“Holy shit I wonder if that fake corpse is still in my parents’ crawl...”
Why is there a fake corpse there anyways?
I put it there when I was a teenager.
When I was home after my first year of college I got the idea into my head to try LARPing, but didn’t really know what LARPing was. The idea that there were sourcebooks with rules or anything like that was alien to me at the time, I just thought you made a bunch of props and got people together and told a story or something.
I was really into Cthulhu-esque stuff at the time and I wanted to do something with that. The players were all supposed to be paranormal investigators, and I was a woman who’d hired them to investigate some strange disturbances in her new house. The idea was that it would start off like a Ghost Hunters-esque expedition but they’d gradually realize there was something much bigger and more dangerous involved.
They were supposed to search the house and find clues. (My parents were, in retrospect, incredibly patient letting me take over 90% of the house for this.) I had a tape recorder with me that I’d press play on at various points in the evening allowing a ghostly voice (i.e.,, me whispering hoarsely into the microphone) to whisper various hints and ominous messages.
There were two major items they were supposed to find. One was a map, the other was a rock that had been smashed into three pieces. (There was a symbol painted on it to help indicate that the three pieces should be put together.) The rock would summon a monster and the map led the players to a nearby park where they would have a chance of defeating it.
(The monster was a cheap pinata I’d added a bunch of eyeballs and teeth to and hidden in the bushes. To succeed, they had to smash it open without looking at it or being touched by it. If they touched it, they were dead. If they looked at it, the sight of it left them catatonic. My biggest regret is that I did not fill it with gummy eyeballs.)
That brings us to the crawlspace. I’d hidden the third piece of the rock on what was meant to be the corpse of the house’s former owner, i.e, a paper mache head, an old jacket, (the stone was in his pocket,) fake hands, sticks for arms, and a rib cage I’d made out of plastic folders when I was trying to recreate this cake. It was down there because it was supposed to be the last thing they found, as assembling the rock pieces would start a chase sequence that ended at the park.
I remember my parents had been very concerned about the mess I’d be making turning their home into my own private chamber of horrors, so I’d stayed up late to clean afterwards. But I didn’t bother removing the fake corpse since they wouldn’t see it when they woke up anyway. I just went to bed and figured I’d take care of it later.
I was a teenager. I did not take care of it later.
That was about eleven years ago.
