Shiver: A Collection Of Paranormal Stories

Touch the Box + The Hanging Tree**

This is a story that happened to my grandmother's brother in law who was also my grandfather's childhood best friend.

**Names changed to cover identity.

Uncle Steve was out with his friends and they were having a few drinks, playing music and darts and a while after dark he decided to go home. He had a friend with him, not quite sure who it was but I think it was another relative of mine, probably one of my grandma's brothers.

They took a short cut home through this old road which wasn't really used by vehicles, it was sort of a walking trail going through the woods.

They're walking on, talking to each other, they're about half way down the path when the wind changes and it suddenly gets really chilly.

They hear trees rustling a while behind them and this black figure comes out of a trail in the woods, whistling along to some sort of song. Uncle Steve said he never ever heard it before but it was haunting, the second he heard it the hairs raised on his neck and a chill went down his body and he knew something wasn't right.

The figure was a woman's, she had strikingly straight posture and appeared to be wearing a hooded gown and she was holding a box.

Keep in mind it's late at night and this figure basically came out of nowhere. There's no houses anywhere near this area, it's a very small town and everyone knows each other. Steve and his friend were walking for about half an hour to get where they were which shows how far away houses were from this area.

They're like ok, this is weird but it might be someone lost or someone visiting family and was on the way home from somewhere to so they try to brush it off, but walked a little faster just in case.

So they're walking fast and completely stop talking to each other. All they can hear is the wind, trees, footsteps and whistling from the black figured woman who was walking really slowly behind them but somehow was only a few feet behind them at this point.

They're a little freaked out because she caught up so fast when she was walking so slow and suddenly she stops humming, but they're assuming she just sped up at some point and maybe she was gonna ask for directions.

He turns back to greet her and he gets a good look at her and she's seemingly normal at first, but she's pale as a sheet. She's staring at him, almost through him, unblinking. She's holding a wooden chest and he says something to her, something along the lines of "are you lost? I haven't seen you around here before," and she completely ignores what he's saying and just goes: "Touch the box."

Him and his friend exchange looks and they ask why.

And in response she steps closer and tells them if they touch it, they'll get everything in life that they ever wanted and she sort of jerks the box closer to them.

He refuses and she comes closer, looking scarier than before, insisting, "Touch the box!"

This continued a few more times, Steve tried to be polite but she became more and more aggressive and somehow inhuman.

Him and his friend run down the rest of the road and she chased them, box in hand. He said he ran because he noticed something weird about her around this time, I think her ears were pointy and her eyes were a weird colour and her skin was almost transparent.

He said he ran as fast he could home and when he finially reached his yard, he looked behind him and she was gone and the wind had died down completely.

Uncle Steve explains when he tells this story that it's like something came over him and he wanted to touch the box. Even before she explained why and he says to this very day, he believe it was something demonic trying to get him to sell his soul.

The path he took that night was creepy in itself. There was once a tree there which up to 3 people hung themselves on, one woman who could've been the one he saw that night.

The scarest part about the hanging tree was that one halloween night, kids took a short cut through that path and they saw a decaying person hanging from their neck, being naive and it being Halloween, they assumed it was a decoration and threw rocks at it and etc, but it turned out that it was the dead body of a suicide victim.

As of today, that tree is cut down and it's used as a quad track instead of a walking trail, but it's almost completely grown in with trees and shrubs.

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A/N: Hi, guys! More uploading troubles on this chapter. I hope everyone who read this enjoyed it, leave comments below on what you thought! Hope it gave you some goosebumps! Xx