This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/RepomanSC on 2026-05-27 17:19:35+00:00.

---

In 1984 I was eight years old. That summer would change me, my cousin, and my brother forever. And I am now ready to tell the story. I haven't spoken about it since that summer, so bear with me as I may become a little unsettled while telling it.

My grandparents lived out in the country in South Carolina. Their house sat back from the road, with woods that started at the edge of the yard and ran for miles behind it. I spent half my childhood at that house. Sunday dinners, summer weekends, holidays, if my mama needed me out of the way, that's where I went.

The woods were full of pines, hardwoods and gullies. By the time I was eight, my brother Wes and my cousin Derrick had been walking them for years. They were both twelve. And with me being the baby, I tagged along whenever they'd let me.

I want to be clear about something before I go any further. We knew those woods. Every clearing, every fallen tree, every place a snake might be hiding, every gully you could break an ankle in. We had walked the same paths a thousand times. The land was familiar.

Which is why what we found out there in the summer of ‘84 made no sense.

It was an old wooden house. Tucked deep into the woods, back behind all the trees, like somebody had wanted it that way. Shiplap walls, grayed from decades of weathering. The whole thing was literally falling apart. And the strangest part, the part I still can't explain to this day, was that I don't remember ever finding a road that led to it. No driveway. No path. No clearing wide enough for a wagon to have come through. Just a house, in the middle of nowhere, sitting there like it had always been there since the beginning of time.

It had a full wraparound porch, the kind old farmhouses used to have. Two windows on each of the four sides, eight windows in all, and every pane of glass had been busted out. The front door was made from the same wood as the rest of the house, weathered to the same gray, and it stood partly open, hanging crooked on its hinges.

To an eight-year-old boy, it was the perfect hideout. At that age you don't care about the dangers or the possibilities beyond your own imagination.

But here's the problem. Wes and Derrick had been walking those woods for years longer than I had. And the three of us had been in that exact spot — that exact spot — dozens of times. Wes said it. Derrick said it. I knew it. None of us had ever seen that house before.

We stood there in front of it for a long time, the three of us. Trying to figure out how we could possibly have missed it. Trying to come up with any reason it could be there. And after enough debating about how to react, we did what any logical pack of kids would do.

We went inside. You know, to check the place out.

At first it was an adventure. We walked through the front door, which was barely a door anymore, into the front room. The den, if you grew up calling it that.

There were holes in the wooden floor. Holes in the walls. An old dusty love seat sat in one corner. In the opposite corner was a wicker rocking chair, except most of the wicker had done poofed and vanished. It was a shell of a chair really. Probably older than all of us put together.

The roof had partly caved in. Right in the center of the room, a beam of light came down through the hole where it used to be. Underneath the collapsed section sat a beautiful old flagstone fireplace, half-buried under the rubble.

Everything was gray. Everything was moist. The smell of mildew was almost overwhelming. And of course there were spiders, and other things moving in the corners that I didn't want to look at too closely.

The three of us stood there in the den with looks of interest, and maybe a little fear, on our faces.

But we didn't feel scared. Not really. We felt adventurous. We wanted to see the rest of the house.

But —

Something didn't feel right. I can't explain it in words, and I couldn't have at eight either. It was a feeling. Like someone else was in the house with us. Watching. And I know it wasn't just me thinking it, because I could see it on Wes and Derrick's faces too. They felt it.

All three of us felt it at the same time.

There was a door hole at the back of the den, you know a doorway with no door in it. It led to what looked like a hallway. But it was so dark in there that you couldn't see more than a foot or two past the threshold.

We decided to go take a closer look.

We moved in single file along the wall. Wes was the oldest, so he took the lead. Derrick was in the middle. I was last. We were so close to each other that I could feel my cousin's shirt against mine the whole way down that wall.

Wes reached the doorway. He pressed himself flat against the wood frame, and slowly he leaned his head around the corner to look down the dark hallway.

And I watched his eyes.

I want you to understand what I saw. His eyes started to widen. Not fast. Not all at once. Slow. Almost in slow motion. It was almost like I was watching a movie of his face, frame by frame. And I will never, in my whole life, forget the look on him in that second.

I don't know what Wes saw down that hallway.

I never have.

What I do know is what he did next.

He turned and he ran. He ran right through us. Bowled my cousin and me over trying to get out of that house. And we didn't ask any questions. We didn't stand there wondering. We didn't even look down the hallway ourselves.

We just got up off the floor, and we ran after him.

Stumbling over the rotten wood. Tripping on the holes in the floor. Out through the front door, off the porch, we jumped clean off the porch, didn't bother with the steps — and into the trees.

And here's the thing. Only one of us knew why we were running. But it didn't matter. The oldest one had bolted, and the rest of us followed.

It was about a mile and a half from that house back to my grandmama’s and we ran every step of it.

We barreled through the front door of the house and ran straight to a guest bedroom, and Wes shut the door behind all three of us.

We sat down on the floor to catch our breath. Confused, sweating, faces red, mud all over our shoes and pants. My cousin and I asked Wes what the heck he had seen.

Before he could answer, there was a soft knock at the door.

We all looked at each other. And the strange thing was none of us knew why the knock scared us. We just knew that it did. It was the same feeling we'd had in the house. That feeling that something was on the other side.

It was my Uncle Billy. It was Sunday and he, along with many other family members, were there to have Sunday dinner together.

Now, Billy was a funny guy. He had seen us tearing across the yard and into the house, and he was just coming to check on us.

Wes opened the door, and Billy came in and shut it behind him. He had this sarcastic look on his face, the look he always had, like he was already in on the joke before anybody else.

"What are y'all running from?" he asked us.

None of us could answer.

He looked at the three of us sweaty, red-faced, muddy, sitting on the guest room floor and then he said something I'll never forget.

"Y'all weren't running from Mr. NoBody, were you?"

And the three of us, simultaneously, said: "Who is Mr. NoBody?"

Uncle Billy giggled. A slick little giggle. The kind a man gives when he's been waiting a long time to tell you something.

And then he sat down on the edge of the bed and told us a story.

When Billy and my dad were boys, the two of them used to walk those same woods. And one day, the two of them found an old house out there. A wooden house. Shiplap. The roof caving in.

The same house.

They went inside. They got as far as a doorway leading to a dark hallway. And my dad — Billy's brother — looked around the corner.

And whatever my dad saw down that hall, Billy told us, scared him so bad that the two of them ran a mile and a half back to my grandmama’s. Just like we had. And after that day, Billy said my dad never spoke about it. He wouldn't say what he saw. He wouldn't say anything.

The only thing my dad ever said about that day, Billy told us, was this:

"I don't think I was supposed to see him."

Billy got quiet after he said that. He looked down at the floor for a minute. The silly look on his face went away. I had never seen Uncle Billy serious about anything in my life. But he looked serious right then.

He slowly looked back up at the three of us.

"Your daddy saw who we now know to be Mr. NoBody," he said.

He looked at Wes.

"Wes. What did Mr. NoBody look like?"

And my brother — twelve years old, the oldest of the three of us, the one who'd been brave enough to lean around that doorway in the first place — my brother started shaking. He started sweating. The color drained out of his face. His lips went pale, like they were dusted with white powder, as if he'd been parched for days.

And then he leaped off the floor and he ran out of the house.

We tried to go after him, but he was too fast. He ran until we couldn't see him anymore. He didn't run toward the woods either. Nowhere near em.

Derrick and I went home. We waited almost two hours before Wes came back.

When he finally walked through the door, he looked defeated. Drenched in sweat. The color still gone from his face. Uncle Billy said my dad had done the same thing — disappeared for hours, come back the same way.

Wes went straight to the guest bedroom and laid down on the bed without taking his shoes off. His clothes were still dirty....

---

Content cut off. Read original on https://old.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/1tpc6b8/mr_nobody_killed_my_family/