creepypasta stories

The demon butcher of palos park (long af)

In my home town we have a legend.

In the 1890s, a man called Butcher (this was back when people got their name from their trades) had a butcher shop that was doing well. From what I can tell, he was a large man but cowardly at heart. He was well respected and well liked. He always did good business. But he wasn't a person you'd look twice at.
Then the depression hit. Livestock was harder to come by and many other shops were going out of business. Butcher had good connections and he was getting by. But he had to raise prices, much to the annoyance of his customers. He was losing business.

One day a shipment of beef came in. Butcher told his apprentice to carry the load to the basement meat locker. The boy followed his orders, but like most kids, he tried to rush and took too much down at once. The boy tripped on the stairs and broke his neck at the bottom. He died, I assume, instantly.
Butcher heard the noise and soon found the body. The law was pretty scary in these times. Death sentences were still a viable option and Butcher thought this looked like murder. He could die because of this accident. They might kill him. He panicked and hid the body in his meat freezer.

When the boy's parents came, he lied. When the boy's father called the police and he got investigated, Butcher lied harder.
The police let him go for the time being but Butcher was terrified. Hiding the body made what could have been an accident look like real murder. He could lose everything. He could die. He had to get rid of the body.
That's when he had an idea... he was a butcher. If he could cut the boy up and sell him as meat, who would be the wiser? No one, that's who. No one. So in the dead of night he took his knife to the body and wrapped it like any other cut of meat. The next day he sold it with a nervous smile and no one questioned it.

In fact people seemed to like it. I suppose compared to the livestock of the time, human meat was clean and healthy. People liked it so much that they started asking for more. Now Butcher was a nervous man. Though he was nearly out of hot water he couldn't help but think that people would wonder why his prime meat wasn't as good as this one batch. If they kept asking... if they kept digging, they would make the connection. They would find out his crime. It was definitely a crime now, he couldn't deny that. But, no, Butcher wouldn't get caught. He would just have to find more meat.

He started with hobos. He would offer them food and lure them to his shop, then he'd kill them. I don't think it's much of a stretch to say that he had gone completely insane. As far as Butcher was concerned, not one was going to miss the vagabonds so it wasn't much of a crime. To make matters worse real beef was getting even harder to come by. He needed these people or he would go out of business. It was necessary.

But Butcher's luck seemed against him. The rail-riders realized that Palos Park wasn't a safe place to get off and they stopped coming. Butcher was again out of meat.

When the first child disappeared people were worried but no one thought there could be a killer among them. When more disappeared, someone remembered who went missing first; Butcher's apprentice. And wasn't it odd how he still had meat when everyone else was out of business? And wasn't it odd the way homeless men used to wonder into his store and never come out? And wasn't it strange the way he would sometimes stare at the children who entered his store?
Nothing makes an angry mob form faster than a child killer. This man had taken people, taken children, and dissected them like cattle. He had turned the town into cannibals. Oh, god, had parents unknowingly eaten their own children? How many people had died for this man's business? How many people had they eaten?
The proof was there on the hooks when they broke into his shop. A child skinned and hanging. No one could tell who it was but they could only assume that it was the child who went missing the most recently. This man didn't leave survivors. This man didn't hesitate to kill them.