whatistwigs

[whatistwigs]

What is twigs?

[whatistwigs]

How I spent Christmas Eve

I've been "out of commission" for some time now, and for that, I apologize.

I wrote this out on Christmas morning. It was the best way to record what happened. It's not much, but I got some very important information.

Please, don't think less of me.

-Jared

My eyes were locked on the corner of the living room while I lay still, unable to move. The heroin had weighed down my body, rendering my arms, legs, and torso useless. My neck had given in, leaving my heavy head to rest on my chest.  The only thing that I seemed to have retained some semblance of control over was the movement of my eyes, and that is all that I needed.

However, I couldn’t control my focus. As I breathed out, I could see the off-white wallpaper with relative clarity. But, as I breathed in, my focus blurred and a portion of the white corner faded into a dark, oppressive shade of brown or black. Thick scratches in the paint outlined what I could only guess was the exposed and rotting wood that was the foundation for my aged little home. Even the carpet seemed to be torn up and rolled upon itself from what I could tell. My head seemed to swell as my eyelids rapidly sagged downwards and I begin to feel myself drifting off. As the curtain closed on my vision, I managed to gather my thoughts just enough and let that breath out in one deep sigh.

My head felt lighter. I could lift my eyelids again, if only enough to make out the corner of the room.

The corner was white once again. My orange shag carpet was intact. I braced myself before taking another deep breath. Blood rushed to my head and my focus blurred once more. I had to try to keep my thoughts in check. The corner returned to its state of decay as I turned my eyes towards the television set that sat on the ground near the corner. Using all of the attention that I could muster, I tried to get a grasp on the dimensions of the mess.

“The TV is about two-and-a-half feet high,” I thought to myself, ���which means that the decay goes up the wall about four feet from the ground. Did I take too much? I swear that I measured it properly. If I die here, how long before someone-”

Intrusive thoughts; losing vision. I let out a breath, then took one in.

“It doesn’t appear to be in its corner. Has it ever left the house? Is it in another room?”  

As I let out another breath, the normalcy began to return, but stopped before the corner had returned to its pristine state. My focus was as good as it could get in my current state, and I could still make out the outline the whole destroyed area. But, something wasn’t right.

The color was flickering in and out, alternating between that familiar off-white and the oppressive brown of the rotting wood. The carpet seemed to be both intact and torn to pieces all at the same time. My mind struggled to get a grasp on what I was seeing. I could actually feel the thoughts rush through my brain like thousands of subway trains speeding past each other in a small network of tiny tunnels. I heard scraping sounds coming from the kitchen behind me. My eyes grew dry and began to twitch in an attempt to focus properly on either white wallpaper or what was underneath it. I tried to let go and let my eyes rest, but my eyelids wouldn’t close. They began to seer and swell as everything in my field of view started to flicker intensely. They felt like they were about ready to pop when I remembered: “breathe.”

I took a deep breath and my view of the corner settled into blurry darkness.

Relieved, I held the air in my lungs like it was my saving grace.

My head grew heavy again as my eyes rested and my eyelids slowly began to sink. At that point, it didn’t matter how close I was to passing out. At least my mind could get a rest from the cognitive dissonance that I had just experienced. In fact, resting began to sound like a better and better idea. Pleased with myself, I let the curtains close and nodded off into nothingness.

H is what I’ve been looking for; it’s the one. The first dose didn’t go so well, but I’ll get it right.

Heroin is going to let me see him.

[whatistwigs]

I think I may have your unsolved mysteries leas. I remember some episode about a religious deity in South America called Twigs in English but it looked different, meant more for the rain forest. The pictures tell me that was in fact it. Maybe it can change it's form or maybe there are two of them

Well, send me some more info. I need it. These last few months have damn near killed me.

-Jared

[whatistwigs]

I always thought this monster was fake. A living tree, the scary story in the back of the mind. A tale grandmothers tell their young ones to keep them from wandering in the woods. Things have since changed with the internet at our disposal. Word spread more quickly of this 'Twigs.' More of us confide this monster to the privacy of our blogs. This is how we are losing our grasp of it, for it wants its work to be known of, -- like any story spread, it's alive, and evolving, feeding on our thought.

I don't care if the son of a bitch is just like Freddy Krueger. I refuse to spend the rest of my life living in fear of something that I might have invented in my own fucked up mind.

[whatistwigs]

sorry about that last rambling nonsense

i think this is the last time i will bother you

this was sent to me, not sure who by, not sure what it is, but i thought you might find it interesting

I see him in the seconds before I fall asleep.

[whatistwigs]

Anesthetic- Taken from the blog of one Travis Hartley

Of all the times I went into open brain surgery for the removal of my tumor, I never understood why the gnarled tree appeared in the operating room. It was always there, so who knows what the doctors prodded in my head to triggered those visions. I don't fully recall, but the nurses said I asked repeatedly why there was a 'big tree' in the operating room when they pumped me with propofol; they said no plants were allowed in the OR. I never understood why I saw it or why it was moving about the room, branches scraping at the IV in my arm. They always had trouble with that IV, it constantly dislodged and bled me out.

[whatistwigs]

Anonymous submission- January 14, 2015

Ever since I was a kid, the tree outside my room scared the hell out of me. It always looked like a hand trying to claw its way in. Even to this day I still see that gnarled hand scratching at my window at night. I'm an adult now, so reasonably this shouldn't scare me, but I cut that tree down last week.

[whatistwigs]

Anonymous Submission

Jared.

            I found this blog several weeks ago, and though I've tried to deny any correlation between these accounts and mine, I now feel that my experiences may be too relevant to be explained by mere coincidence. And honestly, it's scaring the shit out of me.

                          I've lived in the Midwest my entire life. College only took me a few counties north into Chicago, and for the two years I spent there I was separated away from the farming communities I grew up in. The city is very different from the country. But the city wasn't for me. College wasn't for me. I came home within two years and left the crowded streets and noisy commuters behind me.

            It was just too busy, I guess, and I've always found myself drawn to a certain loneliness. Yet, as the events of the recent months have unfolded, I question that more and more often. What madness drives a person to loneliness? What does it take? Not "to loneliness" like loneliness is last resort, all you have left. But "to loneliness" out of pleasure, as dancers are driven to the stage, as pyromaniacs are driven to flame, and so on.

            And yet, is it madness?

            I thought that in my case it was some ironic pursuit of sanity. My mind was so heavy with stress, and the day I drove myself away from that campus I knew I wouldn't ever go back. I needed to get away. I took my refuge in the outskirts of my hometown. A farm on the edge of city limits. Nearly 400 acres of corn standing in neat little rows as far as I could see, and settled in the middle, a barn-turned-house the farmer called home. He was a good man, offered me a small house a ways from the farmstead, a tiny one-bedroom space 'for the in-laws if they ever decide to show up' or something along those lines, and all for rent nearly half the price of my old dorm. So I took it, a little quiet home tucked back in the corn, right off the tiny gravel back road. I loved every inch of its blissful loneliness.

                        Time went on. Two months or so. I thought more of loneliness, overwhelmed by a subtle growing dread I'd begun to notice. I suppose, in some further thought, the love of loneliness is not madness. To be lonely is not to be crazy, all in the same way that to have company is not to be sane. But the division between the two, the line between loneliness and madness, has grown thinner and thinner in the passing weeks. Because there's something else here and I doubt that I'm ever alone.

            It's never in the day. Nothing is unusual when the tractors make their rounds about the fields, or in the evening when the television fills the room with steady noise. It's when I settle down for the night and all is still. Silence. A silence thicker and heavier than any loneliness I've ever wished for. And it's become so much worse since the harvest arrived and the corn fell and the fields sit vast and empty. Silent. Not even the rustle of the cornstalks in the night breeze to overcome the emptiness.

            Last month, the cable went out. It happens, sure, and when you live where I do it takes some time before someone can come do the needed maintenance. But that had been my recent anecdote. I left that TV running night and day. With the outage the silence had returned anew and I left, seized my iPod and sat out back, looking out over the road and across the acres of empty fields. The stars were out, the moon was high leaving no single detail hidden, and somehow I went to bed feeling semi at peace with the lonely silence. That was the last time I felt that peace.

            This is where you come in. This is when the damn sticks started snapping. And this here is the part where I'm told I'm imagining things. They all try to tell me that there must be some explanation. I'm just hearing the left over corn husks getting crushed by the cat. Just cornhusks, that's all. But I know what that sounds like. I've been listening to that each night for three months and this was so much...different. A scrawny little cat just doesn't make those noises. Each snap was sharp and violent, too much for little feet across corn husks. I know it was the sound of branches. I was hearing tree branches snapping outside my window when there isn't a single tree on this entire farm. And it's not stopping. Every night they snap and snap and snap and snap and when I go out, like I always force myself to do, flashlight in hand, I feel like something's watching me. I doubt that I'm ever alone.

                        I found your blog two weeks ago, on Tuesday. That awful sound and the dread were all too familiar, and those stories were as gruesome as the fucked up nightmares I've been starting to have. It all made sense the moment I read them, but, I believe that it's in human nature to deny that something you can't explain is happening, or to deny that you are in harm's way. The posts brought many sleepless nights upon me, but I pushed it off as another illusion of my growing discomfort here. God did I want to leave. I just can't afford to. But I've truly begun to doubt that I'm ever alone.

            The snapping returned the next night, and Jared, everyday since it just keeps getting louder. I highly doubt that I'm ever alone.

            I write because of last night, when I decided that I can no longer ignore the correlation.

            Last night it started again. I grabbed a gun I'd stolen from the tool shed and ran like hell out into the empty field. I was done dealing with this shit, and if the old farmer wasn't going to do anything about it despite my recent pleading, then damn right I was going to put an end to it myself. I tried to debunk it. I stomped around in the broken chunks of corn stalk, trying to recreate that goddamn sound and I couldn't. There aren't trees out here or sticks or twigs out here, but there it was, that fuckin sound coming from behind me. The correlation can't be a coincidence. The coincidence was over when it followed me. The coincidence was over when I felt its dread like thin, sharp fingers crawling up the back of my neck. The coincidence was over when I gagged from the scent of not pumpkin or cinnamon, but of shitty 75 cent campus coffee. I never wanted to have to put up with that smell again, and it was blocking out all but the sounds behind me. I ran back to the house, panting and gagging, and the smell blended with the stench of decay. I didn't go inside. I jumped in my car, gunned it past ninety down the back road, and didn't return until morning. I tried to tell myself it was just the cat like everyone else in the whole wide fuckin world is trying to tell me. The farmer called, I explained, again, and he said it was the cat. The old lady said it was the cat. My brother said it must have been some farm cat hunting in the corn husks. The cat, just the cat.

                        This morning the cat was dead on my porch. The farmer has asked me to leave. I doubt that I will ever be alone.

              Jared, am I seeing something real?

                        Or am I just lonely and mad?

                                    -Anonymous

[whatistwigs]

Submission from Filipa

People always talk about how it’s the little things that destroyed their marriage—things that were there all along, but seemed so tiny or insignificant at the time they went virtually overlooked. I think I can almost guarantee that up until we moved to our house in New England, there was nothing wrong with our relationship, nothing hindsight would point to and say ‘see the red flag?’ Paul and I had been happily married for four years by this point, and had welcomed our first and only child, Ashley, into the world. Paul always said he wanted two kids: a boy and a girl. We were halfway there.

Ashley was three when we decided to make the move. Paul grew up on the West Coast, and I had always moved around the Midwest as a child, so we were frightened and excited by the prospect. We didn’t know anyone out east besides our realtor, but we had each other, and we had Ashley, and at the time that had always felt like more than enough. Ashley even made the final decision for us; the house we had both had our eye on from the beginning was built on ten acres, and there was a juvenile grove of white ash trees growing practically in the backyard. Paul was the first to draw the parallel between the location and our daughter’s name… it seemed like fate. For a young family looking to make a change, it felt like the sign we had been waiting for.

I got a job as a paralegal. Paul was a writer and worked out of the house. We fell into our new routines fairly quickly: during the week I spent most of my days (and the majority of my nights) at the office; Paul wrote and teleconferenced from home, taking almost hourly breaks to play with Ashley and go for nature walks on the property, though the latter he generally took unaccompanied. Despite our best efforts to indoctrinate her early, Ashley had never liked nature or the woods, and wouldn’t step foot into the ash grove without crying even when we were out there with her—not even when we brought along her stuffed toy dog, Snowy, from whom she could normally never be parted. Paul took to putting her down for her nap before going out. I didn’t like the thought of her left alone at home, but Paul insisted he never strayed further than the grove, and assured me he kept the house in sight at all times. Honestly, a part of me felt guilty for not being there myself, so I didn’t push the issue. Paul took walks for inspiration, and I wanted him to feel inspired.

We moved to the house in late winter; by spring, the trees had finally started to leaf, working their way slowly upwards from the trunks to fill out their anorexic branches. Despite my work schedule and my frequent absences from the house, I did finally manage to make one friend: our closest neighbor, Deborah, who lived alone up the street with her ailing father. From her I learned a lot about the town, and a lot about our property in particular—she told me that the house had stood unoccupied for much longer than our realtor had led us to believe, and that with us on the premises she was seeing the white ash bloom for the first time; before that, she had always assumed the trees stood dead on their roots, and presumed that was one of the reasons why the house had trouble selling. It had been a rough week at work, and I remember feeling so encouraged, so proud, that we were what had finally moved them to grow. I never had time to walk the backyard path myself during daylight hours, so I took to admiring the trees from the second story window, when I woke up in the morning, and just before I went to bed. Often, Paul would look up and wave to me as he came and went. Secretly, I had taken to thinking of the trees as his garden, since Ashley had so fervently disowned them. I had no doubt that in time she would grow to cherish them as much as he did… we did.

Summer arrived in New England, and then it was fall before we knew it. By this time, Paul was taking frequent walks through the woods, disappearing for hours on end. I assumed writer’s block—he hadn’t had any significant articles published since the move, and spent most evenings holed up in his office working. I had enough leeway at work by this point that I was now making it home in time for dinner; often, I would find Ashley still in her room dozing, and Paul nowhere to be found. I didn’t want to put a name to it, but I could feel a rift starting to form in our family. I almost wholly blamed myself. I was working too much, and I tried to cut back my hours spent at the office… only when I did, I would start to see the bills pile up alongside the take-out boxes, and I felt frustrated. I had known and accepted what life with Paul would be like before I married him, but we had both worked so hard before. Now, I felt like I was the only one keeping us afloat… even if my darkest fear was that it was my absence that was pulling us all apart.

Deborah was a great friend, and a great source of reassurance and comfort, as the fall days darkened. I remember sitting with her on her porch, both of us watching Ashley play with Snowy on the lawn, though our eyes still occasionally wandered to the ash grove standing in the distance. I remember wishing, not for the first time, that Paul had elected to come visit with us, but he had mentioned a vague deadline and stayed home at the last minute. Maybe our luck was about to change.

"Speaking of change," Deborah had interrupted gently, obviously trying to get my mind off the subject, "can we talk about your magic trees, Filipa? They haven’t changed their colors, not a single one. All of them, green! They’ve got to be the only green trees left in the county. Just take a look at ours."

Sure enough, all of the trees in Deborah’s yard were dressed in autumnal shades of orange and yellow. I can remember very vividly that I did not want to talk about trees, especially not our trees. I had a sneaking suspicion at the time that I was growing to hate them, and I didn’t want to be right. I had dreams about chopping them down… mostly on the nights when I went to bed alone.

"Fraxinus nigra."

It was Deborah’s father who said the words. He was seated on the porch with us in his rocking chair, though I had never heard him speak before, and gathered from things Deborah had mentioned that his dementia was so advanced it had been years since he had spoken a coherent word. Today seemed like no exception, but I accepted the leaf he gave me like it was a cherished heirloom as Deborah rose and helped him back inside. Seeing what remained of her family in shambles made me all the more determined to preserve mine.

But I was getting angry, so deeply angry, and by now I was also frightened. I picked up Paul’s phone one day, something I had never done before, and thumbed quickly through his messages, though my haste was less a product of any chance of being caught (he was out in the garden at the time) and more a product of my own guilty conscience. I saw all the texts I had sent from the office that he had never responded to, and unresponded-to texts from friends back home; nothing to indicate an affair. I flipped through his e-mails. I closed out every app and put the phone down where I had found it. Fifteen or more individual correspondences, all one-sided, from his editor, wondering where Paul was and where his stories were. The final one had been sent three weeks ago, then silence. I didn’t need to read what it said.

I didn’t tell Deborah, she had enough to worry about. But I started to prepare myself for a confrontation. Everything came to a head the day I came home and heard Ashley screaming in her bedroom. I ran inside to find her in her room, hot tears pouring down her face; I remember wiping her nose with the back of my sleeve, something you never think twice about when you’re a parent, and noticing that she had peed more than once in her pajamas. Had Paul even changed her out of them that morning? I looked around frantically for Snowy, but couldn’t find him—I looked for a stuffed dog before I even looked for my husband. When I found neither, I lifted Ashley into my arms and descended the stairs, every furious footfall on hardwood reporting like a gunshot, warning him of the war that was coming before I had even thrown open the door to his office.

"Paul!"

He wasn’t there, and neither was Snowy. A fetid gust of cool air hit me full in the face as soon as the door was open, stirring the pile of papers on his desk; the window had been left ajar for I don’t know how long, and even from the doorway I could tell there was a costly water stain blooming on the carpet from the rain. All of the papers that slipped and fell to the floor were blank. Worse than the state of the room, worse than even the smell coming off my weeping daughter, was the smell that assaulted me upon entering. Such an overwhelmingly putrid odor… how had I never noticed it before? How had it not crept out through the bottom of the door? How had it not clung to Paul, if this was really where he had gone to every night?

I didn’t go into the room. I went back into our bedroom and placed Ashley down on the bed, telling her to sit and be still. In the absence of Snowy, I grabbed for the first thing I could give her to hold onto—the leaf on my bedside table, the one that Deborah’s demented old father had given me. What had he said to me? Fraxinus nigra.

My computer was open, and I typed an approximation of what I thought the spelling could be into a web search and hit ‘send’. Every few seconds my eyes would flash to the window, hoping, dreading, that I’d catch a glimpse of Paul coming out of the woods. I noticed a flock of birds in one tree further out, sitting undisturbed. Where was he? The results were in: fraxinus nigra. Black ash. The leaf matched the image results for a black ash tree. Ours were white ash. Weren’t they?

My head was spinning as I carried Ashley back down the stairs with me and locked her in the backseat of the car. The smell from the office had already started to leech into the rest of the house. I had made up my mind by this point that we were staying at a hotel in town, but before I could think to put the key in the ignition I was headed for the woods. The trees didn’t match their leaves. The leaves didn’t match their trees. Where was Paul? He could sleep out here in his garden for all I cared.

It was then that I started to notice them. The little things. The leaves. It was then that I realized they weren’t growing at all—they had never been growing. Each one of the dozens, thousands, millions, had been impaled on its twig, a facsimile of growth, of life. Nothing was growing here. Someone had taken our dead forest and dressed up its corpse. It seemed like impossibly precise work, work that would take months, seasons, of nonstop attention—worse, it wasn’t real work at all, because there was no gain, no point, just hours upon hours of irreplaceable time being swallowed up forever.

I knew I was right when I found Paul. He was standing in a clearing with his back to me. I didn’t call out to him when I found him because I wanted to catch him in the act, to see for myself the insanity of his project. I watched as he took each leaf from his hand measuredly, then speared it through a dead twig. It was Paul. Paul had done this.

I didn’t watch in silence for long. I remember that by the time it occurred to me to speak, I was already screaming.

"Where did you get the leaves, Paul? Where did you get the leaves?”

I remember being more surprised by the question than by my screaming—it wasn’t one that had occurred to me on a conscious level, though suddenly it seemed like the only one that was important. White ash. Black ash. I thought I saw something move out of the corner of my eye, and I could smell it: the smell from the office, that suffocating putrescence that drug up family memories of Christmas and perverted them all one by one. When I turned my head to look, there was nothing, but I found Snowy. He was gored on a branch, the stuffing spilling out of his chest.

I didn’t move to retrieve him. Paul had turned and was staring at me, his mouth hanging open as if in shock at being found out—only it stayed open, and he stayed staring at me. Like he was brain dead. Like his eyes had been eaten out by ash borers, and in the darkness only pitted sockets remained. Pitted sockets and pitted husband. Beyond him, I could see the tree filled with birds. I could see that despite screaming my throat raw, none of them had moved to fly away.

I left Paul there in the clearing, and I took our baby girl with me. I haven’t heard from him since. It’s the little things you don’t notice, they say. I had a lot of fears when I first got married, but I guess my only fear toward the end was that he had run out of leaves.

[whatistwigs]

My dad worked on that unsolved mysteries case mentioned in the audio. It was about the disappearance of people who walked into a house. Apparently everything they had brought with them would be found in a pile outside the house but they were never found. No one was ever arrested. No suspects. No evidence except for the stuff. Im gonna see if I can ask him about it and try to find stuff from filming.

I don't know if it's related, but I can't rule anything out, not with this.

Keep me posted.

[whatistwigs]

Sticks - Submission from it-is-a-talking-tree

I had a friend in school when i was about seven years old. Let’s say his name was John. The circumstances of John’s death have lead me to think that, perhaps, you could make use of the story. Even if I can’t.

John would often have us play a game with his imaginary friend. He called this friend Sticks. My friend always said that Sticks was like a sort of deer-man. So, I always thought of him as a kind of centaur-like creature. I was never that interested in the thing, and I never really asked for any details.

Well, he never grew out of his imaginary friend the way the rest of us grew out of ours. He was fifteen and still talking about his friend. I was a little concerned about it, but I hadn’t known he was in actual danger.

A friend of mine (I shan’t say who) told me about your ‘twig’ problem and, after skimming through your posts, I was reminded of some drawings and a note - short letter - John left me before he committed suicide.

I can’t find the drawing right now, but I still have the note.

In the last couple of weeks he was alive he stopped going to school completely. When we talked, it was always about Sticks for him. I visited him a couple of nights before he died. His parents weren’t home, and he didn’t talk much. I managed to talk to him a bit about how school was (shitty, of course), and he told me, naturally, about Sticks.

It was now that he told me that his friend had become angry with him. John hadn’t done what Sticks had wanted him to do, or something like that. 

He wouldn’t talk about him after that. For once, he was himself again. I went home with a package he told me I’d know when to open. So, when he died, I found his note.

He’d drawn Sticks as a roughly human figure, quite hunched over and with rough, sort of bark-like skin on his arms. The face was human-ish too, although the mouth was jagged, and the eyes sunken (or, at best, completely dark in colour).

The ‘sticks’ grew from its back in a similar way to how antlers might grow from a deer. It wasn’t exactly the more endearing idea I had once had of the character.

The note explained that Sticks had started being aggressive. John would wake up sometimes to it standing close to him. Sometimes he would have grazes on his arms.

His cat had been attacked, too. I’ll spare you the details, but suffice to say there wasn’t much of a cat left when they found her. His parents had passed it off as a dog attack, but John insisted that he had seen Sticks do it.

John was found dead in his room. From the reports, he’d torn into both his arms with a serrated blade. I don’t know any more about that part, and I’m not sure I want to.

I tried to contact his parents at the time, but they moved away strangely soon after John’s funeral.

Now, I have to admit something. I did see a strange figure at his funeral - but I didn’t get a good look at it. It could have been a large dog, or even a damn bush in the wind. I was paranoid at the time, but eventually I convinced myself that John had just been a very sick, unfortunate, friend. I never understood why his parents never got him help.

It’s been a few days since I started following your blog now, and I think I should add that I’ve started having these really weird dreams - scary, or at least unnerving:

I stand on a dirt road I don’t recognise. Trees on both sides. It’s bright as day, and I can see a figure a ways down the road. I’ve never actually seen him in the flesh but I know that this is Sticks. He’s getting closer every time I have the dream - which isn’t often, exactly, but… it’s regular.

I’m scared, and I’ve been brought into something I would have much rather avoided, but I think Sticks would have turned up sooner or later anyway.

Now I’m just glad that I’m not alone. Sorry if that’s a little morbid.

I’m going to try to get in contact with John’s parents. If I turn anything up, I’ll send it your way.

Thank you for listening, and Good luck.

[whatistwigs]

Submission from it-is-a-talking-tree

I found John’s drawing last night, like I said. It’s pretty crumpled now, but it’s in good condition - I did my best to keep it as it was, seeing at was the last thing he gave me, and something he had believed in. I don’t know, maybe I thought it could have meant something at the time.

The second sketch is my own - how I think Sticks looks in my dream. I think.

In the end, I kept it to myself. The only time I ever asked his parents about Sticks as a child, they cancelled a sleepover we had planned, and John didn’t talk about his ‘friend’ for days after that.

Anyway, I asked my parents if they knew where John’s parents had moved to, or if they had a number. They said they didn’t know who I was talking about. Weird. John was a close friend, but I supposed that they’d just sort of forgotten him because he didn’t come to our house in the later years of his life.

But my friends had trouble remembering him, too. Friends who were as close to him as I had been. But they remembered Sticks - the name, at least. Can you think of a way to explain that, logically?

I’m done with this for today - I can’t make any sense of all this. I hope this is at least a little bit useful.

Could it cause amnesia? Could that be it?

Update! My anonymous friend sent me an email address for John’s parents. The timing is almost too good to be true, right?

So, anyway, I send them a message just saying hello, asking if they remembered me, how their son was, that kind of thing. I just received a reply saying that not only did they not remember ever having a son, but that they only ever had a dog, named Sticks.

Nobody but my friend and I can remember John at all. I’m beyond confused now, not to mention terrified. 

But everyone remembers Sticks. What do they remember? A dog? Something else? If I didn’t know about this being a seemingly widespread thing, I’d think I was just - insane.

I’m going over to my friend’s place so we can talk over this. they’re the only person in the world who seems to understand. Plus, they’ve got cinnamon buns. They make the best I’ve ever had. It’s the one thing I actually have to look forward to today.

Something has to come of this. If not… well, I guess that’s the way it goes. If I do get some extra info, I can send it your way.

I know it doesn’t give a whole load of answers but… I found some of it intriguing.

Again, I hope this helps - at least a little bit.

[whatistwigs]

Submision from Sasha - 10/29/2014

This never started with these same similarities until I saw this, the nicotine part at least, but I never felt the urge to smoke tobacco before hearing about this. I always was a firm believer in tulpas, and ever since, I could feel something latched onto me. I can feel it evolving now. Maybe it’s trying to adapt other identities to grow, or to hide. Or maybe it’s the same and it’s just finally found the right way to get through to me. The cinnamon tastes so familiar. That feeling in my spine and shoulders and neck that I’m not alone in the garage always gets worse when I smoke my occasional cigar, but kind of blurs away if it’s pot. When smoking said cigar, I swear I can sometimes see things move in my peripherals. Now that the outdoor cats are gone, it’s getting harder to convince myself of what the sounds moving in the bushes is. I’m glad I switched rooms with my roommate. The room itself always had worse energy. I’ve put up some things to collect energy, namely sunlight, and some ornaments for warding off bad spirits. The invisible eyes that I felt must be transfixed on someone else now.

I don’t know if it’s the same thing as what you’re dealing with, but maybe it’ll help you?

-Sasha, Penn. USA

[whatistwigs]

I don't understand. What is all this?

It's my collection, our collection of information about something that I have been trying to understand for years.

Hell, this "something" might not even exist. But with others discussing some similar, consistent traits of it, maybe I might not be as crazy as I think I am.

I have a list, a small list that I've built over the years that have helped to convince me that it is, in fact, out there. Sights, smells, sounds that help me determine whether or not its around.

It's not much, but from what I can tell, I'm not alone.

[whatistwigs]

I haven't seen it yet. What should I be looking out for?

For starters, look for something that you know like the back of your hand, something that you could articulate perfectly, something that you could paint from memory.

Now, is there something different about it? Is something off?

[whatistwigs]

A Submission from C.I.R. - 10/2014

"Take my story as you will, but I’ll take it as a sign that my life is getting more fucked up as the day passes. I’ve had these dreams, these freaky ass dreams about my family. It isn’t my family though. They are but they aren’t, they aren’t in control. These dreams keep happening, they’ve been happening for about a month now. I’m running around my house, with no real reason at the beginning. Soon I start running by family members, everyone sitting in my living room. They just watch me run. It’s like some game. Everyone’s on the edge of their seats waiting. Waiting for what I don’t know. It’s like they’re waiting for a signal. Like a dog waiting for a command when it knows you have a treat for it. Eventually one of them will get up and begin chasing me. I could just pass this off as my messed up brain being more messed up if I hadn’t woken up with my arm bleeding from what looks like a human bite mark and my feet bleeding. It’s weird how I can never remember how those dreams end, but I end up always going outside at some point. I just remembered something. The house always smells of wood and pumpkin spice in my dreams.

The more I think about this while I’m typing this up, maybe those things really happened during the night. The wood smell would make sense since we have several wooden chests laying around our house but never that intense of a smell. I’ve really only been assuming I had dreamed them. The bite and my feet really being the only basis of this theory. My dogs have also kept barking at the window for some strange reason. It’s always the same window, and they’re always all looking as if something is standing right outside the window. I may go outside the next time they do that and investigate. Speaking of which they’re doing it right now. I’ll update you when I get back.”

- The last post on now deleted blog of Allison

This was taken from the blog of my best friend. This was the last post she made before she disappeared and her rotting corpse was found a few days latter in the woods. She never told me about her dreams, but she did make several blog posts about them. This happened a few weeks ago. Her dogs have always been extremely observant, and loyal. They may have been trying to protect her from something. I have no idea if this could be of any help but the pumpkin spice and wood smells made me think of some of the other stories posted on your blog. Also the dogs, you put at the end of that dogs may be able to sense or see the thing. This may contribute to that theory. I’m smelling wood and pumpkin spice right now, which is largely unsettling because I live in an apartment complex. -C.I.R.

[whatistwigs]

I have been trying to reach you

I apologize to everyone, I haven't remained vigilant about these things. I've been, to say the least, distracted.

Please, if you know something, share it.

-Jared