The NoSleep Podcast - Nosleep Podcast - Butcherface Edition

Episode Date: August 2, 2011

This special extended episode of The Nosleep Podcast features a tale that resonated within the walls of the “No Sleep” forum at Reddit.com.Settle in to your dark room, hide the knives, and endure the saga of “Butcherface“ written by A.J. Garlisi (Redditor Dash32) and read by David Cummings (Redditor MikeRowPhone). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For the dark hours when you dare not close your eyes. No sleep. It's the No sleep podcast. No sleep. Featuring stories from Reddit.com's No sleep forum. No sleep. Join us as the sleepless hours. This episode of the No Sleep podcast features just one tale.

The saga of Butcher Face. written by A.J. Garlisi and read by David Cummings. In 1997, my friend Chris moved across the state. At that time, we were ten. We didn't really have a way to see each other besides getting a ride from our parents to one or the other's house, which would be a hassle for our parents, so we eventually lost contact. During this time, I had only gotten the chance to visit his house once. It was a very plain split-level house, probably built in the early 80s, with neighbors close by, so it wasn't even secluded.

We lost contact with each other for ten years, that is, until Chris contacted a mutual friend through MySpace. We made plans to hook up and hang out, now that we had our own means of transportation, it was a lot easier. After maybe a month of this, Chris mentioned that his family would be remodeling the house, and I offered my help. He and his father gladly accepted the offer, since the previous owners apparently didn't keep up on it themselves.

So a couple weeks later, I drove down one weekend, and we started tearing up carpeting, ripping off wallpaper, etc. The basement had been changed into a room for Chris some years before, and while half of the floor was concrete, the other half seemed to have been torn up and replaced with floorboards, and one of the boards had become warped and broken, leaving it protruding up from under the carpet, so they wanted to replace it. We tore up the carpet and started ripping out the floorboards when we found what looked like a hole dug about five feet into the ground,

under the floor. Chris jumped down there thinking he could get better leverage to tear up the boards when he said something was down there. His father got a flashlight and we jumped down to check it out. It turned out to be a very worn box. It looked similar to a shoe box, but it was about three feet long and extremely damaged by the elements. It was so tattered that you wouldn't be able to pick it up in one piece. We believed that whatever was in it would be just as damaged, but when we ripped it open, we noticed that whatever was in it had the added protection of a black trash bag. Chris picked up the trash bag, and its contents made the sound of plastic hitting plastic. We were curious as to what was in there, so we brought it upstairs and cut the bag open with a pair of scissors

and found 24 unmarked videotapes. Chris and I were curious as to what was on them, but his father claimed that they were most likely somebody's old bootleg collection, and if we're still curious, we should check them out later after we were done for the day. Since the plan was for me to stay the night and help them out the next day, then leave Sunday night, we decided to watch them that night. Since Chris's father was tired and didn't really care what was on the tapes, he went to bed a little bit early that night. We pulled their old VCR from their attic, hooked it up to the TV in Chris's room, and took one of the tapes out of the bag, and slipped it in. The tapes certainly weren't bootlegged movies like Chris's father believed.

They were the home movies of an unknown man we eventually began to call Butcher Face. There was seemingly no flow from one scene to the next. It was like he would just film something random for what was. It was usually just a couple of minutes, then put the camera away for, God knows how long, until he found something else that interested him. Most of the footage was random footage like him turning on the camera facing a chair. He would walk out from behind the camera to the chair, push it over onto the floor, walk back to the camera, and turn it off.

Or him playing with a random spider, which he would talk to in a low, childlike voice, then end the tape with him squashing it, or him just filming down at his feet as he walks while deeply breathing. The one thing that always stuck out about all the footage is that on the few times that his face was shown, he was seen wearing what looked like a burlap sack tied tightly around his head with twine, with two eye holes cut out.

He was also a big guy, being easily over six feet tall with a decent bill, with some muscles, but not being buff. A lot of the footage was creepier and sinister. Some of the footage was of him videotaping people leaving buildings and houses. He was obviously hiding somewhere across the street from these locations, and he was often breathing loudly. Even worse were the things he videotaped himself doing.

One piece of footage showed him sitting at a table with a rat, wrapped in an empty pickle jar. He unscrewed the pickle jar, took the rat out, slowly put his hand on its head, and started twisting until it stopped screaming. He twisted a little more until its head was completely ripped off the body. Then he turned the camera off. Another clip showed him in a barn. There was no barn on Chris's property, so we don't know where this was filmed. He turned the camera on, showing a pig tied to a post.

He walked over to the pig with an axe in his hand and hacked its head off. What was really creepy was that most of the footage was shot in what was now my friend's house. It was always dark in the footage, like this man didn't like to have the lights on. But we did recognize various locations of the house. One piece of footage was obviously shot in the living room which showed butcher face using a large hunting knife to cut the power cord of something we couldn't see wrapping this cord tightly around his arm

grunting and moaning as he did it and using the knife to cut deep cuts into his hand and arm. One disturbing clip showed him standing in front of a table in the kitchen. On the table was a close iron. He then unzipped his pants, took out his penis, put it on the table, and pressed the hot iron against it. He screamed, but didn't take it off for about 30 seconds. He finally took it off, limped over to the camera, and turned it off. What freaked us out the most was a clip of butcher face in what used to be Chris's upstairs bedroom before he moved to the basement.

He turned the camera on and showed the whole room covered in what appeared to be hundreds of lit candles. They were on every table, chair, and shelf. The walls were covered in paintings of grotesque and ghostly faces. He then walked to a corner of the room and started furiously carving something into the floor with the hunting knife. He would stab it into the floor and drag it around, pull it out, and stab it again. Since that room was vacant at the moment and used for storage and was going to be renovated anyway, Chris's father let us tear up the carpet in that area of the room. What we found was a section of the floor that had been heavily sanded down with no real evidence of what had been carved there. Another tape showed footage of butcher face in that same room with even more candles.

He was on his knees, facing away from the camera with his arbor. arms in the air, screaming to be brought to the pits of pain and torture. One interesting thing about that clip is that he only had three fingers on his left hand, missing his pinky and ring finger. He had all five fingers in the previous clips, and we think he cut them off. That was the end of that one, and the camera appeared to run out of tape. The last piece of footage on the last tape showed Butcher Face furious. digging the hole that we found in the basement.

He was digging fast and breathing heavily. He was constantly grunting. His shirt was off, but he still had the mask on. After a couple minutes of him just digging, he started talking, saying something like, This is it. This is it. They won't know. They'll never find me. This is where I'll hide.

We were getting tired of having to lug the VCR up and down. those steep attic steps because Chris's father, for some reason, kept asking us to put it back up there when we weren't using it. About two weeks after we found the butcher face tapes, Chris's younger brother Evan, who was going to college for media production, came in to the middle of a conversation about this and mentioned that he could convert the tapes to DVD using equipment at his college. After some haggling and way too much negotiating, Chris and I, having recently turned 21, would get the liquor for a party that Friends of Evans were having if he'd do the conversion the next day. When that day came, both Chris and I were waiting anxiously in the kitchen for Evan to get home. When he finally walked in the door, an hour later than he said he'd be back, he was looking extremely pale. We asked him if he was done converting and he jumped in our faces saying that we never told him what was on the tapes.

Apparently he didn't actually hear what we were talking about and only heard that we wanted some tapes converted and he thought they were more like old family recordings of Christmas or birthday videos. We calmed him down and asked him if he converted the tapes. He said no and quickly left the room. We were disappointed and started talking about what to do next when Evan came back into the room with his father behind him. After talking about what was on the tapes, Evan retrieved them from his car, and the four of us watched every one of the 24 tapes together. After the last tape was finished, the one with, this is it, this is it, they won't know, they'll never find me, this is where I'll hide. Chris's father's face was just as pale as Evans was earlier.

He leaned back in his chair and said, That was creepy. An hour of talking that night ended with us wanting to know who was on the tapes. I left for home soon after with the understanding that I would be kept in the loop on what we would do next, which was to figure out the previous owners of the house. A couple days later, I got a phone call from Chris, saying that it took them a little while. They found nothing on the county website, they found some history on the house at the town library, on something called a reverse

directory, about a previous owner who had it in the mid-80s. After a few unanswered phone calls, we decided to visit these people in person. So that Friday, me, Chris, and his father drove to their house and knocked on the door, only to be greeted by two 80-something-year-old women. Chris's father told them that his family was living in their old house and asked if we could asked them some questions about it. They refused to let us in, but they did tell us about their old house. It turned out they were sisters. Their first names were Shirley and Louise. And Louise turned out to be the former owner of the house, but never lived in it. Apparently, she and her husband bought

the house and were planning to add some new wiring and plumbing before moving in, but her husband had a severe stroke not too long after buying it and eventually died. With the combination, of hospital and funerary bills, Louise couldn't afford to fix it up and live there, so she moved in with her sister instead. But she did mention that during that time the house was known to be home to a fair number of homeless people who would be regularly chased off the property. We also asked if either of them had a son, and they both said no. We left there with not too many answers. A couple of weeks later, Chris and I went to the movies with his girlfriend. I think he was trying to get his mind off the tapes because I could tell that he was still creeped out.

We were talking about how much the movie sucked when Chris slammed on the brakes. We practically skidded about 30 feet and I was choked by my seatbelt and his girlfriend, who wasn't wearing a seatbelt, was almost thrown into the front seat. We started screaming at him, asking him what the hell he was doing when we looked at what he was staring at and saw a house. It looked familiar to me, but I couldn't put my finger on it. I looked back to Chris and he said, That house is on the tapes. Then I remembered,

one of the houses that Butcher Face had watched people come and go from was right there, not 20 feet from us. We knocked on the door, but no one answered, so we decided to come back later. When we got back to Chris's house, I noticed the VCR hooked back up to Chris's TV in his room. I asked him about it and he said he'd been watching the tapes again for any clues. No wonder he was still creeped out.

That night, when I got home, I got a phone call from Chris. He was whispering and said that he thought he saw someone walking around his backyard. Two days later, that Friday, I agreed to sleep over and see for myself. Chris was claiming to see glimpses of someone standing or walking around in his backyard, but it was always too dark to see any details on those previous nights. I was set up to sleep on a couch that was on the now reboarded up hole we first found the tapes in. Very little sleeping actually went on that night because we stayed up in the living room, staring out the sliding glass door to the backyard.

We were talking about how we weren't even sure if Butcher Face actually hurts people when Chris suddenly leans forward and points out the window and said, See? Right there! Do you see that shadow? or something? I jumped up and flipped on the switch to the deck lights, but they didn't turn on. We got flashlights and went out to look. Besides some tree branches blowing in the wind, we found nothing. At around 4 a.m., we decided to get some sleep. I only stayed on the couch a couple of hours. I got too cold because I felt a draft that I think was coming up between the boards on the floor. I went home the next afternoon thinking the night before was a dud.

until I got a frantic phone call that night. Someone had broken into Chris's house while they were out. The sliding glass door to the backyard was completely smashed with broken glass having been thrown all the way across the living room and into the dining room. I drove back there because they wanted me as a witness to seeing a shadow in the backyard the night before. They showed me around and I saw that this person

had completely tossed the living room, dining room and kitchen. In the bathroom, the mirror over the medicine cabinet had been smashed and all the meds were missing. Something else was missing which was a lot more disconcerting. Four knives had been removed from the knife holder in the kitchen. I stayed there for about an hour and decided to go home, and it was only after I left that I realized that the butcher face tapes were never mentioned to the cops. A little while after I got home, I got another call from Chris saying, that they had found the missing knives under the blankets of each of the family member's beds.

That weekend, Chris and his father decided to look around the house more thoroughly to see if butcher face had left any other clues to his former presence in the house. I came over to help in the only room they said they'd never thoroughly looked in since getting the house was the attic, so we decided to start there. It didn't take long to find anything because almost immediately I came across an old-looking, trash bag in one of the corners. I picked it up and heard the tinkling sound of glass against glass. We brought it downstairs and cut it open and found it completely full of liquor bottles

and used syringes. Using rubber gloves, we removed every object one at a time. It was almost all bottles and syringes and the occasional bit of trash until we got to the bottom. At the bottom of the bag, we found a shoe box. It was stained and worn, and we couldn't even see the brand of shoe that used to be in it. We carefully took it out and removed the top, which seemed to have been glued closed. Inside was a series of papers and photos.

The photos were pretty disturbing. One was a close-up of a hand covered in pins, those ones with the long point with the tiny ball of colored plastic at one end. There were so many of them that it looked like a porcupine. Another one had a presumably dead dog lying on the ground. All we could really see of its surroundings was the dirt on the ground because it was too dark. We assumed it was dead because it was missing half its face. The flesh on the side of the face that was facing the camera was gone, making it look like it was smiling with a lidless eye.

There were a lot more pictures, including a cow with blood on its mouth, A very pale looking foot. Various 70s and 80s-era toys, a collection of knives, a hand and arm painted multiple colors like patchwork, and a close-up of an eyeball. The papers were pretty freaky as well. They were a combination of drawings and writings. Most of the writings were what seemed like a wish list of murder, listing practically every imaginable way how to kill people. Others seem to be random thoughts Like how he accidentally pissed his pants while at the movies

Or how he has an infectious evil And that he'll spread that to his disciples Some of the drawings were pretty similar To the one scene on some of the tapes on the walls In Chris's old room Others were more detailed and showed corpses In various states of decay and of strange creatures They were humanoid but they all had a demonic look

to them, with many of them shown standing on all fours. One thing that showed up often was a strange symbol. It looked like the letter C, with the gap in the sea pointing down, with a V laid on top of it. When we got to the bottom of the box, we found another tape, one that we'll never get to watch because it was completely coated in candle wax. Running out of clues, we decided to revisit the old women who owned the house in the 80s. It had been almost two months since we last visited them, and we came to realize that their story didn't quite make sense. For instance, Louise claimed to have given up on the house, yet on the tapes we could see that the house had power.

Why would she have continued paying the power bill if she didn't want the house? They also mentioned that homeless people had been regularly arrested or chased off the property by the cops, but we found no record of this. We tried calling them, but just like last time, we got no answer, so we decided to drop by again. When we got there, we found the house abandoned. We went next door and asked the neighbor if they knew where the two old ladies that lived next door had gone. They told us that Louise had died about three weeks earlier, but they didn't know how, and surely abruptly packed up and moved away a week later. While Chris's father was talking to the neighbor, Chris pulled me up.

aside and whispered, we're breaking into that house. That same night, we waited until it was late and drove to the old lady's former house. We had never broken into a house before in our lives, and we were dressed in the stereotypical burglar outfit, black shirt and pants, and a black mask. When we got to the house, we were so nervous that we didn't even leave the car for a good 45 minutes. When we felt assured that the neighborhood was asleep, we got out of the car and crept into the backyard and up to the back door. We looked in the window of the door, but it was too dark to see anything. I took my shirt off and put it up against the window and gave it a punch, breaking the glass. It felt surprisingly loud, but that could have been because it was so

quiet, and the neighbors never woke up, so I guess it really wasn't that loud. I reached in through the hole in the glass and unlatched the door. Then we had a whispered fight over who will go in first. It actually came down to a game of rock paper scissors, which I won, so Chris went in first. We crept in, hunched over, and I closed the door behind me, accidentally slamming it, giving Chris a good jump that we couldn't help laughing over. We snuck around the house with our flashlight shining over the walls. As a side note, I really don't see how much they would have fixed up Chris's house when they had it, because this one looked like crap.

The wallpaper was probably older than me and Chris combined. Anyway, we went into the living room and found a huge pile of trash lying in the far corner with a depression in the middle, like a person or a large dog had used it as a bed. We went upstairs and found something that connected this house to Chris'clock. In one of the bedrooms was a pile of pill bottles. Some of the pill bottles were the one stolen from Chris's bathroom medicine cabinet. We knew this because some of them had his mother and father's name on them and one of them was Chris's back pain medicine. That was all we needed to see, so we booked it back down the stairs and ran to the door, but when we got to the door, I jumped back, knocking both me and Chris down. On the inside of the back door was the CV symbol from Butcher Face's notes.

After we got back to the car, Chris said something that creeped both of us out. If Butcher Face really is living in that house, he probably wasn't there because he was staking out Chris's house right now. Later that week, I visited Chris's house again, and as soon as I walked into the door, I knew I walked into an air of distress. Chris's mother and brother were pacing back and forth in the living room looking out the window into the backyard. I walked in and asked what was going on and looked out the window and saw Chris and his father in the backyard screaming at each other and behind them was a large bonfire that was almost nothing more than cinders. Chris's mother said their dog Brackett had gone missing but didn't say anything else. I opened the newly repaired sliding glass door and walked out to meet them.

As soon as Chris's father saw me, he became even angrier. Chris met me halfway to the fire and said, I had to tell them that we broke into that house. I asked why, and he said that he thinks that Butcher Face took their dog as payback for breaking into his home. I asked about the fire, and Chris told me that what his father was burning was Butcher Face's notes, photos, and tapes. Everything had been burned to ashes. During this time, his father had walked up behind him and said, I'm going to end this right now.

I'm burning everything so that you guys can't get into any more trouble. As he said this, he continued past us and into the back door of his garage and came back with a shovel, adding, and I'm burying the ashes to put this to rest for good, and started digging a hole in the back of his yard close to the woods. Chris pulled me back into the house into the basement and started talking about how all of this was unfair, How could his father just burn tapes like that?

They were so close to figuring out who butcher face was, etc. Then his mother called for us from upstairs. We came up and she pointed out the door to his father who had stopped digging and was looking into the hole he had just dug. We walked outside and crossed the yard to the hole that his father was still looking into. When we got to it, we realized why he was frozen there, because just a couple feet into the hole was what turned. out to be over 30 skeletons of cats, dogs, and other animals.

This is when we started calling him Butcher Face. After Chris's father burned Butcher Face's media, including the art and photos and tapes, I think everyone, including me, hoped that Chris would let it go. I know I was willing to let it go, but it wasn't long after that Chris began looking for any evidence of other media by Butcher Face. He would occasionally talk just to me about strange tapes and art found in other parts of the country, but most of it seemed sketchy, which even Chris was completely willing to admit. My attitude began to change about looking into Butcher Face around this time when I was sitting at my desk and caught myself absent-mindedly drawing Butcher Face's CV symbol on a piece of paper.

roughly two weeks after Chris's dog disappeared and his father burned all evidence of butcher face Chris showed up on my doorstep saying he wanted to go back to the house we found that was on the tapes. When we first found it, no one was home. We showed up at the house around 6 p.m. on a Wednesday hoping that anybody living there would be home from work. We went to the door and knocked. The person who answered the door was a man in his 50s. It turned out that he had actually did live in the house in the mid-80s when we believed the tapes were shot. We told him about the tapes and how his house was on them and asked if anything strange had happened around that time. He said that they didn't notice anything like what was on the tapes,

but there was a point when they realized that someone had been living in their shed in the backyard. The shed had since been torn down, but he did remember that there was a carving left on the doorframe. We asked him what it was, and he pulled out a pattern. out of paper and drew the CV symbol. The very next day, Chris's mother was walking around in their backyard and came across their dog. He had been ripped open from the neck to the stomach and placed in the still open hole his father had dug two weeks earlier. The cops had been called and they were finally told about butcher face. Since Chris's father had burned everything, they really had no evidence that the dog had been killed by a person.

and labeled it an animal mauling. It wasn't long after that that I came home to find my front door open. I walked up the front steps and saw that the door was swung open, only hanging on one hinge. It being dark out, I flipped the light switch just inside the door and it didn't come on. I went around the house to the shed in the backyard and grabbed the most menacing thing I could that was near the door, which was a pitchfork. Going back to the front door, I pulled out my cell phone and called 911.

After making the call, I cautiously entered the house, making sure the pitchfork was in front of me. I crept up the stairs and got to the nearest light switch and flipped it, but this one wasn't working either. I came to the conclusion that the power was cut. Using my cell phone as a flashlight, I got a look at the damage done. The leather couch had been slashed open with many cuts and the paddock. pulled out and the glass doors of the kitchen cabinets had been smashed. More than half the liquor bottles in the liquor cabinet were missing and the medicine in the bathroom cabinet was gone. It all seemed very familiar. I mean, even my 13-year-old dog's arthritis pills were taken.

My dog Drake has an anxiety problem, so we keep him in a crate whenever we leave the house. Thinking of what happened to Chris's dog, I ran down the hall to the office where the crate is kept. I shined what little light I had from my phone on the crate and saw its door open and it looked empty. I stepped forward, afraid at what I'd see and shone the light into the crate and saw Drake cowering in the back, whimpering. That's when the cops pulled up. My family came home soon afterwards. When the cops asked us if we had any enemies, since the house mostly just seemed to be tossed. I had to tell them about Butcher Face. While the cops were looking around, they noticed that the power hadn't been cut. It turned out that every single light bulb in the whole house

had been partially unscrewed, leaving the light bulb in the socket, but not able to light up. This was the first time my family had heard about Butcher Face, and they asked me to stop seeing Chris. I hadn't so much as talked to Chris on the phone for almost two months after that. Very little had happened in that time, but something still didn't feel right. For one thing, my sister, who worked nights, started asking me to stand at the front door and wait until she got into her car whenever she left, since she leaves after dark. I asked a couple of times why, but she never gave an answer. It's like she just fell creeped out or that she was being watched whenever she went outside.

Our dog still seemed to be spooked too. Whenever we'd tie him outside, he'd only do his business and come right back in, which is very out of character for him. One day I was standing at my back door, looking into the backyard, thinking of all of this, when my eyes locked onto the shed in my backyard, and I remembered the story told to us by the people we talked to whose house we saw on the tapes. They found evidence of someone living in their shed. I went to my room and picked up a sword from my nerdy sword collection and went out to the shed.

I crossed the yard and when I got to the shed I found it unlocked. I opened the door and looked inside, only using the sunlight since there's no power running to it. I immediately saw a pile of trash in the far corner. It was a loose pile of tarps, cloth from umbrellas and trash bags that had a compression in the middle like someone had been lying in it. Off to the side of the pile was the missing liquor bottles from inside the house and some garbage. This guy had been living in the shed and there was a good chance he had been there since the house was broken into two months ago. In fact, for all I know, he could have been in there that night when I went to the shed for the pitch for, watching me. I didn't want to freak out my family, so I cleaned it up in secret.

At the bottom of the bedding of trash, I found a ratty notebook. I only half opened it to a random page, saw some very familiar artwork and immediately closed it, tore it up and threw it in the trash. A couple weeks later, I got a phone call from Chris. He said he was still doing some looking around and found some strange stuff. Before I could say that I didn't want to hear it, he said he went back to the house of the women who were the former owners of the house who we had talked to before. Before I could respond to this, he said, They lied, come see me tomorrow. The next day, without telling my family,

I drove back to Chris's house. When I got there, I was greeted by his mother, who seemed to be in a good mood. I asked her how it was going, and, knowing what I was talking about, she said nothing strange had happened there for a couple months. I asked where Chris was, and she pointed to the stairs

that led down to his basement bedroom. I opened the door and immediately heard Chris talking, but I couldn't quite hear what he was saying, but assumed that he was talking to his girlfriend. When I got to a point on the stairs that I could see into his room, I saw that he was sitting in front of his desk, talking to a video camera. I asked him what the hell he was doing, and he smiled and said nothing, and turned off the camera and slid it back between his monitor and computer tower, like it wasn't strange that he was talking to a camera, just like Butcher Face did.

By this time, I had gotten to the bottom of the stairs, and Chris stood from his chair, and immediately changed the subject. He walked up to me and started talking about how, a couple of days before, he drove to the house of the old women who used to own his house. When he got there, he parked across the street and waited. He knew that the former owner of the house, Louise, had died,

and that her sister surely moved away soon after, and that someone had been living in her house since then. He was hoping to see butcher face either entering or leaving the house. Instead, he saw Shirley pull into the driveway. They got out of their cars at the same time. Shirley apparently didn't see Chris because she just continued to the house. By the time he caught up to her, she had already gone into the house, but she then began to back out, apparently shocked at something she saw in there.

When he got to her she was already back on the porch. He started talking to her and she finally told him what she really knew about Butcher Face. Like we already knew, she started with when her sister Louise and her husband bought the house. They wanted to replace the wiring and plumbing, but before that could happen, Louise's husband had the stroke and eventually died. This is where the story left off before. What they didn't tell us is that a couple years after, her husband's death, Louise still couldn't afford paying for it, so she decided to sell it instead. After it just sitting there for not too long, they thought it would be relatively easy to fix up,

so they, in their early 60s at the time, decided to do it themselves. When they arrived to check out the house for the first time, they found the house like it looks in the videos, with garbage everywhere and drawings on the wall, with burnt out candles everywhere, and a hole in the basement. They began to clean it up, picking up the garbage, putting up cheap wallpaper, putting down carpeting, and boarding up the hole in the basement as best they could. One thing she did mention that we never noticed

is that in the basement there was another hole in the cinder block wall in the foundation that led into the backyard. They bricked up the hole, but due to their budget and old age, they never used any mortar. They just laid the bricks in place and left it at that.

Chris asked her if they put the videos in the hole and she outright refused to answer. We determined that if anybody knew where that hole in the wall was, they could just remove the cinder blocks and get into the hole and do whatever they wanted there, like hiding some tapes. We went out to his backyard to see if this was true, and we did indeed find a patch of the cinderblock wall

where you could remove the blocks. They seemed to have fresh scrape marks. like they had been recently moved, but we couldn't be sure. Chris resumed his story and told of how he and Shirley continued their conversation with her telling him that while cleaning out the kitchen, they found a rectangular object wrapped in tinfoil. They unwrapped it and found a videotape. They brought it back home and popped it in their VCR and watched it. Apparently there was no picture.

The screen was just black like the lens cap had been left on or something. But it seemed to be intentional because what the video lacked in visuals, it compensated for with sound. He said she described it as rants and strange noises for the entire tape. He said she then ended their conversation and quickly walked back to her car, left her house's door open, and drove away. Chris then abruptly changed the subject by jumping back to his desk and pulling a folder out of a drawer and opening it up. The papers inside were printouts of various disconnected websites showing pictures of stills from videotapes, drawings, photos, and carvings that all looked familiar.

He said, Look, they're from all over the country, including some places in Mexico and Canada. Some of these apparently even appear in some places in Europe. It's like he's traveling around and leaving the stuff wherever he can. Chris then said that he will continue his investigation into Butcher Face. That investigation continued for four years until last weekend. I hate to make this sound cliche, but Chris became pretty obsessed with trying to find out who Butcher Face was. His investigation was slow, finding the occasional picture or video.

He even traveled to a town near Denver, Colorado, because he believed he found what he called a nest, a place where Butcher Face seemed to appear often, much like around our area, but he didn't find much. We were never really sure what was fueling Chris's interest in Butcher Face because he had no more of Butcher Face's media since his father burned at all. Then, last week, we found out where it was all coming from. I had come by because we were planning to see a movie, but we never got to go. I pulled into his driveway at the same time as his girlfriend. We both got out of our cars and laughed at the coincidence of both of us getting there at the same time and walked into his house. His family was working, so we just walked into the house and down the stairs to his room.

We hung out for a little while, Chris and his girlfriend sitting on his bed with me sitting at the desk. We were just chit-chatting and I was spinning the chair I was in when I happened to notice a tape leaning against the speaker to his computer. I picked up the tape and asked him what it was. He immediately got an, oh shit, look on his face. When his girlfriend got into the questioning, he finally broke down and admitted that it was the tape the old ladies had found in the house in the 80s. He said that when he talked to Shirley that time in front of her house and she told him they found the tape, she also gave the tape to him, and he chose to leave that part out of

the story four years ago. This is when we knew he had a problem. We asked him to stop listening to the tape. We asked him to stop this search for butcher face because it had never led to anything good. The next week, we decided to go to a cabin that Chris's girlfriend's family owns on a lake a couple towns over to finally finish this.

We didn't know how right we were. We arrived at the cabin Monday afternoon. It was me, Chris, his girlfriend, and our friend Jesse. We filled Jesse in on the whole Butcher Face story on the drive down, and he immediately regretted coming along. Chris brought everything he had on Butcher Face, and soon after we got there, he asked if we could watch the last tape one final time.

Jesse wanted to see what all the fuss was about, and I must admit I was curious to check it out myself. The cabin had no cable, phone line, cell phone signal or internet access. The only form of entertainment was to watch movies, so they actually had a VCR still there with a decent VHS collection. We popped the tape into the VCR and turned it on. As mentioned before, this tape had nothing visual and was all audio.

It began with clicking sounds like from an insect that would start off slow and go faster than slow down and go fast again. It then changed to a quiet, it talking like a whisper. The voice talked about how he had an infectious evil and wanted to spread it to his disciples, and then it just faded out like he simply walked away from the camera. There were more noises of what sounded like animals walking around inside a building and a high screeching noise that lasted for a good five minutes.

There was more talking where he called people zombies and cows and how only a few were worthy for the pit. followed by a jabbering sound like he was humming while wiggling his tongue around. That night, we lit a bonfire and Chris burned every note, picture, schematic, and the last tape he had about Butcher Face. The next day we spent most of the morning watching movies, regular movies, and then we went out on a rowboat and explored the lake for a couple of hours. We got back and we hung out on the shore with some drinks.

I must admit it reminded me of that time I walked into Chris's house and met his mother. She was in such a good mood after not having any problems with Butcher Face anymore. It felt almost exactly like that. At one point, Chris's girlfriend came out and asked if any of us knew where her iPod touch was. She claimed that she left it in its docking bay, one of those ones with the speakers, which was also missing. She kept accusing us of hiding it from her. At this point it was starting to get dark, and we began going back into the cabin one by one.

I was the last one in, and I must admit I didn't close the door. Chris and his girlfriend and I were in their room looking for the iPod and its docking station when Jesse, who was still out in the living room, yelled, holy fuck! We ran out into the living room, and he said that he just saw a person run by the open door outside, on all fours. Chris's girlfriend rushed to the door and slammed it shut and locked it.

We stood still listening for where this person could have gone when all of a sudden we started hearing loud noises coming from the front deck. It was random noises like a voice chattering, something like the grinding of a buzzsaw, sobbing, all in quick succession.

We rushed to the door and peeked out the small window and saw Chris's girlfriend's iPod sitting on its docking bay. with a power cord going from it to a plug on the outside wall, sitting on the railing of the deck. These sounds were coming from the iPod. Chris opened the door, ran out, and grabbed the iPod off the docking bay,

and ran back into the cabin. He gave it to his girlfriend and told her to delete the file that was playing, effectively erasing every known piece of media we knew of by Butcher Face. Chris and I then ran to the door, opened it, and yelled, that there was nothing left of any of his media we had. We destroyed every connection we had to him, and he had no reason to follow us anymore. It stayed quiet for the rest of the night,

and we left that morning. During the drive home, we started thinking of some things. We now believe that Butcher Face wanted us to find those tapes. Maybe not us, per se, but someone. The day that we found those first 24 tapes, we started an avalanche of more and more of his media and possibly assisted in it spreading to others. He had mentioned more than once in his media

that he wanted to spread his infectious evil only to his disciples. And we think those disciples are those that have seen his media. We say this because he never seems to attempt to hide it and he seems to keep watch of all those who have seen it. In the notes I saw of Chris's before he broke, them, I saw that many of the sightings of him were scary, but never seemed to be completely dangerous. It was like he was just keeping watch over those who had experienced his media.

Ultimately, I decided to write this to warn you that if you ever come across anything that even resembles the footage, audio, art, writings, or carvings that are described in these stories, do not look at them. When we got back home, Chris decided to tell his family everything that had happened, including the tape he had hidden from everyone else, and our hypothesis as to who butcher face is and what he's doing. Chris's brother Evan's face became pale, just as pale as the day he first saw the tapes. We asked him what the matter was, and he said, You know how I said I never converted the tapes to DVDs? Well, I lied. Apparently, he actually did do the conversion at his college after the day their house was broken into. The thing is that

they disappeared and he later learned that fellow students had taken them thinking it was a cool school project and made copies. From what we've heard, they've been handed down from person to person and copied, leading to countless duplicates. Sleepless tales have come to an end. Close your eyes. And the No Sleep podcast is licensed under a Creative Commons license, 2011. Some rights reserved.