A Local Legend
What is a legend if not a whimsical lie? Some half-truth meant to explain something we can’t quite comprehend. I always thought that every myth, every legend, even every lie had a kernel of truth to it. But was I wrong? Have I simply been perpetuating a comforting falsehood?
I’ve been called a liar. The internet declared me as such, all because I tried to add truth to what I had assumed to be a slanderous lie. But was my story any more true? Did the songs of my youth tell the true story of Boneless Jim? Or did my peers, my parents and my community simply perpetuate a fantasy to make us feel safe?
Before he was this hateful stalking thing, Jim was my legend. My local monster. I wanted to believe the old stories could return. But now I’ve seen the truth. Jim is gone, and my town is haunted by the Boneless. Reality is far worse than fiction.
As it goes, James (Jim) McCarthy was born with a rare degenerative condition that made his bones brittle. In some versions of the story, they were slowly deteriorating. When my parents told it, the story had little explanation of what ailed Jim. The versions my generation told their children described it as an auto-immune disorder. The doctors said Jim wouldn’t survive infancy, but in a twist of cruel fate, he did. Jim grew constantly, fracturing and breaking his bones. With every trip to the hospital Jim was met with gasps and proclamations of his impending death. But each time, he would heal up wrong and grow, until he was five years old and a parody of other children. He was massively deformed and became more and more crooked as time went on.
Jim’s parents, well-to-do elites from the rival town of Elizabeth’s Haven, saw him as an object of shame and grew to hate him. They were the pride of Birch Island, wealthy and privileged. But they’d never be the perfect family. Not as long as they had Jim.
One day, they led Jim out deep into the woods and told him they were going to play Hide and Seek. His mother kneeled down and whispered in Jim’s ear. “Close your eyes and count to one hundred.”
Slowly, Jim counted to one hundred, a difficult task for a boy of five. When he opened his eyes, he began looking. Minutes turned to hours, hours to days, but he never found them.
Jim’s parents, certain that exposure would kill him, told officials he had died of his disease and reportedly buried him in the family mausoleum. If you visit, there is, in fact, a plaque for James McCarthy, aged five. However, the crypt has never been opened to discover how much of the tale is true. If their child had a strange degenerative disorder that claimed his life. Or if his small casket is indeed empty, and Jim was left in the woods to die.
It seems more likely this story is born of town rivalry or class conflict. Combined with class tensions, it turned a rich family with a sick child into a target of scorn and rumour. This would make the story of the McCarthys like that of the Leeds and their devil. But this isn’t where the legend ends. Much like the Jersey Devil, sightings of Jim continue to this day.
As the legend goes, Jim wandered through the woods for years. Further deteriorating, he grew up feral and misshapen in those woods. The story doesn’t go into how he survived; it only says that by the time he found our town, Fort Champlain, his bones had fully dissolved. He was now enormous, bloated, and deformed like some abyssal sea creature, surviving off the fringes of society.
This version of the character was scary but not violent. Parents used Jim to teach their kids to protect their property. “Close your windows before you go to sleep, or Boneless Jim will slip through the crack and steal your sweets.” “Don’t play near the storm drain, or Boneless Jim will take your ball, and you’ll never see it again.” He was harmless. However, kids can be crueler than the worst adults, and used Jim as an outlet for juvenile fears of the ‘outsider’. Bullies would say you were spineless, like Boneless Jim. Say you were so ugly only Boneless Jim could love you. Tell you to climb down into the sewer and live with Boneless Jim and the rats. Older kids would band together to “go hunting” for him, baseball bats in hand. They would come back with tales of chasing him back into the storm drains, his strange flexible body the topic of much horror and debate in the schoolyard.
I never saw Boneless Jim, but some of my friends said they did. They added further to the mythos. Sometimes, he had reflective eyes like a cat. Other times, he dragged his body around like a slug, and his limbs trashed about like worms. Supposedly, there were rituals to summon him from the sewer. Place a bowl of candy ten feet from the drain, at midnight of course, and then say his name 5 times. You would see his long arms snake out of the drain and pull the candy in, or so it was said. I tried it once, but he did not appear. I grew up assuming he was just a story. The only thing that carried into adulthood was that stupid schoolyard song.
Beware, beware of Boneless Jim,
Abandoned by his next of kin.
His eyes are black, skin pale as sin.
Beware his wide and toothless grin!
A Post-Modern Monster
My generation made some attempts to take the story back as adults. Bring more sympathy to it, give Jim more humanity, and maybe a happy ending. Sadly, it didn’t catch on like these internet stories have. For example, I wrote a collection of short stories about Jim. The publishers told me that the subject matter was too disturbing to be children’s literature and not scary enough to be a horror story for adults. The grim and dire always hits harder than the inspirational, and my peers and I barely made a dent in the old childhood tales we helped spin. Though with time Jim had begun to fade into memory. New ghosts and monsters captivated children, and the sightings became fewer and less interesting. That is until the tale was adapted and published in the Birch Island Observer.
When they published their story, simply titled ‘The Boneless’, I knew it had something to do with Jim. The Observer office is in Elizabeth’s Haven, so of course they would leave themselves out of the story. The Boneless was a homegrown monster. Something that was created and fed on the town of Fort Champlain. And it did it with a spiteful malice none of Boneless Jim’s stories had. The Boneless hates us. It doesn’t want to steal toys or candy. It wants victims. It was now a supernatural stalker, sowing fear in its victims and gnawing at their psyche. This became a more and more pervasive trend as the story grew online and was adapted and elaborated on by dozens of online authors.
Gnawing is an apt description. That stood out to me in the stories online. The Boneless has teeth. I think this feature grew from the online community specifically, as the Observer’s story never mentioned teeth. I can’t understand why it would have either. Wouldn’t his disease mean his teeth wouldn’t form? Regardless, he sure does like to use them. He seems to be a biter now.
Boneless Jim became simply “the Boneless”. His tragic backstory was excised, and his habits became malicious. He soon began stealing dogs from doghouses, and children from their open windows. But more than anything, the Boneless wanted to possess what he lacked. If the victim was lucky, they would simply have their toes bitten off in the shower after the Boneless wound itself up the drain. Others would be found in the sewer with all their bones removed. It was as if it was keeping them as trophies.
It makes me sad reading these stories. Boneless Jim was a character that, in some ways, I identify with. I was unpopular, I had a difficult relationship with my parents, and I often wanted to just hide away from the world. I want a happy ending for this character. The Boneless shouldn’t be his legacy.
This led to my reason for emailing the Observer and contacting members of the forum. The story had changed, and it had a direct impact on the sightings. Someone, surely a member of some forum, began harassing locals in my town. As I mentioned, sightings of Jim were declining rapidly, and then shortly after the first stories went up, so did the number of reported sightings. Moreover, these new encounters were threatening and verged on stalking behaviour. It soon became obvious that these were not made-up stories. Someone was out there terrorising the people of my town. There were reports of children being chased through the woods. On multiple occasions, the assailant had waited in the dark and jumped out at unsuspecting people wearing a grotesque rubber suit. We hear howls at night, and our dogs are agitated, as if someone is creeping around private property in the dark.
The police haven’t found any leads yet, but, as a local historian, I took interest and made the connection between the dates and the online stories. Either someone on one of the creepypasta sites is the culprit or the stories posted online have inspired this psycho to terrorize our town. I tried to get the editors and writers to understand the gravity of the issue. This creep in costume was going to traumatise some poor kid. But I found out the hard way that online communities don’t appreciate the criticism of an outsider.
Seeing is Believing
It didn’t take long for the internet to figure out who I was. My message was already being ignored. I wanted to clarify that the Boneless had a real backstory. That the lore of my hometown was being bastardised and inspiring real-life crimes. Most people thought I was trying to sell them something, or that I was trying to profit somehow. When they figured out I was a writer, they felt their suspicions were vindicated. They did not respond to my concerns and instead mocked me on their forums. This resulted in some rather incendiary emails and an online campaign to “review bomb” my books.
I had purposely distanced myself from my profession in my posts. I figured correctly that if they had known I was a professional writer, they would not have taken me seriously. They would have thought I was trying to market my own work. I should have, at the very least, given my email pseudonym a male name. The emails might not have been as bad if I had not .
I’m not bitter. I blocked a few email addresses and had Amazon investigate the review issue. Within a few weeks, it was like nothing had happened. However, the problem I emailed about intensified…
Since my initial email to the Observer, there have been disappearances. First, four dogs have gone missing over the course of a month. The police didn’t investigate too closely, but it happened at properties where the Boneless had been spotted, and the animals had been behaving strangely in the preceding nights. The abductions happened on nights when the neighbourhood dogs had all been barking madly.
Then two children went missing. This time the police saw the connection–both children had previously reported seeing the Boneless. It isn’t subtle. It likes that its victims know it’s coming. But afterwards, it leaves no trace. No evidence has been discovered. No bodies were found.
I am ashamed to admit it, but I had decided to leave it alone. However, that is no longer an option. Last night, as I was walking home from a dance recital with my daughter, we saw it.
We were walking through an apartment complex. It was a shortcut home, and out of the corner of my eye, I saw a shape at the corner of the building. It was large and rotund. At first, I thought it was a pile of dirt or trash, but then it moved.
Its eyes flashed in the dark. That was the first thing I noticed – those eyes like mirrors, reflecting the dim light. It didn’t have a distinctive head. Its facial features were simply set in a lump at the top of the pale fleshy mound. It pulled itself forward with two long appendages. I can’t bring myself to call them arms. They had no joints. At the end of those appendages, and – I’m almost gagging remembering this – long, wriggling, boneless fingers. Like worms impaled on hooks.
The last thing I saw was its mouth opening and six crooked teeth glinting in the light. I didn’t have time to consider the significance at that moment. But I know for a fact there were six mismatched teeth in that thing’s rubbery maw.
I picked up my daughter and ran away as fast as I could. My heel broke, and I tripped, nearly falling. I’ve clearly sprained my ankle, but I didn’t notice at the time. Adrenaline and parental instincts had taken over. I kicked off my shoes and continued running. I could hear it, you see. I could hear it scraping against the ground behind me. It was fast – faster than you would ever expect – but I never turned back. Somewhere back in the dark, that wet, scraping sound faded away, but I didn’t stop running until my daughter and I were home behind a locked door.
We spent the night locked in my bedroom facing the door. I’ve had a knife either in my hand or beside me ever since.
I called the police and told them what I saw. They are taking it seriously now, but I fear there is nothing they can do. They are still looking for a man, and even if they weren’t, there is no way they can keep us safe. Thanks to your writers, the fucking thing can squeeze up drains now.
That’s why I’m writing to you again, this time with the full story from start to finish. I have no idea how this thing works, but something about the story shifting changed him. This isn’t our story anymore; it’s yours, and I’m trapped in it. I doubt I have long, so I will ask you again. Remove all content related to the Boneless from your site and print the true origin of Boneless Jim. If not for me, do it for my daughter.
Click the articles attached to this email. They have all the details you will need to know I’m not making this up. This is happening, and if you do nothing, our blood will be on your hands. You will be allowing this to continue, growing more hideous and abstract with every subsequent post. Like a faded copy, losing shape and meaning with every iteration. James McCarthy is gone. Boneless Jim is gone. All that’s left is a shambling mass fueled by the creative subconscious of your readers. Stalking, stealing, and biting with stolen fangs. And when we’re gone, the next victim will see that thing smiling from the shadows. Eight mismatched teeth glimmering within an empty, pointless, hunger.
Jacob Marsh 