Nosleep and Creepypasta Stories to Keep You up All Night

The Reappearance of Carrie Mae

Looking back, I remember how all of my family's summer barbecues went the same way. There'd be the initial bustle of uncles and aunts arriving with kids, clinking paper bags full of liquor, and lopsided foil trays of macaroni and lasagna. First drinks were poured, meat was thrown on the grill, and cackles followed light gossip in the crowded kitchen. We ate. Parents drank. And as the afternoon progressed, all of the cousins overcame their shyness and darted around the open back yard. The older crowd took up residence in plastic woven chairs with cups in hand. As they ventured deeper down into their drinks, so too did the light chatter from earlier in the afternoon descend into more serious subjects. It wasn't until I had reached 11 or 12 years old that I began to recognize the recurrence of the name "Carrie Mae" uttered from the semicircle of elders across the lawn. I asked my mom about who she was while driving home from a barbecue one afternoon. She just said, "I'll tell you when you're older."

I am 15 now and the "grown-ups" still fall into whispers when I pass by their drinking circle if Carrie Mae is the topic of conversation. Little do they know that I have done a bit of sleuthing on my own. Through equal parts hearsay (courtesy of older cousins) and eavesdropping, I have since managed to piece together a general account of what happened to my distant cousin, Carrie Mae and her family. After the fact, I can understand why my mother and all of the other grown-ups chose to keep her story from us kids. It's to this day the scariest thing I have ever (or never) heard:

It happened in a little town on the North Shore of Massachusetts called Middleton where Carrie Mae and her parents (my aunt and uncle) lived. Middleton was still pretty undeveloped in the mid-eighties. Young couples looking to start a family often opted for the paved and well-lit streets of neighboring Danvers or Salem over the pocked dirt roads of Middleton. But my Uncle Steven and Aunt Lena (Carrie Mae's parents) were known for being somewhat bohemian. They were both painters who relished the unfettered wilderness that the small wooded town had to offer. The family fit in well there. Carrie Mae grew up surrounded by the likes of artists, painters, and eccentrics who called that small stretch of forest home.

On the evening that Carrie Mae went missing, her family was visiting a public patch of garden rented by one of her father's friends. This particular field was divided into dozens of small plots where the town's citizens could grow anything from cucumbers to black-eyed Susans. Their friend's plot bordered the forest surrounding the field. While the parents sat in rickety chairs among the watermelons, the kids darted in and out of the trees and played hide-and-seek. At one point in the evening, the other kids in the group came back to their parents saying that they couldn't find Carrie Mae. They had been playing a game of hide-and-seek. And even though the game had been over for 20 minutes, Carrie Mae was still nowhere in sight.

At first, my aunt and uncle weren't that alarmed. They yelled her name from where they sat, expecting her to come running from the woods once she heard their voices. Carrie Mae was a playful and imaginative girl, but she was always well-behaved. That's why my Uncle Steven and Aunt Lena started to get worried after only a few minutes of getting no answer from their calls into the woods. As the sun began to set, flashlights were retrieved from cars and the grown-ups in the group fanned out into the surrounding woods to search for Carrie Mae. They called her name until nine o'clock or so. After that, they called the cops. Days went by. Weeks. All the while police officers and volunteers from Middleton and neighboring towns combed the woods, going miles into the New England forests. Yet, despite the fervor of the search, not so much as a shoelace was recovered. After one month of fliers, false tips, the whir of helicopter blades, and television appearances, my aunt and uncle first began to consider the possibility that they would never see Carrie Mae again.

But then something extraordinary happened. Contrary to all statistics for missing children, kidnappings, and the rule of the first 48 hours, Carrie Mae was found...or, more accurately, she just showed up. One day, roughly five weeks after her disappearance, she emerged naked, bruised, and scratched from the woods at the exact spot that she had entered from. No one was at the gardening plot at the time as it was five o'clock in the morning. So she walked barefoot across the misty field and down the country road into town. Angus McLeod, a fry-cook at N&J Doughnuts, was the first one to spot her. He called the police who picked her up and brought her to the station. By 7:30, there had been a tearful reunion between Carrie Mae, Uncle Steven, and Aunt Lena; by 9:00, the news of Carrie Mae's return had trickled through the neighborhood and was spilling over into neighboring towns; 12 o'clock saw the long driveway to their home jammed with vans from every newspaper and television station on the North Shore; and by dinnertime, all of Essex County was in celebration for the darling 13-year-old who had finally come home. "It was like a bad dream," Aunt Lena whimpered into a Channel 5 microphone. "A bad dream that I couldn't wake up from. But today, I woke up." And so it seemed to that small pocket of Massachusetts in the dog days of 1985, like some great nightmare had hovered for a spell over their town only to move on, saving its worst for another time and another place.