My Family's Curse nosleep

Hello r/nosleep,

This is a story my mom told me many years ago. It never occurred to me to share it here because I never thought it was interesting, or all that scary, but I've told a few of my friends and they told me they thought it was one of the creepiest stories they'd ever heard. So here goes nothing. I will do my best to recount the story as faithfully as I can to the version my mother told me.

But first, a little backstory. My parents, sisters, and I used to live in the industrial city of South San Francisco, which unsurprisingly was less than 10 miles south of the metropolis it borrows its name from. The house was a quaint suburban town home that sat right next to a storm overflow canal. I will go into more detail about this house later, but at the time that I heard this story we had moved out of this house nearly five years prior to another city very far away. But this story begins at my grandma's house.

She lived in a two story in-law not far from us at the time. Living with her was my uncle, her youngest son, and his wife and two children. They rented the bottom floor out and occupied the second floor. As you can probably imagine the two bedroom one bath in-law was a very crowded place for five people to live. It's probably for this reason that my grandma and her daughter-in-law could never get along.

They would always fight about everything; what they were having dinner, who was supposed to do what chore, how to raise the kids. Everything between them was a shouting match. Now grandma, like most people in my family, is extremely superstitious. Following one of their fights she had convinced herself that something was causing the animosity in the house. Some kind of negative energy that couldn't just simply be attributed to living in a small house. She decided she wanted to have her house "investigated" so to speak, for negative energies.

She invited a man into her home that was visiting from the middle eastern country that my family lineage originates from. I don't remember the Arabic term for what he was called, but he was the equivalent to a psychic or paranormal medium. Something along those lines. He was someone she trusted. Well he came to the house one day, the way my mother told me the story, he came up the outside staircase to the front door, and as soon as my grandma opened the door he told her "Don't close the door! I sense evil in this house. We have to let it." Cheesy, I know, but it probably loses something in the translation.

The layout of the house is such that from the front door one can see directly down the hallway into the kitchen. He rushed passed her and fixated directly on the refrigerator. He put his hands around it, felt it up and down, shook it a little, and yanked on it to test it for how much slack there was to pull it from the wall. He asked my grandmother when they last looked behind it. She told him that they hadn't moved it once since they had put there decades ago. This man told her it needed to be moved and he and my uncle, with much effort, pulled it from the wall. What they found was...disturbing to say the least.

Caked over in dust was a brown paper lunch bag that looked to be filled to brim. Inside was a large collection of what appeared to be human fingernail and toe nail clippings. There were enough to fill the bag nearly halfway. Submerged in the clippings was an old photo. It was of my grandfather, whom had passed some seven years before, and all of his brothers, sisters, and cousins. Now I won't bore you with all the details, but my family tree is a little odd such that this photo had direct and distant relatives of both my parents, despite being a photo of my mother's dad. But the what's worst about the photo was the writing. There were these strange characters written above the heads of each of the people in the photograph. The characters were grouped in such a way so as to imply that each grouping of them were directed toward the person they were written above. It wasn't Arabic, or Hebrew, or any other language my grandmother would've recognized, but this paranormal medium did recognize it.

He told her that it spelled out a curse for our family, for all the offspring and descendants of those in the picture. For some it said they would die in disease and in pain, others would never find success in any ventures, my branch of the family was destined to always been alone and never find happiness or love. However, there was one curse that was spread to us all; that we would never be at peace. That something, or someone, would always be sure to haunt us so as to rob us of any security we might ever hope in feel in our homes.

This deeply disturbed my grandmother. She had no idea who could've put this in her home, and she couldn't begin to fathom who could've possibly wished such ill fate upon my family. It was then that she got the notion that she might not be the only person that was targeted. She asked this medium if he would be willing to check her eldest daughter's house just a couple of miles away. Much to her dismay, they found many similar items for which they could find no explanation. They found little notes hidden in the cracks of the walls, crucifixes with strange markings on them, and most notably, they found the sock. Have you ever seen one of the ceramic ornaments? They are just small blocks of textured and painted ceramic used for decoration. The medium picked one up and saw that it was completely sealed; no holes to put anything in or take anything out. He asked my aunt if she had remembered where she had gotten it. My aunt reported that it was a gift, but she had had it for many years and could not recall from whom she had received it. The medium asked her if he could break it open and she said yes. Inside was an old white sock. The part of the sock where a person's toes ought to go were cut off and there were dark brown stains all over it. Presumably the stains were from dried blood. Someone must have molded and then baked the ceramic around the sock. There was no other way to get it in there.

Now let's go back to my old house by the canal. We had moved out of this long before this incident at my grandmother's or my aunt's house, but my mother firmly believes that we would have found something similar had we checked our house. I was too young to understand why, but no one ever seemed comfortable in that house. One time, when everyone was downstairs, we heard the upstairs toilet flush. Our family was the type that always locked the front door, and occasionally we'd walk past the staircase and look down towards the front door to find it slightly ajar. As a kid I used to have nightmares all the time about monsters or ghosts trying to get me. My sisters arguably got the worst of it.

One example my mom likes to reference was the ant problem. One of my sisters' bedroom was always infested with ants no matter what she did or what the weather was like. No poison or ant trap in the world could repel them. We all thought that the ants went to her room because her's was nearest to the bathroom and that they just found their way through the piping. One day she had decided she had had enough and traded bedrooms with my other sister on the exact opposite end of the house. Within a week the ants had followed her. I'll never forget the confusion I felt when I stepped out of my house one day and watched the ant trail go up the house, then around the house all the way to the room my sister had moved to.

And then there's my other sister. Let's call her L She always believed she had some sort of psychic sensitivity to ghosts and spirits and all that stuff. Well she claimed that she had so much trouble sleeping in that house. She said that quite often she would wake in the middle of the night to have the undeniable sensation of someone leaning over her bed, breathing in her face, but she was too terrified to ever open her eyes to see what it was.

My mom also swears that on the day we moved out of that house, something was trying to force her out. She was walking down the stairs for the final time and heading to the moving truck outside, when she nearly fell down the whole flight of stairs. She barely caught herself on the hand rail. It worried all of us and when we asked what happened she wouldn't tell us. Years later when she told me this story, she said that she felt something push her down the stairs. She believed that something had tried to kill her that day, that whatever it was knew we were leaving and knew it had only one last chance. Since we've lived in the house I live in now nothing strange like any of these things has happened. No more nightmares, no ants, no breathing in anyone's face. Just plenty of peace of mind. And we've lived her for just over ten years now. My mother tells me that she firmly believes that if that medium had searched that house by the canal that he would have found more cursed artifacts.

I will be the first to stay that I don't believe in curses, or magic, or ghosts, or anything of the sort. But there is something about this story that scares me a truly base, visceral level. Whether or not the curse is real is irrelevant. Someone believed in it. And somehow, that person got into our homes and put all these objects there. And here's the thing; I don't think it was just some random person who doesn't like my family. I think it's someone we all know. Someone that we've unwittingly invited into our homes possibly many times. The thought that scares me the most is this:

For all I know, it might be someone in the family.

Submitted October 19, 2015 at 02:41PM by jedipaul9 http://ift.tt/1LxM3P5 nosleep