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I found a red VHS tape in my grandma's collection. What I saw still terrifies me
I used to spend a lot of time at my grandma’s house. She didn’t quite raise me, but with how often my mom was in and out of jail or rehab, she may as well have. That’s not to say my childhood was bad though. Maybe it wasn’t as good as some had, but I got to spend a lot of time with my cousins when they visited. The house was in a beautiful spot on the edge of the woods, and grandma really knew how to cook. I enjoyed my childhood and no one can take that away from me.
In fact, I really only had one truly bad experience in the years I spent at my grandma's house. The day started out better than most. It was in the early summer, so I was out of school, and the days hadn’t gotten unbearably hot yet. My two cousins, Thomas and Isabelle, had spent the previous night at grandma’s with me. We woke up all strung out on the couch in the family room because we’d stayed up the night before watching a bunch of old movies. After a hearty pancake and sausage breakfast, we went to the pool, and then back to the house to play near the woods. That’s when grandma started calling for us from the back deck. She chastised us for leaving VHS tapes all over the family room floor and not cleaning up after ourselves.
“Can’t we clean up after our game?” we pleaded.
“I’m going out to drop off some things at your grandfather’s work. Then I’m going to the store for supper ingredients. If I get back, and that room isn’t clean-”
“We know, grandma!” We called back. She clicked her tongue at us but smiled and walked to the car.
I don’t remember all the games we were playing, only that my younger cousin, Isabelle, stopped wanting to participate because we were spending too much time in the woods. They weren’t scary or anything. The coniferous forest was always magical to me. In the autumn the woods were filled with pinecones and acorns for me to collect. In the spring it was populated by herds of young whitetail deer. And especially in the winter the snow coverage made my grandma’s back yard look like the cover of a Christmas CD. Isabelle loved the woods as much as Thomas and I did, but for some reason today she kept her distance. Regardless of her hesitation we would have headed in anyway because soon dark gray clouds began to roll in from the hills.
The water droplets began to cover the windows as we shuffled through the piles of VHS tapes we’d left on the floor. We hadn’t watched most of them the night before, but like young kids do, we’d taken a bunch out and left them scattered looking for ones we could agree on. Isabelle was only 5 and couldn’t really read yet so it was up to Thomas and I to match most of the tapes to their proper cases. In case you didn't grow up around them, most of the VHS tapes were black. That was the standard color. Occasionally there would be some with the top strip a different color, and even rarer were the fully colored ones that we had. I say this not just to recall a bit of nostalgia from an age of simpler tech, but also to highlight why what happened next was so strange.
You see, with how rare colored VHS tapes were, we knew exactly which ones we had. Two orange ones and a blue one. Ironically the blue one wasn’t Blues Clues, that was one of the orange ones along with Rugrats. The blue one was Monsters Inc. But that afternoon as the storm really started to lay in thick and the view out the windows was obstructed near completely, Isabelle handed me a tape and asked me which one it went to. I was confused not only because I had never seen the dark red VHS tape before, but because the writing on the front was something I couldn’t read.
“Hey, Thomas, check this out. Can you read it?”
Thomas looked as confused as I was. Indeed neither of us had remembered ever seeing the VHS before, and we wouldn’t have forgotten such a distinct hue. Thomas assured me I wasn’t crazy and that the writing on the tape couldn’t have been English. We decided we’d watch it to figure it out. Although she denied it, we figured Isabelle had just gotten another VHS tape off the shelf when we weren’t looking and liked the color of it. Thomas popped the tape into the player and I turned on the TV.
At first we thought it didn’t work. The screen was just black with the exception of the text on the edges of the screen which suggested the tape was homemade. All the letters were in that weird writing though, one that I was certain didn’t even share the same alphabet as English. We were about to take it out when I noticed the numbers in the timestamp were going up, meaning that it was working and whoever had filmed the video was only filming in the dark.
“It’s probably some old home movie grandma recorded and just left the camera going overnight or something.”
“Why would it be written like that though? Maybe we should just rewind it to find out.”
I agreed with Thomas that rewinding the tape made the most sense. I hit the button on the player and went to sit back on the couch next to my cousins. I had expected the tape to take a while to rewind considering the working theory was grandma leaving the camera on overnight, but not long after I settled in I heard the distinctive click of the tape reaching the beginning. Thomas and I shared a confused look as I got up again to press play.
The first scene was of the ground on the edge of the highway. Whoever was recording was clearly walking down the road. My suspicions that they were hitchhiking were confirmed as the next scene came up of the cameraman getting into the cab of a long haul semi truck. The trucker looked into the camera and smiled. He was an older man with a salt and pepper beard and a healthy sized pot belly.
“Making a documentary or something.”
“Something like that,” was the first thing we had heard the cameraman say. The tone was cheery, like he was clearly obliged to finally get off his feet and into a vehicle. He also had an accent belonging to somewhere that my fourth grade mind couldn’t place. The scene continued with the cameraman and the trucker having a friendly conversation. The cameraman placed the camcorder on the dash of the truck, pointed out onto the highway ahead of them.
It didn’t take long for us to get bored at this and I decided to fast forward the tape. The scene lasted some time, and I watched the sun on the horizon dip below the treeline and the cool evening sky take place on the screen. Then the camcorder began to shift and I stopped the rewind. The camera turned to film the trucker as he walked into a gas station in the middle of nowhere. Or so I thought.
“Hey, that's the truck stop on the edge of town,” Thomas said. I looked more closely and realized he was right. It was the truck stop a few miles out of town that grandma would always stop at to fill up and get snacks whenever we’d go on roadtrips. As soon as the trucker got into the shop, the cameraman began to search through his belongings. He unzipped duffle bags and opened shelves, pocketing random things as he went. I hurried to sit back down on the couch next to my cousins so that I could get a better angle of the screen. It wasn’t long before we heard a “what’s going on,” from the screen.
The trucker had returned and wasn’t happy to see what his guest was up to. A skirmish broke out between the cameraman and the trucker. At least that’s what I gathered, as the camcorder was dropped almost immediately so all I heard was the noise of a brawl as the screen showed the dusty underside of the passenger seat. The sounds of the fight went from unnerving to disturbing quickly. Neither was screaming or yelling anymore, but one was unmistakably choking. Gasping for air and struggling to breath. The screen began to shake to the rhythm of one of the men kicking the passenger seat, clinging onto a hope of life.
Isabelle grabbed my hand and whispered, “I’m scared.”
“It’s okay,” I assured her, not very assured myself. “It’s just a scary movie. It’s not real.”
Isabelle buried her face in my side, and I welcomed the contact. I grabbed Thomas’s hand and squeezed. We shared a look that signaled what we both knew. If this was a horror movie, why was that the truck stop we knew so well?
The noises on screen stopped. Isabelle began to lift her head to look again but I held her head in place. The cameraman fished the camcorder from under the seat, and pointed it straight at the lifeless truck driver. Thomas and I screamed. He lay awkwardly on the mattress of the cabin. His face was purple and his eyes were bloodshot. Then the camera turned. And for the first time we saw the identity, or lack thereof, of the man behind the film. He wore a wooden face mask. It was fashioned to look like an old man with a big, bulbous nose and sad, wrinkled eyes. Gray yarn was attached around all of it to give the impression of long disheveled hair and a matching beard.
The scene cut. Now it was nothing but trees. Isabelle asked us what happened, but we didn’t speak. She fought me to see the screen again and this time I didn’t resist. Trees. Nothing but trees and dirt, and then, it hit me. It was all too familiar. The grass, the trees, the pinecones and acorns. It was the woods behind the house. My gaze darted out the window to the treeline. The heavy rainfall distorted the forest. What I once considered to be a wonderland was now a mystery. Then I heard grandma. But not from the front door, not from the hallway, from the screen. Thomas gripped my hand so tightly it hurt. Isabelle began to tear up.
“I’m going out to drop off some things at your grandfather’s work…”
My heart dropped. The camera’s point of view was from the woods looking into the back yard. It focused on the deck where my grandma spoke to us. And then panned down to show…me. My heart began to race as I saw the back of my head on the TV in front of me. Thomas stood next to me, and Isabelle, Isabelle looked right into the camera. She looked confused, as if she didn’t know what she was seeing. On screen, Thomas and I began to play tag, and I witnessed the moment in my life I came closest to death. As I ran from Thomas I ran right past the cameraman, who moved the camcorder to follow my path. My heart was louder than the screen. My throat was so tight I almost couldn’t breathe. Then the cameraman began to move. Not towards us but towards the house. He filmed as he made his way right into the family room. He filmed the VHS tapes sprawled along the floor and chuckled. Then my grandma came back into the house, forgetting something, and the man darted into the closet to hide.
“Thomas,” I whispered. He looked at me and the same realization dawned on him. The screen was black. The same black screen that we saw when we first put the tape in. But worse than that. The closet he hid in was the same one I had been standing next to so many times today. Every time I got up to rewind or fast forward. I was only feet away. Thomas and I looked over at the closet now. And we saw the door ajar. And in the darkness, a wooden nose and frayed gray yarn.
All I remember was screaming and running as fast as I could with Isabelle and Thomas next to me. We hurried up to the second floor, then into the attic. We hid away in a crawlspace and prayed the man wouldn’t find us. After what felt like hours we heard footsteps. The creak of movement up the old, wooden stairs. I closed my eyes and sobbed. The door to the crawlspace opened and we all screamed.
“What has gotten into you three?” asked my grandma. And the whole world came back. We stumbled over our words explaining it to her. I doubt she understood, but she took our testimony seriously. Grandma opened the gun safe and pulled out one of her husband’s rifles. “Stay here and I’ll be back.”
It didn’t take her long. Once she was sure no one was in the house, she got us and had us recall our story on the couch of the family room. I think she believed us, but the police couldn’t do anything. The closet was open but there was no man in a wooden mask, the dark red VHS tape wasn’t in the player, and no trace of him was found in the woods.
It took a while, but life returned to normal. School was back in session before I knew it. Homework began to take more importance in my mind than that afternoon. Pretty soon it felt surreal, and as I got older I began to doubt if what we saw was even real. Only three things told me that it was though. Isabelle and Thomas had always recalled the exact same scenario I had. When we got older my grandmother had admitted that a murder had taken place at the truck stop not long before the incident. And the third thing happened most recently. I have it again. I’m now older. I live alone in a different town, but just this afternoon I got it. Outside of my door was the same dark red VHS tape. I have called the police, and in the meantime I sit here writing this story down while simultaneously looking behind my back every few seconds. And at the same time I can’t help but glance at the old VHS player on my TV stand. I don’t know if I should watch the tape.
I used to spend a lot of time at my grandma’s house. She didn’t quite raise me, but with how often my mom was in and out of jail or rehab, she may as well have. That’s not to say my childhood was bad though. Maybe it wasn’t as good as some had, but I got to spend a lot of time with my cousins when they visited. The house was in a beautiful spot on the edge of the woods, and grandma really knew how to cook. I enjoyed my childhood and no one can take that away from me.
In fact, I really only had one truly bad experience in the years I spent at my grandma's house. The day started out better than most. It was in the early summer, so I was out of school, and the days hadn’t gotten unbearably hot yet. My two cousins, Thomas and Isabelle, had spent the previous night at grandma’s with me. We woke up all strung out on the couch in the family room because we’d stayed up the night before watching a bunch of old movies. After a hearty pancake and sausage breakfast, we went to the pool, and then back to the house to play near the woods. That’s when grandma started calling for us from the back deck. She chastised us for leaving VHS tapes all over the family room floor and not cleaning up after ourselves.
“Can’t we clean up after our game?” we pleaded.
“I’m going out to drop off some things at your grandfather’s work. Then I’m going to the store for supper ingredients. If I get back, and that room isn’t clean-”
“We know, grandma!” We called back. She clicked her tongue at us but smiled and walked to the car.
I don’t remember all the games we were playing, only that my younger cousin, Isabelle, stopped wanting to participate because we were spending too much time in the woods. They weren’t scary or anything. The coniferous forest was always magical to me. In the autumn the woods were filled with pinecones and acorns for me to collect. In the spring it was populated by herds of young whitetail deer. And especially in the winter the snow coverage made my grandma’s back yard look like the cover of a Christmas CD. Isabelle loved the woods as much as Thomas and I did, but for some reason today she kept her distance. Regardless of her hesitation we would have headed in anyway because soon dark gray clouds began to roll in from the hills.
The water droplets began to cover the windows as we shuffled through the piles of VHS tapes we’d left on the floor. We hadn’t watched most of them the night before, but like young kids do, we’d taken a bunch out and left them scattered looking for ones we could agree on. Isabelle was only 5 and couldn’t really read yet so it was up to Thomas and I to match most of the tapes to their proper cases. In case you didn't grow up around them, most of the VHS tapes were black. That was the standard color. Occasionally there would be some with the top strip a different color, and even rarer were the fully colored ones that we had. I say this not just to recall a bit of nostalgia from an age of simpler tech, but also to highlight why what happened next was so strange.
You see, with how rare colored VHS tapes were, we knew exactly which ones we had. Two orange ones and a blue one. Ironically the blue one wasn’t Blues Clues, that was one of the orange ones along with Rugrats. The blue one was Monsters Inc. But that afternoon as the storm really started to lay in thick and the view out the windows was obstructed near completely, Isabelle handed me a tape and asked me which one it went to. I was confused not only because I had never seen the dark red VHS tape before, but because the writing on the front was something I couldn’t read.
“Hey, Thomas, check this out. Can you read it?”
Thomas looked as confused as I was. Indeed neither of us had remembered ever seeing the VHS before, and we wouldn’t have forgotten such a distinct hue. Thomas assured me I wasn’t crazy and that the writing on the tape couldn’t have been English. We decided we’d watch it to figure it out. Although she denied it, we figured Isabelle had just gotten another VHS tape off the shelf when we weren’t looking and liked the color of it. Thomas popped the tape into the player and I turned on the TV.
At first we thought it didn’t work. The screen was just black with the exception of the text on the edges of the screen which suggested the tape was homemade. All the letters were in that weird writing though, one that I was certain didn’t even share the same alphabet as English. We were about to take it out when I noticed the numbers in the timestamp were going up, meaning that it was working and whoever had filmed the video was only filming in the dark.
“It’s probably some old home movie grandma recorded and just left the camera going overnight or something.”
“Why would it be written like that though? Maybe we should just rewind it to find out.”
I agreed with Thomas that rewinding the tape made the most sense. I hit the button on the player and went to sit back on the couch next to my cousins. I had expected the tape to take a while to rewind considering the working theory was grandma leaving the camera on overnight, but not long after I settled in I heard the distinctive click of the tape reaching the beginning. Thomas and I shared a confused look as I got up again to press play.
The first scene was of the ground on the edge of the highway. Whoever was recording was clearly walking down the road. My suspicions that they were hitchhiking were confirmed as the next scene came up of the cameraman getting into the cab of a long haul semi truck. The trucker looked into the camera and smiled. He was an older man with a salt and pepper beard and a healthy sized pot belly.
“Making a documentary or something.”
“Something like that,” was the first thing we had heard the cameraman say. The tone was cheery, like he was clearly obliged to finally get off his feet and into a vehicle. He also had an accent belonging to somewhere that my fourth grade mind couldn’t place. The scene continued with the cameraman and the trucker having a friendly conversation. The cameraman placed the camcorder on the dash of the truck, pointed out onto the highway ahead of them.
It didn’t take long for us to get bored at this and I decided to fast forward the tape. The scene lasted some time, and I watched the sun on the horizon dip below the treeline and the cool evening sky take place on the screen. Then the camcorder began to shift and I stopped the rewind. The camera turned to film the trucker as he walked into a gas station in the middle of nowhere. Or so I thought.
“Hey, that's the truck stop on the edge of town,” Thomas said. I looked more closely and realized he was right. It was the truck stop a few miles out of town that grandma would always stop at to fill up and get snacks whenever we’d go on roadtrips. As soon as the trucker got into the shop, the cameraman began to search through his belongings. He unzipped duffle bags and opened shelves, pocketing random things as he went. I hurried to sit back down on the couch next to my cousins so that I could get a better angle of the screen. It wasn’t long before we heard a “what’s going on,” from the screen.
The trucker had returned and wasn’t happy to see what his guest was up to. A skirmish broke out between the cameraman and the trucker. At least that’s what I gathered, as the camcorder was dropped almost immediately so all I heard was the noise of a brawl as the screen showed the dusty underside of the passenger seat. The sounds of the fight went from unnerving to disturbing quickly. Neither was screaming or yelling anymore, but one was unmistakably choking. Gasping for air and struggling to breath. The screen began to shake to the rhythm of one of the men kicking the passenger seat, clinging onto a hope of life.
Isabelle grabbed my hand and whispered, “I’m scared.”
“It’s okay,” I assured her, not very assured myself. “It’s just a scary movie. It’s not real.”
Isabelle buried her face in my side, and I welcomed the contact. I grabbed Thomas’s hand and squeezed. We shared a look that signaled what we both knew. If this was a horror movie, why was that the truck stop we knew so well?
The noises on screen stopped. Isabelle began to lift her head to look again but I held her head in place. The cameraman fished the camcorder from under the seat, and pointed it straight at the lifeless truck driver. Thomas and I screamed. He lay awkwardly on the mattress of the cabin. His face was purple and his eyes were bloodshot. Then the camera turned. And for the first time we saw the identity, or lack thereof, of the man behind the film. He wore a wooden face mask. It was fashioned to look like an old man with a big, bulbous nose and sad, wrinkled eyes. Gray yarn was attached around all of it to give the impression of long disheveled hair and a matching beard.
The scene cut. Now it was nothing but trees. Isabelle asked us what happened, but we didn’t speak. She fought me to see the screen again and this time I didn’t resist. Trees. Nothing but trees and dirt, and then, it hit me. It was all too familiar. The grass, the trees, the pinecones and acorns. It was the woods behind the house. My gaze darted out the window to the treeline. The heavy rainfall distorted the forest. What I once considered to be a wonderland was now a mystery. Then I heard grandma. But not from the front door, not from the hallway, from the screen. Thomas gripped my hand so tightly it hurt. Isabelle began to tear up.
“I’m going out to drop off some things at your grandfather’s work…”
My heart dropped. The camera’s point of view was from the woods looking into the back yard. It focused on the deck where my grandma spoke to us. And then panned down to show…me. My heart began to race as I saw the back of my head on the TV in front of me. Thomas stood next to me, and Isabelle, Isabelle looked right into the camera. She looked confused, as if she didn’t know what she was seeing. On screen, Thomas and I began to play tag, and I witnessed the moment in my life I came closest to death. As I ran from Thomas I ran right past the cameraman, who moved the camcorder to follow my path. My heart was louder than the screen. My throat was so tight I almost couldn’t breathe. Then the cameraman began to move. Not towards us but towards the house. He filmed as he made his way right into the family room. He filmed the VHS tapes sprawled along the floor and chuckled. Then my grandma came back into the house, forgetting something, and the man darted into the closet to hide.
“Thomas,” I whispered. He looked at me and the same realization dawned on him. The screen was black. The same black screen that we saw when we first put the tape in. But worse than that. The closet he hid in was the same one I had been standing next to so many times today. Every time I got up to rewind or fast forward. I was only feet away. Thomas and I looked over at the closet now. And we saw the door ajar. And in the darkness, a wooden nose and frayed gray yarn.
All I remember was screaming and running as fast as I could with Isabelle and Thomas next to me. We hurried up to the second floor, then into the attic. We hid away in a crawlspace and prayed the man wouldn’t find us. After what felt like hours we heard footsteps. The creak of movement up the old, wooden stairs. I closed my eyes and sobbed. The door to the crawlspace opened and we all screamed.
“What has gotten into you three?” asked my grandma. And the whole world came back. We stumbled over our words explaining it to her. I doubt she understood, but she took our testimony seriously. Grandma opened the gun safe and pulled out one of her husband’s rifles. “Stay here and I’ll be back.”
It didn’t take her long. Once she was sure no one was in the house, she got us and had us recall our story on the couch of the family room. I think she believed us, but the police couldn’t do anything. The closet was open but there was no man in a wooden mask, the dark red VHS tape wasn’t in the player, and no trace of him was found in the woods.
It took a while, but life returned to normal. School was back in session before I knew it. Homework began to take more importance in my mind than that afternoon. Pretty soon it felt surreal, and as I got older I began to doubt if what we saw was even real. Only three things told me that it was though. Isabelle and Thomas had always recalled the exact same scenario I had. When we got older my grandmother had admitted that a murder had taken place at the truck stop not long before the incident. And the third thing happened most recently. I have it again. I’m now older. I live alone in a different town, but just this afternoon I got it. Outside of my door was the same dark red VHS tape. I have called the police, and in the meantime I sit here writing this story down while simultaneously looking behind my back every few seconds. And at the same time I can’t help but glance at the old VHS player on my TV stand. I don’t know if I should watch the tape.
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