This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/Relative-Obscurity on 2024-08-02 23:15:33+00:00.

It was mid-June when my wife and I dropped our ten-year-old daughter, Jonie, off at summer camp.

We honestly didn’t think much of it, given that this was her fourth year in a row attending the camp, and that she had amassed a great group of best girl friends during that time.

But when Jonie finally returned home from camp later that summer, we couldn’t help but notice that something was… off about her…

…Staring off into space…

…A look of sadness in her eyes…

…Her previously cheery disposition replaced with a more somber one…

…And, strangest of all, constantly hacking up a peculiar cough that my wife and I kept hearing at all hours of the day.

At first, we chalked up her melancholy mood to the discomfort of a cold or flu…

…Until we discovered that it was no flu at all.

My daughter had been sitting with my wife and I at the dinner table, doing her best to hold back the bizarre cough she had contracted at camp, when she finally couldn’t hold it back any longer.

COUGH! COUGH!

After coughing loudly into her hand, she proceeded to hold it out in front of her, and look at what she had coughed up.

Suddenly, Jonie’s eyes opened wide, as if terrified by what she had seen, before she closed her fist.

“Poor thing. Here, take a napkin.” My wife said, as she held one out for our daughter.

“Uh, it’s okay. Don’t worry about it.” Jonie replied nervously, still clenching her fist.

“Dear, what’s in your hand?” I asked.

“My hand? What do you mean?”

“You coughed something up. And seemed to have a visceral reaction to it.”

“Oh, that? It’s nothing.” She said dismissively, as she tried to hop up from the dinner table.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa. Where do you think you’re going?” My wife asked.

“Uh, just to throw something out.”

“Something?” I asked.

Jonie tried to think of an excuse, but ultimately shrugged her shoulders and gave up. “Okay fine. But it’s something gross.”

“Gross? We’re your parents, dear. We changed your diapers as a child. I think we can handle it.”

“Are you sure?” She asked, before pleading with us. “Just let me throw it away.”

“It? Okay enough is enough, let’s see it-” I said, as I pried her hand open.

Suddenly, both my wife and my jaws dropped…

…As we saw the “it” she was referring to…

…An enormous, slimy maggot, still alive, as it writhed around in the palm of her hand.

I nearly threw up on the spot, as my wife kept her composure and tried to make sense of what was happening.

“That… came… from… inside… you?” My wife asked.

“Um, yes.”

“And has this happened before?”

“Uh, yes.”

“How often?”

“Every time I cough.”

“Is it always… maggots?”

“No… sometimes it’s spiders, centipedes, and-”

“Flies,” I interrupted, remembering the strange number of flies I had seen in the house as of late.

“Yes.”

“When did this start happening?” My wife asked.

“At camp.”

“What happened there?” I asked.

“The girls. They-”

But before Jonie could continue, she coughed again.

COUGH! COUGH!

This time, spitting out a centipede, just as she had mentioned.

That’s when my wife turned to me, with a sense of urgency in her eyes. “We need to get her to the hospital.”

And so, that’s exactly what we did, calling an ambulance, and rushing my daughter to the emergency room, where we waited… and waited… and waited… until she was eventually seen by a doctor.

They ran test after test after test.

But no matter how many times they tried to determine why so many insects were living inside my daughter, they continued to come up empty-handed.

And after multiple surgeries, and a rapid decline in Jonie’s health over the course of the night…

…She was proclaimed dead around 10am the next morning.

My wife and I sat there in silence, at her bedside table, equal parts shocked, saddened, and confused.

Until the medical staff eventually had to tear us away, trying their best to stop our screaming, as they covered her body with a blanket.

That night, we sat up in bed, crying.

And that’s when…

…It happened again.

COUGH! COUGH!

This time, the sound coming from my wife.

After covering her mouth with her hand, she opened it to find a number of tiny spiders crawling all over her fingers.

She turned back to me, a look of horror in her eyes, as I tried to hide my own look of horror, both of us realizing that if nothing was done, she too, would suffer the same fate as my daughter.

And so, for the second time in two days, we rushed back to the hospital, this time checking my wife into the emergency room, where the doctors continued to scratch their heads at such a bizarre ailment.

I held my wife’s hand that night, as she went back and forth, coughing and crying, until she eventually fell asleep.

That’s when it happened again.

COUGH! COUGH!

Except this time, I was the one coughing into my hand.

Sure enough, after opening it, I saw a maggot crawling across my palm.

That’s when I began to wonder, what could have possibly happened at my daughter’s summer camp.

So, in the whirlwind of having just lost a daughter, checked my wife into the hospital, and discovered that I too was infected, I did the only thing I could think of, sneaking out of my wife’s hospital room, making my way to the parking lot, hopping into my car, and setting off for the camp.

When I arrived about an hour later, I found the area desolate, with only one car in the parking lot. That of the caretaker, who was the only staff member that resided at the camp during offseason.

“Have you heard anything about a strange cough?” I asked him, after he was nice enough to invite me into his cabin.

“Why do you ask?” The old man replied.

“My daughter contracted an illness while she was here over the summer and I was trying to find out how.”

“Did she say anything else?”

“Something about her friends.”

“Friends.” The caretaker thought about it for a moment. “Come to think of it, I do recall a group of girls acting suspicious this summer.”

“Suspicious?”

“Yeah. Hopping the stone fences on the north side of the camp grounds. Where they’re not supposed to go.”

“Why not?”

“Well, there’s an old cemetery up there.”

“Can you take me to it?”

Thirty minutes later, the caretaker and I were trudging through the camp’s dense forest, eventually hopping over the very stone fences that my daughter and her friends had hopped.

Not far after that, we reached the old cemetery, its headstones broken and faded.

And not far from that…

…We found a disgusting sight…

…The rotting body of a camp counselor, his branded camp t-shirt ripped wide open, his corpse rotting, his entrails protruding from a wound in his stomach. And all over his body, were what must have been a hundred human bite marks. Small ones, made from someone no older than ten years old.

All around him, were small scarecrow-like dolls, made of sticks and twigs, tied together with rope.

“What is all this?” I called out, before throwing up into the dirt.

The caretaker simply replied, “Witches.”

“Witches?” I replied, confused by what he meant.

“Here.” He said, handing me half of the makeshift dolls. “We need to bring these back to the camp.”

After we headed back to his cabin and reported the body to the police, the caretaker led me to a fire pit, where we tossed the dolls in, and burnt them all.

“Couldn’t help but notice, you had come down with the cough yourself.” He said, clearly having noticed my illness over the course of the day.

“Unfortunately I have. And my wife.”

“Don’t worry, it’ll be gone by morning.” He reassured me.

“How do you know for certain?”

“Every few years, the witches in those woods possess campers. I wish this was the first time it happened. But I’m afraid it’s not. And I doubt it’ll be the last.”

I stood there for a moment, speechless, before eventually willing myself to thank him and hopping back in my car, where I returned to the hospital, and sat back down beside my wife.

COUGH! COUGH!

“What was that?” My wife asked, awaking to the sound of my cough but too tired to process what she had heard.

“Don’t worry, I’ll tell you in the morning.” I said, before she fell back asleep. Not long after, I fell asleep beside her.

Sure enough, when we both up the next morning, our coughs were gone.

The next week, we held a private funeral for Jonie, and after telling my wife what had happened at the camp, we never spoke of the witches, or the insects, or the caretaker again.

But no matter how hard I try to put the terrifying event behind me, every time I hear someone cough, I can’t help but think of the camp, and wonder if some poor soul’s daughter is out there somewhere, coughing up insects.