This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/DarksomePrairie on 2026-08-14 17:03:01+00:00.

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RING. RING. RING.

The reception desk’s phone displayed ROOM 801 and trilled with the sound of an incoming call. It was 2:50 AM, and I was bored out of my freaking mind.

I hated working the night shift at the Red Pharaoh, one of downtown Chicago’s finest—and oldest—Art Deco hotels. Between working days as a math teacher and nights as the front desk clerk of the Pharaoh, I was fried.

RING. RING. RING.

But I needed the money. I was a single dad with a daughter a few years away from college; a daughter who had rheumatoid arthritis and needed expensive medication just to function. But enough about me and my problems … for now, that is.

RING. RING. RING.

“Front desk, this is Gil. How can I help you?” I spoke into the phone.

“This is—Kats—my VCR is fucked—can you send—help?”

“I’m sorry, sir, our connection is a bit spotty. Could you say that again?”

“This is Katsa—my VCR isn’t working and—trying to watch a tape. Can you—”

The phone line buzzed with static punctuated by a man’s voice that sounded miles away. It was the voice of a confident man who was used to getting what he wanted.

“I apologize, Mr. … Katsa? Our rooms don’t have VCRs, I believe those were phased out in the early 2000s. However, the television in your room has numerous cable channels as well as some of the common streaming services. If you just use your remote—”

“—the fuck—only streaming will—be blood streaming out of your nose, punk—"

“Again, I apologize, Mr. Katsa. Is there anything else I can help you with?”

A pause. Loud crackling. Heavy breathing echoed across a dead canyon.

The voice came again—serious, cruel, rocklike.

“I’ll leave a tape—the elevator—for you, Gil. Maybe you’d like to see what I see.”

The call disconnected and I felt unsettled. As I’m sure you could guess, I occasionally received strange calls from the hotel’s guests while working the night shift, but nothing this strange had ever happened before. A VCR—really?

But then, when I remembered the front desk phone’s display, my heart stopped. ROOM 801. What the fuck? The first digit of the room number signified the floor on which the room resided. Room 801? The hotel only had seven floors. There was no eighth floor, and therefore, no room 801. Where had this Mr. Katsa called from?

It was a strange name to begin with, so I decided to do an internet search on the front desk’s ancient computer. I navigated to Google and searched Katsa + Chicago.

No good hits, though the search did reveal another, similar name: Katsaros.

I learned Katsaros had been a semi-famous Greek-American filmmaker who had made a number of bizarre arthouse films before disappearing in 1996. I began to read news articles from the time that overviewed the details of his vanishing until I froze abruptly, feeling like a brick had been thrown into my chest.

Katsaros went missing 30 years ago in 1996. Guess where he was last seen? The Red Pharaoh Hotel … my place of work, the hotel where I answered the filmmaker’s ghostly call.

I tried to remember what else the man had said on the phone in between the sharp bouts of interference. Then it came to me:

… I’ll leave a tape—the elevator—for you, Gil …

… maybe you’d like to see what I see …

Without pause I jumped up and over the front desk and made my way to the elevator bay. The Pharaoh had four elevators, heavily adorned with mid-century golden design accents. Where would I even find this … tape? And even more important, why did I believe the—I don’t know … ghost—of this filmmaker left me anything at all?

To ensure I wasn’t going mad, I checked each elevator to verify a button for the eighth floor hadn’t magically appeared. And to double-check, I rode up to the seventh floor, looked around, then unlocked a stairwell to access the roof. Everything was as expected.

Nothing unusual. No eighth floor. No Katsaros. No demonic VCRs sitting around. All good …

It was time to get back to the front desk and do a whole lot of nothing.

The elevator descended, opened, and I stepped out. My heart stopped for the second time that night.

In the middle of the elevator bay sat a black VHS tape on its side, as if the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey had spontaneously appeared—in miniature—before my widening eyes. The magnetic film tape inside was tightly wound and ready to play. Within a narrow white sticker along the spine of the videocassette, words had been scratched haphazardly in black marker: Purgatorio Tapes #3.

Purgatorio—like the Dante poem? As in purgatory? … the religious, mythical space between Heaven and Hell where some souls reside in a kind of limbo?

I had too many questions, too many concerns. I won’t lay them all out here. I’ll just tell you that I quickly grabbed the tape—something was off about how heavy it felt for a hunk of plastic—and returned to the front desk. I stored the VHS tape in my backpack and went back to watching a movie on my phone, trying to ignore the sense of unreality, the sense of fear that pinched in my gut.

***

When my shift ended, I went home and cleaned up for a day of teaching. I’ll sleep when I’m dead had become something of a new mantra. I always made time to have breakfast with my daughter before driving her to school. I won’t share much about her—I’ll just tell you it broke my heart how much of her life I was missing by working so much. She was having to spend a lot of time home alone. I consistently promised her that I was doing great, even though I was struggling. I didn’t want her to have to worry … ever.

After teaching a few hours of math—spending most of that time in my head as I ruminated on the events of the previous night—I came to an unsettling decision: I had to know what was on that VHS tape, what was contained on Purgatorio Tapes #3.

But where was I going to find an old-ass TV and VCR in 2026, you might ask? I knew where.

Over the lunch hour, as the rowdy teens noisily paraded down the halls to the cafeteria, I secreted away to a back storage area, where the janitors kept all of their equipment and supplies. Finding a back freight-style elevator in the storeroom, I descended to the school’s little-used concrete basement.

Through the dark, wet, and webs, I searched around old boxes, supplies, tables, and chairs, and finally found what I was looking for—straight out of the 1990s.

The black metal rolling stand stood dust-covered in a corner. Atop it, held steady with a moldy strap, was an old television that resembled a black tank, and on the shelf below it sat a VCR.

I maneuvered the shrieking cart over to the nearest electrical outlet, clicked on the TV, inserted the mysterious VHS tape into the VCR with a clunky, plastic clutter, and—after fumbling with a few buttons—pressed PLAY.

“Here goes nothing,” I said. “What do you have for me, Mr. Katsaros?”

Fuzz. Static. Black and white. Buzzing. The droning of cicadas. Distortion.

Nothing. Nothing at all …

But then, a scene snapped into frame with an electronic pop.

It was a single camera view, black-and-white, fuzzy, and obviously filmed with a 90s-era camcorder. The picture shook viciously as if the filmmaker—perhaps Katsaros himself—was terrified of what he saw before him.

Every few seconds the image on-screen would stretch and distort violently, as if the tape reel itself were possessed and convulsing.

The scene showed a sinewy, naked old man with a wiry beard hunched and quivering on a floor of white sand. Around him rose the ascending walls of a small Romanesque colosseum. From what I could make out, the arena’s arches and columns were unusual—they looked as if they’d been painted with a heavy, shadowy black paint. Too, the structure’s geometry made no sense ... crooked, bent, demented—I didn’t understand how it remained standing.

Even more horrifying were the massive statues that embellished the stadium, honoring gods and monsters the likes of which I’d never seen.

I tried to better interpret the strange architecture before me, but the footage violently snapped back to the old man, who now sobbed and knelt. Around him, from the numerous dark archways in the lower walls of the structure that surrounded the white sand ground, growls and shrieks and rumbles erupted like a storm.

Every muscle in my body tensed in anticipatory terror …

What happened next I witnessed through the lurching, warping, and flickering of the tape’s picture. The footage was grainy and dark, and the filmmaker’s hands shook with fear. Dust from the arena’s floor mixed with a black fog that descended from the unseen sky.

I thought I could see something coming out of the inky dark—

In an instant, a grossly-elongated red humanoid form pounced from one of the black archways and decapitated the old man with a swipe of a vicious, clawed hand. Ram-like horns on the creature’s head ripped holes and gashes across the now-headless body.

Within moments, a second … thing … appeared from another doorway opposite, this one also humanoid in form, its body a sickly-gray and wearing a ragged sheet of black. Twisted, soaked wings made of ashen skin and sinew grew out from the thing’s upper back. Its eyes were deep charcoal voids, and they set their sights on the horned, crimson beast.

The two creatures lunged for each other with dual screams of sharp, destructive intent. The corpse—caught in between the two warring beings—exploded in a fountain of blood, bile, and tissue, as the horn...

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