Solved Murders - True Crime Stories - The Crooked Man Returns A Childhood Rhyme Awakens a Nightmare No One Can Escape #31

Episode Date: August 22, 2025

#horrorstories #reddithorrorstories #ScaryStories #creepypasta #horrortales #crookedman #childhoodhorror #urbanlegend #nightmare #darkrhyme  A chilling childhood rhyme stirs an ancient evil—the Crooked Man—who returns to haunt those who once heard his twisted tale. This dark horror story blurs the line between legend and reality, as terror creeps back into the lives of victims who thought the nightmare was long gone. A haunting exploration of fear, innocence lost, and nightmares that refuse to die.  horrorstories, reddithorrorstories, scarystories, horrorstory, creepypasta, horrortales, crookedman, nightmarehorror, childhoodfear, urbanlegend, darkrhyme, supernaturalhorror, hauntingtale, psychologicalhorror, eerie, terror, nightmarefuel, scarytale, legend, folklore

I grabbed Iris and pulled her toward the car. She stood like a statue, resistant and unmoving. Iris, we need to go. I hissed. She seemed to wake up then, looking at me. Then she looked past me, her eyes glancing up and widening with horror. I turned, seeing the crooked man peering down from the upstairs window, his top hat balanced on his alien skull, a grin of sadistically marring his face.

We need to leave, I repeated, pulling her. She came willingly. We stumbled away from the corpse of Ben. The crooked man's black eyes followed us like cameras. I got her in the car and peeled out of there. Every time I closed my eyes, though, even just to blink, I would catch a glimpse of the crooked man's smiling visage. Where are we going?

Iris called. We need to call the cops. My phone is upstairs on the floor somewhere. The cops aren't going to help us, I said. That thing isn't human. It can go wherever it wants, apparently. You think a police station would protect us. The cops would leave for a few minutes and come back to find us dead.

We need to end this. We need to go to the abandoned factory. The abandoned factory. Iris asked, confused. I told her the story. everything that had happened up to that point, even the vision of my grandmother. That's fucking nuts, Iris muttered. This whole thing is crazy.

There's no way there's actually such a thing as a crooked man shit like that doesn't happen in real life. It's got to be a serial killer in some sort of weird costume. You know it's not, I answered. You saw that thing. That's no mask. I sped on the highway at 100 miles an hour toward Union, toward the abandoned factory where this had all started so many years ago. As we pulled into the cracked lot surrounding the old, run-down building, a sense of overwhelming

dread crashed through my chest. I felt like I was stuck in some cyclical nightmare from which it was impossible to wake up. I pulled out a cigarette and lighter from my cup holder and lit it. Iris gave me a strange look. This is probably my last cigarette, I said. Might as well enjoy it. Iris didn't say anything, her dilated eyes simply flicking around randomly. She looked like she was still partially in shock.

Slowly, she got out of the car, limping across the parking lot by my side. I hurt my ankle when I jump from the window, she said. I don't think I'm going to be doing much running. It feels swollen. I'm just glad you still have the point four-five, I said. Though I wish you had grabbed the AR. She shook her head. Ben shot that thing with a 10-gauge shotgun in the chest. With a slug, she said.

It didn't work. The pistol might slow it down, but it's not going to kill it. We need to find another way. I remembered the graffiti in the factory, destroy it with fire. Save Your Soul. We found a threshold in the back where the door was totally knocked off the hinges. It lay on top of crunching shards. of glass and layers of thick dust. Old rectangular tables were still nailed into the wooden floor,

their surfaces pockmarked and covered in grime. Most of the windows had giant, spiderwebbing cracks running through the glass, though some were just smashed entirely. I had never been here, but as I walked further in, I realized it was exactly the same as I had seen in my vision with my grandmother. Even the same graffiti was there. Don't look behind you, was splayed across the wall in giant letters. Fuck, this place is creepy, Iris whispered. She held the Ruger clenched tightly in her hand, her knuckles white. Where do we go? I'm not sure, I said. I think we're supposed to burn something. Maybe we should just burn down the whole factory. Iris gave me a funny look. That's your plan. Lighting an abandoned building on fire, she asked with an expression of grave

concern. Let's look around, I said. Maybe we're supposed to find something. We descended deeper into the factory, through more identical rooms that looked like they were from the apocalypse. At the end, I found old, concrete steps leading down into the pitch-black basement. I pulled out my cell phone, shining the LED light down the steps. Iris gave me a worried look. Let's go, I whispered grimly. I felt watched here, even more than at Iris House. I knew the crooked man was near, biting his time, playing with his food like a cat with a mouse. The steps led into a concrete boiler room with ancient, rusted machinery still welded into the floor. All over the dark walls, someone had spray-painted pictures of extended, contorted arms and limbs with fingers like talons.

There was a smell down here, too, a smell like rotting bodies. As we got to the center, I heard crying behind us. I turned to see my grandmother, pale and ghostly, crying into her hands. Grandma? I whispered. Iris looked at me, confused. Who are you talking to? She asked. I shook my head. My grandmother looked up at me, fresh tears in her ghostly eyes. Jack, you need to burn it, my grandmother said with a quaver in her voice. The corpse of the owner, the one who killed us all, it's hidden in the surge pump. We came together to end it, to end the deaths, but it didn't stop it. Somehow, he's still connected to this world through that body. It's been in there, festering like an open wound for

who knows how long, I looked at the surge pump across the room. Iris could apparently neither see nor hear my grandmother. It's in there, I murmured, pointing at the pump. We need to burn the body hidden in there. The surge pump had valves and a giant will at the end. It was a horizontal cylinder that looked just big enough to stuff a man's body into. The rusted pipes grew smaller as they crawled up the wall. I put my hands on the rusted wheel and turned. It looked like something from a submarine door. With a squeal of tortured metal, the surge pump began opening. It was difficult going. Iris came and put her small body behind it, and I felt it turning faster. How are we going to burn it, though? I asked myself,

grunting through the effort. Looking behind the surge pump, I found the answer. A fairly fresh dead body lay there hidden under the metal of the surge pump, holding a small can of gasoline. It looked like a young man in his 20s with dark hair and tan skin. His arms and legs had been ripped off, and now only a decomposing torso and head remained. Another victim of the crooked man? Iris asked. He was so close, I wondered, at that moment, how many others had been drawn here, how many victims the crooked man was hunting.

I grabbed the gasoline. I heard a skittering of feet behind us. Iris backpedaled and gave a horrified scream. In terror, I looked behind us and saw the crooked man, flanked by the transformed bodies of seven children. Their arms and legs had all grown inhumanly long, bending in strange places like crooked stalks. Their faces have become like the crooked man's, their eyes black and lips blue, their teeth long and dark, their movements jerky and eerie.

Iris raised the Ruger. In that concrete tomb, the gunshots reverberated like exploding missiles, deafening me. With waves of adrenaline shaking every muscle in my body, body, I swung the end of the surge pump open. Stuffed into the narrow metal steel tube, I saw a mummified corpse covered in tattered rags. Its grinning skull was a mass of cobwebs and dead insects. I unscrewed and overturned the gas can, then pushed it quickly into the tunnel. It just fit through the narrow enclosure. The gunshots ended as abruptly as they had started. Beside me, Iris was still frantically pulling the trigger, her face a broken mass

of shell shock. I dared not look back as I pulled the lighter out and flicked it. With my ears ringing from the gunshot still, I couldn't hear a thing, though the ringing had started to slowly fade. A wave of cold, dead flesh crashed into my back. I went flying forward. Next to me, Iris threw the empty pistol at the nearest of the transformed children. It smacked the boy in the head with a dull crack, but as black, lidless eyes never looked away. As I fell, the lighter touched the edge of the surge pump. A few drops of gas ignited, sizzling and dripping in liquid flames. After what felt like an eternal moment, the rest of it lit up with a wamp and a flash of burning heat. The crooked man started wailing, a tortured, diseased wailing that seemed like it had the voices

of many screaming children mixed in with it. I knocked hard to the ground, slamming my head against the concrete floor. Four of the children used their bent, stick-like arms to gingerly pull the burning mummy out of the metal tomb, their claws talons of fingers grabbing the burning flesh without hesitation. On the other side of the room, the form of the crooked man started to blacken and drip as his mummy did the same. Next to me, a transformed girl in blood-stained rags held Iris arms tightly behind her back. Iris gave a scream of pain. I saw the demonic girl biting at Iris' neck and shoulders over and over with her long, black teeth, ripping off strips of bloody skin and muscle between her blue, dead lips.

She grinned as she bit and chewed. Iris struggled like a woman being burned alive, but the superhuman strength of the girl held Iris wrists pinned together behind her back with an iron grip. With the sound of hissing flames and shrieking echoing all around me, I watched as the children laid the burning body of the crooked man gingerly on the concrete floor. One by one, they laid down on it, smothering the fire with their own pale bodies. The flames continued to whip and flicker for a long moment.

The children's bodies caught on fire, their white skin blackening and cooking. Even as they burned, though, the fire on the crooked man's body had started to die down, and the mummified corpse wasn't even most of the way burned yet. No. I wailed, a sense of deep loss ripping its way through my heart. I saw Iris, too, her entire body covered in blood, her white clothes turned ruby red with blood and gore. She had stopped screaming and struggling by this point, even as the girl leaned forward and ripped her left ear off with her predatory teeth. The flesh gave a sickening,

tearing sound as it came off. Iris eyes rolled up in her head, showing only the whites as her teeth chattered. The demonic girl laughed and pushed the limp form of Iris forward. Her There still body spurted blood from dozens of deep gashes. Her legs and arms twitched, as if she were seizing. I found myself alone with these abominations. The crooked man's screaming stopped suddenly. He stepped forward, his bleached white skin blackened and peeling now. His clothes had nearly burned off, and his top hat stood as a smoldering pile of ashes.

Yet he still moved fast, seeming to disappear and reappear closer and closer, his man misshapen legs jerkily skittering to the left and right in rhythmic cracks. Then he was standing over me, a pillar of burnt skin and insanity. With his sharp fingers, he reached down and grabbed me. I blacked out at that moment, and merciful oblivion took over my mind. I don't remember much of the next couple months. I woke up in some strange, otherworldly city where the sky rained fire and corpses hung from lampposts all down the street.

Empty skyscrapers filled with skeletons and spiderweb stretched around me, seemingly forever. I could see no end to the city in any direction, even from the top of the highest buildings. The world there was always dark, the sky always black and cloudless as drops of burning flame fell from it, searing me whenever I tried to go outside. I wandered there constantly, the crooked man always behind me. As I wasted away in that land of shadows, he grew stronger, his own. body healing slowly. I felt something vital and deep within my heart drained more and more, day by day, until I was no more than a walking skeleton-clad in rags, hopeless and insane. After what felt like an eternity of endless nights in that place, waking up to see the crooked

man grinning over me, it abruptly changed. One day, I woke up at the edge of some woods in a light drizzle, the rain soaking my threadbare clothes. My emaciated body shivered constantly. I started crawling out to find help. With the last of my strength, I pushed myself off the ground. Behind me, I heard a gurgling voice ringing out from every tree. I'll be with you until the end, Jack. I need you just as you need me. For the more who know my story, the more fear will spread, and I will be able to come into their homes next.

For this, you must live. But I will always be watching you, and soon, we will be reunited. To me, you must always return. A driver found me wandering the roads, shell-shocked and half-mad, about 20 minutes later. The police came, surprised to see me still alive. Apparently, I had been missing for over two months. They had found the bodies of Iris and Ben, and assumed that I had been abducted and killed by the same serial killer. I tried to explain the true story over and over to anyone who would listen, but they simply gave me sickening looks of pity and ordered an involuntary commitment to a psych ward. After a few days in the psych ward, they reluctantly

released me. No one believed a word I had said. The cops thought it was some sort of mass psychosis, I'm sure, some urban legend that delusional idiots had come to believe was real. But I know it was real. I know my days are numbered. It might look like a suicide or a murder or an accident, But, in the end, the crooked man always comes back and takes what's his.