Scary Horror Stories by Dr. NoSleep - Death's Shadow

Episode Date: October 27, 2021

Halloween Horror Week Special. 🎉 Ad-free episodes + bonus episodes: https://www.patreon.com/drnosleep 🎥 YouTube: https://youtube.com/c/DrNoSleep ✅ Advertising Inquiries: [e-mail] DISCLAIMER: This story contains explicit content and is rated R for adults 18 years or older. NOT for children. Parental discretion is advised. #drnosleep #halloween #scarystories #horrorstories #doctornosleep #truescarystories #horrorpodcast #horror Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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what the movie blog calls something you need to watch. Saving those children is how we all go home. From Binge All Episodes exclusively on Paramount Plus. Every year on Halloween, a person or family in our town gets murdered. Officially, the police release statements blaming the deaths on random culprits, almost always claiming that the bodies have vanished. For any other part of the world, the explanation doesn't seem all that implausible. But for those of us that have lived here for the better part of our lives, we know the actual truth,

that there's an entity, a being that stalks the victims in the days before Halloween, a nightmare-inducing humanoid shrouded in darkness. We call him Death's Shadow. I had my first encounter with a shadow at the ripe old age of five. My room was on the second floor of our home and had a perfect view over our neighborhood. In the days before Halloween, I'd sit up in the evening and admire the bright and spooky decorations. Since I was too young to partake in the yearly hunt for candy, I could only live vicariously

through others. And until my parents deemed me mature enough to go out on my own hunt, I could only observe from afar. That year there was a particularly large number of decorations, as if our neighbors had all gone to war to prove who had the most hauntingly created. creative mind. Directly across the street lived a family that had covered the entirety of their house and fake cobwebs, full on with lights casting their shine on plastic spiders. It was truly a sight to behold. But one night, just a week prior to the main event, I noticed a figure

standing in the neighbor's yard. He first caught my eye due to the darkness of his being, akin to a silhouette magically defined the lights around him. All I could see was his sickly thin outline and oddly long arms. On his head a few thin strands of pitch black hair emerged, but his actual facial figures were obscured by an inexplicable shadow. At first, I thought he might be part of the decorations himself, but the longer I stared at him, the more a feeling of impending doom sank through my body. It was an emotion that was all too overwhelming for a five-year-old child, and without really knowing why, I started bawling my eyes. out, running into my parents' room for comfort. I told them about the strange, evil man standing

outside, but by the time they went to verify my claims, he had just vanished. Of course, since I was a kid with an overactive imagination, my parents were right to doubt my bizarre claims. Their logical explanation was that I'd been half asleep. The tired mind can play tricks on one's eyes, and for that blissfully ignorant moment, I believed them. But despite the haunting memories of the prior night, nothing could deter me from spending the evening staring out at the spooky streets. Sure enough, the man had returned.

And that time, he'd moved out from the yard onto the street. Even the streetlights didn't seem to touch him, leaving him free from any illumination, a perfectly dark soul just staring into the night. I closed the blinds and tried not to cry. I pinched myself to check if I was dreaming, finding comfort in my parents' reassurance that I was making things up. As I finally found the nerve to peek outside once more, I realized that the man was gone. It became a nightly ritual after that.

I kept admiring the decorations until the man showed up, and each night he'd moved just a few steps. After a week of spying on the entity, I realized he was moving towards a specific house, one belonging to the Johnson family. As Halloween approached, the man kept getting closer and closer to the house. I tried to warn my parents, worried about what might happen once he arrived there. But no matter what I did, I could never get their attention quick enough to show them the man before he vanished. It got to the point where they threatened to take me to a doctor, at which point I promptly stopped talking about him. Then the last day of the month finally rolled around.

Hundreds of scarily dressed up kids and teenagers poured out onto the street, frantically searching for candy. Among them stood the shadow, but to my surprise, not a single one of them seemed to realize he was there. He just stood idly by at the front door of the Johnson's house, not knocking or trying to enter. And before the clock had struck midnight, he was just gone. Not much happened in the following days. The shadow seemed to have been erased from reality, and everything stayed calm at the time. our neighborhood. It wouldn't be until five days later before police noticed that the Johnson family hadn't been seen since Halloween. The police were quickly alerted, and by the end of that

day, dozens of law enforcement personnel had gathered around the house. Four covered-up stretchers were carried outside, presumably holding the bodies of the entire family. The Johnson's had been slaughtered on Halloween, and from what the rumors told, it wasn't a pleasant way to go. I only personally found out about their brutal deaths several years later. People claimed that the family had been flayed and split open. Every single organ had been removed, one by one. According to the alleged forensic pathology report, they'd been kept alive and aware for most of the ordeal.

And despite the bloody horror show, no perpetrator was ever found. I never told anyone about the shadow again. I had convinced myself that he had been a figment of my imagination, imagination, and for each passing month, the memory started to fade. But from that year on, a family in our town would be brutally murdered, always on the evening of Halloween. As a child, I only heard a few details about the murders, enough to know they were happening, but not how or who.

But for each passing year, witnesses would mention a man covered in darkness appearing in the days before Halloween. By the time I'd made it to fourth grade, every child in school had heard about him, though only a handful claimed to have actually seen him. The murder method was always the same, flayed skin, and organs removed with surgical precision. Strangely enough, no one ever heard them call out for help. They were somehow kept alive to suffer, but were always unable to fight back or scream. In the following years, all Halloween celebration, stopped. People tried to hide away in their homes, locking all doors and windows, but nothing ever helped. Throughout the year, people would plan possible escapes, but no one ever survived

an encounter with the entity only known as Death's Shadow. But despite the horrors of the shadow, life went on. I graduated college, found a girlfriend, and started building a proper adult life. By our first anniversary, we were practically living together. She had a house that was inherited from her parents, so I'd spend most nights with her. Even with the impending threat of death looming over us, we were happy. The annual murder slowly became a certainty in life, one that should have scared us half to death, but we'd miraculously learned to live with it. It had been two decades since I myself saw the shadow, a distant memory only appearing in my dreams.

Even then, I'd subconsciously stare at the window on the even, evenings of October, waiting to see the shadow choose his next victim. And as fate would have it, at the age of 27, I would see the shadow once again. He was standing still just down the street, his grotesque silhouette starkly contrasting with the streetlights above. What are you looking at? Jennifer asked as she grabbed me from behind in a tight hug. With a blink of the eye, the figure had vanished, and the neighborhood, fell to peaceful silence once more. But the damage had been done,

and I knew that by the end of the month, someone in our neighborhood would die. The question just remained who the shadow had chosen this time. Nothing. Just admiring the decorations? I lied. Yeah, we better get on with our own if we want to beat the competition this year, Jennifer said with a smile, oblivious to the oncoming danger.

From that night on, I would peek out the window to get a glimpse. of the shadow, and each night I saw him move ever so slightly closer. Although it was still too early to guess who the chosen victim was, I couldn't shake the feeling that he was heading straight for us. About halfway through October, the shadow had gotten uncomfortably close to our little home. It had become apparent that he was staring at our house. We were the victims to be, which meant that in about two weeks' time,

we'd both be dead. That night I lay awake and contemplated what to do with the knowledge of our impending doom. I considered whether to tell Jennifer or to let her live out her last days in blissful ignorance. On one hand, to tell her

would be borderline cruel. On the other, she deserved to get her affairs in order before passing on the wrong side of life. In the end, I decided to carry the burden of knowledge by myself. All I could do was to make sure our last days together were perfect. Ironically, me being extra nice is what tipped her off in the first place.

She knew something was wrong, and despite my best efforts at denying the fact, she was too smart to be fooled. But she respected my boundaries and never pushed for information. Maybe a part of her knew what was coming, or maybe she just wanted to give me space. On the last few days of October, the shadow had reached our doorstep. It was the closest I'd ever gotten to him. The apparent clothes he wore were just fleshy extensions of his body, charred as if fire had consumed his entire skin. In place of his eyes, all I could see was thick scar tissue.

As the eve of Halloween finally arrived, we were huddled up on our sofa, watching through a list of cheesy horror films from our childhood. Jennifer fell asleep on my lap, slightly buzzed on red wine, and Halloween theme. shots. It was a truly happy moment, a perfect evening to end our lives. I stayed awake watching the movies as I envied Jennifer where she lay unaware of what was to come. As midnight approached, I felt myself drift off to sleep. Fighting my inevitable demise would be pointless. I just had to accept what would come and pray it wouldn't hurt too much. It wouldn't be until the morning light shot in through our window before I finally

regained consciousness. For a moment, I had forgotten all about the shadow, and though I could barely see in the harsh light of day, I could still feel Jennifer resting in my arms. Hey, you awake? I asked as I tried to get used to the light. No response. Jennifer? As my eyes finally adapted, I glanced down at my girlfriend, only to feel my heart skip a beat out of pure terror. There she lay. Every inch of skin removed from her body, with my clothes soaked in blood. The shadow had killed her, but for reasons I couldn't fathom, I had been spared. Officially the cause of death remains unknown, because the police would never publicly admit that people in our town kept getting killed by a supernatural entity. I can't tell for sure why I

remain alive. Maybe it's because I wasn't completely moved in, or because I'd seen the shadow as a child. Whatever the case, by the next time the next Halloween comes around, I swear to God I am going to destroy death's shadow. Thanks for listening. To get notified every time a new episode is released, be sure to click the follow or subscribe button and turn on all notifications.