The Beach
there's a detail in the story that comes from real life, but you'll never guess which one.
You can listen to an original audio recording of this story here.
CW: suicide, ritual, body modification, torture, self-harm, gore, police
My brother is a cop in a little seaside town in Florida and he told me this story. Back in 2016, he was called to report for a graveyard shift on a remote beach after Hurricane Matthew came through. It was an all-hands-on-deck thing: coast guard, local cops, state police all on the scene. Not unusual after a hurricane, when personnel are moved around to where they’re most needed. But this was not a rescue mission.
There were four bodies found on that beach, being tossed back and forth in the
waves. The first thought was that they were surfers—it’s so typical for surfers
to go out in a hurricane, especially in Florida where monster waves are rare. But all four of these people were women, in their 80s at least, and not athletic. They were naked, not a scrap of wetsuit to be found. All four were different races, and looked to be from different backgrounds entirely— one had tattoos all over, another had a perfect grandma perm. They didn’t seem to have anything in common, except for being dead together. And in the condition they were found, these old girls weren’t there to surf.
The one with the tattoos was missing all her teeth. Again, she’s like 85, maybe she just doesn’t have any. But the next one, the one with the perm, was missing her fingernails, every single one of them, so the missing teeth start to seem like… not an accident. The third one, a dark-skinned woman, looked pretty good— she had this shiny silver hair, rings on her fingers and a pink manicure, but her eyes were gouged out. And the fourth one, when they pull her out of the surf, she’s just a head, with about six inches of spine hanging out the back. Her face was perfect, not a scar or a scrape.
Bodies rolling around in the waves during a hurricane do not preserve evidence well, but these bodies were in good condition, barely a scratch if you didn’t count the missing pieces. It was like someone stood guard, keeping the fish and flies away. They figured out that all these women had died around the same time.
The one with the missing eyes was found clutching a curved blade. They had to break
her stiff, dead fingers to get it out of her hand. And they could figure this was how she got her own eyes out.
They didn’t find anything to show how the head was removed from the body without severing that piece of spine. The first thought was scavengers ate the body, but they were only out there for one, two days max. Not enough time for all the crabs in Florida to eat an entire person, bones and all. And the face was intact, which is not consistent with scavengers; they always go for the eyes and tongue first. It was as if someone just pulled her head off like a kid with a Barbie doll.
The state sent a crime scene team to the beach, and they called out the whole cavalry to help, trying to get ahead of the news story, because this one had the details that bring out all the vultures. They needed to search the sand for clothes, IDs, anything that would explain why someone did this to four old ladies, why they did this to themselves, or even just a clue about how they ended up on this remote stretch of beach in the middle of a Cat 5.
Turns out, the beach was absolutely covered in evidence. The CSU never found any IDs or personal belongings, but they found so much other stuff they declared the whole beach a crime scene. That’s when they brought in all the extra agencies to help. For one thing, they needed help keeping treasure hunters out. These kinds of scenes always attract looters and creeps, looking for something to sell online.
Brass made this terrible decision to process the whole beach at night, to keep tourists and looters off the scent and to get it done fast, before anything leaks to the media. But a graveyard shift in the middle of nowhere means this is not the A-team. These are the newbies, the ones who haven’t learned to be unafraid, to bury their superstitions. These are the people who need a night shift to make ends meet.
They bring in huge flood lights but, of course this is a beach, so the lights are unpredictable. A big gust of wind, or just sand shifting underneath the generator, and everything can go out for a minute or two. My brother and his partners were just running around in the middle of the night, trying to support this CSU team, operating lights and making sure no looky-loos wandered up the path.
When he first got there he said the beach was glittering under these floodlights and, at first, he couldn’t be sure what he was looking at. Then he figures it out: the CSU was processing literally hundreds, maybe thousands, of glass jars with cork stoppers, all jumbled together just under the top layer of in the sand. Big ones, tiny ones, some look like they’re empty, but he realizes later that none of them were empty. He said there were more jars than sand.
Not a single one is broken or cracked, but some look old, fogged over from exposure to sun, sand, and salt. In the jars that he can see: snake shed, porcupine quills, stingray barbs, crab claws, wasp nests, chicken feet, teeth. So many teeth—deer teeth, gator teeth, raccoon, horse, dog, human, baby teeth. They can tell a few of the jars are brand new, because the spiders inside are still alive. Every once in a while, a white whisp of a ghost crab, disturbed by the activity, scuttles across them, its feet making this little clicking sound like something trying to get out.
Some of the jars are filled to the top with these translucent yellow scales or flakes. A couple of the guys are looking really closely at those, peering into the jars, when someone finally figures out they’re fingernails. Maybe the DOA’s fingernails, but also hundreds more.
Others contain evidence of a dried-out liquid: black, red, brown smudges inside leaving almost no mystery about the contents. Of course, they find two jars with one fresh bloody eye in each of them, the pupil clouding over like a fish that didn’t get sold at market.
So, everyone knows what kind of place this is, but no one wants to say it. Cop speak would deem it “consistent with ritualistic behavior.” But naming it, even writing those words, would make this whole thing real and no one wants to. My brother says the beach was silent. Nobody speculating, no soundtrack of dark humor that cops and investigators rely on to get by. Just the sounds of breathing, the hum of generators, cameras clicking, and these little jars clinking together. The amount of evidence is so overwhelming, everyone’s getting kind of sloppy, piling jars up all over, trying to get them out of there and go home. The clinking comes from every direction.
Every once in a while, all the lights blink out, and there are a couple minutes of terror. The CSUs can’t take a single step, afraid to crush some little piece of evidence underfoot, while the cops run around on the beach testing connections and restarting the generators.
Without light, the smell becomes more obvious, one sense making up for the others. The smell is low tide, rot, and decay. It’s seaweed in the sun. It’s a heavy, liquefied smell that gets in your mouth. They know they can’t smell what’s sealed in the jars, but everyone keeps thinking they can.
While the lights are out the beach is empty, boundless, cloud cover from the storm blots out the moon, which is a tiny sliver that night anyway. No one says it, but in the silent dark they’re secretly reaching out a hand to make sure the guy beside them is still there. To make sure they aren’t suddenly left alone in the black void breathing fetid air. My brother says this happens a couple times—a hand comes out of the black to touch his arm, his back, then darts away. He assumes they are his colleagues’ at the time. But no one ever said “sorry” or “excuse me,” too embarassed to need.
The only thing they can see in the dark is this tiny, eerie, red glow: embers from a bonfire that are surprisingly still glowing, even after so much rain. Every so often the hairs on the back of their necks stand up, it happens to everyone at once, like a cold wind blew through the site. The dread sticks to them like sweat.
The embers are super low, so the team is trying to pull evidence from out of the ashes and around the fire without dousing them and rinsing away any clues. They find some weird stuff—stuff that looks really old. A carved piece of turtle shell, fragments of pottery, broken pieces of what look like dolls. They can tell fires have been set in this spot maybe thousands of times. Someone suggests the hurricane uncovered archaeological evidence. Or did they? My brother says no one told him that, he just remembers having the thought. If there are artifacts that means they can’t dig without specialists on the scene. And they are required to contact the Seminole Tribe in case anything they find is indigenous. So, thank God, crime scene work is over for the night.
Everyone is exhausted, sweaty, covered in wet sand. The whole team is on edge, gritting their teeth, looking over their shoulders. They know in their guts these aren’t ancient artifacts but they accept that as their ticket home. A logical, by-the-book way to make this someone else’s problem. But as much as they want out, it feels like they’re moving in slow motion, maybe because they’re so tired, maybe because they don’t want to rattle those jars any more than they have to. My brother said it was like the feeling you get in church—you just know you should move slowly, reverently, and speak only in whispers.
The jars are packed into evidence bags and the bags into boxes, but the tinkling is unstoppable, slowly worming into everyone’s brain. The team is carrying the boxes out, loading them on ATVs to be driven back to a parking lot, about a mile away, and the glass tinkling rings out with every step, from every direction. Every time these jars clink together everyone is thinking about what’s inside them. The ride back to the parking lot is slow and bumpy. The sound of the jars ringing and the horrible contents rolling around inside is loud enough to be heard over the engines of the ATVs. The sound is nauseating.
The bodies were long gone before my brother got there, but he says the clinking of glasses still brings an image to his mind of the head without a body, rolling around in the surf. It’s something he never saw with his own eyes, but it’s as vivid as a photograph. Like, he can tell you exactly what the woman looked like. In his mind, her face is totally intact, perfectly preserved, hair down around her head, and those six inches of spine hanging out. He understands now, of course those macho cops weren’t reaching out a hand in the dark, looking for comfort. It was her reaching out, tapping his arm, pressing on his back, then fluttering away.
He says he still hears the tinkling sometimes when he’s trying to fall asleep and it
jerks him out of bed, searching around in the dark for that perfect head without a body.
So scary, so well done! I want to know more!
Love it, so so creepy!