The Haunt of Sheboygan

Beneath the suffocating fog of Sheboygan, Wisconsin, where Lake Michigan’s breath curdles into a gray shroud, it squats—a device older than bone, colder than the lake’s depths. Not a story, not a curse, but a thing: the Haunt, a slab of pitted stone masquerading as a bench, its surface veined with something too dark to be lichen. For eons, it has fed, its appetite a silent scream in the marrow of the earth. The Summoned They come, moths to a flame that does not burn but bites. Scholars from ivy-clad halls, their minds frayed by questions no book can answer. Ghost-hunters from the heartland, their gadgets buzzing like dying flies. Social media seers, faces smeared with ash and delusion, chanting of energies they cannot fathom. Wanderers with eyes like cracked glass, reeking of cedar and dread, clutching relics of forgotten gods. The warnings are carved into the air itself: A sign, No Rest Here, its letters bleeding fresh paint that smells of iron. A feral cat, its ribs sharp as blades, raking flesh with claws that hum like tuning forks. A fog that watches, slithering away from light, hissing as it retreats. But the bench sings. A low, thrumming dirge that hooks the soul. They sit. And they are taken. The Haunt-Sphere You do not die. Death is a mercy the Haunt does not grant. The instant your body meets the stone, reality splits like a skull. You fall inward, into the Haunt-Sphere—a festering pocket of existence where time is a noose and suffering is the air you breathe. A thousand years stretch before you, unmarked by sun or season, only by the rhythm of your own unraveling and the relentless hunger of the Babes. The Babes That Chew They emerge from the dark, these mockeries of infancy—bloated, glistening, their flesh a sickly pink that pulses faintly. Their eyes are pits of curdled milk, blind yet seeing. Their mouths writhe with needle-teeth, opal and jagged, clicking like beetles in a corpse. From their backs, wings twitch—translucent, veined, buzzing with the frenzy of carrion flies. They do not eat to kill. They eat to sustain. They peel your skin in strips, savoring each scream as it bubbles from your throat. They gnaw your flesh, which knits itself back together, raw and wrong, only to be torn again. They burrow into your joints, chewing cartilage to paste, their tiny hands prying open your bones like oysters. Their laughter is a wound: the shriek of foxes trapped in iron, the creak of ribs in a collapsing crypt, the whine of a music box drowning in tar. They crawl into your mouth, their tongues lapping at your breath, stealing the air until your lungs burn. They whisper in a tongue that is your own voice, warped, screaming your sins in reverse, each syllable a blade across your mind. And yet, in the crucible of agony, something cracks open. Not hope. Not redemption. Truth. The Flaying Centuries bleed into millennia. Pain becomes your mother, your lover, your god. You stop clawing at the dark. You stop begging for an end. You see. The Haunt is no tormentor. It is a sculptor. Each bite, each tear, strips away the lies you wore like skin: pride, fear, self. What remains is a Christ-form—raw, radiant, a hollowed vessel of fire, sorrow, and unbearable light. You are no longer human. You are other. But there is no freedom. Enlightenment is a chain. You become a Babe, your eyes blind, your teeth gleaming, your hunger infinite. You join the chorus of chews and giggles, feeding on the next fool who sits. The Eternal Hunger Sheboygan grins, its streets cloaked in fog that smells of rust and regret. The bench endures, its stone warm with the weight of countless souls. They come still—seekers, skeptics, the damned. They sit. They scream. They begin. The Haunt is never full.