07 May Her Tongue Too Long

Posted at 11:00h in Deaths, Murders, and Disappearances, Folklore and Folktales, Ghosts and Spirits, Monsters, Creatures, and Cryptids, Period Pieces by CreepypastaStories.com 1 Comment

📅 Published on May 7, 2020

“Her Tongue Too Long”

Written by David Feuling
Edited by Craig Groshek and Chris Buza
Thumbnail Art by David Romero
Narrated by Otis Jiry

Copyright Statement: Unless explicitly stated, all stories published on CreepypastaStories.com are the property of (and under copyright to) their respective authors, and may not be narrated or performed, adapted to film, television or audio mediums, republished in a print or electronic book, reposted on any other website, blog, or online platform, or otherwise monetized without the express written consent of its author(s).

🎧 Available Audio Adaptations: Scary Stories Told in the Dark – 🔑 Podcast (Extended Edition) (feat. Otis Jiry)

⏰ ESTIMATED READING TIME — 6 minutes

Rating: 9.40/10. From 15 votes.

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In places where the very old traditions still hold, August is known as “the ghost month.” Hungry ghosts are said to roam the streets and hillsides, especially at night and especially when things are quiet. Some say that hungry ghosts are created when someone innocent dies a violent or unfair death. Others say the hungry ghosts are created by a person’s own misdeeds, their sins tainting their souls even in death.

One thing that is agreed upon is that the spirits always seek something that they craved in life. But they will not find it alone. Those who are still alive can do little to ease their suffering or help them along, but it is important to do all that we can. Offerings are one way to soothe a hungry ghost’s pain. For this reason, if you see a meal or small gift offered to the dead, it is in your best interest to leave it alone.

People often describe the hungry ghosts as having something wrong with their mouths, such that they cannot satisfy their swollen bellies. Sometimes a throat is as thin as a needle, or sometimes a mouth is sealed shut. The first ghost that Barton Edmund ever saw was not badly deformed. She didn’t have fetid breath or bulging eyes. The only clue as to how she died was that her tongue was far too long, dancing like a snake from her open mouth.

Mr. Edmund visited a town where the very old traditions still hold. It was a sweltering August day, and the town was bustling with preparations to honor the dead. As he walked he noticed that countless offerings had been crowded beneath a single hillside tree on the outskirts of the town. He asked a passerby why there should be so many gifts offered in a single place like that. “That’s where the nobleman’s daughter died,” the passerby told him. He did not seem inclined to say anything else.

On an evening walk that night, Mr. Edmund enjoyed the soft light of a gibbous moon and listened to the dry rattle of cicadas in the trees. At the hillside tree that was packed with gifts for the dead, a few candles burned. They produced a dim light, and cast the tree in an eerie state of dusk that existed only around the offerings. The candles had burned for hours already, and their flames were now nearly drowned by molten wax. One of the candles puffed out as he approached the tree on the hill.

Among the offerings was a framed ink drawing of the nobleman’s daughter. Mr. Edmund stooped to examine it more closely. She had been lovely in life, he thought to himself as he looked at the image. The drawing was preserved admirably. Someone must have guarded it as a dear keepsake. The woman in the frame wore clothing from centuries ago.

It was then that Mr. Edmund felt he was not alone. A growl, followed by a rasping bark, sounded from very near behind him. As he heard it the last of the dying candles blew out in a rush of freezing air. The specter brought with her a chill that coursed over the hillside. He turned and recognized the nobleman’s daughter immediately. Her clothing, her eyes, and her gorgeously thick hair were exactly as the ink drawing had depicted them.

No one had told how him how the nobleman’s daughter had died. But in his terror, Mr. Edmund now understood. Tradition holds that the hungry ghosts of those who die by hanging are disfigured in a unique way. It was precisely how the nobleman’s daughter appeared to him that night.

Her tongue dangled from her open throat, trailing past a badly broken jaw and nearly reaching her chest. The tongue was inhumanly long and it heaved around as though trying to escape her mouth entirely. The lower half of the woman’s formerly lovely smile was fully unhinged. Her jawbone was disarticulated from the skull, now only connected to her face by sallow flesh.

The tongue – bright red despite the corpselike pallor of her skin – lolled about uselessly and produced no sound. Mr. Edmund drew an inch nearer to the wraith despite his fear. He had to confirm a dreadful detail that he thought he the moonlight illuminated. Yes, he could now see it. The nobleman’s daughter still wore the heavy, braided noose that ended her life. Cinched tightly around her throat, the rope frayed away past the hangman’s knot. The result was a heavy collar that she could not remove.

A second rasping bark alerted Mr. Edmund to the phantasmal beast standing between the spirit and himself. Straining tautly at a chain held by the nobleman’s daughter was a deformed and hellish creature. Moving much like a predatory dog, it seemed eager to rip him apart. He had not noticed its presence earlier, because the thing crouched in the shadows of the dead woman’s form. It only moved to confront him as he stepped forward toward the nobleman’s daughter.

The leashed monstrosity was large enough to be a wolf. But if it was a wolf, then its pelt had gone missing. Rather than fur, the creature was covered with irregular and heavily scarred flesh. In the low light, Barton judged that the hound must have been burned, or perhaps scalded, all over its body. Its skin was a patchwork of necrotic gray and shiny-smooth pink. The miserable animal only looked healthy in the places where stretch marks had revealed new flesh from beneath the surface.

The ghost of the nobleman’s daughter let a few links of the chain slip through her clenched fist, allowing her dog-like thing to approach Mr. Edmund more closely. The beast still d sought to attack, and as he fell backwards in terror, Mr. Edmund saw the yellow gleam of its bared teeth. Worse still, he noticed that it had no eyes or ears. Whatever had damaged the ghoul’s skin also left it with dark holes where those should have been. Scrambling down the hill away from the tree, Mr. Edmund thought the creature would be upon him at any moment. As he turned to look back toward the shrine of offerings, however, there was no hint of the woman’s presence. Her monstrous pet had disappeared as well.

He learned from the townspeople that the woman with the grotesque tongue and the braided rope necklet had taken her own life. It was the end of a tragic love story, they told him. Mr. Edmund pressed for more information, but he only learned that the nobleman’s daughter once loved the animal trapper’s son. The nobleman was a cruel man and hated the animal trapper because of all the noisy and foul-smelling dogs he kept. The nobleman forbade his daughter to be married to the son of a commoner, especially one he detested so. When the two lovers would not submit to his demands, the nobleman did something truly awful. No one Mr. Edmund asked could say precisely what had transpired, but everyone agreed that after his daughter saw what the nobleman had done, she hanged herself in grief.

He heard deep and rasping barks on the second night that he stayed in that haunted town. Looking out of his room’s window, he saw a tall silhouette by the hillside tree where the offerings had been piled. Barton retrieved binoculars from his bag and used them to observe the hill from afar. He felt his pulse turn to ice as the magnified image revealed the woman with the too-long tongue staring directly into Barton’s lit window.

Worse still, as his trembling hands fumbled to focus the binoculars, Mr. Edmund could see that her hellish dog was still hunched in the shadows at her feet. It also looked in the direction of Barton’s window. It stared at him with empty eye sockets and sniffed the air with nostrils that were barely more than snakelike slits in its face. A truly unnatural dog, its snout was truncated, barely pronounced. Except in the way that it moved about, the beast was unlike any species of canine that Mr. Edmund had ever seen.

He asked those who would answer about monstrous dogs in the village or about whether a ghostly and misshapen wolf had been sighted in the past. “Yes,” a few brave townsfolk told him, always lowering their voices to a whisper as they did so. “We’ve heard the barking and the baying of an unholy animal on many dark nights.”

A few had even seen the apparition Mr. Edmund described and confirmed that the nobleman’s daughter always led it about, just as he had seen it. No one could explain how she had obtained such a frightful pet in the afterlife or why the creature guarded her so jealously. Mr. Edmund was maddened by the mystery of it, and so he persisted in his questions. He was eventually told that the local innkeeper – the very man with whom he had been boarding – knew more than most about the old stories of the nobleman’s daughter.

“There’s no such thing as a demon hound,” the innkeeper told Mr. Edmund gruffly. “The only ghosts in this town are the nobleman’s daughter and the animal trapper’s son.”

“I never saw the animal trapper’s son,” Barton insisted. “The daughter is always alone. There is not another human soul in sight, except for those of us who witness her. The only thing that walks with her is that monstrous, blind dog.”

“There is no dog,” said the innkeeper firmly. “The nobleman crippled the trapper’s son, and forced him for months to walk on all fours. He told the boy that he was just another of his father’s filthy curs. He broke the boy’s mind with torture and didn’t relent until the poor lad truly believed that he was an animal. After the nobleman had taught him to snarl and gnaw at scraps on the floor, the animal trapper’s son was presented to the town. After that, the nobleman had the broken son boiled alive, and the daughter was forced to watch her love die like an animal. What you saw were the daughter and her lover. Despite torment and death, they are still hopelessly devoted to each other.”

In the morning, Mr. Barton Edmund left an offering by the tree on the hill and fled that place forever. August comes and goes, but countless ghosts remain.