Candle Face Victim #25 and #26: The Pen Pal Letters

April 17, 2024

Main subjects:

• Victim #25
• Victim #26

• Candle Face

I arrived in Sugar Land, Texas, for a conference late that evening, much earlier than I expected. Traffic wasn’t nearly as bad as I feared. Since I had time to spare, I stopped at Schlotzsky’s for a quick meal. Afterward, I still had an hour or more to kill, so I sat in my car and planned to watch puppy videos on YouTube until it was time.

Then it happened.

While I was scrolling through my phone, the locked passenger door suddenly swung open. A young woman in her twenties got into my car without hesitation. My first reaction was fear. I thought I was being robbed, until I saw that half of her head was gone. In that instant, I understood. She was another visitor, and she had come to tell me what happened to her.

She didn’t look afraid, and she didn’t look hostile. She only looked at me with tired eyes, the kind that had seen more than I could understand. Then she started to speak, and I sat there in silence, waiting for whatever she was about to tell me.

This is her story:

Living in Austin, a city full of myths and legends, I had always been a skeptic. Out of all of them, Candle Face amused me the most. To me, she was just another story people told to scare kids or fool gullible adults. I never thought my disbelief would be tested.

It started with my secret pen pal in San Francisco. We didn’t use Facebook or social media. We wrote letters. We’d been writing each other for years about our lives, our hopes, and sometimes our fears. But after a while, something in her letters changed. They started taking on this unsettling tone. She kept bringing up ghosts, vampires, and other things like that.

One day, she wrote to me about the Bloody Mary ritual, something I’d heard about a hundred times growing up. I brushed it off, played along, and even tried it myself in front of the bathroom mirror. Nothing happened, of course, and I laughed at how ridiculous it felt.

But as the months passed, her letters got stranger. She wrote more and more about the supernatural. She described things she said she’d seen, things she said had happened to her. The way she wrote started building this picture of a world where folklore and legend had real power, and it felt like she was getting pulled into it.

Then one evening, I got a letter from her that felt different from the rest. Her handwriting, usually neat and careful, looked rushed and shaky. She begged me to find information about Candle Face, the ghost of Austin, and send it to her. It was like she thought learning more about Candle Face would explain whatever had started haunting her.

I should have taken it seriously. I made things up. I thought it would lighten the mood. I wrote her a letter full of fake details and creepy made-up stories about Candle Face, like it was all some joke.

I filled that letter with made-up legends, each one worse than the last. I described Candle Face as a vengeful spirit hungry for the souls of skeptics. Then I mailed it.

Two weeks went by without another letter from my pen pal. I started to worry. I started thinking maybe I had gone too far. So I walked to the post office to send another letter, this time admitting that everything I’d written about Candle Face was fake.

On the way home, I kept thinking about her and how she seemed to be slipping deeper into those fears. While I was lost in thought, I ran into a boy I’d known in high school. We started talking, and it came easy, almost too easy. Before I knew it, hours had passed.

As the sun got lower, he offered to walk me home. It was kind of him, but I wanted to be alone for a while. I wanted the quiet of the woods near my neighborhood, the place that had always felt safe to me. So I told him I’d be fine and went to a clearing in the woods that I’d always thought of as my own.

I sat on a familiar log and thought about my pen pal again. I wanted to write to her about the boy I’d just seen, about something normal and hopeful, something that might pull her away from all the darkness she’d been feeding. I wanted to remind her there was still beauty in the world outside myths and ghost stories.

But that night, the woods felt wrong. They felt alert, like something was waiting for me. Then I heard faint voices. I couldn’t make out much, just words like “Believe” and “Accept.” I didn’t know what they meant. I tried to tell myself it was my imagination.

Then a warm gust of wind moved through the trees. I turned, and what I saw filled me with dread.

Standing there was Candle Face.

She looked worse than anything I had ever mocked or imagined. Her face looked like it was melting, like wax running down from a flame. In that moment, I understood the stories hadn’t come close to what she really was. And I understood something else. She was there because of me.

“Are you going to kill me?” I asked. I could hear the fear in my own voice.

“Yes, of course,” Candle Face said, laughing.

“Why?” I asked.

Her mouth curled into a cruel smile. Her voice rasped like dry leaves dragged across stone. “Because, little girl, you mocked me. You denied my existence. You used me in your joke and wrote lies to your pen pal. Your inventions brought me here.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it. I thought it was harmless,” I said, panicking.

“Sorry means nothing,” she said. “There are enough true horrors about me already, and you still chose to invent more. There is no need for false stories. Every lie invites disbelief. Every joke weakens the fear I feed on.”

Then she leaned closer, and her face seemed to melt faster as she got angrier. “Your pen pal,” she said, “she feared me. She respected me. Her fear fed me well, and so did her body. But you mocked me in your letters. Now her soul belongs to me, twisted by the true stories I whispered to her at night, stories untouched by your foolish little inventions.”

“What did you do to her?” I shouted.“

I told her the truth to fight your lies. Now she entertains my shadows. She is bound to me forever, and it is because of you.”

Then Candle Face moved even closer. “And you,” she hissed, “will join her soon enough. The two of you will scream together while the shadows have their way with you. Your secretions will soak into the soil of my underworld and draw even more shadows to you.”

She pressed her mouth to my right ear and whispered, “And your screams, there will be many. The shadows will enjoy every one of them.”

I started crying then, because I understood what I had done and what was about to happen to me. Candle Face shoved me off the log until I was on my back, my legs thrown up, helpless under her strength.

Then, calm as could be, she picked up a large rock. She raised it over my head while laughter filled the air. When it came down, death came with it. But not before I felt the shadows spreading my legs. They were already waiting for their turn.

She finished her testimony so quietly that I almost missed her last words. She asked if she could stay a little longer. She told me that when she was near me, the shadows couldn’t hurt her. I said nothing. I knew too well that answering might draw Candle Face’s anger onto her again. I can only hope she understood why I stayed silent. She opened the car door, stepped out, and walked toward the dark shapes waiting for her near the restaurant dumpsters until she was gone. I could hear the shadows shrieking with excitement as she disappeared.

Personal Note to My Readers

I’m asking again for help. So far, we have only managed to help four of the twenty-six Lost Souls who have come to me. This young woman and the person she called her pen pal are still trapped in something far beyond anything I can untangle on my own. I need to know whether readers, investigators, or anyone else willing to take this seriously can help bring some kind of peace to these souls. There may still be a way to free them from Candle Face’s lair.

This is the first time I can remember hearing of Candle Face reaching beyond Central Texas, at least based on what I have gathered so far. But even that remains uncertain. The spirits don’t come to me in the same order as Candle Face encountered them. The thought that her power may be spreading scares me more than almost anything else. Stay alert, and if you know something that may help, share it.