Candle Face Victim #12: Laughing at the Water's Edge

January 23, 2024

Main Subjects: Candle Face

• Victim #12

It had been two weeks since my last nocturnal visitor. I was starting to think they had all given up on me, assuming I couldn’t help them. I’ve tried, though. I’ve contacted a long list of supposed paranormal “experts,” from investigators to mediums and psychics, and I’ve even shared the spirits’ testimonies on a podcast. So far, no one has stepped forward in any serious way.

Then last night, while I was in the kitchen making a snack, I heard the sunroom door creak open. My first thought was that someone had broken in, and I braced myself. But when I turned, I found another Lost Soul.

He was a middle-aged man, soaked from head to toe, and he stayed mostly in the shadows as he came toward me. After two weeks of silence, I felt relief. I hadn’t been abandoned. Without any prompting, he began telling me what happened.

It was a warm night, and I was stumbling home from a party, still laughing at the ghost stories we’d been joking about all evening. The one about a young ghost girl? Ridiculous.

I was too busy amusing myself to notice the streetlights dimming one by one.

“Believe in some kid ghost?” I scoffed into the dark. “It’s all just a bunch of BS.”

She stepped out from the treeline on the north side of Longhorn Dam so suddenly it felt like she’d been standing there the whole time, waiting for me to say it.

“You do not believe,” she said, her voice calm.

I tried to laugh it off. “This can’t be real,” I said, and I could hear the fear in it.

“Real enough,” she replied.

I wanted to run, but my legs felt heavy, like the night itself was holding me in place. The water was only a few steps away, its surface barely catching what little light was left.

“Why me?” I asked, and now my voice was shaking for real.

She tilted her head and looked at me with her hollow eyes. “Because you laughed at me,” she said. “You mocked what you did not understand. Now you become part of my story.”

Her small hand reached out and grabbed my arm. Her grip was firm, and I couldn’t move. I couldn’t scream. She started pulling me toward the water.

“You will not be forgotten,” she said. There was nothing comforting in it.

Before I knew what was happening, I was under. The water closed over my head, cold and suffocating. Her laughter echoed around me.

As the water filled my lungs, I understood too late that Candle Face was real, and that I had just become part of her story.

When he finished, he thanked me for listening. Then, just as quietly as he had come in, he went back through the sunroom door and disappeared into the night.

He kept coughing as he told his story. Each time he did, water poured from his mouth. It was hard to watch. He grimaced through nearly every word.

When he first came in, I told myself he was soaked from rain. But the amount of water coming from his mouth felt like a clue. Rain couldn’t explain that. It was as if the water itself had stayed attached to his death.

The investigation continues in the three most recent entries below. Each adds to the record on Candle Face (Isabel), the Lost Souls, and the Fugitives. You’ll find every entry to date in The Journal.