Solved Murders - True Crime Stories - SWAT Raid Unleashes Plague-Worshipping Demons and a Vanished, Grinning Hostage Boy #53

Episode Date: September 4, 2025

#horrorstories #reddithorrorstories #ScaryStories #creepypasta #horrortales #demonhorror #swatraid #cultterror #vanishedchild #plagueworship  During a tense SWAT raid on a cult suspected of worshipping ancient plagues, something horrific is unleashed—plague-worshipping demons that defy explanation. Amid the chaos, a young hostage disappears, only to be seen later with a chilling grin that hints at dark possession or worse. This story plunges into supernatural horror, cult madness, and the terrifying unknown lurking beneath the surface of reality.  horrorstories, reddithorrorstories, scarystories, horrorstory, creepypasta, horrortales, demonpossession, swatraidhorror, cultcultures, supernaturalterror, vanishedchildmystery, plaguecurse, darkrituals, ancientevils, hostagehorror, chillingencounter, twistedcult, paranormalactivity, fearandmadness, sinisterpresence

We have a hostage in a moving vehicle, the dispatcher told the team. Our commander, James Maplin, did not look happy. The suspects allegedly have access to fully automatic rifles. Fuck, James said. His gaze scanned over me and the others, his killer's eyes looking as hard as stone. Are they parked? The current suspect location is in a Walmart parking lot, the soft female voice responded. They are not moving at this time.

There are many civilians in the area, however, this just keeps getting worse, I muttered. My partner, Sergeant Motz, narrowed his dark eyes and pursed his thin lips. He ran a hand over his shaved head, his tattooed muscles bulging. We could surround it with unmarked police cars, Sergeant Motz said. Disable the vehicle so that it can't move in any direction at all. One unmarked car smashes into the front while three smash into the back at the the same moment. Then we can all run out and smoke the fuckers, hopefully before they kill the hostage. Simple enough, I said sarcastically, smiling. The rest of the team kept their faces

stony and blank. Commander Maplen looked displeased with the idea. That would mean our officers would be exposed to their own crossfire, he said icily. And the civilians in the area would also be susceptible to getting shot. I shrugged. He's right, though. I said. It's the best idea we have. We can't use snipers, because if one misses, we would then be at a massive disadvantage. The shooter would have plenty of time to speed out of there and murder the hostage as he went. Disabling the vehicle has worked before. We could have four police officers hit it at the exact same moment. We just have to be quick about it. Once the unmarked cars smash into the suspect vehicle, we only have a matter of seconds to take out the gunman. Gunmen,

Commander Maplin said. There's two of them. This just gets better and better, I muttered. The plan was simple, we would all drive in unmarked, inconspicuous cars. No one was going in with cherries blaring on this one. I would be driving a black pickup truck, and my job was to smash directly into the front of the car. Sergeant Motes would attack the rear driver's side. Two other team members would hit the center of the back and the rear passenger side. This would make it impossible for the driver to escape, but it would also give him a one-to-two-second advantage while we all bailed out of our own vehicles and opened fire. I didn't like it, but there was no other way to get the hostage out that we could see. Right before we were to execute the mission, I found myself driving slowly down the street in the truck.

I saw the target vehicle, a dark blue SUV with tinted windows. The front of the suspect's vehicle faced a sidewalk and a couple inch high dividers which I would have to tear through to get to them. I swore. The tinted windows would make this even more impossible. It would be an absolute miracle if the hostage escaped without getting shot. I had my M4A1 rifle slung around my shoulder and my Glock 20 around my waist. I felt waves of adrenaline. and pounding through my body. It almost felt unreal, like some video game. All the colors of the world seemed overly saturated and bright. I saw my hands trembling as I gripped the wheel. Now, Commander Maplin cried into the radio. Disable the vehicle. I pressed the accelerator down and, with my seatbelt tightly hugging my chest, prepared to smash headfirst into the blue SUV.

I went over the divider with a loud bang that would have woken the dead. Time seemed to slow down as I looked through the front windshield, trying to take a snapshot of what I saw in my mind. In the driver's seat, a tall, black man sat with an automatic rifle in his hands. A black woman with wide, insane eyes sat in the back seat, peering around the edge of it, her mouth and oh of surprise, her fingers tightly gripping another rifle. In the passenger seat, I saw a little blonde boy with a face like a statue. He didn't seem scared or surprised in the slightest.

In fact, I could have sworn he was grinning. The truck gave a sudden burst of speed, the engine whining. Behind the blue SUV, I saw three more cars speeding towards impact at the same time, each of them only a few feet away. We all hit it at the same time. There was a tortured screaming of metal and an accident. explosion of glass. I felt myself thrown forward. From inside the suspect vehicle, the shooter started shouting something. Breathing hard, I pushed open the door and fell out into the

freezing winter air. At that moment, gunshots erupted all around me. The smell of gun smoke and gasoline hung thick in the air. Bullets cracked into the pavement with their hypersonic shrieking. I raised my rifle and pointed at where I knew the driver was. Without hesitation, I opened fire, emptying the magazine. The high-caliber rifle bullets ate their way through the SUV's frame as easily as if it were cardboard. I'm shot. I heard a man scream from the back of the group of crashed cars. The cacophony of gunshots made the world sound like it was exploding all around us.

I saw Sergeant Mote's run around the vehicles, using them as cover. He was crouched, his dark eyes frantic and searching. The woman in the back seat had opened fire with an automatic rifle. She was shooting out of the back window, just spraying bullets everywhere. They burst from the gun with a sound like an industrial sewing machine. Behind the cars, I saw a SWAT officer dragging himself away from the scene as a river of blood followed behind him. He looked like a raccoon who had just been hit by a car.

Sergeant Motz immediately started shooting through the SUV's door at the woman. The first shot hit her in the neck. I saw a sphere of blood explode from her mutilated throat as she dropped her rifle and fell back. Her eyes rolled up in her head as she choked on her own blood. The man in the driver's seat had turned his attention to the police behind him, trying to shoot Sergeant Motz. Not having time to reload, I dropped my rifle and pulled out my Glock. Shooting through the driver's side window, I hit him in the chest and shoulder.

He jerked back with every shot, his eyes wild and filled with an animal panic. He looked at the hostage in the passenger seat, the little boy with the strange eyes and grinning mouth. The shooter kept his rifle held tightly in his hands. With the last of his dying energy, he raised it towards the hostage. At that moment, I shot through the window, hitting the shooter in the right shoulder. With a spray of blood, the rifle fell from his limp hands. Don't, let him go, the shooter cried as he vomited a stream of blood.

The shooter kept his attention fully fixed on the boy as if he were an object of meditation, not looking back at me. But at that moment, the boy flung the door open and scurried out of the car with his head down. You don't, understand, please, stop, he kept insisting. Spitting blood, the shooter tried to rise. His right arm hung at his side, limp inside. He tried to grab the rifle with his working left hand and aim it at the boy. Drop the gun.

I screamed. His head ratcheted towards me, and I opened fire. Another three shots entered his chest, opening up holes the size of quarters up and down his torso. Drop the gun. I repeated. The shooter started wailing. He made gurgling, pleading sounds, like some sort of torture victim from the dark ages. He spit blood constantly, and I saw gaping holes all over his body.

He tried to raise his head once more. Sergeant Motz screamed next to me. Drop the gun, fucker, he shrieked. I aimed at the center of the shooter's forehead. Our eyes met for a brief moment, and then I pulled the trigger. His head jerked back as a bullet pierced his right eye and blew a chunk out of the back of his head. of bone and a bloody wad of mutilated brains sprayed the inside of the car.

Like a puppet with its strings cut, the shooter collapsed and went still. Where's our victim? Where's the goddamn victim?" Sergeant Motz yelled from nearby. I jumped, looking around frantically. Where was the victim? Everything had happened so fast. It had seemed like the entire planet was exploding into chaos for a few seconds.

I had glimpsed the little boy running during the firefight, but I didn't know if he had gotten hit by the relentless spray of bullets or not. There. I cried, pointing a few hundred feet away to the far side of the parking lot. The boy, who looked no older than five or six, was huddled in a ball between two cars, silently rocking back and forth. He looked totally shell-shocked, his face a blank mask of nothingness. Yet his dark, almost black, eyes seemed to be staring at.

in our direction. In fact, it looked like he was staring directly at me. I sprinted over in the boy's direction. Customers had taken cover behind their cars all over the parking lot, though, in reality, a car would be unlikely to stop a high-caliber rifle bullet anyway. One woman slunk out, crouched over, her fat face pale and covered in sweat. Is it safe, she asked. I glanced over at her. Yes, the gunmen are dead. dead, I answered, annoyed. I looked back at where the victim was. But the boy was gone. One officer had been severely injured in the shooting. Two pedestrians were injured by bullets, but were in stable condition. Both of the kidnappers were gone, smoked by dozens of gunshot wounds, but the hostage

was gone too. He had simply vanished. A light star helicopter came and took the SWAT officer to the hospital, where he required immediate life-saving surgery due to a round that pierced his kidney and liver and clipped his spine. It seems unlikely he will ever return to work. It was a strange situation, and we would learn more about it in the days to come. From what Commander Mapland told me later on, the boy had been kidnapped from some religious group who lived deep in the mountains a couple hours away. They apparently were a strange bunch who worshipped angels and tried to control and summon demons. We had no motive for why they chose that boy or that religious group. It seemed totally random at the time.

But even stranger, the two suspects hadn't even had a criminal record. Neither of them had so much as a traffic ticket, at least before they had tried kidnapping and murdering a child. For the next week, I kept thinking about that strange, grinning child. I wondered where he had gone. I had so many questions about the case, like everyone else. else, but it seemed like there were no answers to be had. Perhaps it would simply become an eternal mystery, just like the cases of the Zodiac and Jack the Ripper had. When we got the call

that there was an active hostage situation at the church at the edge of town, I had no idea that I would see that boy again. I would have many of my questions answered, whether I wanted it or not. I saw the church from a distance, surrounded by a grove of dead evergreens whose bare branches reached upwards towards the sky, as if in prayer to a dead god. Sergeant Motes and five other team members sat next to me in full sweat gear. The bulletproof van rolled forward with its powerful engine whining like a hornet. Night had come early, as it always did on these cold winter days. This is, strange, one of the team members, a muscular Asian guy with a shaved head named Dan

said. He was sitting to my left and Sergeant Motes to my right. It's fucking weird, Sergeant Mote said, his dark eyes scanning the church. We slowly pulled into the far edge of the parking lot, behind a thick stone cemetery wall that would hopefully prevent bullets from passing through. But we hadn't gotten a call about any shootings here. We had been told by Commander Maplin that someone had made a call from a church built in the 1800s.

A young woman had told the 911 operator, in a panic tone, that they were all being held hostage inside the church, that they were holed up in the rectory and had barricaded the door. She started rambling about how the kidnappers had faces like birds. I assumed she was talking about the masks they were wearing. She had said they were trying to break down the doors and would certainly kill them. Then the call had gotten cut off suddenly. We're going in hot, Sergeant Mote said. Everyone looked excited, their eyes gleaming.

Dan had a shotgun in his hands for breaching the door. if necessary. He would go first. With excitement and no small sense of panic, we ran out of the armored truck. The thick wall dividing the cemetery and the church was solid stone, and a sniper would be unable to see through it. The wall led to a gate that opened only 15 feet or so from the front door. That was the part one was worried about, running across that no man's land. And, of course, the breaching. We sprinted across the no man's land, glancing constantly around for signs of movement. In the stained-glass windows of the church, pale shapes flittered, but I couldn't make them out through the distortion

and the darkness. Within the church, it looked as if all the lights were off. Only the bloody flickering of candlelight shone through the windows. Dan fired a breaching round at the locked church door with a boom like thunder. He leaned back and kicked it open. It crashed against the wall and we all ran in together with our rifles raised, ready to begin shooting. But the nave was empty. I glanced around, seeing hundreds of lit candles flickering all along the walls. The church was a wasteland of destruction. Someone had filled the holy water font with blood instead of water.

Jesus hung on his crucifix in front of the church, but the psychos holding this place hostage had nailed another body on top of his, an old woman, by the looks of her. She had been stripped naked. In deep, slicing letters, someone had written across her skin, victim of the disease. Her dead eyes still stared straight ahead, sightless and terrified. Her blue lips hung open in a silent scream. But even stranger, she had great, purple welts all over her body.

They reminded me of pictures I had seen of victims of the black death, the bubos of pus and dead tissue that formed and often burst in the dying. Trails of blood swerved their way down the nave and towards the rectory. From the back, we heard muffled screams of terror. Without speaking a word, Sergeant Motz motioned us forward. Dan held his breaching shotgun at the ready as we got to the locked rectory door. Oh God, please, no, someone shrieked on the other side of the door. Dan blew apart the lock and smashed into it with his shoulder.

On the other side, we found a scene from a nightmare. There were what looked like three men in black robes facing a pile of naked bodies. The bodies all had those same purplish black buboes covering their pale flesh. In the middle of them, I saw the boy, the victim who had disappeared from the hostage rescue a week ago. But he looked different now. His eyes were black, and his face had started to drip and change. His nose had stretched out and become almost bird-like, and his flesh had started to harden into something pale and dead. The other men turned.

To my horror, I saw they had the final version of the transformed faces. Their faces had morphed into something bird-like and skeletal, as if their flesh had become living plague doctor masks. A smell like mummified bodies and septic shock radiated off of them. You are a victim of the spreading sickness, one hissed through its pale beak as its black robes fluttered around its body. I am the cure. Their eyes, too, were black.

Tiny, sharp fangs lined their mouths, like the teeth of some prehistoric dinosaur. In horror, we only stood there for a long moment, until another scream shattered its way through the room. In the pile of corpses, I saw a little girl. She was covered in blood, trying to crawl out of the bottom. All across her neck and arms, the black buboes rose like flowering tumors. Help me, she cried. Get me out of here.

They killed Mommy and Daddy. We all opened fire at once at that point. The strange men in their black robes moved like shadows, however, strafing at superhuman speeds towards us. I saw a few bullets pierced their torsos, their arms and legs, but no blood came out. It was like their insides were made of dust. In a blur, they oozed forward. At one moment, they were twenty feet away, then they were right there.

Boney, skeletal hands raised all around me. I saw Dan trying to backpedal away from one who had him by the throat. Dan's face had turned red with suffocation. He held the breech shotgun to the creature's chest and pulled the trigger. The plaid doctor's chest exploded, an exit wound the size of a basketball ripping its way out of his dusty, dead body. He dropped Dan, who immediately sucked in a breath of air. To my horror, though, I saw black buboes rising all over Dan's neck.

The little boy skittered forward, his bird-like mouth giving a wail like a hungry infant. As the blood of my comrades soaked the floor all around me and the screams of the dying rang out like church bells, I turned and ran. I glanced back, seeing the little boy only feet behind me. Sergeant Motez was fighting one of the plague doctors. I saw others laying on the ground, their heads twisted around 180 degrees or their neck snapped. They all showed signs of the spreading black bubos. I turned and shot at the little boy, hitting him in the leg.

His wailing increased to an ear-splitting cacophony as he went sprawling, his kneecap exploding in a shower of blood and bones. He kept trying to drag himself forward towards me, gnashing his strange mouth and sharp little teeth. I sprinted through the nave and passed the font of blood. Without looking back, I got to the armored van and told the driver to get us the fuck out of there. I ended up being the only survivor, and when I told my story, people looked at me as if I were totally insane. All of the body cameras had apparently stopped working when we entered the rectory, simply fizzing out in a wave of static and white noise. By the time reinforcements arrived, the plague doctors and the boy were gone.

They found only a church filled with horrors. Men in hazmat suits had to go in and clean up the bodies, which were all apparently contaminated by an especially virulent form of plague. When investigators went to the compound in the woods where the religious group supposedly was, they found the place abandoned. It looked like they had all just left in the middle of the night, leaving everything behind. At first, it seemed we would never find any answers to our questions. But as police searched through the homes of the shooters who had taken the boy hostage, they found a diary.

It seemed to be written by a psychotic person, someone who believed that a cult in the woods was impregnating women with demons. They claimed they were members of a secret group that exterminated these demons wherever they found them. In hindsight, after what I went through, perhaps it wasn't so psychotic after all. The end.