Creeps, true stories from Reddit (Second book)

Every summer my neighbour built a new scarecrow.

The rural area I grew up in made the smallest towns appear densely populated. It was the sort of place where you had to cycle a mile or so to the nearest neighbour and the bus only came through twice a day.
Most kids think growing up on a farm is some sort of constantly thrilling adventure. The kids at my school in the nearest town certainly did.
They didn't see me waking up at four in the morning just to get ready in time for my parents to get me there, or how lonely weekends were when your friends lived so far away. No. They thought it was all just chickens and tractors. In truth, I resented it.
The farm was on a large plot of land. We had acres surrounding the house, ending at a thick forested border that separated us from two distant neighbours and some fields.
My parents would let me play freely on the farm from a young age, my only rule was to stay on the land that we owned. Where the trees started, I should've always stopped.
Boredom was a killer, chickens aren't so exciting when they're your day to day life and there's only so much fun a kid can have on his own.
When I was about eight years old I started to explore the woods that made up the border, at first weaving in and out of the trees on the edge of the farm and eventually building up the courage to go deeper into the forest.
I was careful, making sure that I embarked on my adventures almost as soon as I'd left the house so that I had maximum time to explore without being caught by mum and dad. The day I first made it through the border I was trying to time how long it took to walk through the trees.
It was fifteen minutes until I reached the clearing owned by Mr Hinchcliff, an elderly potato farmer to the left of us. He was known by the local people for being insular and quiet.
It was a large, circular clearing, cut off from the rest of his land by a different species of tree to the ones in the forest. It's like they had been planted years before to create and keep the clearing separate and hidden.
In the centre of the circle was a man stood facing me, unmoving. I was terrified at first, convinced that Mr Hinchcliff was about to March me home for trespassing. I tried to conceal myself behind a tree whilst keeping an eye on the man, realising that he hadn't moved an inch.
It took me a moment, but the poles eventually gave it away. That and the lack of feet - the figure started from the ankles. The man in the clearing wasn't a man at all, he was a scarecrow.
I was fascinated, I stayed behind my tree but strained my eyes to try and get a better look. My parents put scarecrows up around our own crops but none of ours were ever as elaborate as the one stood in the middle of Mr Hinchcliff's clearing.
He was realistic, more realistic than anything that I'd seen before. He wore a red checked shirt, a straw hat and had a wide smile stitched across his face from the corners of his lips. I wanted to get closer, but as I started to emerge from the trees I could feel his eyes on me and could've sworn that I saw his fingers move.
I ran back through the woods to the farm, eager to get home and try to forget about what I'd seen, my little heart pounding. I didn't tell my parents about the scarecrow or the clearing but as I laid in bed that night all I could think about was that smile, stitched across his face.
I spent hours that night convincing myself that scarecrows couldn't move. What I'd seen must have been the wind, I was just freaking out over nothing.
I tried to stop myself going back, but I desperately wanted to get a closer look. I wondered what Mr Hinchcliff had used to make his scarecrow look so realistic and my curiosity eventually got the best of me.
Three days after my initial discovery I left the farm and made my way through the same dense section of woods until I reached the clearing again. I stopped behind the same tree, inspecting the scarecrow until I'd gathered the bravery to get a little closer.
Mr Hinchcliff's creation was even more spectacular up close. I couldn't work out what material he had used to make the face, it was like something out of a film. I touched the skin to try and understand what it was but I couldn't, it felt like my own, just colder. I was in complete awe.
The smile had been hand stitched into the skin like material, it must have taken the old man hours. If the scarecrow had ever had feet, they had been buried in the dirt to try and help him stand. Poles were driven into the ground behind him and tied to his torso, keeping him propped up and secured.
The longer I looked at the scarecrow, the more I started to feel like he were alive in ways. I was certain that he occasionally blinked and that his chest rose and fell. I was cautious and more than a little unsettled, but I took my time and inspected him as much as I could.
Walking back to the farm through the forest I couldn't get the scarecrow out of my thoughts. I struggled to make conversation over dinner, my mind completely filled with that stitched up smile.
I became obsessed. I returned every day for the next three weeks. The clearing became my place of solace and the scarecrow that stood there my best friend. I would sit by his planted ankles reading and drawing in my sketchbook.
I named the scarecrow Peter and I spoke to him whenever I could. I told him my deepest thoughts and feelings, cried to him when I was sad and spent every moment that I could with him.
I was careful not to sit in the clearing for too long and always returned to the farm before my parents felt I was gone too long. I wished I could spend more time with Peter, it's sad when I think back to what a lonely kid I must've been to spend so much time with an object. A glorified effigy of a human.
With every visit, the rising and falling of Peter's chest lessened, I stopped catching him blinking and his skin started to sag and grey after a few days of rain. I knew it must just be me getting used to him, realising that he was never going to spring to life and answer me like a real friend but it still made me a little sad.
After a while Peter's magic was gone, I would go and visit like always but it didn't feel the same, the clearing was as empty as the rest of my life, and my propped up friend in the middle was in a sorry state.
The stitched smile barely held itself in place and lumps of the material that made up his skin had started to dry and fall off. He couldn't even scare the birds away anymore and often had multiple perched on his straw hat and shoulders, pecking at his face.
One day, towards the end of that summer, I made my way through the clearing to find it empty. Peter was gone. There wasn't a trace of him left bar the pole that still stuck firmly in the ground. Despite the fact that my initial fascination with Peter had already depleted it still felt like a loss.
My parents couldn't understand why I was so withdrawn. I was grieving for someone that had never actually existed. Eight years old and I already understood what it was to mourn a friend.
I visited the clearing multiple times and it remained empty. School restarted and the autumn hit, bringing with it ice cold winds that would frost the entire land. I spent less time outside and barely visited Mr Hinchcliff's clearing through the winter.
By the time we reached the next summer, Peter and the time I'd spent with my silent friend was all but forgotten. It was by chance, on a sunny day, that I decided to walk through the woods one more time to my old sanctuary.
I didn't expect it, I thought that part of my life was over but there she was. An entirely new scarecrow, propped up just like Peter had been, ankles pressed firmly into the ground with poles behind her. She wore a different outfit, dungarees and a yellow checked shirt, but the straw hat was unmistakably the same.
Her chest rose and fell gently just like Peter's once had and her eyes appeared to move barely millimetres as I looked into them. It was almost impossible to see, but I was sure that she was alive.
She gave me hope that I wouldn't have to spend a summer lonely and sad on the farm. Her stitched smile gave me the same familiar comforting feeling as a warm hot chocolate on a chilly night.
The process repeated, just like it had with Peter, as the weeks passed she started to look more haggard and less alive. The magic became less, the loneliness returned and eventually, she disappeared entirely.
Every year would be the same. Summer would come and with it Mr Hinchcliff would build a new scarecrow. They came in every age, shape and gender. A new friend, that I knew would wither and vanish just like the others. Regardless, I grew attached to every single one of them.
As I got older and my parents awarded me more freedom I was able to spend more time in the town, with friends that spoke back. After a while I started to forget about the scarecrows entirely, favouring girls and nights out to sitting with inanimate objects.
Years passed by and I left home to take a degree in art. University changed my life, for the first time, I had a group of friends around me all the time. Ones that weren't planted in the ground. I moved in with them and only went home for Christmas.
I never forgot about Mr Hinchcliff's scarecrows, they were my lifeline for so long, but I did move on, I didn't need them anymore.
It's been three years since I last spent a summer on the farm and lock down has forced me back here. When my housemates all returned to their families I couldn't bare the idea of just me in the house so I did the same.
I wasn't intending to visit the clearing, in fact it's been years since I really thought about it, I've been too wrapped up in a social life that I never had as a kid.
It was only when my mother bought up her new friend Linda, who now lives at the farm to the left, that I was reminded of my childhood secret. One that I now wish I could erase.
"What happened to Mr Hinchcliff?" I asked, my heart sinking at the sudden realisation that I would never get to see another one of his amazing creations. My mother hung her head, trying to plan a response.
"It was awful, Charlie, all over the local news. He stopped responding to his sister's calls last year and after a while she sent local police to do a welfare check.
"When they arrived he wasn't in the house so they started searching the land and they found him, collapsed in a wooded bit just the other side of our trees, he'd died of a heart attack."
"Why would that make the news?" I asked, a bead of sweat running down my neck as I imagined Mr Hinchcliff, dead in the clearing. My clearing. My mothers face somehow lowered further.
"He wasn't alone, Charlie. They found a woman strapped to a pole next to his body. He'd been injecting her with some sort of drug that kept her completely paralysed while conscious. He'd planted her feet in the ground to keep her upright and dressed her up like a... scarecrow.
"Police combed the land and found 45 bodies buried. He'd been at it for years."
I felt bile rising in my throat, my mind started to connect dots that I'd never imagined.
"What happened to the girl?" I asked.
"She survived, barely, when they finally got her conscious she wrote a letter explaining that she'd been strapped to that pole for two weeks before she was found. Hinchcliff took every precaution possible to keep her alive up there.
"Worst of all, she can only communicate through writing now after what he did to her face. The sick fuck cut her mouth up, only to stitch it back into a smile."

Posted by u/newtotownJAM