r/nosleep | Reddit Horror Stories • Collection

I was a boogeyman for 12 years. Yesterday the kid I was supposed to haunt finall

Boogeymen are born from normal people; people who have let the evil enter and break their minds.

It starts with seemingly innocent bad thoughts. Someone has let their dog poop in your front yard and you half-jokingly wish they were hit by a bus.

You newborn son can’t get a whole night of sleep. You love him, but you wish just a little bit that he didn’t exist.

You look at your boss, yelling at you for being late and sleep-deprived, and imagine yourself twisting his neck, very, very slowly, until he cannot breathe.

You sometimes feel a lack of memory, like some minutes went by and you didn’t even notice, or someone had a whole conversation with you that you can’t remember, but you blame it to your stress and bad sleeping. Your boss is putting you through a lot this week.

Your neighbors don’t say good morning to you anymore. Even the overfriendly neighbor is different. He timidly waves at you, but in a colder way.

You say something that sounds normal to you when you’re mad, but the whole room is looking at you like you’re crazy.

The water and the food start to taste weird. And the smell. The sulfuric smell will never leave your nostrils anymore, although no one else feels it. Like your very soul is rotten. You go to the doctor and with a shaky voice he asks that you never come back again.

He won’t tell you what you have, he didn’t even charge you. You suspect the smell comes from inside, so there’s no amount of baths and lotions that can solve it.

You go to churches and temples and synagogues and mosques but no one can help you. No one can find what’s wrong. There’s no devil, no vengeful spirit. The poison is in your very being.

You realize nothing of it can ever go away again. You only had to feed It once or twice before It learned to feed Itself on you.

You find yourself in the middle of the night in the living room. You don’t remember getting there. You’re fully dressed, covered in sweat and holding a butcher knife in your hand. There’s no blood, but it could have been bloodied moments ago.

The next day, you watch and read the local news, praying that none of the vicious actions they describe are yours.

You start a diary, because that’s what people descending into madness do. They write to document their decay.

But when you try to write, you notice you have no control over your hand anymore. You write what It wants, not what you intended to. You know It craves violence, unspeakable acts that make your stomach churn, so you lock yourself.

You know you’re dangerous and others will be safer without you around. But It controls your every move, so It unlocks all the big padlocks every night.

That’s the reason you can’t die. You’re not in control of your body anymore. You’re locked outside of yourself. It has taken over.

You’re not you anymore. Your friends abandon you, your family despises you.. Your eyes hurt and you hate the light. Your fingers are numb, everything is numb, because your body isn’t yours anymore.

Maybe Humanity’s greatest fears of all are Being Forgotten, Being Misunderstood and Powerlessness, and you get to experience all of them at once.

What you used to be – the real You – no longer exists in other people’s memories. Your loved ones suppressed every good time they had with you, and replaced any fond recollection of you by fearing what you are now. You must be left behind, because now you’re It, and It is evil.