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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/mallratserf on 2024-11-08 12:33:50+00:00.

I believe we should just jump right into this story. This all began two years ago, when I was still posted up north and lived close to the mountains. Five-thirty in the morning, we get a shepherd boy come down to the station saying he “found a witch engaged in some sort of blood ritual”. Now I’d been posted at this station, in this small town located up in the mountains for a while now, and I knew how the locals were. I cannot count on my fingers the amount of times we’d get a call at the station reporting some sort of paranormal activity, when it was usually just some small animal scuttering in the night. The locals were a superstitious folk. Urban legends ran amuck in the town – from the haunted woods to the abandoned bank to the “DogMan”. But after the events that would unfold that night, perhaps they were right to be that way. There was something in those mountains even if I didn’t believe any of it. Still, we had to do our due diligence and investigate the call regardless.

Six-thirty or so we reach the site of this supposed ritual and in reality it was a ghastly, tragic sight. A young woman, somewhere in her early-twenties, who’d lost her life to herself. Wide and deep slits ran down both her forearms like half closed eyes, letting the blood drain, stain her hands in its ghastly deep velvet red. Surprisingly however, she looked at rest. Her gentle arms softly set on the grass, her posture as though she were only sleeping, her lips curled in a soft satisfied smile. But her gaze, oh her gaze, I can’t ever forget those deep, piercing green eyes, illuminated by the sun as it was just climbing over the mountains, gazing straight through me. Though she was not more than just a child – early twenties is practically infanthood when you’re forty-five – her eyes told a different story; of a life that had seen a great deal before somehow ending up here.

The case could’ve been dismissed as a tragic loss of a life still in its infancy if it wasn’t for two key details. Firstly, none of the locals recognised her and if anything, she looked to be a foreigner, somehow in this small town up in the north. Secondly, the woman was completely naked. This complicated things. Was this a case of sex trafficking? Did someone take advantage of this woman and left her here to die, setting it up to look like a suicide? There were no signs of struggle visible on her body, we had to investigate it anyway.

First thing we did was cover up her body and sent her off with the paramedics for an autopsy, and we got to investigating the locals and finding out the identity of the woman. In the time it took for us to investigate the locals to no success, they all had sound alibis, the preliminary autopsy report came through about twenty-four hours later, quenching our fears. All signs, in the initial report at least, indicated that this was not the work of some crazy sexual deviant on the loose. The report basically outlined that all signs pointed to this being a suicide (which was good news, for me atleast, since it meant less work for me) but it led to even stranger revelations in the case. Long story short, the woman could not be identified.

In the upcoming weeks, as the toxicology reports and the more detailed autopsy report came through, it confirmed that this was in fact a suicide. There was no poison, or any drugs detected in her system and the cause of death was determined to be suicide by blood loss. While this was all good, we still could not identify her. The woman had no fingerprints, as if they’d been burned off. No employers, or family, or friends came looking for her. We couldn’t find anything – no passports, no properties, no dental records, no medical records at all in fact. The strangest thing however, was that we could not even determine her nationality. We looked into every nook and corner one can possibly imagine and still came up empty handed. It was as though as far as the world was concerned, this woman didn’t exist.

Yet she did. There she was in our town with an ongoing investigation on her. Posters went up everywhere yet to no avail, no one came to find her. At last she had to be buried in an unmarked grave on state property. Grave number 201, that’s where she found her eternal resting place.

In the upcoming weeks we would go from the officers down at the station talking about the mystery woman, making up theories about her identity, talking about how her “tits were out to the wind when they found her” and how “some freak probably trafficked her all the way here and left her here to die”, to complete radio silence regarding her. The rains came down and washed away the posters, washing away her memory alongside.

But I didn’t stop investigating. I, along with some of my closest buddies at the station, officers I trusted the most; we kept our investigation going in secrecy. This was, yes I’ll agree, simply because the mystery captivated me and I wanted to reach some kind of conclusion regarding her story.

My buddies, however, got tired of it all. Of coming up empty handed all the time and so after a year of this, I called off the investigation. I don’t blame them for being disheartened and losing interest in the case, it was going nowhere and I knew it. And so time does what it does best and another year passed.

All this now brings us to the present day, two years have now gone by since the day we found the woman yet she won’t leave my mind. I’ve gone and visited her grave twice now: on the day she was buried and on her first burial anniversary, last year. In these two years the superiors talked amongst themselves and I’ve been promoted and soon I’ll be down south, in some other station. I’d be lying to you if I said this didn’t bum me out; I’ve grown accustomed to the cold of the north and the thought of the warmer, tropical south feels alien to me now.

Last week on this day was supposed to be my last day at that station, which was also coincidentally the day of her second burial anniversary. The morning after that I was supposed to leave and then the morning after that I would’ve reached my new place of employment – they were sending me far away from this tiny town I’d grown in love with. None of that happened because of the events that ended up unfolding that day.

On that day, I went and grabbed some drinks with some people from the station and my best friend, let’s call him N for his and my own privacy’s sake. We reminisced about the past, laughed at a few old inside jokes. I asked him about the missus and he told me she’s doing just fine, with a baby on the way. Things were going great, hearty laughs, red cheeks and friendly banter, until I brought up the case of the mystery woman. A strange look of unfamiliarity swept across his face. He gazed at me with suspicion and asked what the hell was I on about. Well sure, it’d been two years since that day but that doesn’t mean you just forget about a case as interesting as that, right? I started going into the details of the case and his brow only burrowed further upon this new information and he asked if I’d drank too much. This frustrated me because how can one possibly completely forget about such a case. Hell, we worked on it together in secrecy for a whole year.

Something was wrong. I called V over and asked him about the mystery woman and the same look of unfamiliarity and suspicion swept across his face. They were both looking at me like I was crazy. I called the others over, I was screaming now and they were all looking at me with those same eyes that said “did he finally snap? Has he actually gone insane this time?” Hell maybe I had. How could none of them possibly remember?

But when N grabbed me by the shoulders and told me I’d had too much to drink was the final straw for me. I wasn’t gonna have them thinking I was some crazy drunkard doing what drunkards do best; ramble. I made my way for the storage where we kept all the files, sure they might have forgotten but the files should still be there. I pulled up the files. Scanned through them meticulously and I found nothing and I started questioning if maybe I had actually had too much to drink.

This couldn’t be happening, I was certain her files were kept in the drawer I was checking yet they were nowhere to be found. I went through all the files all over again and again but they weren’t there. Somewhere in the middle of my mental spiral N came down and tried to drag me away but I pushed him back. I wasn’t going to be made a fool of. I still had one last piece of evidence left of her existence – the posters. The posters, physical ones, were all gone now obviously but I still had a copy of the posters left on my phone. So I took it out and I scanned through the files, went back two years ago around the time where we would’ve put up the posters and there she was looking straight at me.

I pushed my phone up against N’s eyes, showing him the poster. I wasn’t crazy, I wasn’t making shit up you see?? Look at this poster right here, this isn’t some tall tale, the evidence is right in front of you! I was yelling like a maniac by this point and I’ll admit it maybe I’d had too much to drink which perhaps contributed to this mental spiral. N’s eyes didn’t change though, he was still looking at me with those “you’re insane eyes”. He remained quiet for a while waiting for me to shut up. When I did, he simply asked me why I was showing him the calculator app. I looked back at my phone and he was right.

I don’t re…

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