Scary Stories.

Echo in the woods

Echo in the woods.

My grandmother was an immigrant from Kadychan, Siberia. Many years ago when she was in her early twenties, her first job was as a part time cook in a church that also served as a school and an orphanage.

After working there for several months she took a fondness to a mute child that lived there, named Michael. About a year and a half before she started there, the child's father left him there with a promise that he would return once he was able to find a job and a steady home in a bigger city.

Anyway my grandmother fell in love with the kid. She said he was the sweetest and most helpful child there. What he lacked in voice, he made up for with the biggest smile and the most curious eyes. Even the other children adored him.

Every weekday during the children's recess from school, this boy and a group of other children loved to play hide and go seek.

Since the mute child wasnt able to yell, the other children had given him a stick to use to signify if he was ready or not. Three taps for when he wasn't ready, and a steady continual tap for when he'd found a hiding place. As strange as it was to make a sound from his hiding spot, he was the hardest to find and often the last to be found.

This game continued for several months, clear into the fall. And then the beginning of winter, the children played even less because of the heavy snow. But on Christmas Eve, the father of the church allowed the orphans to have the day off from their school work and allowed the children to play.

As dusk started to set, the church bell rang to let the children know it was time to come in because dinner was ready. During dinner, the father noticed that a few of the children looked worried and were barley touching their food.

He asked them what was wrong, but they kept quiet and only looked at each other in fear. The father looked around and then he realized that the mute child was missing. The father pulled these children aside and asked them where Michael was. After a few minutes of interrogation, one of the little girls finally spoke up.

They were playing hide and seek and as expected, the mute boy was the last to be found. After several hours of searching the children gave up when they heard the church bell ring. They assumed that Michael was able to hear the bell and would come inside with the rest of the kids.

Panicked, the father gathered most of the staff, including my grandmother, and spent the entire night searching the church and a section of the forests that resided near them. They sent someone into town to report to the police about the missing child. By the time the police got there it was already morning.

The staff members and the police spent the next three days combing the area. My grandmother said it was the coldest winter with the heaviest snowfall she'd ever seen. It snowed so hard that it erased all footprints and the mute child was never found. They mourned their loss, held a funeral, and forbid any child from playing the game ever again in fear of another tragedy.

Now this is were the story gets interesting.

Three years later my grandmother went full time as a cook. Christmas Eve came and another child went missing. And again, the father and most of the staff went searching in the dark. After a while they began to hear the light, continual, tapping sound. They all went into the forest and soon the tapping began to get louder. It got so loud that it started to echo off of the trees, making it harder to distinguish any direction.

Eventually one of the cleaning maids found the child sitting in a small gully, holding a wooden stick tapping it against a tree.

For the rest of the night the child did not speak a single word, but had the biggest smile on his face. My grandmother found it eerie that this child looked and acted exactly as the mute child, it was unsettling.

The child eventually fell asleep and in the morning, when asked about what happened the night before, the child swore that he didn't remember anything at all. The following year, the same events took place on Christmas Eve. Another child went missing and again the year after that.

Each time the staff members would hear the tapping in the woods, and each year they'd have to go deeper and deeper into the woods. Each child shared the same giant smile and refused to speak until morning with no recollection of what happened.

My grandmother stayed there as an employee for another four years. The fourth year my grandmother didn't have the heart left as this continued to happen until the staff members came home on Christmas day without finding the missing child.

The police found the girl frozen under a tree stump with a stick in her hand.

My grandmother fell in love with my grandfather, moved to America, and started a family in Ohio. We'll skip ahead about forty years and she received a letter in the mail one day. She translated the letter and read it to my brother and I. The letter was from one of my grandmothers co-workers at the church/orphanage.

Most of the letter was just about catching up with my grandmother and how she'd started a family in Kadychan, but part of the letter was about the church.

The church stayed open for about another ten years after my grandmother moved away. It eventually closed down due to the lack of donations and financial assistance from the city.

Everyone was afraid to come to mass there and believed the church was cursed as several children continued to get lost only to be found dead. Eventually the children couldn't even be found. In time the church became abandoned and eventually torn down. It ultimately became just an empty field next to the forest. The last few sentences in the letter was that of her friend would visit the field each Christmas Eve to say a prayer for the children's lost souls. And each year she would hear the soft tapping echo through the forest .

She'd take her husband and children with her to pay her respects, but also to reassure that she wasn't the only one hearing the tapping. Her husband could only hear silence, and the occasional breeze.