Nosleep and Creepypasta Stories to Keep You up All Night

Black Sap

We were having another lockdown drill when I found out about Holly Reyes. I was in Social Studies, third period, when Principal Weston's muffled voice spat at us from the ceiling. We all sighed and ducked under the long tables, limbs shoving aside plastic chairs as we army-crawled into tucked positions. Mrs. Loew shut the door and sat back at her desk to grade papers.

I remember being glad the drill happened in third period because that's the class I shared with my best friend Dina. We lay on our arms under the table, glancing at Mrs. Loew, waiting for the unspoken amount of time to pass until we could whisper to each other without getting in trouble.

When we heard a few boys at the table next to us snicker at each other without retribution, Dina glanced around and whispered, "Who do you like?"

Her favorite game.

"No one," I said.

She rolled her eyes. "You have to like someone."

I shrugged and dug my chin into the carpet, a grumpy blue color with red flecks. "I dunno. I don't. Who do you like?"

"I'll tell you if you tell me."

"But I know you like Tom."

She held a finger to her lips and glared at me. "Not anymore!"

I looked around the room, trying to think of a reasonable victim for me to "like" so I could learn her secret. I suddenly remembered a moment from the day before: a boy running out of the lunch line to chase a dime and a penny that were rolling away, change I had dropped in an embarrassing effort to get money out of my new Pikachu wallet. He handed the coins to me. His smile was so bright, and he had dimples—

"The new kid," I said. "I don't know his name."

Dina raised her eyebrows. "Ricardo?"

I shrugged. "Maybe. I don't know."

Dina gasped so loudly that Mrs. Loew shushed her. "Oh! No! But you heard what happened to his baby sister!"

I barely knew who we were talking about. "No?"

"Holly, a sixth-grader," Dina said with a grin that only schadenfreude could build. "Her posters went up this morning. She's missing."

I remember feeling the weight of those words like a foot stepping on my back. I remember thinking she was lying, then thinking I was dumb for not knowing until three whole periods had passed, then hearing Dina babble about her latest crush, whose name I forgot immediately because I just didn't care about that anymore.

The missing posters went on every telephone pole and bulletin board in Hocstat, which turned out to be a lot for such a small town. A few made it onto the trees, even though people mostly avoided the black maples that hovered above all our buildings because the black maple sap in Hocstat was notoriously gooey and hard to get out of your clothes.

I felt a dramatic, overwhelming tug at my heartstrings every time I saw Ricardo in the halls. He had stopped trying to make friends. His eyes had bags under them that I'd never seen on any other eighth-grader. All of his notebooks looked like they'd been yanked from a shredder, and he often trailed pencil stubs behind him. I wondered why his parents didn't just pull him out of school, but Dina pointed out that they were probably distraught at home, so maybe being at school gave him some peace.

It didn't take long before the high schoolers started passing down rumors to their siblings in middle school, which then spread around our territory like wildfire. I heard the rumors from my science partner Finn DeCorma, whose older brother said this was exactly like the disappearances of Troy Evers and McKenzie Kentworth, two ninth-graders who disappeared a few years back. I didn't remember much about Troy and McKenzie; but thankfully, Finn was more than happy to tell their tales while I labeled the parts of a cell in colored pencil.