The Venetian Raven

My mother used to tell my siblings and I the story of how when she was a kid she knew a girl who was taken away in the middle of the night.

The story goes that the girl lived with her family in an apartment complex, one she claimed was haunted by a man. She said he lived in the apartment directly above hers and he would only be seen at night roaming the halls and would sometimes be outside on the grass walking aimlessly, the man was dressed in all black and wore a white masquerade mask. From what my mom was told, before the girl went missing, is that she was the only one who ever seemed to see the dark man, or her him for that matter, pacing the halls just outside her apartment door. She claimed to have told her parents about the man several times, but they wouldn't listen, insisting that nobody lived in that apartment.

The girl would show up to school shaking sometimes, claiming that the dark man visited her bedroom. So my mother, being the good friend she was offered to let her friend come stay the night at her house to keep her mind off the creep. That night the girl came to my mom's house with her sleeping back and school supplies for the next day. They did the normal slumber party routine, painting nails, watching bad horror movies, having my mom's mother order pizza, and they had a good time... until it was time for the lights to go out.

My mother said she fell asleep no problem but was awoken in the middle of the night by something off settling. Something woke her up, but she couldn't pace her finger on what it was. When she was awake enough to move, she turned on her bedside lamp to see her friend gone from the bed her mother had made up on the floor next to my mom's bed. She got up from her bed and searched her room, but couldn't find her friend anywhere, but on her way to the bedroom door, something caught her eye outside the second story window. It was a man standing out under a street lamp, wearing all black and a white mask that resembled a bird.

He seemed to notice my mother looking down on him because he cocked his head to the side and pulled a large knife out from behind his back, then proceeded to walk towards the front door of the house. A moment later she heard screams from downstairs, that of her friend. she ran to her bed and hid under the covers, while she heard her parents opening their bedroom door and running down the stairs, she told us how she heard her father yelling at someone, while my mother pleaded with the phone as she contacted the police.

My mother never found sleep that night, as the blue and red lights flashed into her bedroom window all night, the police had to question everyone in the house. The next morning she had to go downstairs and was escorted out the back door by a policeman to get to the bus stop, she figured this was so she wouldn't see what had happened in the living room the night prior. She went to school to find that her friend was not sitting in her usual seat, next to her.

There was an announcement on the PA that day about a missing girl. So overwhelmed with grief she tucked her head in to her folded arms on her desk and looked out the window. What she saw still makes her tremble to discuss outloud to this day, the man with the bird mask was standing out in the middle of the soccer field. Standing, and staring at what she assumed was her. When she jolted up and pointed at the window, nobody else seemed to be able to see what she saw, when she turned her head back to the window the man was no longer there.

She blocked most of this stuff out her memory but the what she can remember is that what they found in apartment above her friends house was too explicit to mention to us kids, when we were younger, but from what I have gathered over the years is that it was full of child pornography and photos of children the man had murdered before and after they had been mutilated, but to this day she sometimes has episodes in the middle of the night, fits of terror, being her eldest son, I sometimes get phone calls in the middle of the night from mother, claiming she saw him again, and sometimes she tells me to never visit Apartment K12.