Hey everyone, it’s CryptoGemGR. The holiday season brings out the best stories from you all—cozy, chaotic, and sometimes bone-chilling. This one came in last week from a follower who asked to stay anonymous (we’ll call him David). He’s a 34-year-old paramedic from a small town in upstate New York, and what he claims happened last Christmas Eve has him refusing to work night shifts during December ever again. I’ve kept his words as raw as he sent them.

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David’s Story: Christmas Eve, 2024

I’ve been a paramedic for twelve years. I’ve seen bodies in snowbanks, kids hit by sleds, heart attacks at midnight mass. Nothing prepares you for what’s coming, though. Not training, not therapy, not the whiskey I poured after.

My mom died in 2019—lung cancer, quick and brutal. Christmas was her thing: she’d bake seven kinds of cookies, force us to sing carols off-key, hang the same chipped angel on the tree every year. After she passed, I kept the tradition going at her old house, the one I inherited. I work 24-hour shifts, so last Christmas Eve I was off at 7 p.m. Drove straight there through the blizzard, planning to sleep in her recliner like always, wake up, eat cold pie for breakfast.

Got in around 9:30. House was dark, heat cranked because the pipes freeze if you don’t. I kicked off my boots, started a fire in the woodstove—same cast-iron beast Mom swore Santa used before the chimney got bricked up in the ’80s. I put her angel on the tree, cracked a beer, and dozed off to the crackle.

Woke up at 11:47 p.m. to the sound of the front door latch. Slow, deliberate. *Click.* Then the hinges creaked—exactly the way they did when Mom came in from shoveling, snow dripping off her coat. I sat up, heart already sprinting. “Hello?” Nothing. Just the wind rattling the storm windows.

I grabbed the poker from the stove. Walked the hallway. Kitchen light was on—I *know* I left it off. On the table: a single plate of spritz cookies, the almond ones with red sprinkles only on the left half, exactly how Mom decorated them when her hands started shaking from chemo. The cookies were warm. Steam curled up like someone had just pulled them from the oven.

I called out again, louder. Footsteps answered—soft, socked feet on hardwood—coming from the upstairs bedroom. My childhood room. I took the stairs two at a time. The hallway smelled like her: Chantilly perfume and Virginia Slims she hid in the cookie tin.

The bedroom door was ajar. Inside, the bedside lamp glowed. Someone sat on the edge of my old twin bed, back to me, rocking slightly. Same gray cardigan Mom wore the day she died. Same hunch in the shoulders. I whispered, “Mom?”

It turned.

The face was hers—down to the nicotine stain on her left index finger, the tiny scar above her eyebrow from when I beaned her with a Tonka truck in 1994. But the eyes were wrong. Black, wet, no whites. Like someone poured ink into the sockets. It smiled with her mouth, but the teeth were too many, too sharp, overlapping like a shark’s.

“Merry Christmas, Davey,” it said in her voice. Then it opened its mouth wider—impossible, the jaw unhinging—and *screamed* with the sound of every ambulance siren I’ve ever heard layered on top of each other.

I ran. Slipped on the stairs, cracked my knee hard enough to bruise bone. Behind me, the footsteps thundered—bare feet slapping, gaining. I hit the front door, yanked it open into the blizzard. Looked back.

It stood at the top of the stairs, head tilted, cardigan dripping something dark onto the runner rug. Raised one hand. Waved with Mom’s arthritis-swollen fingers. The door slammed shut on its own. Deadbolt clicked.

I slept in my rig that night, engine running, heater blasting. At 3:12 a.m., my phone buzzed. Unknown number. Voicemail. I played it on speaker.

Just breathing. Then, soft as snowfall: “You forgot to leave cookies for Santa, sweetheart.”

I deleted the message. Smashed the plate when I went back at dawn—cookies were gone, plate licked clean. The rug at the top of the stairs had a stain shaped like a handprint. I bleached it. Still there.

I haven’t spent Christmas Eve in that house since. This year, I’m working a double shift. If dispatch calls me to a cardiac arrest at my old address, I’m radioing in sick.

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