01 Aug Passover

Posted at 17:58h in Strange and Unexplained by CreepypastaStories.com 0 Comments

📅 Published on August 1, 2025

“Passover”

Written by Grey Walker
Edited by Craig Groshek
Thumbnail Art by Craig Groshek
Narrated by N/A

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⏰ ESTIMATED READING TIME — 8 minutes

Rating: 10.00/10. From 1 vote.

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The 1960s were a hell of a decade. Between ‘Nam, the Civil Rights movement, the Cold War, and JFK, saying things were insane would be a massive understatement. Of course, with my tiny hometown of Harley, Mississippi, being the isolated Southern farming community that it was, didn’t have much in the way of outside information. We had a town newspaper, but it didn’t bring the news in until at least a week after the rest of the country had learned about it. I still don’t know if what happened was a result of the turbulence or the other way around.

It had been just another scorching day in July of 1968. I remember that I was twelve then. I had been sent out of the house to go pick up a few things from the local grocery store. The clerk, a kindly old man by the name of Max, bade me goodbye with a warm smile, telling me to say hi to my mom for him. That’s how it was most days. Today, though, something was different. As I walked down the sidewalk, groceries in hand, I noticed a group of townsfolk gathered in the town center, muttering and whispering in confusion. Puzzled, I went over to the crowd and asked my friend, Matt, what was going on.

“You mean you haven’t heard?” he asked, looking at me like I was stupid. “Some preacher fella’s came here this mornin’.”

I hadn’t heard. And the announcement that someone new had come was enough to perk my ears up. We didn’t get visitors often, much less from wandering holy men. Peering over the sweaty shoulders of several men, I caught a glimpse of the preacher, and immediately I sensed something wrong with him. At first glance, one might mistake him for just a standard religious man, wearing a long, dark priest’s robe and a wide-brimmed hat, as well as a pair of spectacles. Two things struck me as truly strange, though. The first was his face. His eyes were beady like a crow’s, and he had a wrinkled, elderly face. He was smiling sadly and pitifully, the sort of smile one might expect a grandfather to give to his child after telling them he had a terminal illness. The second was the book his veiny hands clutched. It wasn’t like any Bible I’d ever seen. It was adorned with all manner of strange symbols. Even after years of research, I’ve never been able to determine their origin. The only discernible thing on it was the design of a locust on the cover.

The preacher stood, facing the crowd, which had grown over the past few minutes to include most of Harley if not all of it, including my mother, who had wondered what was taking me so long. Then he spoke in a wavering voice. “My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me.” Then he bowed his head and began to weep. It was quiet and soft, as if he were determined not to let us hear him. Tears fell from his bespectacled eyes. Then he said in resignation, “Yet not my will, but yours be done.”

I knew that verse: Jesus in Gethsemane. But why was this man here to preach *that* of all verses? And why was he crying? Was he just so overtaken by the emotion felt by Jesus in that verse that he just had to express it aloud?

That was when it began.

We watched, puzzled by the preacher’s sudden appearance and his tears, when we noticed something. He wasn’t crying anymore. Now he was chuckling. His shoulders shook as he laughed, his voice slowly rising before his head snapped up to reveal his face, still wet with tears but now stretched into an impossible rictus of a grin as he cackled. His beady eyes were now large, green, and bloodshot. Everyone gasped, backing away, with several younger kids crying. As quickly as the preacher’s laughter started, it stopped. He just stood there, grinning like a fox in a hen house, completely still save for a twitch every so often. The town sheriff, 45-year-old Richard Lloyd, stepped forward uneasily, yet mustering all of the toughness of his 20-plus years in law enforcement. I suppose he still figured that this man was still just that: a normal man, albeit with a severe mental condition.

“Mister?” he said with as much authority as possible. “I don’t know who you are, or what you’re doing here, but I’m going to have to ask you to leave.” The preacher ignored him, not even sparing him a glance. “Mister, didn’t you hear me?” Richard said firmly. “You’re terrorizing these good folks. If you won’t leave on foot, I’ll have to take you in cuffs.”

Even the threat of arrest wasn’t enough to warrant the preacher’s attention. Growing impatient, Richard decided to be the first to approach him, reaching for his cuffs and opening them. Then as he was about to remove the book from the preacher’s hands, it happened. With a speed and strength that shouldn’t have been possible for a man his age, he grabbed Richard’s arm and lifted the opened cuff to his throat. In the same motion, he buried it into his flesh and drew it across his neck, slashing it open. Blood gushed from the wound, and poor Richard, shocked by the sudden display of power, had no time to even grasp at his wound until it was too late.

It all happened within a fraction of a second. It didn’t occur to us what had happened until Richard’s body lay twitching and bleeding. Then pandemonium set in. Most people screamed, running to protect their loved ones, while several fruitlessly tried to stop the bleeding, which the preacher made no attempt to prevent. He glanced at them sideways, though, smiling the whole time. It was obvious that he was mocking their attempts to assist him. All too soon, the sheriff lay still. The deputy, John Callow, snapped out of his shock to remove his service pistol from his belt.

“Get on the ground!” he snarled, anger over his boss and friend’s death overriding his shock and horror. “Get on the ground now!”

The preacher did nothing, but his chest shook slightly with restrained chuckles. I guess what happened next was inevitable. Enraged, John pulled the trigger, and the bullet struck the preacher in the head. He kept standing, even as blood poured in rivulets from the hole in his head. Dumbfounded, John unloaded all of his rounds into the preacher. Still, the monster stood there, grinning at the people who had retreated into their homes or the nearest buildings, with Max pulling me and my mother into the grocery store. As John began to reload, the preacher extended a hand and again moved unnaturally fast. He seized the deputy’s face, digging his fingertips into his skull.

We heard only the beginning of a scream before the crunch, then poor John fell lifelessly to the ground. Then he returned to his spot. The wounds on his body didn’t seem to affect him at all, and despite taking bullet after bullet, the only thing that had been accomplished was making his grinning face that much more ghoulish and staining his robe. How I wish that this had been it. How I wish that after killing our town’s sheriff and his deputy the preacher would leave us. But life can’t be that fair for anyone.

He opened his “Bible” and chanted in a bizarre language, gesturing at the corpses. Then he lifted a hand to the sky and raised his voice as if pleading with God for some miracle. Then in English, he cried out, “RICHARD! JONATHAN! RISE AND WALK AGAIN!”

Then, as odd and scary as things had been before, they became worse. The bodies of Sheriff Lloyd and Deputy Callow stood up as if it were the most natural thing in the world. They walked over to the preacher and knelt before him, saying something that we couldn’t hear from inside. He placed a hand on both of them in what looked to be a comforting gesture, and they stood up. The sheriff’s throat was still bleeding, and there was blood leaking from the deputy’s crushed skull, but they now sported the exact same grins as the preacher who had invaded our town.

For three hours, they just stood, staring, smiling as the blood ran from them. Then a man named Nick Webb, our resident “town drunk”, grew tired of waiting for someone to do something. “Damn you, preacher man!” he yelled, stone-sober for once as he broke a glass bottle and stupidly advanced on the preacher. “I don’t rightly know what god you worshippin’, but he ain’t no god I ever heard of and you—”

The preacher interrupted by pointing at Nick. All at once, Nick stopped, then he fell to the ground, covering his eyes as he howled in agony. Even as he cried out, the preacher quoted Scripture again.

“Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind? Neither this man nor his parents sinned, but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him.”

Once he was finished, he gestured at Nick to stand, which he did, then joined the deputy and sheriff at the preacher’s side. His eyes were milky, and he now had the same matching grin as the others.

The next week was Hell. I don’t say that as hyperbole; if there’s a Hell, then we got a taste of it for the whole week that the preacher was there. Every day, he would randomly point at someone’s house, speak some verse from Scripture along with the inhuman language that I assume his book was written in, and one of the adult occupants would exit. Several houses’ occupants tried to stop them, but after the first couple of screams followed by silence from their children, nobody else did. I never saw Matt again, and after seeing his mother emerge from the house covered in blood, maybe that’s for the best.

Then came the seventh day. Twelve of the adults had joined the preacher, all injured in some way, all smiling. The preacher stepped forward, then called out to the sky in that same language. Something new happened. The symbols on his book glowed a sickly green color. The clear sky darkened as *something* descended. I say “something” because I only got a look at it for a few seconds before Max covered my eyes. It was too late, though. What little I saw was burned into my memory.

It was enormous, almost as big as an aircraft carrier, if I had to guess. It was dark all over, and the best thing to liken its body to would be a locust. There was certainly a loud buzzing to support this, and its skin was made of some chitinous material. But its face… My God, its face. It stared at its “followers” with a face all too human, despite its insect eyes. It bore the same grin that tormented us for the past week, only this belonged to something beyond this world, beyond all logic.

Then came the culmination of our week of horror. The preacher made one final declaration, but he wasn’t smiling anymore. Now he was weeping. “My Lord, into your hands I commit my spirit!” he cried out. Then the damn thing spoke in the preacher’s voice, but it was now a hissing, throaty, distorted mess, with a sadistic, mocking tone to it.

“Well done, good and faithful servant.”

Then it ate him, followed by the twelve who joined him. But it didn’t just pick them up and swallow them, no. It chewed, just as a locust might do to crops. It ate everything, down to the last drop of blood they had shed. And then, just like that, it left without a trace save for the bodies of those who tried to stop its “food”, and something else. The book the preacher held now lay in the center of town. Nobody dared to touch it. Understandably, everyone alive skipped town by the end of that month. By then, Harley, Mississippi was a veritable ghost town.

That was about 55 years ago. I never went back to Mississippi, let alone Harley. To this day, I don’t know what exactly happened there, who the preacher was, or how he and that thing did what they did. There is something I do know, however. Two weeks ago, I found a video on YouTube of some urban explorer who apparently liked to record his findings of old ghost towns nobody’s ever heard of before. It wouldn’t have caught my interest, except for the title of the video: “Harley, Mississippi.” I watched as he wandered the empty streets of my hometown. Of course, finding human bones in some of the houses scared him, but unfortunately, not enough to scare him into leaving. Before he could, he focused the camera on a small, black object in the center of town.

I knew what it was, and I silently pleaded, Don’t, please don’t. He reached a trembling hand out and picked it up. I averted my eyes. I never wanted to see that damn book again, let alone read it. He was nervous from what I could hear, but he made a note to report the bodies to the State Police. He hasn’t uploaded any videos since then, and his subscribers appear to have noticed. I write this as a warning. If a strange preacher with a book like that comes to your town, you need to hightail it out of there. If you can’t do that, then I’m afraid all I can say is, “Good luck.”