Candle Face Victim #11: The Girl from the Shack

January 11, 2024

Main subject:

• Victim #11

• Candle Face

Last night, as I settled in to sleep on the couch, the eleventh ghostly visitor entered my living room. Her account was the most sorrowful and horrifying one I have heard so far. She began her testimony through sobs of agony. For the first time, I felt the same torment one of these visitors had endured. It’s something I hope I never experience again. This is her testimony:

I had always been shaped by skepticism. My parents, both rationalists to the core, taught me to question everything and look for logical explanations. So that was how I moved through life. I questioned, I analyzed, and I doubted. It was second nature to me.

Then I met him.

My boyfriend of two years saw the world very differently. He was a dreamer who believed in mystery, magic, and the supernatural without embarrassment.

One night, we were sitting together in his dim living room, planning to watch a string of horror movies. The idea was simple. We wanted to scare ourselves. But as the night went on, the distance between the way we saw the world became harder to ignore.

“Do you believe in ghosts?” he asked, his eyes catching the light from the television.

I laughed. My disbelief was firm. “Of course not,” I said. “Ghosts are nothing more than figments of our imagination.”

He leaned in, speaking low, almost as if he were letting me in on something. “But think about it. Cultures all over the world believe in ghosts, in spirits that remain after death. They can’t all be wrong.”

I brushed that aside. “Superstition and folklore,” I said. “Stories people make up to explain what they don’t understand. Nothing more.”

That night, he told me a story he had heard from a friend. It was about a cruel spirit, a young female ghost called Candle Face. According to the story, she tormented people who refused to believe in her, driving some of them into madness. Others she killed.

I answered with a dismissive laugh and a shake of my head. To me, ghost stories were for gullible people. I couldn’t understand how anyone could truly fear something like that.

It wasn’t long before I started having vivid dreams about Candle Face.

In the first one, she looked harmless, almost sweet. She sat across from me at a quiet playground, her small fingers pushing grains of sand around. Her face stayed hidden in shadow as she asked, “Do you believe in me?”

Without hesitation, I said, “No.” It was only a dream, I told myself. Maybe a leftover effect from the movies we had watched. Maybe the drugs in my system.

But as the nights passed, Candle Face kept returning, and each time she became worse. In one dream, she sat on my chest, her ghostly fingers tightening around my throat. I woke up gasping.

Then came the dream that left marks on my body. Candle Face lay on top of me, her lips pressed against my neck, leaving grotesque hickeys behind. In what sounded like pleasure, she whispered into my ear, “You’re going to be famous with the demons in hell.”

I woke in a cold sweat, my neck covered in painful marks. My throat felt tight from the sensation that something had been wrapped around it. I touched the red welts circling my neck. I couldn’t tell anyone where they came from, not even my best friends. They all blamed my boyfriend and assumed he had done it.

One evening in the July heat, my boyfriend and I made a reckless choice to get away from our families and their judgment. Our relationship had always caused tension. I was barely eighteen, and he was well into his late twenties. He also kept company with a group of men who were often too much, even on a good day.

That night, we were in a hotel room when his phone rang. He stepped outside to take the call, and even though he tried to sound casual, there was strain in his voice. When he came back in, I could see tension in his face.“

Some friends are coming over,” he said.

A few minutes later, three men walked into the room. The whole atmosphere changed. I wanted to get out of there, but it became clear very quickly that they had no intention of letting me leave.

As I started gathering my things, the room blurred. I felt the sting of a needle, and then a heavy paralysis began working through my body. They had drugged me. As they carried me out of the room, everything went black.

The shack they took me to was isolated and miserable, miles outside Austin. A single weak bulb hung from the ceiling and threw shifting shadows across the walls. As my vision cleared, I understood what had been done to me. I was naked, tied to a narrow bed, and there were four chairs lined up against the wall.

For the next six days, men came in one after another and raped me repeatedly. Each chair held a man waiting his turn. There were probably more outside. With every thrust, every minute of pain, I felt another part of myself being stripped away.

But it didn’t stop there. On the sixth day, another presence entered the room, one the men didn’t seem to notice. It was Candle Face. She moved through the room with a calm that made her even worse. She sang lullabies. She stroked my hair like she was comforting me while the men lay on top of me. Sometimes her fingers burned into my skin and left fresh marks behind.“

Why?” I managed to ask her while one of the men was having his way with me.“

Because,” she said with a twisted smile, “my existence becomes more real with every scar, every burn, and, in your case, every stroke.”

By the end of the sixth night, the men were gone. I was alone in that shack with Candle Face. She continued where they had left off and kept me in torment through the rest of the night.

At first light, the shack door opened again. The three men came back with my boyfriend. When he looked at me, his eyes were full of tears and betrayal.“

You have to finish it,” one of the men said, shoving him forward.

My boyfriend came toward me with a knife shaking in his hand. We locked eyes. In that moment, I saw exactly what he had done to me. He leaned in and whispered, “I’m sorry,” then drove the knife into my heart.

As my life left me, Candle Face stood over me. “Thank you,” she said, her fingers moving through my hair one last time. “You have made me real.”

My sight dimmed. But even in death, one thought came over me as I lay in a shallow grave to the right of the shack. We fear what we don’t understand. But sometimes the real monsters stand beside us, and we help create them through our disbelief.

I could tell she had more to say, but what followed was swallowed by the worst sobbing I have ever heard. She gave a faint apology before stepping back into the portal. As she left, it looked as though blood had been smeared across my floor. I turned on the lights and looked for it, expecting to find it there. There was nothing. But the sharp metallic smell of fresh blood still hung in the air.

Personal Note to My Readers

Her story contains clues that may point to her remains and to the people responsible for killing her.

Her testimony calls for an active investigation. She’s asking for what should have been hers all along: the chance for justice, and the chance for her life to be brought to a proper end.

So I’m asking you to read her testimony carefully. Look for the clues in her words. Piece together what you can about where she was taken, where she was buried, and who killed her. If enough of us work through it seriously, we may be able to solve this case.

I want to solve her case. Your research may help a spirit still trapped in the pain of what was done to her.

Join me on my website and take part in the investigation: www.candleface.com.