The Face in the Middle of the Dark



At the end of the 1980's, a horrible murder took place. It was worse than you can ever imagine. It was so gruesome that the investigators refused to release information to the press. In the middle of the day, in a small village in Russia, laid a newly bought house. It was bought by a 29 year old lady named Amanda Branksnovitsch.

The reason the house was sold was because the lady who lived there before had heard a weird creaking noise that made it impossible for her to sleep, but it was fixed shortly before Amanda moved in. But after the moving was finished, the creaking came back. She tried to find the creaking's source, but whenever she found what may have been the source of the sound, it disappeared. Five days later, she began to hear a knocking too. What ''is going on? ''She thought.

After a while she found out that the noise came from the biggest wall in the house, the one standing against the bathroom. She couldn't make sense of a damn thing. She looked into the bathroom, but all she saw were blue tiles of marble reflecting the lamp hanging from the ceiling. She looked all around, and after dusk she found a crack in the roof. She was so desperate to stop the noises that she ran down the stairs to the kitchen, got a roasting fork and spent 1 hour and 23 minutes to make a bigger hole in the crack.

Then she walked outside into her giant treeless garden, got a stepladder and climbed into the ceiling armed just with a photographic camera so she would be able to see what was causing the noises after the print was developed. Inside, it was dark like a black hole. She got to the wall where the creaking noise came from, but accidentally, she fell into the gap inside it.

She was stuck, and sat there horrified and wondered what she should do, stuck in the dark, empty, grim gap. She stared into the nothingness, but then she heard a weak, hoarse, whispering laugh about 5 inches from the back of her head. She barely managed to turn her head around, but she wished she never did that. It was a face in the middle of dark.

She got out her camera, only slightly able to see what was producing the menacing noise, and hit the shutter button as quickly as possible before being frozen in fear. She was found dead two hours later, her charred corpse seeming incredibly mutilated. The face of a scream was stuck on her face, preserving the state she was in right before she died.

It was believed the whole slaughter of the young woman went on for a grueling 20 minutes. The cause of death was covered up and the only definitive evidence, the photograph which she took with her camera, was not revealed to the press.

When the police looked at the image they could barely make out a face in the photograph. But the face was clearly not of a human. The mouth was elongated, the eyes were too large and un-natural and the general facial anatomy of the creature in the camera were all wrong. When the police tore down the woman's house from top-to-bottom, absolutely nothing was found which suggested that such a woman had ever lived anywhere near the area where the photograph was taken. The case was declared un—solveable.

It was not until 2004, long after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the beginning of the freedom of the press in the country was the case brought up again. A relative of Branksnovitsch lead an inquest into the photograph and the police gave the archive to the family. After a large amount of waiting, her loved-ones finally had the photograph in their hands. This was what they saw: