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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/SquadPoopy on 2023-08-10 22:54:31.
Hey guys, I’m not sure if this is the right place to talk about this, but I found something interesting I figured would be up all your alleys.
So I live in the middle of nowhere, not like a desert or anything but just there’s nothing interesting around for quite a while. The town I live in only has about 1,500 residents and the nearest city is about 50 minutes away. If I want to, for instance, go see the latest Marvel movie in theaters it’s a drive of about 1 hour and 10 minutes. Yeah, THAT kind of middle of nowhere. It’s not completely empty of course, there’s other small towns peppered everywhere, we live in a valley surrounded by some small to medium sized hills and there’s a nice creek running through the middle of main street. There’s farms and woods and just a whole bunch of stuff. I don’t want anyone to get the impression that this is some “empty fields on all sides” middle of nowhere.
I want to leave, I NEED to leave. I don’t want to spend my entire life with no amenities, I don’t want to live in a place where the only restaurants are 2 pizza places that serve basically the same pizza but people still get tribal about who they prefer. I graduated high school a couple months ago and applied to go to a nice state college about 4 hours away. I was accepted but due to a bunch of (excuse my language) shit the office of financial aid pulled I owed a balance of $1,300 that would need to be paid before I could start. So I got a job, and luckily it’s a nice one at our local library. My aunt runs the place so she got me started on a 6 hour per day shift and it’s been nice. I have the money for college, and now I’m just waiting for mid August when I’ll drive to my dorm to get settled in. But I found something at the Library that was very odd and like I said you guys here might enjoy.
So the Library is made up of 2 main rooms, the Library itself and the employee room. The employee room is basically a large living room of sorts with a couch, a small TV, a couple card tables (for the weekly poker night) and boxes filled with unused books. Because it’s a tiny town, the library isn’t used much so I spend most of my day on the couch watching TV or whatever and I’ll go into the Library when the door chime goes off, which means someone opened the door. And when I say there’s boxes of books, I mean DOZENS of boxes, maybe 50 or 60. This is where things begin really. My aunt planned on setting up a booth at a flea market a couple towns over, and she wanted to sell the unused and overstocked books on hand, so she gave me the job of going through the boxes and taking out any books in which we had an overstock on or hadn’t been rotated onto the shelves in a while. I might not explain it well but it was a simple task. It was pretty tedious but also pretty fast, especially when I had boxes full of 15 copies of The Hunger Games my aunt bought during the peak of their popularity. I got to the last few boxes, which were covered in dust and had that timeless smell of old paper. I’d estimate the last 4 or 5 boxes hadn’t been touched, let alone sorted through, in at least 10 years. They contained an assortment of things like “The Guiness Book of World Records 2007”, some Roald Dahl classics, Gary Paulsen books, and a ton of western dime novels from the 60s and 50s. But it was the 2nd to last box I looked through when I found it.
At the bottom of the box was a hardcover book called “Local Tales and Wisdom” by an author named Peter Robinson. I flipped it open to look for the library checkout stamp but couldn’t find it, instead on the inside of the cover was a stamp that said “Not for resale”. And that was it. There was no publisher information, no copyright date, nothing. I read the prelude on the first page and surprisingly enough the book is about my town. So it is my assumption that this was the original copy of a self published book that was intended to be formally published (hence the Not for Resale stamp) but for whatever reason just wasn’t, I think the author also lends credence to my theory because it very obviously sounds like a pen name. The book is quite old, I can tell just by how it looks, and if I was to guess when it was made I would say sometime in the 70s or 60s but I could be wrong. The book is just what the title says, and I wanted to transcribe it for you guys since I read it and found it a bit bizarre and interesting. Now I will note that I am apparently not the first person to read it, as there are some markings that have been done by what I would assume is the person who read it before me, but if my theory that this was the original copy meant for distribution, the markups could also be made by the author.
Quick disclosure before we begin, I will italicize my words from now on, so if you see anything in Italics, that is me and not the original text, I may chime in to point out markups or just to interject some thoughts about certain aspects of the book, I’m also going to censor out location details for obvious reasons. I’ll go ahead and segment stuff just like it is in the book.
Prelude
For Kaitlin.
The town of ______ is a small community nestled into the hills of the _____ River Valley, quaint in its appearance, yet rich in history. I spent the first forty years of my life living just outside town, and I intend to spend the remaining years, however many or few, I have raising my children with the same values I was instilled with. As any town, ______ has it’s own culture and history, mixed with urban folklore and stories, and without documentation, these histories fade. What you are reading is a compilation of what I have learned, what I have heard, and what I know. Wisdom about the town and the valley, and tales spread from person to person, from parents to child, and from generation to generation. These have been collected over years, and put onto paper for you to read. Thank you.
The dedication at the top has been crossed out with a pen, I can only barely make out the name as whoever crossed it out did so quite violently it seems.
Wisdom: Superstitions
It is oft said that the _____ Woods just south of town are haunted by a headless spirit. While not a man of religious nature myself, the superstitious may avoid the hiking trails running through the area.
I guess this is one of those generational things passed down, as a child everyone knew to avoid those woods because a headless ghost would get you if you were alone. Weird to see that legend was around even this far back.
The Miss and the Spirit
There was once a young Miss of no more than twelve. Every day she would sit by the creek and toss stones into the water, dreaming about her future. Her father, the town doctor, would call for her at sunset and she would come running into the house for supper. She would sit at the table and talk about her dreams to live in the big city, a notion her parents found most amusing. One day she did not come at sunset when called, bringing worry to her father. He searched up and down the creek where she usually was but found no sign of the child, for little did he know she had wandered into the woods chasing a frog. She only realized where she was once the frog had disappeared into the thick grass. Afraid, she began to run in the direction she believed she came from, only to find more trees, she ran and ran until her ankle caught itself between a rock and branch and she fell. Her ankle hurt very much, and she could no longer stand on it. The child began to cry as she was alone, surrounded by the darkening forest, until she saw a hole in the side of a hill. She crawled towards it, finding a cave that lead down into darkness. “Hello child”, came a voice from the darkness, “Have you found yourself astray?” The child looked and saw a spirit walking towards her, glowing with light and holding out their hand. “I hurt my ankle and can’t find my way home”, the Child said. The spirit knelt down and put his hand on her ankle before saying, “Do not be frightened, for the way home is always lit.” The child closed her eyes and when they were opened again she found herself on the edge of the woods, her home in the distance and a crowd of townsfolk approaching her. None would believe her story and others thought she had played a cruel joke on her parents.
Many years later, the young Miss had become a woman living in the big city just as she had dreamt. On holiday she decided to return home to be with her parents, but she was bearing terrible news. She had discovered that she would be unable to carry children, causing her fiance to leave her. Despite the sadness, her holiday was still quite joyful as she spent the days and nights living and laughing with her parents. One night, she was out on her horse riding along the creek she used to play at when her horse was spooked. She was thrown from the saddle and into the creek, her head clashed against a stone and she was still. A passerby noticed and helped, but the Miss would not reopen her eyes. Her father examined her and rushed her to every doctor in every town he knew, but none could wake her up. After many days, her parents had lost hope until a thought occurred to her father. He picked up his daughter and walked into the woods, and he kept walking until he came upon a hole in the side of a hill. And in the cave he found the spirit, and at the spirit’s feet he placed his daughter and begged for help. The Spirit considered the father’s pleading, and to…
Content cut off. Read original on https://old.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/15no43g/local_tales_and_wisdom/