I go to a small community college in Arizona. I've been working on my Digital Imagery & Video Production certificate for about two semesters now. The college allows me to go in and put in some extra hours of work on my videos before releasing them and displaying them at the small art gallery across from the art department, not to mention that I also work there after classes as well.
Our campus is out on the highway about 10 miles from my town, very isolated and gloomy on most days. The college is surrounded by desert and tall mountains. The college decided to move the art building closer to the other classrooms, since we are in a solitary building that takes a while to walk to. They gutted the small building and left the Digital Photography and Video Production class rooms for last.
One night after I find my shift at work, I decided to work on one of my videos since it was due the following week. We use some expensive new generation Mac computers, but I had always noticed a small beat-up Mac that hid in the back of one of the closets. Since my supervisor had gone home, I decided to hook the little sucker up and see if there was anything interesting on it. I plugged it in, and it took a while to boot up.
Finally, the welcome screen showed up. There were two accounts. One that read "Instructor" and the other that read "Student". I logged into the student account and I skimmed through various student pictures as I noticed they all had the same man in the background. A balding middle-aged male, his eyes were as blue as a picture of a nebula. His grin in every single picture was wide and his eyes seemed to gaze straight through my soul. At the end of the long list of pictures I found a .MOV file. It was titled Crawl.MOV.
Since it was around 8 at night, I started getting uncomfortable. The name of the file made my heart beat fast, I wanted to watch, but I knew I was going to regret it. I called my friend to pick me up. Since I was 10 miles away from town and the buses never run so late, I had about 15 minutes before my friend actually arrived to take me home. I clicked on the file and it popped up on Quicktime. My hands were clammy, and my eyes darted across the small window. It faded in slowly, with a sort of sad, sorrowful song. Then appeared the title, Crawl, in bold red text. It faded out and it quickly cut to a shot in the desert at night. All I could hear were footsteps on gravel, and bushes and weeds being swatted out of someone's way. I began to feel relieved, and assured myself that it was only a student edit. I laughed as I remembered myself being scared to even open the file.
I looked down at my phone and checked for any new notifications as the video played. I looked up, and stopped as my jaw dropped open. What I saw was gruesome and horrifying. A man was covered in blood, and he was exactly the same man in the pictures I had seen just a couple of minutes ago. The shot was of only his face in the beginning, but soon panned down and revealed him sawing through what looked to be a bone. His smile... his smile was still painted across his face. The camera zoomed out and there he was. A petite brunette, her eyes wide with fear as the man was sawing through her leg. I cupped my hand over my mouth. I tried to convince myself that the video was edited, just special effects, but it all looked so real. The footage was so raw, and it showed no signs of being played with whatsoever.
All there was through the whole video was silence. The look on the girl's face. That face I still to this day can't forget. About five minutes passed by and it finally cut to black. I leaned back into my chair, thinking to myself, "What the fuck did I just see?" All of a sudden I started hearing noises, and the screen was still black, but I remembered I hadn't lowered the volume. Slowly but surely, I started making out little whimpers, it was the girl. I hovered over the time bar and the video was still going. It had about five more minutes left. The whimpers grew louder and louder. The black seemed to be growing lighter and lighter, until finally, a dirt road came into focus. The girl was thrown in the middle of the road, shivering and twitching, still alive. Both of her legs... missing. There was chanting in the background behind the camera. It got louder and louder, "Satan is my father and Hell is my home," over and over again. It was a man's voice. I gritted my teeth as I was growing more nervous by the second. The chanting stopped. Then he began to whistle, like he was trying to get the girl's attention, like a person would to a dog.
Then he said, "Come here girl, crawl, you can do it, crawl." The girl looked straight into the camera.
Her eyes were bloodshot. Distorted, they sure as hell didn't look human to me. She turned herself onto her stomach and lifted her hands above her head and started to pull her body towards the camera. This sinister grin started to grow on her lips. The skin on her face was pale, bruised and cut up. All you could hear was her body and the dirt below her. Slowly making her way closer and closer. She finally reached the foot of the man's feet. She had left behind a trail of blood. She looked up and shrieked. I've never in my life have heard such a terrible bloodcurdling sound. Sort of like a pig squealing and the sound of a baby crying. I quickly unplugged the computer and put it back in its place. I closed up the room and almost sprinted outside. As I pushed the door to the building open, my friend rolled up the parking lot and I got in as fast as I could. I hardly spoke on my way home, and thanked him for the ride.
The next morning, I told my supervisor about the video and what I had seen. He laughed and these were his exact words. "Who finally told you that ghost story?" I told him I could show him where it was, I pulled the computer out of the closet and plugged it in. I tried the power button but nothing happened. He proceeded to tell me that the computer had been broken, just sitting there for a couple of years now. He said that the ghost story around the college was about a girl from the dorms that had been kidnapped and dragged out into the desert. Her legs cut off and she was offered as a sacrifice to Satan by one of the staff members from the Ceramics department. He assured me it was just a tale to keep students from the dorms from going out into the desert at night.
My supervisor added, "Some people say they can hear someone whistling in the desert at night, calling for someone to crawl. Something like, 'Come here girl, Crawl, you can do it, Crawl,' but I think that's just a load of bullshit."