The Taxidermist’s Daughter

“…Excuse me,” a tiny voice chirped from somewhere outside my vision. I finished whatever it was I had been doing under the counter and pulled myself up. “Is this Alderman’s Contracting?”

“That’s us.” I replied. I quickly wiped the grease off my hands and extended for a shake. “What can I do you for, ma’am?” The girl in front of me ignored my outstretched palm but offered a weak smile in exchange.

I’d say she was beautiful, but that doesn’t seem the right word. Captivating might be more accurate. Her face and hands, the only skin she was apparently willing to expose, were immaculate, if not slightly paler than normal, but from every collar and cuff of her multiple layers of jackets and sweaters peeked the signs of severe scarring. For a moment I wondered what she looked like underneath all of that, for multiple reasons. Beyond the scars, though, something else seemed strange about the girl; be it the smell of wet pine needles that had followed her into the lobby or the almost feral look in her eyes. Despite the first impression of being a shrinking violet, she carried what I can only describe as a predatory air; almost as if I was in the room with a grizzly bear instead of a waifish bundled-up undergrad.

“You did some work for… my father.” she mumbled, shuffling her feet. “The taxidermist on Highpoint?”

“Oh, yeah, yeah, I remember. Some mold in the insulation, wasn’t it?” I replied. There was no way I could forget this girl’s old man. He was an asshole. Was insistent that his ‘studio’ had to stay as dry as possible and that any mold or leakage had to absolutely be fixed right away. To his credit, he was willing to pay through the nose for it, and up front too, even though, judging from his house, there wasn’t a lot of money to go around.  What I didn’t remember was this girl; I could have sworn the taxidermist lived alone. “What’s wrong? Was there a problem with the job?”

“Oh, no, nothing like that!” she was quick to correct me, “In fact, the opposite. Father was so pleased with your work, he wanted to send you a gift.”

“Oh?” I glanced down and confirmed what I had thought. The girl wasn’t holding any sort of item.

She just mustered another weak smile.

PRINT THIS POST WORDS: Notes: 3 12/10/12 — 10:16pm Filed under: #creepypasta 
Old Town

While the tourism brochures may talk about Old Town’s robust history and colorful residents in a footnote somewhere, don’t let them fool you. Old Town is the grimiest, most dangerous neighborhood in Santa Aria, both from the paranormal and typical city crime. The oldest buildings of the main city, Old Town sags and creaks under its own weight and rotting supports. In the center of Old Town is the long abandoned Mission of Saint Anna. From this central nexus creep a sprawl of haphazardly zoned, incrementally newer buildings, almost all of which have had some history of haunting. When paranormal investigators refer to Santa Aria as “the most haunted city on the west coast”, Old Town is generally what they’re referring to. Of particular note among these structures is the Santa Aria Opry, a huge, formerly opulent music hall that sits atop a cliff overlooking the ocean. Hugely popular in the 40’s and 50’s, the Opry’s popularity, like  so much of Old Town’s architecture, has sagged over the years. While it still operates, doubling as a curio museum for some of the objects the Santa Aria Museum of History find a bit too morbid for their display cases, it’s largely just a satin-lined, gold trimmed carcass.

Slash Ramonez didn’t grow up in Old Town, but he and his friends are typically found hanging out there. Don’t let anyone know he’s actually a spoiled little Hammer Hill punk; you’ll ruin his cred.

PRINT THIS POST WORDS: Notes: 1 8/22/12 — 7:58pm Filed under: #Sandgate  #Old Town  #location 
The Mission of Saint Anna

The first true building erected in what would eventually become Santa Aria, Saint Anna was founded by a small group of Spanish missionaries in 1806, who were emboldened by their southern brethren and pushed farther north into the frontier than any other Spaniard had previously dared. This, of course, was with good reason. Isolated from any sort of outside help, the poorly prepared missionaries had all mysteriously vanished by the spring of 1808, leaving behind only a circle of empty buildings and a few loose pages which looked like the ravings of a madman. The log the support party sent had discovered contained a rambling, panicked scrawl, telling of monsters and living shadows that would erupt from the tree line every sundown to batter the walls of the complex. To most the odd journal was discredited as the mad scribblings of a lunatic, but combined with the missionaries’ strangely corpseless deaths; it was enough to spread rumors of Saint Anna being a cursed, unholy place. The mission stayed abandoned that way for nearly 40 years until the California Gold Rush pushed prospectors back into the area…

PRINT THIS POST WORDS: 8/22/12 — 7:56pm Filed under: #Sandgate  #Old Town  #location 
The Lighthouse on Nameless Island

Nameless Island is peculiar in that it’s not really either of those things; it does have a name, which just happens to be ‘Nameless’, and it’s not so much an island as it is a very large rock sticking out of Saint Anna’s Bay. Being the threat that it was to sailing cargo ships at the beginning of Santa Aria’s shipping boom, however, some kind of warning signal was more or less required despite the inhospitality of the location. Thus, the lighthouse on Nameless Island was built.

To be forced to live on Nameless Island was something only a select few have ever been willing to do without extreme coaxing, and as such the lighthouse can only be described as decrepit even at its best of times. Battered by seawater from below and storm water from above, the whole building reeks and sags with a damp mildew, and keeping a gas light going in those conditions is, as you imagine, a challenge. This caused a general negative opinion of the lighthouse ranging from unlucky to useless over the course of its active lifespan, since a doused pilot light has caused numerous ships to wreck on Nameless regardless of the lighthouse’s presence, anyway.

The lighthouse has been decommissioned for several decades now, as increased use of electric light rendered the already unreliable building obsolete, but it is still kept and maintained by the Santa Aria Historical Society. Visitors via ferry tour are strongly encouraged to stay within the lighthouse grounds, although many can’t resist sneaking a piece of driftwood left by one of the many shipwrecks home with them.

PRINT THIS POST WORDS: 8/22/12 — 7:54pm Filed under: #Sandgate  #Portside  #location 
Portside

After failing both as a religious mission and a gold town, Santa Aria finally hit its stride as a port city following in the wake of the Industrial Revolution. Portside, as the name suggests, is a sprawl of docks, industrial parks, and other manufacturing facilities that run along the west coast. Santa Aria’s main exports are cement and glass products, which have earned it the nickname ‘The Sand City’; an irony not lost on those who work there, since the cityscape has long since cannibalized the coastline’s original rocky beaches.

North of the main harbor, the coastline gives way to steep cliffs, and it’s there a curious traveler can find numerous caverns carved out from the rock face by seawater. These caves were famous in eras past for being places to drop and pick up various illicit goods, namely bootleg liquor, and connections to the Santa Aria Tunnels at the caverns’ rear seem to confirm this. While no one can be found down there now, save for an occasional spelunker, it’s said you can still hear odd echoing voices, trapped inside and bouncing off the cave walls.

PRINT THIS POST WORDS: 8/22/12 — 7:52pm Filed under: #Sandgate  #Portside  #location 
Sparrowrun

When describing the four boroughs of Santa Aria, even long-time residents simply settle for describing Sparrowrun as “everything else”. The only area to touch all three of its sister neighborhoods, Sparrowrun is a potpourri that combines the industrial of Portside and the residential of Hammer Hill with the history of Old Town. The most tourist friendly of the boroughs, Sparrowrun most famously contains the Santa Aria Museum of History and the Santa Aria University of the Arts.

While Old Town’s history is harvested from the city’s earliest eras, Sparrowrun is more notorious for its historic significance to the early twentieth century, namely as a nexus for organized crime. An estimated seven major gangs were operating in Sparrowrun in the 1920s and ‘30s, running every black market business from bootlegging to contract killing. The most well-known for performing the latter was the Rigamorti Gang, an eclectic group of thugs and hit men who have been attributed to hundreds of murders within the city during their short period of operation from 1918 to 1926. It’s speculated that the gang killed itself off in a civil war at what would be known as the All Hallow’s Massacre on Halloween, 1926; however, many of the known members’ whereabouts are to this day unknown, so it’s entirely possible a number went underground after the falling out.

PRINT THIS POST WORDS: 8/22/12 — 7:49pm Filed under: #Sandgate  #Sparrowrun  #location 
The Tunnels

While Santa Aria, in general, is known for its paranormal inclinations, few places are as outwardly creepy as the Tunnels. Formed from a combination of basements, sewers, mine shafts, and the natural caverns carved out underneath Portside’s cliffs, the Tunnels are a network of underground passageways that extend across most of the city’s downtown. There are numerous theories as to what the Tunnels original purpose was, ranging to everything from unfinished mining endeavors from the city’s gold rush era to secret paths for rumrunners during the twenties; the true answer is more likely than not a combination of all of them. Most of the miles of tunnels are closed off to the public due to being structurally unsound, but many believe shady business deals are being made below them even today.

Of particular notoriety is the Wilting Orchid, an abandoned speakeasy located under the intersection of 7th and Cherry Street in Sparrowrun. Legend has it that the entire patronage of the Wilting Orchid was mowed down by the Rigamorti Gang in 1924; if you managed to find a way to sneak past the barriers and get down there, you can still find shattered bottles of bootleg liquor mixed with gallons of blood staining the floorboards.

PRINT THIS POST WORDS: 8/22/12 — 7:46pm Filed under: #Sandgate  #Old Town  #Sparrowrun  #Portside  #location 
The Kemping Glass Factory

Established in 1936 by Harris Kemping Jr., the Kemping Glass Factory is most well-known for its famously ironic “curse”; the building has no windows. Rather, it no longer has any windows; it did up until 1967, when all of them were boarded up. The reason for this is what makes the building curious for those interested in the paranormal. Originally, the factory had several windows, both along the outside of the building and inside the offices of the administrative department. However, on the morning after Kemping’s death in 1959, factory workers arrived to find every one of them had been smashed, including the ones on the upper floors and inside the building. A vandalism report was sent to police and the windows were replaced, but nothing became of the odd occurrence and the matter was soon forgotten. Or, it would have been, if not for the same thing happening one year later to the day. And again, the year after that. Soon, it became clear that every year on the anniversary of Harris Kemping Jr.’s death, every window in the factory would spontaneously shatter. While at first it was deemed an unnaturally dedicated hoodlum, security footage taken after years of abuse revealed that the glass was, in fact, breaking all on its own. Following this revelation, all of the windows were boarded up, and manufacturing continues to this day in a window factory that has no windows.

PRINT THIS POST WORDS: Notes: 1 8/22/12 — 7:07pm Filed under: #Sandgate  #location  #creepypasta  #Portside 
The Hammer Hill Horror

Although the vast majority of sightings were recorded during the 1950s, there have been reports of some sort of creature in the woods of Hammer Hill dating back as far as 1890 and as recently as 2004. While details vary from sighting to sighting, the most common shared recollections of the Hammer Hill Horror are that it’s well over eight feet tall when standing upright, that it gives off a faint white glow, and that it’s some type of insect or other arthropod. Most that have spotted the Horror liken it to a praying mantis, although reports of a giant lobster or scorpion are also common. The Horror is notoriously shy, as well; even the most lucid glimpses of the creature have only been for a split second at best. In one report from 1946, a man even swore that it vanished into thin air right in front of him.

While it’s been regarded as an urban legend for the majority of its history, the Hammer Hill Horror did receive a fair bit of press after its most famous sighting in the summer of 1954. After not returning from a day-hike one afternoon, a search party was sent out to locate local Boy Scout Troop 26. The seven boys and their adult leader were found the next morning camped out inside Hammer Hill crater. The impact site of a meteorite in 531 AD, according to geologists, the Hammer Hill crater is a well-known clearing in the backwoods of Santa Aria famous for its unnatural rock formations, shattered splinters, experts say, of the rock that once fell to earth there. Each of the rescued scouts, ranging in age from 11 to 15, shared the same story upon questioning: that they had been trapped inside the crater all night by a luminescent creature circling the perimeter. When the scout leader had attempted to exit, he had been attacked by the thing with “bladed arms”. Indeed, the 35 year old man did show authorities several cuts and abrasions on his forearms and chest which, upon medical examination, were deemed to have come from a blade at least nine inches long. In addition, while the crater itself has always been known not to grow any flora, dead plant matter was found along the outer rim that day as well, killed by what appeared to be a winter frost. This baffles botanists even today, as that night had been balmy, even for Oregon in July.

After a number of copycat sightings, however, the hype surrounding Hammer Hill crater died off, leaving only another chapter in what continues to be a local legend. Although none of the boys would recant their story in later years, none grew up to show any sort of long-term emotional scarring or mental health issues, so the case, while still unexplained, has mostly been dropped.

PRINT THIS POST WORDS: Notes: 2 8/22/12 — 7:06pm Filed under: #creepypasta  #hammer hill  #location  #monster  #sandgate  #entity 
A Written History of the Fall of Saint Anna, 1807

Log Date: August 8, 1806

It has been three weeks since we set out from Saint Michael’s, and until now we had yet to find any luck in locating a suitable place to lay foundation. The northern country is not made for the hospitality of man, it would seem. At every turn is another rocky cliff face or brine soaked sandbar, and each of these miserable locales are punctuated with endless miles of dark aspen woods. All of our crew longs for the warmth and sunlight of the southern conquests, but God’s will continues to push us northward.

It was only today that our crew discovered a place where our fledgling order might take root. Pocketed between a sprawling range of hills and the ocean we discovered a small clearing of strangely hard packed dirt. Some of the men are claiming it’s providence that such a ready-made foundation for building could crop up in the center of the wild, but secretly, the place sets me at unease. Even as I write I cannot help but feel as though our crew is being judged with invisible eyes, as if something lurks just beyond the treeline. We must soldier on, however; as a missionary I have already chosen the judgment of the invisible as my life’s work, after all.

Log Date: August 13, 1806

Construction is already well underway for what will soon become the Saint Anna Mission of Christ. The lumber in this wood is denser than we had anticipated, and the heavy, dark material should make for sturdy building. Although I have yet to make a formal introduction to the local population, I have heard contact has been made elsewhere. Some of the others reported to me this morning they had seen a small host of natives watching them from the edge of the clearing, but they had fled when we greeted them. A few of the other priests are worried over the tribe’s apparent skittishness, but I would prefer a fearful lot to a warmongering one. Even as far out into the wilderness as we are, there have been rumors coming about other missions being massacred by savages; I would be made a liar to say that it does not make me nervous.

Log Date: November 18, 1806

Everything is going better than we could have hoped. In spite of the bad weather that plagues this part of the continent, our freshly finished complex holds fast against any and all manners of wind, rain, and sleet. Conversation with the natives is still a slow process, but we have, at very least, established some sort of connection with them. The language is not unlike the other tribes found in the area, although we have encountered an odd word or phrase intermixed. One in particular we hear muttered more often than others appears when the seemingly paranoid natives are at their most frightful: “jintos”. Our group of scholars has yet to discern its meaning.

Log Date: February 25, 1807

A breakthrough! Today one of the scholars managed to get a local to agree to an extended interview about the surrounding area and its people. Through this endeavor, a wealth of information has been supplied to us. To start, it would appear that the locals are not a complete tribe, as we had thought, but rather a small core of holy men split off from the main group, who live farther inland. We had wondered why their numbers seemed so few, but this explains it. The man went on to tell us that he and his comrades were a sort of retainer; apparently, the “jintos” we have been hearing so much about is actually the name of the land on which we’ve come to live, and is protected, as the man has told us, by a host of guardian spirits.

This is a truly exciting development. Knowing that these men are others like us, isolated from their families in the name of their beliefs, has planted a seed of kinship in me. Each passing day I look forward to working alongside them more and more.

Log Date: May 3, 1807

An attack by wild animals left three of our own killed last night. We awoke to find the men, part of the original construction group, strewn about our lawn, dismembered and maimed by whatever beasts lurk in the woods. The Jintil, as we have learned the locals call themselves, are even more disturbed by this than we are. They tell me this is the spirits’ doing, and we should repent as soon as possible. I assured them that I would turn to my own God, and that He would see us through this dark time. That did not seem to alleviate their concerns, I’m afraid.

Log Date: October 9, 1807

The fall harvest is ruined. Some blight has fallen upon it and has left it nothing more than a breeding ground for the insects. I can see the fear in superstitious men’s eyes, but more pressing is the logical fear that comes from this wretched turn of events; our food supply has been severely diminished. We must brace ourselves for a long and difficult winter.

Log Date: October 31, 1807

The Jintil are leaving. It saddens me to see them go, but I understand their reasons. The whole valley has fallen to rot, and the boughs of the trees sag under the weight of swarms of mosquitos. In all my years as a priest, I have never seen a plague of this magnitude.

I managed one last conversation with the natives before they departed. I asked them if anything like this had ever happened here before, to which they replied with a down-struck “no”. I then inquired as to why this place was so important to their tribe, even when none lived here. The response I got keeps me awake tonight as I write this.

Jintos is the entrance to the world of the dead.

Log Date: November 4, 1807

We are beset on all sides by monsters. Not more than a single night after the Jintil’s departure, the beasts of the wood have grown as bold as to score our windowpanes and doorways with tooth and claw. We spend our nights huddled together, spades and hoes in hand, just waiting for whatever lurks in the shadows to finally burst in and take us.

Between this, and the hunger, I don’t know how much longer Saint Anna can last.

Log Date: November 18, 1807

God help me.

Over half of us are gone now, dragged into the woods by horrors known only to Hell. Just today I watched an insect the size of a horse descended upon us, vivisecting at least three my comrades before my own eyes. I do not understand where these abominations come from, only that they emerge in waves from beyond the dark corners of the wood.

I know now Saint Anna is doomed. I can only hope this record gets back to the church, and that any parties who come to us hereafter know to turn and run.

——-

The preceding journal is the only known record of the failed Saint Anna Mission of Christ. Discovered in the Spring of 1808 by travelers, the book was found sitting on a desk in the main building of the seemingly abandoned complex. Even up to the present day, however, the book’s authenticity is called into question. No corpses, dismembered or otherwise, have ever been discovered at the Saint Anna mission site, so it is more likely that the missionaries simply left when supplies ran out.

The Saint Anna Mission of Christ is a protected historical site by the state of Oregon, and can be visited during guest hours Monday through Friday from 10 AM to 7 PM. For more information, please contact the Santa Aria Historical Society at (540)215-8807.

PRINT THIS POST WORDS: Notes: 1 8/22/12 — 6:55pm Filed under: #sandgate  #creepypasta  #Old Town