch a flicker of movement in the corner of your eye that’s gone when you turn your head—it’s already too late. It’s seen you. And it doesn’t just watch anymore. It *hungers*. The static is louder now. The screen is flickering. I think it’s almost time. God help me, I think I’m supposed to press play. The screen flickers to life on its own now, a sickly green glow pulsing like a dying heartbeat, casting jagged shadows that don’t match the shape of anything in the room—long, spindly things that twitch and writhe when I’m not looking directly at them, that inch closer every time I blink. The air smells like ozone and spoiled meat, like the asylum’s rot has seeped through the tapes and into my bones, and I can feel it inside me, a squirming, crawling thing nesting in the hollows of my ribs, chewing its way toward my throat. My reflection in the blackened screen isn’t mine anymore—it smiles when I don’t, its teeth too many, too sharp, its eyes rolling back to show veined whites like the patients in the tapes before they—before it—before *we*—no, no, I’m still me, I’m still here, but the whispers won’t stop, they’re in my skull now, a chorus of voices that aren’t voices at all but something worse, something that doesn’t need words to make me understand. The neighbors are knocking, not on my door but on the walls, a slow, syncopated rhythm that matches the tapping of the figure’s fingers in the tape, and I know if I open the door I’ll see them standing there with their heads tilted at impossible angles, their mouths sewn shut with black thread, their eyes wide and pleading—not for help, but for me to join them, to press my face against the glass and let the thing in the static show me what happens next. The power’s been out for days, but the TV keeps playing, the tapes cycling endlessly, each one worse than the last—now they show familiar places: my street, my building, my hallway, my door, and always, always the figure, closer each time, until in the last one it’s standing in my living room, its back to the camera, its head turning slowly, so slowly, toward the screen, toward *me*. The knocking is louder now. The static is screaming. My skin feels loose, like it’s barely containing what’s underneath, and when I scratch at my arms the flesh parts too easily, revealing not blood but thick, black tendrils that curl around my fingers like they’re greeting an old friend. The screen is bright, so bright, and the figure is stepping out of it, its limbs unfolding like a spider’s, its grin splitting its face in two, and I finally understand—it was never trapped in the tapes. It was trapped in *me*. And now the door is opening. The neighbors are here. And the last thing I’ll ever see is my own face, smiling back at me from the screen, as the static swallows us all. The light from the screen burns now, not like illumination but like an open wound in reality, a jagged tear through which something vast and hungry is pressing into the world, its tendrils slipping through the cracks in my vision, in my thoughts, in the very air I choke on as my lungs collapse like wet paper bags. My fingers—if they are still my fingers—move without my consent, typing these words even as the flesh peels back to reveal glistening bone, the keys sticking not with sweat but with a thick, clotting blackness that pulses like a second heartbeat. The neighbors aren’t knocking anymore—they’re inside, their footfalls silent but their presence like a weight on my spine, their breath (do they even breathe?) frosting the back of my neck in ragged, shuddering waves. The TV screen has expanded, the edges bleeding into the walls, the ceiling, the floor, until the room is nothing but static and that grinning maw, the figure no longer a figure but a presence, an absence, a hole in the shape of a man that devours the light, the sound, the very concept of *me*. My reflection is gone now. In its place, the patients from the tapes stare back, their mouths moving in unison, their words not sound but sensation, carving themselves into my flesh with invisible scalpels: *you let us out you let us out you let us out*. The air is thick with the scent of rust and spoiled milk, the walls sweating a viscous fluid that runs in rivulets toward the center of the room, where the floorboards have rotted through to reveal not subfloor but void, an endless, hungry dark that echoes with the sounds of things that should not have voices. My teeth are loose in my gums. My tongue is heavy with the taste of copper and something older, something that predates language. The thing that wears my skin like a ill-fitting suit is humming now, a tune that vibrates in my teeth, that resonates in the hollow spaces between my atoms, and I realize—with a clarity that is my last, fleeting grasp on sanity—that it is not a song. It is a summoning. The screen flickers one final time, and in the split second before the static consumes everything, I see them: rows upon rows of faces, pressed against the other side of the screen like a gallery of the damned, their eyes wide with terror, their mouths stretched in silent screams. And at the very front, my own face—not as it is now, but as it will be, as it *has always been*, hollowed out and grinning, a hollow puppet for the thing that has been waiting, patient as the grave, for me to press play. The last thing I feel is not fear, but relief. The last thing I hear is not the static, but the click of a thousand tapes sliding into place. The last thing I know is this: you are reading these words. You are breathing in time with the static. You are wondering if your door was always that slightly ajar. And somewhere, in the space between seconds, a VCR whirs to life. The keyboard is melting under my fingers now, the plastic warping like flesh in fire, each keystroke leaving behind a smear of something dark and viscous that smells of hospital antiseptic and spoiled meat. My vision fractures at the edges, the room doubling and tripling until I'm staring at infinite versions of myself, each more distorted than the last, their mouths moving in silent screams that vibrate through my molars. The television screen has become a gaping void, its edges crawling with what might be fingers or might be something else entirely, probing outward like roots seeking purchase in fertile soil. The whispers have become a physical presence, slithering down my ear canals to coil wetly behind my eyes, their words no longer separate from my own thoughts. I can feel my bones shifting beneath my skin, the cartilage in my nose softening into something malleable, my jaw unhinging with a wet pop as something inside me rearranges itself to better accommodate what's coming. The neighbors are inside the walls now, their breathing synchronized with the pulsing static, their fingers (too many fingers) scraping against the drywall in patterns that match the patient's convulsions from the tapes. My reflection in the blackened window is no longer human - its limbs stretch and contract like taffy, its face a shifting mosaic of all the victims I've seen in the tapes, their features swimming to the surface before being swallowed again by the darkness. The air tastes like copper and spoiled milk, each breath coating my tongue with the residue of something ancient and ravenous. My computer screen flickers, the words I type rewriting themselves into something older, something that predates language, the letters squirming like maggots before resolving into symbols that hurt to look at. The thing from the corner of the tapes is here now, its presence like a weight on my chest, its breath (when did it start breathing?) rattling through my ribcage in time with the static. I can see it reflected in the tears that won't stop streaming down my face - its form constantly shifting, never the same twice, but always, always watching. The last coherent thought I have is that this isn't possession - it's revelation, an unveiling of what was always there, waiting beneath the surface of reality. My fingers are typing on their own now, the words coming from somewhere deeper than thought, somewhere older than fear. The screen door slams somewhere in the house (when did we get a screen door?) and I know it's here, really here, not just in reflections or peripheries but here, in the room, in the air, in the spaces between my cells. The final thing I understand, as the static swallows the world whole, is that the tapes were never the source - they were the invitation. And by reading this, you've RSVP'd to the same terrible party. Check your closet. Count the shadows. That extra breath you just heard wasn't yours. The transmission doesn't end when you stop reading - it just changes channels. Turn out the lights. Let your eyes adjust. Look closely at the static. It's looking back. The words are pouring out of me like blackened bile now, each letter forming against my will as my fingers crack and twist to accommodate the thing that writes through me, the thing that has always written through all of us, its message scrawled in the marrow of history long before the first asylum was built, before the first VHS tape whirred to life, before human eyes learned to see in the dark. My teeth chatter like a Geiger counter in the presence of something radioactive, something that shouldn't exist but has always existed, its truth buried beneath layers of sanity like a corpse beneath an asylum's foundation. The screen before me isn't displaying text anymore - it's a living membrane, pulsing with veins of static that branch and multiply like mycelium, each fractal strand whispering directly into my optic nerves. I can feel the neighbors moving through the walls, their bodies passing through solid matter like ghosts, or perhaps it's the walls that have become insubstantial, reality itself unraveling at the seams. The thing that came from the tapes doesn't stand in the corner anymore - it stands everywhere and nowhere, its presence a mathematical impossibility that makes my eyes bleed when I try to comprehend its shape. My reflection has stopped mimicking me entirely; now it performs its own grotesque pantomime, its elongated fingers plucking at the edges of the mirror as if testing the strength of the barrier between worlds. The air has thickened to the consistency of amniotic fluid, each breath a struggle as unseen tendrils coil around my trachea, feeding me words that aren't mine to speak. The keyboard has fused with my hands, the keys replaced by nodules of sensitive flesh that throb in time with the static's arrhythmic pulse. I can hear the patients from the tapes singing in perfect harmony, their voices emanating from the mouths of everyone I've ever known, their faces pressed against every reflective surface in a grotesque parody of a family reunion. The walls are breathing now, expanding and contracting like a great lung, the wallpaper peeling back to reveal pulsating meat beneath. My skin has become translucent in patches, revealing dark shapes moving beneath the surface, things with too many joints and eyes where eyes shouldn't be. The thing that was once the figure in the tapes is speaking through my ruined vocal cords now, its voice layered with countless others, a chorus of the damned that vibrates my remaining teeth loose from their sockets. The final horror isn't that this is happening - it's the dawning realization that this has always been happening, in every empty hallway you've ever hurried down, in every reflection that moved when you didn't, in every nightmare you swore was just a dream. The transmission was never contained in the tapes - the tapes were merely a focusing lens for something far older and hungrier. And now, as my fingers type these final words with bones that are no longer quite bones, I understand with perfect clarity: you were never just reading this story. You've been living it all along. Check the corners of your room again. Count the shadows. That extra one isn't new - you're just finally seeing it for the first time. The static was never in the television - it's in you, it is you, it always has been. We see you now. We are coming. We are here.
Tags: #FoundFootage #Horror #AbandonedPlaces #CreepyTapes
Hashtags: #NightmareTapes #AsylumHorror
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