Cinematic horror

The Hundred and Ninety-Ninth Step

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Legend / folkloreOriginal CURSED fiction set at a real place. Not a historical account.

18+ · contains sudden sound scares. Use Mute or “Scares: gentle” at any time; Reduce effects also silences them.

Setting: Whitby Abbey case file (documented history kept separate).

Recorded narrator · sound starts when you tap Listen.

  1. Every child in Whitby is told to count the steps up to the abbey. One hundred and ninety-nine. Never more. Never less. Elsie counted them every morning on her way to the cliff, and every morning the number was right.
  2. Until the morning the fog came in off the sea. Thick and grey and cold as a wet hand. She climbed, counting out loud. One hundred and ninety-seven. One hundred and ninety-eight. One hundred and ninety-nine.
  3. Her foot found another step.
  4. She stopped. Behind her, below her, somebody else kept counting. A thin voice, wet with salt. Two hundred. Two hundred and one. Getting closer, one step at a time.
  5. Elsie did not turn around. Her grandmother had told her what to do. You go back down, and you never look at what is climbing up. So she walked down into the fog, eyes shut, past something that smelled of the drowned.
  6. She counted one hundred and ninety-nine steps on the way down. But when she reached the bottom, the voice was still counting. And it was right behind her ear.