True Reddit Posts

I don't have a sister!

I'm not just some crazy girl. You'll believe me if you just take a moment and see the Leech the way I saw it. I know you will. Just listen.

It started when I was in Japan. I'd been living with a host family for a few months, and my semester abroad was almost over. I had the nerve to believe I'd begun to acclimate; that I understood their culture and could call myself one of them.

On more than a few nights, gathered around the fire, they told me their superstitions and scary stories. Their myths were very different from the ones I'd grown up with, and I found them fascinating, but not scary. They were too different.

There was a heavy emphasis on choice. Rather than facing a mindless slasher that simply wanted to kill you, many Japanese horror stories involved entities approaching an unwary victim in a public place and giving them a choice. If the victim answered one way, they would be killed horribly in a specific manner. If the victim took the other choice... they would be killed horribly in another specific manner. These unwinnable situations made me laugh until the father of my host family explained to me, in quiet tones, the true subtext.

It was all about the third option. It was all about the innate fear of customs in a very traditional society. The only way to survive was to simply know the acceptable third answer and give that one instead. He squeezed my arm and told me that I, as a foreigner, stood no chance of knowing the third answer. If I saw someone approaching me in public, no matter how innocent it seemed, I was to run away before they could speak and give me that fatal choice.

I smiled and laughed it off, but his warning made me shiver a few times over my last few days. As a girl alone in another country, I was already on guard while walking through public spaces, but the towering maze of Tokyo took on a grey and tense tone whenever I thought of what might lurk among the crowds. I stuck to paths that went through the many hidden gardens and parks, and I always looked around warily.

That fear faded, though. I can't tell you why, not exactly. I was young, I thought I was smart, and I was American. Nothing could really hurt me. And besides, I was one of them now, right? I'd spent months there living like they did! So, on my last day, when a woman began walking intently toward me from the opposite end of a long subway car, I stayed in my seat.

She had long black hair, beautiful dark eyes, and a dark green dress that seemed out of place in a crowded car otherwise filled with grey shirts, dark suits, and white blouses. I saw these details about her before I saw the deep scars on her face and hands, as if a maniacal American slasher had brutally carved her up and left her to die some years ago. As she shuffled toward me, the lights flickered once.

The boy in the seat next to me shivered and focused worriedly on his portable game. Adults looked away, tense, and the teenagers opposite me finally stopped talking and began staring at their shoes. They knew. They knew, and there was nothing any of them could—or would—do for me. I was a foreigner, and a stranger to them.

But they listened. Oh, did they listen. I could almost hear them straining their ears to hear her whispers over the keening of wheels on rails beneath us. Every small step the woman took seemed louder than the one before.

Even then, I still didn't believe. I thought it was a prank, or someone being strange. I thought the others in the car with me were turning away out of courtesy or disgust at her scars. When I saw a tear fall from the cheek of the boy next to me—when I saw it splatter onto his game screen while he continued to pretend to play—that was when I understood.

She stood directly above me, and I raised my eyes to meet hers.

Her scars crinkled horribly as she gave me a seemingly innocent smile, and she asked, in a pleasant but whispery voice: "Do you have a sister?"