Candle Face Victim #17: Taken for Not Believing

March 4, 2024

Main Subjects: Candle Face

• Victim #17

I think I finally fell asleep sometime around 4:00 a.m. after hours on the couch scrolling through Facebook and watching YouTube videos. Then my house alarm went off and snapped me awake. By the time I silenced it, a man was standing there in khakis and a button-down shirt. He started talking before I could collect myself.

In Austin, people talked about Candle Face like she was real. I never bought any of it. I was a software engineer. I trusted systems, logic, and things I could test. Ghost stories belonged to bad sleep, stress, or people seeing what they expected to see.

The night it started, I was buried in work, with nothing but the light from my screen filling the apartment. Everything felt normal until the room grew hot. At first, I ignored it. Then I checked the thermostat. Then I saw her out of the corner of my eye.

She was standing there, small, burned, and impossible. Her face was a ruin, and her eyes were fixed on mine. I froze.

“Why do you keep rejecting what is right in front of you?” she asked, her voice calm. Too calm.

I shook my head and tried to hold on to reason. “Ghosts aren’t real. You’re not real. You’re stress, lack of sleep, something in my head.”

“Am I?” she asked. Her voice stayed even, but there was something sad in it, as if she had heard that answer too many times. “You dismiss anything you cannot explain.”

I stood up, hoping movement alone would break whatever this was. “You’re a myth. A story. That’s all.”

She stepped closer, and the heat in the room climbed. “Your disbelief does not erase me,” she said.

I turned back toward my computer, trying to shut her out. “You’re not real,” I said, though I could hear the weakness in my own voice.

She laughed, low and soft. “You will learn soon enough,” she said.

I didn’t sleep that night. Every time I closed my eyes, I felt watched. I kept seeing her face, burned and twisted. The shadows in my apartment seemed to move on their own. Even the silence felt wrong.

The next day, I tried to put it aside. I kept looking over my shoulder. I checked the thermostat twice. I walked through the apartment. I told myself there had to be a reason for what I had seen. It still got to me.

Then it got worse. Objects in my apartment shifted. Bursts of heat came out of nowhere. And her voice kept following me. “Why will you not believe what you see?” she would ask again and again, as if she meant to wear me down.

I started staying out as late as I could, wandering around Austin just to avoid going home. But she followed me there too. She was always somewhere just beyond sight, there enough that I felt it and still couldn’t prove it.

One night, I reached my limit. “What do you want from me?” I shouted into the empty apartment.

She stepped out of the shadows as if she had been waiting for that question. “Belief,” she said. “Say I am real. Admit what happened to me.”

Even then, I clung to the last of my logic. “I can’t believe in something that makes no sense.”

Her expression hardened.

“Then you leave me no choice,” she said.

The walls of my apartment disappeared, and Austin was gone. I was somewhere else, somewhere empty and burning hot. She stood there with a faint glow around her, her hollow eyes on me.

“Where am I?” I asked.

She tilted her head. “Where the ones who deny me end up.”

“Let me go. I’ll believe, I promise!”

Her eyes narrowed. “Too late,” she said.

I tried to run, but there was nowhere to go. She moved toward me, her burned hands reaching out.

“Please!” I begged. “I believe in you. I do!”

She didn’t stop. Her hand touched my face, and it felt like fire tearing through me. I screamed, but there was no one there to hear it.

After that, I was gone. They found my apartment untouched, but there was no sign of me. People around here still talk about it. The ones who believe in Candle Face say she took me for not believing.

Without another word, he turned, walked back into the dark corner of my living room, and disappeared. I checked my surveillance footage afterward, but there was no sign of him.

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.