About two weeks after we found the Butcherface tapes, we were getting tired with having to lug the VCR up and down those steep attic steps, because Chris’s father for some reason kept asking us to put it back up there when we weren’t using it, when Chris’s younger brother (lets call him Evan), who was going to college for media production, came in to the middle of a conversation about this and mentioned that he could convert the tapes to DVD using equipment at his college. After some haggling and way too much negotiating, that if we (being newly 21 at the time) would pay for the liquor bill for a party that friends of Evan’s were having (who were 19 at the time), he’d do it the next day.
When that day came, both me and Chris were waiting anxiously in the kitchen for when Evan got home. When he finally walked in the door, an hour later than he said he‘d be back, he was looking extremely pale. We asked him if he was done converting and he jumped in our faces saying that we never told him what was on the tapes. Apparently, he didn’t actually hear what we were talking about and only heard that we wanted some tapes converted and he thought they were more like old family recordings like Christmas or birthday videos. We calmed him down and asked him if he converted the tapes. He said “no” and quickly left the room. We were disappointed and started talking about what to do next when Evan came back into the room with his father behind him.
After talking about what was on the tapes, Evan retrieved them from his car and the four of us watched every one of the 24 tapes together. After the last tape was finished (“this is it. This is it. They wont know. They’ll never find me. This is where I’ll hide.”), Chris’s fathers face was just as pale as Evan’s was earlier. He leaned back in his chair and said “… That was creepy”. An hour of talking that night ended with us wanting to know who was on the tapes. I left for home soon after with the understanding that I would be kept in the loop on what we would do next, which was to figure out the previous owners of the house.
A couple days later from there I got a phone call from Chris saying that it took them a little while (they found nothing on the county website) but they found some history on the house at the town library (on something called a “reverse directory”) about a previous owner who had it in the mid-80’s. After a few unanswered phone calls, we decided to visit these people in person. So, that Friday, me, Chris, and his father drove to their house and knocked on the door, only to be greeted by two 80-something year old women. Chris’s father told them that his family was living in their old house and asked if we could ask them some questions about it. They refused to let us in their house but they did tell us about the house.
It turned out that the both of them were sisters (Their first names were Shirley and Louise) and Louise turned out to be the former owner of the house, but never lived in it. Apparently, her and her husband bought the house and were planning to add some new wiring and plumbing before moving in but her husband had a severe stroke not too long after buying it and eventually died. With the combination of hospital and funerary bills, Louise couldn’t afford fixing up and moving into the house and moved in with her sister instead. But, she did mention that during that time, the house was known to be home to a fair number of homeless people who would be regularly chased off the property. We also asked if either of them had a son and they both said “no”. We left there with not too many answers.
A couple weeks later from there, me and Chris had gone to the movies with his girlfriend (I think he was trying to get his mind off the tapes because I could tell that he was still creeped out). We were talking about how much the movie sucked (Spiderman 3) when Chris slammed on the breaks. We practically skidded about 30 feet and I was choked by my seatbelt and his girlfriend, who wasn’t wearing a seatbelt, was almost thrown into the front seat. We started screaming at him, asking him what the hell he was doing when we looked at what he was staring at and saw a house. It looked familiar to me but I couldn’t put my finger on it. I looked back to Chris and he said “that house is on the tapes“. Then I remembered, one of the houses that Butcherface had watched people come and go from was right there, not 20 feet from us. We knocked on the door but no one answered so we decided to come back later. When we got back to Chris’s house, I noticed the VCR hooked back up to Chris’s TV in his room. I asked him about it and he said he’d been watching the tapes again for any clues. No wonder why he was still creeped out. That night, when I got home, I got a phone call from Chris. He was whispering and said that he thinks he saw someone walking around his backyard.
Two days later, that Friday, I agreed to sleep over and see for myself. Chris was claiming to see glimpses of someone standing or walking around in his backyard but it was always too dark to see any detail, both of the previous nights. I was set up to sleep on a couch that was on the now re-boarded up hole we first found the tapes in. Very little sleeping actually went on that night because we stayed up in the living room, staring out the sliding glass door to the backyard. We were talking about how we weren’t even sure if he actually hurts people when Chris suddenly leans forward and points out the window and said “see! Right there. Do you see that shadow or something?” I jumped up and flipped the switch to the deck lights but they didn’t go on. So, we got flashlights and went out to look. Besides some tree branches blowing in the wind, we found nothing. At around 4am, we decided to get some sleep. I only stayed on the couch a couple hours because I got too cold because I felt a draft that I think was coming between the boards on the floor. I went home the next afternoon thinking the night before was a dud, until I got a frantic phone call that night.
Someone had broken into Chris’s house while they were out. The sliding glass door to the backyard was completely smashed with broken glass having been thrown all the way across the living room and into the dining room. I drove back there because they wanted me as a witness to seeing a shadow in the backyard. They showed me around and I saw that this person had completely tossed the living room, dining room, and kitchen. In the bathroom, the mirror over the medicine cabinet had been smashed and all the meds in the medicine cabinet were missing. Something else was missing which was a lot more disconcerting. Four knives had been removed from the knife holder in the kitchen. I stayed there for about an hour and decided to go home and it was only when after I left that I realized that the Butcherface tapes was never mentioned to the cops. A little while after I got home I got ANOTHER call from Chris saying that they had found the missing knives, under the blankets of each of the family members beds.
That weekend, Chris and his father decided to look around the house more thoroughly to see if Butcherface had left any other clues to his former presence in the house. I came over to help and the only room they said they’ve never thoroughly looked around in since getting the house was the attic, so we decided to start there. It didn’t take long to find anything because almost immediately, I came across an old looking trash bag in one of the corners. I picked it up and heard the tinking sound of glass against glass. We brought it downstairs and cut it open and found it completely full of liquor bottles and used syringes. Using rubber gloves, we removed every object one at a time. It was almost all bottles and syringes and the occasional trash, until we got to the bottom.
At the bottom of the bag we found a shoebox. It was stained and warn, we couldn’t even see the brand of shoe that used to be in it. We carefully took it out and removed the top (which seemed to have been glued closed). Inside was a series of papers and photos. The photos were pretty disturbing. One was a close-up of a hand covered in pins (those ones with the long point with the tiny ball of colored plastic at one end). There were so many of them that it looked like a porcupine. Another one had a (presumably) dead dog lying on the ground (All we could really see of it’s surroundings was the dirt of the ground. Behind it was too dark). We assume it was dead because it was missing half it’s face. The flesh of the side of the face that was facing the camera was gone, making it look like it was smiling with a lidless eye. There were a lot more picture including a cow with blood on it’s mouth, a very pale looking foot, various 70’s and 80’s era toys, a collection of knives, a hand and arm painted multiple colors like patchwork, and a close-up of an eyeball.
The papers were pretty freaky as well. They were a combination of drawings and writings. Most of the writings were what seemed like a wish list of murder, listing practically every way imaginable how to kill people. Others seemed to be random thoughts, like how he accidentally pissed his pants while at the movies or how he has an “infectious evil“ and that he‘ll spread that to his “disciples”. Some of the drawings were pretty similar to the ones seen on some of the tapes on the walls in Chris’s old room. Others were more detailed and showed corpses of various states of decay and of strange creatures. They were humanoid but they all had a demonic look to them, with many of them shown standing on all fours. One thing that showed up often was a strange symbol. It looked like the letter C with the gap in the C pointing down, with a V laid on top of it. When we got to the bottom of the box, we found another tape, one that we’ll never get to watch, because it was completely coated in candle wax.
Running out of clues, we decided to re-visit the old women, who owned the house in the 80’s, again. It had been almost two months since we last visited them and we grew to realize that their story didn’t quite make sense. For instance, Louise claimed to have given up on the house, yet on the tapes we could see that the house had power (why would she have continued paying the power bill if she didn’t want the house?). They also mention that homeless people had been regularly arrested or chased off the property by the cops but we found no records of this. We tried calling them but just like last time, we got no answer, so we decided to drop by again. When we got there we found the house abandoned. We went next door and asked the neighbor if they knew where the two old ladies that lived next door had gone. They told us that Louise had died (but they didn’t know how) about three weeks earlier and Shirley abruptly packed up and moved away a week later. While Chris’s father was talking to the neighbor, Chris pulled me aside and whispered “we’re breaking into that house”.
That same night, we waited until it was late and drove to the old ladies former house. We had never broken into a house before in our lives and we were dressed in the stereotypical burglar outfit, black shirt and pants and a black hockey mask (I know, stupid). When we got to the house, we were so nervous that we didn’t even leave the car for a good 45 minutes. When we felt assured that the neighborhood was asleep, we got out of the car and crept into the backyard and to the backdoor. We looked into the window on the door but it was too dark to see anything. I took my shirt off and put it up against the window and gave it a punch, breaking the glass. It felt surprisingly loud but that could have been because it was so quiet, and the neighbors never woke up so I guess it really wasn’t THAT loud. I reached in through the hole in the glass and unlatched the door, then we had a whispered fight over who will go in first. It actually got down to a game of rock, paper, scissors, which I won so Chris went in first.
We crept in hunched over and I closed the door behind me, accidentally slamming it, giving Chris a good jump that we couldn’t help laughing over. We snuck around the house with our flashlights shining over the walls. As a side note, I really don’t see how much they really would have fixed up Chris’s house when they had it because this one looked like crap. The wallpaper was probably older than me and Chris combined. But anyway, we went into the living room and found a huge pile of trash lying in the far corner with a depression in the middle, like a person or a large dog had used it as a bed. We went upstairs and found something that connected this house to Chris’s. In one of the bedrooms was a pile of pill bottles. Some of the pill bottles were the ones stolen from Chris’s bathroom medicine cabinet. We knew this because some of them had his mother and fathers name on them and one of them was Chris’s back pain medicine (from an injury that happened a couple years ago that will require surgery). That was all we needed to see so we booked it back down the stairs and to the door, but when we got to the door, I jumped back, knocking both me and Chris down. On the inside of the back door was the CV symbol from Butcherface’s notes. After we got back to the car, Chris said something that creeped the both of us out. If Butcherface really is living in that house, he probably wasn’t there because he was staking out Chris’s house right now.
Later that week, I visited Chris’s house again and as soon as I walked into the door, I knew I walked into an air of distress. Chris’s mother and brother were pacing back and forth in the living room, looking out the window into the backyard. I walked in and asked what was going on and looked out the window and saw Chris and his father in the backyard screaming at each other and behind them was a large bonfire that was almost nothing more than cinders. Chris’s mother said their dog, Bracket, had gone missing but didn’t say anything else. I opened the (now replaced) sliding glass door and walked out to meet them. As soon as Chris’s father saw me, he became even angrier. Chris met me halfway to the fire and said “I had to tell them that we broke into that house”. I asked why and he said that he thinks that Butcherface took their dog as payback for breaking into his home. I asked what was on the fire and Chris told me that what his father was burning was Butcherface’s notes, photos, and tapes. Everything had been burned to ashes. During this, his father had walked up behind him and said “I’m ending this right now. I’m burning everything so that you guys can’t get into any more trouble.” As he said this, he continued past us and into the backdoor of his garage and came back with a shovel, adding “and I’m burying the ashes to put this to rest for good” and started digging a hole at the back of his yard close to the woods.
Chris pulled me back into the house and started talking about all of this was unfair, how could his father just burn the tapes like that, they were so close to figuring out who Butcherface was, etc. Then his mother called for us from upstairs. We came up and she pointed out the door to his father who had stopped digging and was looking into the hole he had dug so far. We walked outside and crossed the yard to the hole that his father was still looking into. When we got to it, we realized why he was frozen there, because just a couple feet into the hole was (after more digging, turned out to be) over 30 skeletons of cats, dogs, and other animals. This is when we started calling him Butcherface.
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