Roughman

It was July 13, 2019. A boy named Dylan Free was playing some Minecraft online with his friend, Cole Charter.

Dylan and Cole had been spending their summer vacation playing Minecraft, and almost nothing else. Every here and there, Dylan would play another video game or continue his blog that debunks the existence of ghosts. When Cole was not gaming, he would read a book of some sort. But one day, when the boys were building a Minecraft shelter, Cole said he stopped feeling like playing the game, and he logged off.

Then Cole would constantly get on for some time and, after a little bit, get off. This got Dylan worried. Dylan thought that he and Cole had a "gamer connection" of some sort, and they were beginning to lose it. But he continued to play anyway.

Although there was a day where the two were building a castle together, and Cole said he was going to log off. So he left the game, and he was not coming back for a long time.

The two eventually connected on a Discord server Cole launched. Dylan asked why Cole did not feel like gaming. Cole said he was starting to feel depressed, and he did not think that gaming would do any good. He also stated that he needed psychological help. Dylan was upset due to this response. He never thought that the happiest person he knew would be depressed. Cole then stated that he needed to take care of something that could help him, then saying goodbye and logging off.

The next day, a disturbing news report aired on television on the 12 P.M. news. The headline was "LOCAL TEENAGE BOY COMMITS SUICIDE." And the local boy was Cole, who put himself on a noose. Dylan was so upset, he went days without playing Minecraft, feeling kind of like committing suicide himself.

Dylan returned to Minecraft after about five days of inactivity. He tried using the game as a way to escape the troubles of reality. He went back to an old world he had where he started a farm. But then something strange happened. He started hearing a strange humming noise from the game that stopped the music disc's playback. Dylan was scared and started breathing heavily. Afterward, he heard garbled speech. All he could make out was, "It's me Dylan. The ... committed suicide ... back ... I ... you never thought you could ... the Roughman."

Dylan was confused but frightened at the same time. Then he made out, "The ... for the times ... me, Cole ... the news channels thought ... Charter ... I am Cole Charter." Then, a reddish brown figure with small white eyes, claws and frighteningly big mouth appeared, and Dylan made out, "It ... time to ... I'm not dead." The thing then started staring at Dylan's avatar, which was randomly being hit. "I loved to play with you," said the voice. "But things are over. Nothing is what it seems anymore." Dylan's avatar was caught in a random explosion, and it died. Dylan was so frightened by his experience that he did not even close the window. He just put his laptop screen down, breathing heavily.

After a few hours of waiting for himself to calm down, Dylan slowly opened back up his laptop lid, and soon enough, he continued to play Minecraft, but he saw the Roughman in the new world he generated. This time, he tried to fight, but then his whole computer crashed, and would not turn back on, worrying Dylan.

The next day, Dylan turned on his laptop, which still worked, and went to the crash logs, and he found a file called "ROUGHMAN.txt." He opened it and found a bunch of binary, and underneath was "Cole was here." Dylan was even more traumatized by this one document than anything that happened in the game yesterday. He put together this and the dialogue, realizing that he was not just encountering an entity, but the spirit of his friend, Cole.

He dubbed this creature "The Roughman" because of the logs, and reported what happened to people on the Internet. And he decided that it was true all along. Ghosts exist.