All I know is that I want this damned thing out of my house.
Something is dreadfully wrong with this bear. I never used to believe
in powers of darkness, but now I do. If you are willing to buy it,
please let me know. I take no responsibility for what may happen
afterwards and for god's sake don't keep it anywhere near children. The
lingering presence is still in my house to some extent and I need to
get the source out. THIS IS A LONG READ AND I AM SORRY BUT IT WAS THE ONLY WAY I COULD POUR IT OUT.
There are indeed things in this world that are best not meddled with
or even thought about, because sometimes all they need is an opening.
I'll start from the beginning, it's the only way to tell the story:
When I was a young child, I had a large stuffed toy bear, and named
him "Baron". Baron was the one I always blamed for stolen candy and
broken dishes, dressed in a button up shirt to imitate Calvin dressing
up Hobbes, that kind of best imaginary friend who I would talk out loud
to. I don't remember a whole lot about what went on, but some things
(which they will not discuss with me) happened to make them get rid of
Baron and take me for counseling, and then to several religious figures
in the local community. This didn't last long, and I turned into
(according to everyone else) a healthy, well adjusted young man.
Two weeks ago, I was in Cleveland on business. There was a small
antique shop on the other side of the street where I was parked, and
after finishing what I was there for, I walked up to the door for a
quick peek. "Merryweather Curiosities" was not only closed but in a
severe state of disrepair, and very dim inside, but I could swear that
back in the shadows I saw movement once or twice. As my eyes adjusted
to peering through the glass into the darkness, shielded by my hands, I
saw a stuffed bear that looked very much like Baron tucked away in one
of the corners. Nothing of note happened and I went home, only to come
back the next day to retrieve my clip-on sunglasses that I had
accidentally left in the waiting room of the office.
Baron, and it was indeed my childhood friend, was on the sidewalk
outside the shop, a McDonald's hamburger wrapper plastered around his
leg by the wind. There was no pricetag. On closer inspection, his fur
was ragged and worn in some places, mostly on the extremities of the
forepaws, and most oddly, his eyes were gone.
I looked up and down the street and put him in the back of my Isuzu Trooper.
At home, I hurried in to check my email and phone messages. I forgot
to bring Baron in, which I sometimes do with groceries if I don't need
them right away. In the morning, I went out to the car. Opening the
door, I was practically bowled over by a very powerful stench of rust,
mold, and what can only be described as the scent of a filthy wet dog.
A dead filthy wet dog.
The back lining of my trooper had been torn out after it started to
mold from being used as a work truck (hauling firewood in the winter
got it wet and dirty), so I figured that maybe the carpet up between
the seats needed cleaning, and that some of the smell might be coming
from Baron who if I remembered properly from the tag, was machine
washable. I pulled him out, put him on the porch, stuck my bike in the
back of the trooper, and drove down to the local carwash and auto
detailing place to have the interior steamcleaned to see if that would
help. My seat was slightly misadjusted and some of the controls were
sticky for no apparent reason. The cycling ride home was uneventful.
The bear was still in the same position where I left him.
Once I got home, I snapped a quick photo with my cameraphone just
for fun, and stuffed Baron into my Staber washing machine, which is an
expensive high quality washer, and ran him as a light cold water load.
Afterwards, I spread him over a laundry rack outside to dry because it
was such a nice sunny day. Right after coming inside, the phone started
ringing. It was the auto detailer, and they wanted me to pick up my car
(this was much earlier than expected).
On arriving, I found the Trooper to be only partly cleaned but the
smell was greatly diminished. None of the college students who worked
there would look me in the eye or give me more than a monosyllablic
reply. The manager pulled me aside, told me that he wanted me to take
my car and leave, that he wasn't willing to discuss anything about it,
and that there would be no charge. This made me feel very uncomfortable
and embarrassed, and I tried to think of what might have happened. The
Trooper had the windows rolled up tightly while sitting in the sun and
was very warm, so I put on the air conditioning on the drive back.
There was almost no airflow, and then a few dried feathers started to
spiral out of the vents, followed by a shaking rustle and a dead baby
bird dropping onto the carpet from the under-dash air vent.
I immediately pulled into the Target parking lot, locked my car, and
spent an hour pacing and then looking underneath the car. I decided
that the source of the stench and problems with the carwash had been
birds nesting in the air conditioning ducts, which then died. I finally
scooped up the dead hatchling with a plastic bag, dropped it in one of
the errant shopping carts and got back in my car. I couldn't shake the
feeling that there was something looking at me from in back. Not
malevolently, but accusingly. Like I had done something wrong.
At home, I worked outside for a while cutting down some new brush
growth and dragging it down to the ditch by the road, then went inside
and out into the back yard to check on Baron drying. The rack had
collapsed and he was sprawled on the ground several feet away, but
completely dry. It almost felt as though there were hard objects inside
him, just deep enough to be difficult to feel under the padding. There
was no smell. I put most of my problems outside of my mind and carried
him upstairs to be stowed away in the guest bedroom, with some of my
other old stuff.
For a few days, nothing happened. Then I began feeling like I wasn't
alone in the house. My girlfriend came over, and started to mention
seeing things out of the corner of her eye. I said they must have been
my cat Harlequin, but we found her upstairs asleep on my bed. That
night when we were watching The Island, we both heard a very loud
banging sound coming from upstairs. Later, she swore she heard
footsteps descending the basement stairs and then sounds coming from
underneath us. I was still trying my best to be skeptical about the odd
things happening, and made fun of her being easily spooked. Our night
didn't last much longer, she went home and I stayed up listening to
every single sound - and this is an old house, it DOES have some creaks
from the heat making it expand and contract - with my hair slowly
prickling up on the back of my neck. Some of the pieces from my chess
set were missing.
I went to sleep with a small light on for the first time in years,
and finally drifted off around 3 am. I can't remember much from my
dreams from that night, but I woke up with most of the coverings balled
up on the floor and dark bags under my eyes. The one mental image that
remained was the lingering sensation of being trapped deep underground
in a space too small to pass through, with the knowledge that something
was coming after me.
Harlequin didn't show up for her breakfast, but I figured she was
just out sleeping in the bushes or in a sunny spot. I realized that I
hadn't seen any birds or squirrels around lately, and there hadn't been
any birdcalls in the morning. Harley takes a bird now and then, but not
enough to silence them all. Walking out the front door, I saw a massive
puddle under the back of the trooper. It was something like motor oil
but was dried and blackish brown. Test driving it showed no problems
and there was no longer any smell at all. Also, the feathers were gone.
At this point, I began questioning whether some of the events were just
my overactive imagination running wild after a period of stress and
extra work. I decided to take the car for a drive to make sure nothing
was wrong, and ended up heading toward Cleveland again. The antique
shop popped into my mind, and I made a beeline for it, thinking maybe I
could ask where they found Baron. I was starting to put some of these
strange occurences together.
At the corner where I had picked up Baron, there was only brick wall
at the section where the shop had been. I thought I was going nuts. It
was the exact same place, but nothing was there. I walked to the next
door down, a local coffeehouse. The grayhaired lady behind the counter
told me that there never had been any "Merryweather" shop there.
Sure that I was going mad, I came back home to see the local
utilities board scooping up all the brush I had been cutting over the
past week. One of the orange hard-hat wearing workers flagged me over
and pointed at what the backhoe claw had unearthed pulling up branches.
There was a good four or five cubic feet of small bones mixed in with
the twigs and saplings, drying white and brown. Feathers, fur, and
scraps of flesh still clung to most of them. Among the bones was a pink
flea collar exactly the same as the one Harlequin had been wearing.
This incident caused me a great deal of difficulty with the city,
fortunately some of the executives on the utilities board and city
council members were close friends of my parents and didn't take to any
wild flights of fancy as to why a small animal graveyard might
have appeared in my discarded branches. I was beginning to be
terrified about the possibilities. My house was rapidly taking on a
very uncomfortable feeling, and no one came inside without commenting
on feeling unease or even outright fear. At several times I heard low
moans uttered from other parts and this happened once while a guest was
over. The shuffling sounds increased in frequency, always happening on
a floor I wasn't on until one day they started happening several rooms
over on the same story. This set me on edge like nothing you would
believe. It was worse than hearing the scraping sounds inside the walls
at night had been. Sometimes I would wake up with a few scratches on my
face, or feel something jump up onto my bed at night. I started to
question my sanity more and more. The next
night my girlfriend was sitting on the couch while I stepped into the
kitchen for a drink of water. I heard a low thump and dragging sound,
and then the wind howled around the house. Coming back into the living
room, I discovered her laying limp with her eyes staring into space,
monotonously repeating "there is a way out. there is a way out. there
is a way out," over and over. The altered voice I could rationalize
away. The chorus in the background, I couldn't. She has since refused
to talk or have any contact with me.
Up to this time, I had only looked in the spare bedroom a few times,
and Baron was always in his place, eyeless sockets staring into space.
I looked at him that day I heard the shuffling, and caught myself
starting to talk to him. This time it wasn't a pair of child friends,
it was me threatening him with the evisceration of his stuffing and the
fate of being stuffed into my woodchipper if he didn't stop whatever
was going on, if it was related to him and I was sure it was. As I
spoke, I felt chills trace up and down my spine and tears jumped into
my eyes for no reason. The room felt twenty degrees colder and visibly
darkened. My heart was in my throat and I felt an incredibly palpable
sensation of hostility spreading through the air like waves.
Shakily I backed out of the room, slammed the door, and ran
downstairs to fix myself some tequila. I noticed in the kitchen that
most if not nearly all of my knives were missing, and that there were
chunks of wood missing out of the locked cupboard under the sink, a
holdover from when the previous owners had had small children to keep
away from drain cleaner, almost as if a very short person had been
gleefully chipping away to try to break past the latch.
After drinking for a good twenty minutes, I started to rationalize
everything that had happened. The feeling that washed over me had been
a natural reaction, all part of my mind spooking itself and reacting on
cue to my subconscious desires to find strange and scary things.
Emboldened by liquor, I strode back upstairs and decided for no
apparent reason to repair Barons eyes. I remembered that once, long
after Baron disappeared but still in my childhood, that I had found a
small box with a pair of stuffed animal type eyes in it, nestled in
strips of paper with scrawled writing, and then was scolded heavily for
snooping. As if my hands found it unbidden, it only took a few minutes
of searching in one of the upstairs closets. The box was wooden with
inlaid crucifixes and a carving of the Virgin Mary, which struck me
very oddly as my parents had most definitely not been Catholic. Inside
were many little strips of parchment, almost as if it had been put
through a shredder. Written on each one was a latin phrase, repeated
over and over from one strip to another. Underneath a wrapping of these
were a pair of simple button eyes that I recognized as definitely
having belonged to Baron in the past. They felt very, very cold.
I took a needle and thread left over from my last shirt repair and
took Baron downstairs. Slamming him onto the dining room table, I
roughly stabbed the needle into the sockets, laced in the eyes, and
sewed them both tight. Again, I felt as if there almost might be an
actual skeletal structure under his padding, but after prodding quite
hardly, found nothing. After taking a few pictures of my handiwork,
tired of the whole thing and wondering why I had done what I did, I
opened the basement door, threw him down the stairs, and locked it.
Nothing happened all day and all night. Maybe I had solved the
problem. Loading my week's laundry into the machine, I noticed that it
was already full of liquid. Looking closer with a flashlight revealed a
layer of scum floating on oily water, glinting red under the beam from
my mini mag. My reflection swirled and distorted in the water, and I
heard whispering, not just one voice but one main tone with a whole
chorus of others in the background. I slammed the lid down and put a
cinderblock on top of it, and ran the machine empty. Five minutes later
all of the power to that side of my house went out and I have still not
been able to find the circuit fault. I called up an electrician the
next morning, after a tormented night of sounds and bumps, and then
tried looking up an exorcist. Exorcists unfortunately aren't in the
yellow pages. The workman came around noon and went down to the
basement (where I had not gone) to check the breakers. He left shortly
after going down and told me that he was never coming back and that he
had a good mind to hit me with his wrench for calling him here. The
shadows in the corners of the house seemed bigger than before, and I
don't like shadows that shift and adjust when you aren't looking. There
was a puddle slowly forming under the washer.
I went outside to pace under the sun, and started to notice
odd scraps of ragged fabric stuck to some of the trees and brambles
edging my property. One of them was recognizeable as part of one of my
much older stuffed animals, from when I was a toddler. There must have
still been a box of them tucked away somewhere. I went upstairs to
look, and found only a decapitated Pooh in an otherwise empty cardboard
box. Pooh's eyeless, mouthless head was on the seat of my car. The rest
of the never-alive animals slowly came to view as I dug through some of
the uncleared thickets, some of them with their heads seperated, some
of them much worse. I saw the entrance to the crawlspace under the
sideporch was open. This crawlspace leads directly to another
crawlspace that goes to the basement. I saw some scraps of fur and
stuffing laying in the entrance and was sure that I heard heavy, animal
breathing deeper inside.
Inside, as the sun faded, the noises started again. I looked at some
other pictures I had taken before and found one I hadn't noticed where
Baron's eyes glowed a faint eerie red. Staying in the house for another
night was a terrifying prospect. I was being forced to accept that some
sort of evil supernatural entity was making a residence and destroying
my life and my wellbeing. Looking in the downstairs bathroom mirror, my
skin was almost china-pale, with dark veins showing through. The
corruption that was overtaking the house was starting to get me as
well. As I looked at my face in the mirror in the dim fluorescent light
(I needed to change one of the pair and hadn't) the reflection slowly
faded to grayish dark, and swirled into ornate patterns that gave way
to a pure blackness that looked back at me through a pair of bright red
eyes, the only thing I could see. I heard a horrible scream that might
have been my own, as the lights went off through the entire house. The
bathroom door is opposite the basement door, only a few feet to the
other side and back a bit. I could hear slow shuffling sounds coming up
them. My maglite was in my hand and my adrenaline was on full fight or
flight mode. I chose fight.
I shone the light into the door and pulled it open. I swear to god
I'm not crazy, and this is what I saw. There below me on the steps was
Baron slowly walking up on two legs, one of my kitchen knives in his
paws, scraps of other animals hanging off him. I yelled at the top of
my lungs and shut the door, but it bounced back open. I was already
several yards away, running upstairs for my guns. In my bedroom, the
moonlight filtered through my curtains and I quickly grabbed my 870 and
prepared to charge back down. I felt prickles on my neck and turned to
see the eyes outside my window. They winked out into nothing with an
unearthly moan and I left the house as fast as I could. I did not see
'Baron' on the way out.
The rest is too difficult for me to write down just now, from the
ordeal under the cellar to what we found in the crawlspaces. With
the help of a Wiccan aquaintance, my house is partially cleansed (thank
God!) and the bear is now locked up in a box. I need to sell it, for
someone to willfully accept it. Please help me.
There is a large rip on the back, a small one on the belly that is
sealed up with red thread. The eyes are firmly attached and for reasons
I am not willing to discuss should not be removed under any
circumstances. I am not a professional ebayer or anything like that. I
just want some peace in my life again.
On May-05-06 at 00:50:17 PDT, seller added the following information:I
am hesitant to accept bids from members who joined within the last few
days or who have 0 feedback, and reserve the right to decline a bid for
any reason. The increment reply in the questions and answers section
was directed to a 0 feedback bidder.
On May-05-06 at 21:00:41 PDT, seller added the following information:Oh,
and if anyone is interested in contacting me directly about any of
this, feel free to use my personal email: aheist@gmail.com.
On May-06-06 at 03:32:40 PDT, seller added the following information:Confidential to Sonic Infidel:
Yes, I can ship to "Iran."
On May-07-06 at 21:08:55 PDT, seller added the following information:I've had my email for a very long time, and it is based on my real name. It's not a gag or a clue.
I'm also getting a lot of screen rights offers/requests. I'll figure out some way to handle them all. Thanks.
On May-08-06 at 08:55:19 PDT, seller added the following information:My
name is aaron heist, will certain idiots please stop emailing me and
going "hehehe i know what you're up to, your email says 'a heist'
heheheh!"
I have hundreds of emails + unanswered ebay questions and today I will
reply to every single one of them. Bear with me here. PS: Funny how I
have more watchers than some of those junk ebook auctions on the pulse
have VIEWS and yet Baron is kept from the pulse. Fishy? I think so.
On May-08-06 at 21:37:10 PDT, seller added the following information:
I was emailed this by pdelder. Says Mr. P:
Hello. Being curious, I saved the photograph of your Baron to my hard drive.
Opening the photograph, I brightened it so as to view the details in a better
light. I noticed something quite cool - in Baron's crotch area, a rather
freaky looking face.
With this email, I have included the photo with an enlargement of the face
superimposed over one corner. The face is plainly visible in the original
photograph which I brightened.
Do you see what I see?
In other news, mcclainx has a girlfriend cheating with a
mutual friend (look in the answered questions list). Everyone is
writing me and wishing they could send the bear to him! There's still
time for someone to buy it with the request that it is shipped to his
girlfriend- a request I would honor with pleasure.
Thanks, that's it for now!
On May-09-06 at 22:58:02 PDT, seller added the following information:Ok guys, two things:
#1: a loyal fan found a ghostly face in one of the pictures:
#2: I discovered some "certain items" in my watchlist that I did
not put there. Seems those jackass "powersellers" who want to make the
"pulse" use a simple code (all it would take is an iframe, I know my
html) to add their auctions to the watchlist of anyone who views a
page. Go check the pulse if you have a second. Look at the views. I
have 838+ legit watchers, but I need more to make the pulse against
cheaters with items that aren't one hundredth as popular as this page.
You guys are all the coolest, so if those of you with eBay accounts
want to take one click to watch this item,
and help me show those lame/lifeless/scum cheaters that good can still
triumph, that would be very cool. I can deal without making the pulse,
but knowing that I should have been there... it feels a little bad.
It's like all the people who clicked this page, who sent me comments,
who forwarded it to their friends, who clicked 'watch this item' of
their own volition are being ripped off. Whew. Sorry for the rant.
Also, here's my pics URL if the little picture show thing doesn't work for you.
)
