Creepypasta Stories

The Love Shack, 1606

Since around 1999, I've lived across the street from an old sawmill. It's sort of assumed that the family who still own and operate the mill have owned the hundred or so acres it sits on since the beginning of time. The owner's sons, now into their 30's, have always sort of been "wild" boys. They like old muscle cars, dirt bikes, fireworks, things like that. They even built part of the largely-unused land behind the sawmill proper into a motocross track, just building up the dirt to make ramps, etc. The parties were endless when my family first moved across the street, and while this was bizarre to us, coming from a mundane Southern Ohio background, I totally dove right in. Chris was the youngest of three brothers born to their old-fashioned, religious parents who had been part of the town, once again, since the beginning of time as far as most were concerned, and who didn't necessarily approve of the craziness, but didn't have it in them to put a stop to it, or so we thought. Chris was fresh out of the hospital after breaking his back jumping an ATV, and this is when I learned just how far back their family went.

The parties would normally involve a lot of riding during the day, and then hanging at an old wooden hut called the "Love Shack" at night. I was around 14, I didn't ask. After the hospital visit, Chris became a little different. More subdued and withdrawn, and much less social. He got in trouble with the law a few times after this, things no one could imagine him doing even months earlier. Yet, no one scolded him, I heard nothing from his parents (he was around 24, but still living at home.) When he would come around, everyone would act like we hadn't just seen his mugshot on the news. His parents weren't rich, but the family have been fixtures in this small town seemingly forever. To my knowledge, none of them had made it through college, and worked off the land just as their ancestors had. Of course, they had cars, cell phones; they were your normal rural

family in the early 2000's.

When I was in 9th grade or so, I only had a few friends. One of them was David, the typical fat kid whose parents wanted him to wrestle and play football at school, though he didn't want to. His family moved a lot, financial trouble, I guess, but he was always cheerful. We liked to ride my little quad across the street, and every now and then, go explore the woods. Portions of their massive plot of land, I'm convinced, are still untouched by humans, so the woods were always exciting.

One day, I told him about the Love Shack. He wanted to go check it out. More than anything, our teenage minds were expecting to find some debauched orgy house. Not quite what we found. We went in, it was a small one-room shack with a ramshackle loft accessible by a rickety ladder, and christened with an old mattress on top. Of course, we lifted the mattress and found early 90's issues of FHM, Playboy, typical mid-20's guy stuff. We even found a discarded bra, which we laughed about for a few minutes while imagining the sex parties that totally must go on there.

The floor of the shack was all boards, which seemed to sit on the ground, though no mud came up through the floorboards. The entire structure was a dark-greyish brown, a far cry from the crisp white pine it was probably built with decades before. As we looked around, I noticed David on his knees messing with the floor in the corner. "Don't fuck anything up," I told him. "No, dude, there's something under the floor. It's like a door." Sure enough, there were two holes in the floor, about a quarter meter apart. We each stuck two fingers in one of the holes, and lifted. The door lifted out of the floor, and we set it aside. What we saw appeared to be a flight of stairs, which were no more than wooden slats shoved into the mud and clay. The walkway went down at probably a 55-60 degree angle, uncomfortably steep, but it was big enough for a person to fit through. We looked at each other, and I led the way in. I had to crouch pretty low to descend, and David, with 100 or so more pounds than me, found a way to keep his feet on the stairs and slowly descend on his back. There was no light whatsoever, though we could tell we were moving by the bluish patterns of clay in the earth. I didn't have a cell phone yet, but I had an outdated Zen MP3 player, which I pulled out of my pocket to try and use as a light. No good, the darkness, "cave darkness" as the call it, was too dense. I did, however, check the time, and notice that we'd been moving downward for almost 20 minutes, and didn't appear to be reaching an end. I mentioned that we should probably turn back, though we were both bummed that we wouldn't see where this stairway led. After an exhaustive hike back up, we climbed out of the hole in the earth and did our best to reposition the door into the floorboards so it wouldn't look out of place. We closed up the shack as we'd found it and headed home.