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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/Mr_Outlaw_ on 2025-09-22 03:43:57+00:00.
Context: https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/1netui5/remember_those_creepy_chain_emails_from_the/
The longer I stared at Jackson’s name on my screen, the more I could feel my panic fading. Though it was just being replaced by white-hot rage. Suddenly all the stress and frustrations from the past few days came bubbling to the surface. And now I knew exactly where to aim it at.
I answered the call and before he could even say a word, I screamed at him for a good thirty seconds, cursing him out, calling him every name under the sun.
I took a moment to catch my breath and in that transitory silence, he asked if I’d gotten it all out of my system.
I told him not all of it. But just enough to think clearly. Then I asked him to tell me exactly what was going on. No bullshit, no lies. We were well past that now. The situation was completely fucked and he owed me answers.
He took a deep breath. And then he laid it all out.
He told me that when we’d gone out that night, I’d blacked out bad. I was throwing up, acting belligerent, barely able to walk straight. It was severe enough that he was forced to sober up in order to make sure that I didn’t get myself into any trouble. By the time he finally managed to pull me out of the bar, he actually felt sober enough to drive. He still considered calling an uber but ultimately decided that it wasn’t worth it. So he led me back to the car and threw me in the backseat. By the time he’d turned the engine over, I was snoring, out cold.
The drive back to my place was smooth enough until he turned off the highway and onto the residential street that was just a few blocks away from my building. He said that all the streetlights were out, and he had to slow down and squint ahead in order to be able to tell where he was going.
It became so bad that he decided to turn his high beams on. There were no other cars around, so he felt safe enough to do so. But the moment that his lights came on, they illuminated what looked like a woman sitting on the road about a dozen feet away. She was hunched over, face buried in her hands.
He said that he’d nearly jumped out of his skin upon seeing her. Because she hadn’t been there before he had turned on the lights. I asked him how he could be so sure of that since it had been so dark out. He just told me that he was certain of it. She hadn’t been there.
He got out of the car to go check on her but stopped himself after a few steps. He said it was so quiet outside that it felt surreal. No wind, no distant sounds of traffic, absolutely nothing. But the most disturbing part was that he’d thought the woman had been crying. Her head and shoulders were bobbing up and down as if she were sobbing furiously. And she continued to do so as he cautiously approached her.
But before he could get too close, he decided to drop the issue. Maybe it really was a woman in distress. But his gut was telling him something else. That he was actually in the presence of something extremely dangerous.
He walked back to the car and shut the doors. But when he looked at the road again, the woman was now standing, moving towards us with these unnaturally long strides. By the time that he’d overcome the initial shock of seeing it, she was standing right in front of the car. He said that there was something wrong with her face. Her features were uncanny, stretched out too far.
He began backing up when the woman suddenly slammed her head viciously down onto the hood. And then she did it again. And again. He panicked and hit the gas, but she followed the car wherever it went, sticking to the hood like glue. Continuing to bash her head.
So he put the car in drive instead. The vehicle lurched forward, and the woman bounced off of the windshield, her body catching a split-second of air before landing. He stopped and looked into the rearview mirror, seeing the outline of her figure sprawled out onto the pavement behind us. Unmoving.
I was still passed out so he just sat there in the dark and the silence as his mind moved a million miles a minute. He wondered if he’d just committed homicide. But given how the woman was behaving, surely he had an argument for self defense?
He began questioning how the woman had even managed to slam her head so many times with such force. Each one had sounded like a gunshot, each impact shaking the steering wheel. What the hell was she?
Ultimately he convinced himself that it was better to go out and check on her. Maybe she had just been wired on PCP or something else. If that were the case, then leaving the scene would’ve been a really bad look for him.
He crawled over to his trunk and grabbed the crowbar he kept back there. He said he didn’t really know why because he should’ve been able to handle her without it. She looked to be about a hundred pounds lighter than him. She should’ve also been dead.
He said that the closer he got to her body, the weirder he felt. And he only understood why once he was standing right over it.
It was a mannequin. Realistic but still utterly artificial. He reached down and touched its skin and all he could feel was cold plastic. This thing wasn’t alive. It shouldn’t have had the capacity to be alive. He tried picking it up and found that it weighed no more than ten pounds.
He went back to the car and stared at the dents that had been left behind on the hood. They were larger than he’d expected, looked like they had been caused by a wild animal. Then he looked back at the woman/mannequin and saw her sitting up. Staring at him.
He got back into his car and drove away. A few minutes later, he dropped me off.
He said that he might’ve been able to convince himself that it was a dream or a hallucination if there hadn’t been very real damage done to his car. Damage he was forced to look at everyday when he drove to work. He also knew what he saw. How real it felt.
For the entire next week, he lived his life on high alert. He said that he wasn’t sure what he was expecting to happen. But that he sure as hell didn’t feel safe.
But nothing did happen. At least not that week. Life went on as normal. By the time that the second week rolled around, he was starting to relax. He still couldn’t stop himself from looking over his shoulder, but he was more willing to accept that it had just been a one-off incident. He had been dealing with something dangerous and abnormal, but he was free from it now. He’d escaped it.
But then he got the email. He said that the dread he’d felt while reading it was something you had to experience in order to understand. The email by itself would’ve been ridiculous but given what had happened, this just about drove him to a breakdown.
I brought up the line about the sewer. How the person in the story had supposedly dragged her into one. Based on his account of things, that hadn’t happened.
I didn’t mean to make it sound as if I thought he were lying about that part. But I did. At this point, I didn’t feel like I could trust the guy. He sounded earnest enough, but I’d gone through too much to fully accept what he was telling me.
He just told me that the woman was lying. He’d never tried dragging her into a sewer. There hadn’t even been a manhole nearby. I asked him what reason it would have to try and frame him for something like that. What was the point? He told me didn’t know but that it didn’t matter. Clearly it was trying to fuck with him. Mess with his head.
I then asked him the inevitable question.
“Why the fuck did you forward that email to me?”
He went silent. I repeated the question.
He told me that he’d panicked. That he hadn’t been thinking straight. I told him that wasn’t a good enough excuse. That he had no right dragging me into this shit. Why couldn’t he have just found five inactive addresses and forwarded it to them?
He said that he’d tried that, but it doesn’t work. They had to belong to real people. The email he’d sent to me hadn’t even been the original. That one had stated that if he didn’t forward the message, she’d show up inside his closet. So that night he had set up a camera to face the closet in his room while he stayed awake at a 24/7 café a few blocks away.
When he checked the footage the next morning, he could see her face peaking out behind his clothes.
“It knows exactly what you’re doing,” he said. “You have to follow the rules. It knows when you try and skirt around them. It won’t accept that. It won’t stop. It’ll never stop.”
Then I asked him why it had to be me. A selfish question, but I still wanted to know. Why did he have to send it to me?
He just told me he was sorry. I told him that wasn’t an answer. Why me? Why did I have to be part of this?
He then admitted that he’d feel guilty about screwing over anybody else. So I asked why I was different. Why he didn’t feel about doing it to me. He clarified that he did feel bad about it. That he hates himself for it. But that I had been there that night. That whether I liked it or not, I was part of this. I told him that didn’t make any sense. I hadn’t seen the woman that night. I wasn’t the one that she’d first sent the email to. He said that I was naïve to think that I was separate from all this. That I wasn’t involved. That eventually it would’ve caught up to me. That she doesn’t forget.
I asked him why he’d bothered to call me then if he was just going to justify everything. Did he expect me to forgive him? Could he not live with this on his conscience or something?
…
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