The Macabre

Ring Past

I typed into the search bar the store name, "The Macabre" tons of pages popped up. It was a store built in the late 1800s. It also read that it had burnt down 5 times previous. Each time a customer and an employee had died. The first time, it had burnt down, everything had burned and only 10 items survived. No one knows how these items survived the fires. Two rings, a bracelet, a pair of shoes, a table, an old dress, a necklace, a mug, a mirror and a pair of earrings. These items all survived the fires without a single scratch on them.

Each item, their previous owner had died or gone missing. No one knows what happened to them, or how the item got into the store to begin with. I took notes as I kept reading. I did more background digging. I wanted to see who Analise was and what happened to her. I looked up Analise and a description of the ring to see if anything pops up. At first it just kept loading, and after a bit, a single article showed up. She was a woman who was practicing black magic, and was found dead a week later at her home. She was all alone, lived alone and no one knew if she had family. She cursed anyone who did her wrong. Once the city got a hold of her house they got rid of everything, back in 1862.

I looked up to see if anyone had documented their encounter with this ring before me. I searched up what happened with the ring and got surprisingly but not so much, a lot of articles. 35 different people who have had this ring have gone missing or end up dead. Each image was worse than the last, each more gruesome than the last. Every article started with the image of a woman or man with the ring on their hand.

The most recent owner was from five years ago. She lived two cities over where I live and she had suddenly disappeared and to this day hasn't been found. Her name was Carol Dawson, forty-five years old, she was a single mother to a thirteen year old. I searched up her name and a lot more articles popped up. They had interviewed her daughter to have clues to where she could have disappeared to.

"She didn't do much, she didn't have much friends to hang out with. Mom was a person of routine, she only went to work and back, drove me to school and I'd take the bus back home. My Mom was a great woman, she was kind to anyone that needed her. She would help around the community when it was needed. She's been through so much with my father leaving us, to us losing our home in another state and having to live here. She worked two jobs, she was finally starting to show that she was getting happy. It was a regular day. On Saturday, we had plans to go to the grocery, and afterwards go relax at the park. I didn't go with her on the grocery trip, I remembered I had slept in that morning. I remember waiting for her to come home. It wasn't unusual for her to talk around an hour at the store she likes to browse the isles.

I waited for hours that day, thinking maybe she got caught in traffic or caught up with a friend at the store. But when it was getting dark around eight at night, that's when I decided to call the police. Days turned to weeks, weeks into a month. I'm still looking and they said that after a couple of months with no clues the case will go cold. - Cheryl Dawson

Cheryl is eighteen now and is living with her grandparents. The case went cold about a year later when they couldn't find any clues or anything about where Carol could be. Cheryl also said in another interview that her mom was starting to get a little paranoid. She would constantly look over her shoulder and would triple check that every single lock in their house was on. The detectives on the case were looking for a possible stalker but nothing showed up. She wasn't being followed, she had no enemies, no coworkers with a grudge, nothing. It's like she disappeared off the face of the earth. The only thing left was her ring which was found in a bundle inside the bloody sweater she was wearing the day she went missing. After that no other clue of what happened to her came to light. 

Cheryl moved houses into her grandparents house and gave all her mother's things to various thrift shops. 'Maybe if I could contact Cheryl and ask about her mom and how she was before she disappeared, maybe I can get some clues as to what is happening to me and around me right now. Just have to see how I can find her or where she lives.' I thought. I looked at my notes and saw that I had a couple of notes written in them, to anyone else it wouldn't make sense. I looked at the time and saw that it was already nine at night. I didn't even realize that time went by so fast. I got up and got ready to go to sleep.