CreepyPasta Stories to read at night

My student submitted the most disturbing project I've ever seen.

(There is no estimated read time for this one, sorry folks)

One of my least favorite parts about being a middle school history teacher is the bullshit "Living History" assignments we give at the end of every school year. Kids are supposed to sit with their grandparents and video tape, voice record, or transcribe their oldest memories for posterity (and for an easy way to bring up their GPA).

I have been doing this for seventeen years, and when I collected the projects this time around, I assumed they would be as dull, if not duller than usual. This had not been a particularly bright class.

So I went home, poured myself a glass of wine, and prepared for a long night of "I only owned two pairs of pants when I was your age" and "My brother got beat with a newspaper for hitting a baseball into a neighbor's yard." And of course, these projects were peppered with innocent, old-person comments that were so horribly sexist and racist you just had to laugh.

Now, I had a girl in my class whom I will call Olivia. She was pudgy, quiet, and proved herself a consistent B student. I expected her project to be as unremarkable as her, and perhaps that's why I was so profoundly disturbed by what I witnessed that night.

Olivia had submitted two discs for some reason, so I began with the one marked "interview." My screen hiccuped twice before a grainy image of a living room came into view. The place was a hoarder's hell. Olivia was curled up in an armchair clutching a notebook and looking like a scared animal. Across from her sat a man with a somber countenance, smoking a cigarette and staring at her expectantly.

"Go ahead," a woman's voice whispered from behind the camera. Olivia's owlish eyes flashed towards the screen, then back to the man.

"I am here with my Great Uncle Stephen," she began almost inaudibly. "He is going to tell us about his oldest memories from being in the army."

Great Uncle Stephen looked like he'd rather be in a goddamn trench at the moment, but he waited patiently for the questions to begin.

Not surprisingly, Olivia read verbatim from the suggested questions sheet I had handed out to the students. He answered her curtly. Once or twice I heard her mother whisper "speak up, Olivia" from behind the camera. Typical, boring shit.

So I was intrigued when Olivia set down the notebook and asked, "Did you like being in the army?"

That was totally off-script. Great Uncle Stephen emitted a chain smoker's wheeze. "Nope. Glad to get out of my town though."

"Where did you go?"

"Balkans."

"Uh-huh," she said. I doubted she knew what the Balkans were, and my suspicion was confirmed when she asked, "Was Baukiss very different from here?"

"Yes."

Mom cleared her throat from behind the camera, perhaps encouraging Great Uncle Stephen to be a little more forthcoming.

But Olivia seemed genuinely interested. "Uncle Stephen," she asked, "what is your very worst memory from the army?"

The old man crushed his cigarette in the ashtray and then slowly lifted himself out of his chair. "I'll be back," he mumbled. The camera cut off.

When the screen flashed back on, everything was the same except Great Uncle Stephen had several pieces of paper in plastic sleeves laid atop all the crap sitting on his coffee table. One, he held in his hand.

"I was a kid when I enlisted," he said, looking at Olivia. "Your brother's age," he told her. Olivia nodded. "I never saw combat. Both of my deployments were to cities in Eastern Europe that had been destroyed by civil wars. Everything was a mess. I felt like a janitor for fuck's sa-"