Episode Details

by William Seehttps://creepypasta.fandom.com/wiki/Wriggling_TreesWhen I was a kid, we had these unreachable, giant pine trees sitting down a long embankment behind my house. I say they were ‘unreachable’ only because my parents would repeatedly warn me not to approach the hill to get a closer look.It's not like it was a particularly steep hill looking back, but to my child sensibilities there was still an element of danger to the approach, especially because mom and dad told me no without much elaboration. Obviously I could’ve been seriously hurt if I lost my footing, but I rarely had any reason to visit that area unless I was taking the trash out to the small gravel path where we kept our garbage bins.There’s a rather unpleasant association I have with that old place now. I’ve since moved out, being in my thirties, but every now and then I try to run my brain back to that age where things seemed just ‘off’. You know what I mean? That thing where as a kid, you’re dead certain about the little things coinciding with each other, but because it was so long ago, there’s no way to empirically prove it. There were a lot of little things that contributed to that unpleasantness, but the primary element was the trees.I don’t have any specific memories from that house by now, but I do remember the pines. I remember looking at them from my bedroom window at night, elevated just slightly above ground floor so I was more so on a second floor. I could see down the embankment, so that the forest below was just barely able to peek out. I’d see the trees swaying in the night breeze, black giants contrasting against a dark blue sky. I’d fixate on two specific trees, ones that were slightly shorter than the rest of their siblings.Maybe it was my kid brain overthinking, maybe it was the effect of staring for too long at shadows with nebulous outlines. But in my mind’s eye I could see them swaying in the opposite directions of the other trees, often asynchronously. Sometimes they’d stand completely still even during turbulent storms. It didn’t make much sense to me but in a small way, my kid mind rationalized it as myself simply not understanding all the complexities of wind physics and nature working in tandem. But the excuses of not understanding would rapidly give way to doubt; after all, if I didn’t understand why they do what they do, would that not justify my delusion?And in my head, for some insane reason, I felt like they were watching me as they danced sleepily. In the same way a kid peeks out from barely open crescent eyes to fool their parents, but in a patently obvious way that might make the parents aware the kid was awake. Almost like an inside joke, I suppose.They were watching me. They were pretending to not be alive, to simply be trees in the only way a tree can be. But they knew I was watching, and that's why they danced the way they did when it was only me awake at ten pm, a time I should’ve been long asleep by. In my perception, they could only know I was awake if they saw me open the blinders, so I’d push my iris as closely as possible to the tiny little gap where the blinder string pushed through, so that there was no perceivable way for them to know I was watching them back. But perception is in itself a curse of sorts. All you have to do is be aware of something for it to be in your radius of knowledge. And in that sense, it becomes aware of YOU in return.It only went downhill after my blinders became damaged from my repeated and more frantically curious observations. Due to my bending them to look out the window, either while watching my dad come home from work or the former nighttime ritual, one blinder eventually bent far enough it snapped off. So now my window had, in itself, a doorway for the unsettling trees to progress into my room and my mind. And once this came to pass, more and more strange things began to o