Lighthouse Horror Podcast - I'm The LAST HUMAN In My Town. Everyone Else Was Replaced | Scary Stories

Episode Date: March 23, 2024

I'm the last one still alive.    Story from Head of Spectre Make sure to check out more of their work at u/HeadOfSpectre  Cover Art from Alex SpLiNe        Original Post: I Might Be The Only One Left Who Knows The Truth About Mayflower Oklahoma : r/nosleep  Original YouTube link: I'm The LAST HUMAN In My Town. Everyone Else Was Replaced           For more stories like this one, check out my YouTube channel: Lighthouse Horror | YouTube  Patreon: Lighthouse Horror | Patreon Merch: lighthousehorror.com  Music: Lucas King - YouTube Myuu - YouTube  Incompetech  Darren Curtis Music - YouTube Thank you for listening to this scary story! If you enjoyed this new creepypasta story, please check out some of my other horror stories. We'll be uploading new episodes every week, featuring ghost stories, haunted encounters, mysteries, true stories, creepypasta, and anything supernatural and paranormal. Don't miss out on the thrill and suspense that await you in each episode!

If you ever drive down the I-44 through Oklahoma, you might just see a sign for a little town called Mayflower. It's easy to miss. Mayflower is a tiny little town with the current population of just a few hundred people, and every year it just seems to get smaller and smaller. On the off chance you've ever met someone who actually claims to be from Mayflower, they're likely to tell you that that's because nobody really sticks around. There's not a lot there to draw people in, and nobody seems to be from.

to care enough to really invest in it. In fact, I'd reckon in a few more decades, Mayflower will quietly disappear off the map completely. That's probably the plan, at least. To have it all conveniently fade away and be forgotten. But you can't erase history. And the stupidest thing you can do is to try. History shouldn't be hidden away in the shadows. It shouldn't be covered up. It should be examined, studied, learned from. The town that people drive past without a second thought these days is nothing more than an elaborate hoax, a cover-up. I might be the only one left who knows the truth about Mayflower, Oklahoma.

In almost 70 years, I've never once heard anyone speak of what happened there, and I've stayed silent myself for most of my life. But as time creeps up on me and leaves me with fewer and fewer days ahead, I can't in good conscience keep that silence anymore. Maybe they'll kill me for finally speaking out, but that's fine. I'm an older man now, with a few years left in me. All my time is behind me now. So let them kill me. They'll be doing me a favor. Time has robbed me of many memories, but it could never let me forget the things I saw in June of 1944 when the sickness came to Mayflower.

My father, Dr. John Alderson was the town physician at the time, and as a result, I often found myself working as his unofficial assistant, usually just carrying his bags, handing him things he needed or running tonics and medicines down to the neighbors. I always got the impression that Dad had hoped I'd eventually decide to follow in his footsteps someday, although my life ultimately followed a different path. That's neither here nor there, though. I worked fairly closely with Dad, I was probably one of the first people in Mayflower to see what was happening firsthand. We got our first call about the sickness in early June,

when the parents of a local girl by the name of Emma Nibbs called us, claiming their little girl had been acting strange. Now, I didn't know little Emma all that well, but I'd seen her around town a few times. She'd seemed like a good kid though, with a happy-go-lucky demeanor and a thousand-wacht grin. As my father, I'd see her around town, I'd seen her around town a few-time, and I had driven down to the Nibbs' house, I was expecting to see the same thing we'd seen a thousand times before whenever we got a call about a sick kid. A fever, snotty nose, maybe a rash. Stuff like that. Nine times out of ten, most calls we got about kids could be boiled down to a cold, the flu,

chickenpox, measles, or mumps. Instead, when we walked into the house, Mr. Nibbs was in the middle of bandaging his hand. I remember that Dad had asked him what had happened, and Mr. Nibbs had said that little Emma had bitten him. He'd even shown us the wound, which was still bleeding pretty heavily. I'd seen my fair share of bites before at that point, and this looked pretty bad for a bite from a six-year-old. She'd damn near torn out a chunk of his thumb.

Dad had needed to stop and treat him before he'd even set foot in Emma's room, and while he worked on Mr. Nibbs, I'd listened as the man had talked to him. about what had happened. Now, my memory is a little foggy these days, but I can remember what he'd said with nothing less than perfect clarity. He and his wife had noticed the shift in Emma's behavior a couple of days prior. She'd apparently gotten a lot quieter and started spending more time in her room. They'd checked her for fever and found nothing, and had resolved to just go ahead and keep an eye on her. Then a couple of days later, Mrs. Nibs had gone in to wake the girl up, only to find her sitting in the corner of her bedroom.

Apparently, she'd stolen a knife from the kitchen and taken it to one of her teddy bears. At some point during the night, she'd slid it open, ripped out the stuffing, and put the hollowed-out cloth head over her own head, like a mask. When Mrs. Nibbs had tried to talk her into taking the makeshift teddy bear mask off, Emma had just snarled and clawed at her, fighting her until she'd managed to take it off. Now Mrs. Nibbs had been nimble enough to wrestle it off her head without suffering too much, but considering the way Emma was acting, they decided it was probably best not to send her to school and let her rest instead. Sure enough, by that afternoon Emma had eviscerated another teddy bear and fashioned herself a new mask.

Mr. Nibbs had gotten his bite trying to remove that second mask. I remember that Dad had sat there listening to Mr. Nib's story with this stony look of concern on his face. When Mr. Nibbs had asked him if he'd ever heard of anything like this, he'd just slowly shaken his head and said, No, I'm afraid this is as new to me as it is to you. Then a few minutes later, he and I had gone in to take a look at Emma ourselves. When we'd walked into her bedroom, we were greeted by the sight of Little Emma Nibbs sitting cross-legged on her bed, still in her nightgown. Her father's blood was still somewhat fresh

along the front, and a little bit of it stained the makeshift teddy bear mask she wore. When she'd turned her head to look at us, I remember feeling my blood freeze in my veins. She'd poke the eyes out of the bear, and I could see her big pale blue eyes watching us from behind the mask. She didn't say anything. She just growled at us. Like some sort of rabid dog. Then when we'd approached her, she stood up on the bed and started howling and snarling. Dad and I had a hell of time grabbing her. And once we had her, it was my job to hold her still while he pried off the mask.

Her hair was wet with sweat underneath, and there was still blood staining her lips and teeth as she gnashed and tried to bite at Dad's hands while he'd done a quick examination. He looked at her eyes, studied her skin for any signs of trauma, then taking a blood sample. That was the worst part. She'd howled like a wounded animal when the needle went in and kicked like a mule. As soon as we'd let her go, she'd scrambled away, pulling the teddy bear mask back on and crawling under her bed. We'd made a point to leave as quickly as we could.

Mr. and Mrs. Nibbs had been waiting for us anxiously outside of Little Emma's door, In the moment they saw us, they were asking for his thoughts. Dad had just shaken his head and told them straight up that he had no idea what was going on with her. The issue here may be psychological, not physical. He'd said, It could well be some sort of hysteria brought on by a recent trauma. He did promise he'd take a look at her blood and call them if he found anything out of the ordinary.

But as far as I know, he never found anything of note. He and I had both quickly dismissed the whole thing as just a strange psychological case and gone about our work, expecting that to be the end of it. And yet it wasn't. About six days later, my dad and I got another call, this time to the morgue. My dad generally wasn't bothered by the local coroner. Being a small town, Mayflower didn't exactly have a lot of deaths, and when someone did turn up dead, it was usually due to old age or a tragic accident.

This was something else entirely. Albert Brown was a generally healthy and pleasant man in his late 50s who owned a local hardware store. Just about everyone in Mayflower knew him, and just about everyone liked him. If you had a project at home you were working on, you called Albert. If you just shot a prize buck and wanted the head stuffed and mounted, you called Albert. If you were looking for a guy to go out drinking with, you called Albert. So when a man was seen wandering down the middle of a street, naked from the waist up, save for a taxidermied deer head, and carrying a bloody sledgehammer, people didn't expect it

to turn out to be Albert Brown. The police had been called. Obviously, and by all accounts, they'd attempted to detain him, but Albert had just raised the hammer, started screaming, and charged them. After putting one of the two officers on the scene in the hospital, the other had shot him dead. Later on, when a couple of officers had been dispatched to notify his wife, they'd found out the hard way where the blood on Albert's hammer had come from. Dad had been called in early in the afternoon to help examine the body. The general consensus was that either Albert had been a hell of a lot drunker than usual, or something had been seriously wrong with him. And since Albert had never been a particularly violent drunk, the coroner was leaned.

towards the second option. Now, I'd never actually seen a dead body before, and I sure as hell had never been present for an autopsy either. But I was there when they cut open Albert Brown that afternoon. I was right there. I won't lie, the sight of friendly old Albert Brown on that table. His ribs getting cut open by my dad and Mr. Rogers, our local coroner, was not a pleasant one. I may have lost my lunch after hearing the sound of his ribs cracking, and I couldn't bring myself to watch as they did their examination. I heard plenty, though. Stomach looks fine, liver too, for a man his age at least.

Mr. Rogers had said, How about we check the brain? Then a few moments later, I listened as they cut open Albert's skull. I knew better than to watch and just kept busy on the far side of the room. Huh. Brain looks fine too. I remember Dad saying, this doesn't make sense. Physically, I'd say there's nothing wrong with him. They spent another hour or so actually picking apart his brain, and I'd made a point to leave for that. If I'd still had anything in my stomach, I would have upchuck that too. Come to think of it. That day alone was probably part of the reason I decided I had no interest in ever becoming a doctor like my dad.

Anyways, after Dad and Mr. Rogers were done ripping poor Albert apart and stitching him back together, all they could really do was shake their heads and shrug their shoulders. Neither of them could come up with any medical explanation for why the man had just snapped. Just like before, Dad had suggested the whole thing was psychological and that Albert had suffered some sort of mental break. I remember him explaining it to one of the police officers, and I remember him not sounding entirely convinced of what he was saying. I didn't need to be a doctor to know why that was. One little girl, having a violent episode and wearing an animal mask, could be explained away easily.

One little girl, and a respected member of the community, partaking in the exact same violent behavior was suspicious. Granted, Emma Nibbs hadn't killed anybody, but that wasn't exactly much of a comfort. In the days after Albert Brown's death, my dad started to be a bit of a bit of a bit of a had started spending more nights alone in his office, reviewing notes and studying some of the blood he'd taken from both Emma and Albert. He never said anything to me out loud, but I knew he was looking for some commonalities, some sort of cause to what had happened, and as far as I knew, he never found it. A couple of days later, I heard the neighbors talking about how one of their kids had started

attacking another kid at school. They just started biting and clawing at them all of a sudden. Dad got called in to investigate a few new cases of hysteria where people had suddenly started acting violent without any provocation. In just about every case, the aggressor had stopped responding verbally, and in most of them, they'd put on some sort of animal mask. Then, about ten days after the death of Albert Brown came the incident at the Mayflower shopping center.

I suppose I should count myself lucky that I never saw this part firsthand. The things I did see have left me with enough nightmares to last a lifetime already. All that I know of what happened, I know from secondhand accounts. So forgive me if my retelling has some inaccuracies, although I doubt anyone is out there who could give a more accurate description of events. On June 27, 1944, several people inside the Mayflower Shopping Center entered a sudden fit of violence. From what I've heard, there was little to no connection between any of them. Jim Creighton worked in one of the warehouses in town and had come in with his two daughters.

Tom Bragg was one of the employees there, working at one of the department stores. Patrick Hurley worked out of town and otherwise enjoyed a pleasant upper-class life. He'd come in with his wife, looking for a birthday gift for her. And Danielle Graham was a housewife who had come in just a to shop. Chances are they'd never even met each other, and yet the madness took them all on the same day at just about the same time. According to most accounts, Creighton was the first one to be afflicted. One minute he'd been walking through a store with his daughters, the next his thumbs were gouging out a woman's eyes. Moments later, Patrick Hurley was seen sinking his teeth into his wife's throat, while Danielle Graham stagued.

the nearest employee to death. Naturally, those who weren't taken by the madness fled, and most of them made it out. The police were called, and by the time they got there, they were greeted by the sight of Tom Bragg, screaming blue murder and naked as the day he was born, save for a mask, made from the head of a plush mouse toy. He came charging out at them with a hatchet and every intention of using it. Bragg had supposedly taken taken several bullets before he'd gone down. And when he finally died, he did so trying to bury that axe in the head of the nearest officer. Unfortunately, the other three hadn't been quite so full of piss and vinegar. They'd sent five armed police officers in to deal with them.

And from outside, the others just watched and listened as all hell broke loose. According to the survivors, they'd been ambushed by Danielle Graham first, dressed in a full-fur- coat and wearing the head of a plush dog. She'd killed one officer by stabbing him to death, then went for his gun and started shooting, killing another. Apparently, one of the officers had put two bullets of buckshot into her and it had barely seemed to slow her down. She'd just laughed, blood and spittle flying out of her mouth. Even when the officers fired the third and fourth shells into her head, she hadn't stopped laughing, even as she'd hit the ground. Her body had bucked and twitched in her final moments, a raspy, twisted,

howling noise, coming from what was left of her throat. They'd run into Jim Creighton next, and found him dragging the bodies of one of his dead daughters behind him, snorting with laughter. Creighton had been an interesting case. Unlike the others, he hadn't adorned himself with any makeshift animal masks. He'd instead taken a knife and started carving markings and patterns into his own body. From what I heard, he just looked at the officers and kept cackling at them, before dropping his daughter's body and coming at them with a pair of garden shears. They'd put a lot of lead into him, but it hadn't been enough to stop him from impaling one of the officers through the chest with them. Fortunately, Creighton never got the chance to hurt anyone else before the officers finished

him off. With only two of them left, the surviving officers had opted to back out, although Patrick Hurley had found them first. The two had described seeing him wandering the mall, grinning from ear to ear, and popping sweets into his mouth. They hadn't been brave enough to start shooting at him and had instead decided to get the hell out of Dodge. I don't know if Hurley chased them or not.

but I know that when they sent more officers in, Hurley was long gone. All in all, 16 people had been killed at the Mayflower Shopping Center that day. God only knows how many more were injured. Dad and I spent the better part of that evening tending to the wounded, and when that was done, just like before, Dad was called in to help examine the bodies. Just like before, he found nothing. And the situation just continued to escalate. Two days after the incident at the shopping center, one of the surviving officers walked

into the police station wearing his own teddy bear mask and started shooting. Not even a day later, Emma Nibbs was shot and killed in the street after being seen walking around with her daddy's shotgun. Mr. and Mrs. Nibbs turned up in the morgue that night to join their daughter, having most likely been killed by her several hours prior. Mayflower just went to hell. The people just went feral, and we had no answers. The turning point came when it got my mother.

One minute, I've been downstairs in the garden, having as normal a conversation as one can have, considering what was going on outside. Dad had called me into his office to help him with something, so I'd excused myself and stepped away to tend to him. I couldn't have been gone more than ten minutes, and yet when I came back, my mom was standing in front of the kitchen window. She had a couple of branches from outside set in front of her, along with Dad's hammer and some nails. I remember I tried speaking to her, but she didn't answer. I just watched as she picked up one of the branches and fixed it in her hair, then picked up the

hammer in one of the nails, and... Jesus. She... I watched as my mother picked up the hammer. one of the nails, and I watched as she placed the nail against the wood, hanging in her hair, and I watched as she started to hammer it into her skull. She didn't… she didn't even flinch. I could see the reflection of her face on the window, and she just kept smiling. Even as the blood ran down the side of her head, she just… Once she finished one side, she picked up the other branch. and did the other, just as casually as I'd watched her do her makeup.

With every strike of the hammer, I flinched in pain. I didn't recognize the warmth of tears down my cheeks until she finally turned around, grinning from ear to ear as she looked at me. Blood trickled from her nose and her right eye. Her body seemed to twitch and spasm, but she stood there like nothing was wrong. Then, Hammer still in hand, she started coming towards me and I knew, I knew she was going to kill me. And all I could think to do as she drew closer and closer was to cry and beg her not to do it. I held my hands up over my face as she raised the hammer to end my life.

And then I heard the gunshot. The first bullet tore out a chunk of her head. I saw bits of brain through the hole in her skull. The force of the bullet had popped one of her eyes slightly out of its socket, and yet she kept smiling. I turned back to see my dad, holding the gun he'd kept in his study. His usual stony expression was gone, replaced by one I'd never seen before. Horror. Pure horror.

He'd shot her again and again. And again, until finally she just collapsed to the ground, still twitching, still smiling. His hands were shaking as tears rolled down his cheeks. I remember the sound of him hyperventilating. Then he'd grabbed me, pulling me in for a hug, and told me quietly to get in the car. We left Mayflower immediately. We didn't stop to pack. All we had were the clothes on our backs and Dad's gun.

As we drove out of town, I remember seeing several people in animal masks running through the streets, hooting like wild animals. Some of them stopped to watch the car as it passed. Some of them even tried to chase it, but none of them got too close. I remember watching as a man in a dirty business suit with a severed pig's head over his own head, stood by the side of the road, watching us pass him by, before lifting a hand to wave at us. I could hear his muffled, wheezing laughter underneath the pig's head, and I'm certain that it was Patrick Hurley under there. Dad and I didn't stop until we'd

left Mayflower far behind. We parked at a motel and slept there for a few days, neither of us exactly sure what to do next. It was three days later, then I noticed the military trucks passing by the motel, covered trucks that I'd seen them use to transport troops in the movies. It was early in the morning when I saw it. Dad was still asleep, and considering how much I'd watched him drink the other night, I got the impression he'd be asleep for some time. So I did what made sense to me. I borrowed his car keys, and once the trucks had passed, I followed them out to Mayflower. Looking back on it, I can't tell you just what I'd expected to see. Maybe I was naive enough to trick myself into thinking that the soldiers were on their way

to help whatever was left of Mayflower. But in my heart, I think I knew better. I was smart enough not to actually go into Mayflower, at least. I parked the car on the south side of town near a hill that would give me a good enough vantage point and walked out to see what I could see. And what did I see? I could hear the gunshots start even before I made it to the hill. I knew what was happening. And yet morbid curiosity made me look. From that hill, I could hear I watched as the soldiers made their way through the street. Their movements were cold and mechanical. They killed everything they saw, although whether or not they would have shown any mercy

to someone who hadn't been touched by the madness was unclear. As far as I could tell, there wasn't anyone left who was still sane. Nobody except for my dad and I. After watching the soldiers do their work, I decided I couldn't do it anymore. I'd turned to leave and I never looked at. back. In 70 years, I've never once heard anyone talk about what happened in Mayflower, Oklahoma. Not once. It might as well be like it never even happened. Dad died about 30 years after the whole affair. He and I had eventually moved on and started over. We never

spoke about what we'd seen in Mayflower. Not once. And yet our silence spoke volumes. I know he tried looking for answers on his own, but I don't think he ever found them. Me? I gave up looking a long time ago, when I realized that there are none to be found, which isn't to say that they don't exist, only that no matter how hard I look, I know that I will never find them, because I am not meant to find them. God. I feel like such a crazy old man saying things like this, but with no answers, I've been forced to draw my own conclusions about what happened. I suppose in my head the narrative is that something afflicted the people of Mayflower,

whether it was a disease or a chemical, or something else entirely, isn't clear to me, nor does it matter much. Something clearly affected us. Perhaps it was something the government did to us. Perhaps it was some sort of attack by a foreign power, who's to say, really? caused it, though. I can say with certainty that the government covered it up. The Mayflower Oklahoma that exists today is little more than a hoax. A well-done hoax, I won't lie, but a hoax all the same. I've driven through the town as it is today. It's as if nothing ever happened. There's no memorial

to the dead. The Mayflower Shopping Center still stands. Almost everything as it did all those years ago. So the houses we used to live in are mostly still there, and the people. I'm sure they'll have you believe they're still there too. Once, a number of years ago, when I passed through Mayflower, I stopped into a store to grab a drink and look around. The girl working at the register wore a name tag. Emma Nibs. Little Emma Nibbs.

The happy-go-lucky girl with a thousand-wots smile. The girl who'd carved up her teddy bears and bitten her father. The little girl who'd murdered her family with a shotgun, then got killed in the street like a dog. The woman wearing the name tag certainly bore a resemblance to her, but I knew that it was just that. A resemblance. It was most obvious when she smiled.

It wasn't the same smile. I'd just smiled back at the woman as I would any other stranger. my drink and left. I never went back to Mayflower after that. I don't need to.