Prestotac's Abandoned Houses Mod

This happened in December, 2011. I had played Minecraft since March after my friend Jack introduced me to the game. I started by going to his house and playing on his account before I got my own. Then I played constantly, even creating a little YouTube account which consisted of videos filmed on an old camcorder instead of being directly recorded from the screen. I would watch Minecraft animations. This inspired Jack and I to create our own Minecraft videos with Legos, spending nights on them. I often find myself drifting into this old reality in the calmer moments of life. I can smell the floral scents of his house, see the mess of colored Legos sprawled across his carpet, and hear us laughing while we played at night. But then the memories from that December slice through these soft parts of my brain. Sometimes I can see the facts of the situation; a logical translation. But the dread soon follows. The stifling of tears, the aching, the fear.

I have told people of these things throughout the years, but they were always of the facts. Jack has long since moved away, and I often wonder whether he has told anyone. I wonder if the others who found themselves in the situation and whether they told anyone. That is, if they ever found out.

After all those months of playing, I decided to download a mod onto the cheap laptop I had used to play. I did this without Jack because I wanted to show him something I found on my own. I went through a website for mods, I forgot the name of it, until I found a small, very new, mod called Prestocat's Abandoned House Mod. The number of visitors to the page was low. It added naturally spawned abandoned houses throughout the world, along with little things like mossy wood, and a ghost mob which would spawn in the houses. There were also grave stones.

After a night of watching dozens of videos on how to download mods, I finally managed to download it. I went onto Creative Mode and began searching for a house. After a while I found one. It was a crude structure of wood, mossy wood, cobblestone, mossy cobblestone, and brick. The walls had holes in them and vines covered the fractured sides. Inside was a chest with the typical things you would find in a generated chest. There was also the ghost mob, which was transparent and white like a cloud. It made deep, breathing sounds. I continued flying through the world, finding several houses and looking through their chests. I also found grave stones, which were crosses of mossy cobblestone with names on signs. I found the fact that these thing were separate from the official content of Minecraft so fascinating. The mod's display page had no comments and no one had made a video about it. It was my own piece of the game only I knew about.

As the sky outside my window was beginning to turn pink, I built little structures on a super flat world with mossy wood. The block was not anything amazing, but it was the separation from the rest of the game that excited me. I made a house and tried putting a painting inside. I placed then destroyed the paintings, looking for the best one to fit the house, until I found a painting that wasn't from the original game. I felt unnerved by it.

It was two by two blocks and was more of an actual picture rather than pixel art. It was the image of an eye in the darkness of a head. It took up most of the space. Under it was a smile spliced with a jack o' lantern's grin, orange and glowing. There was a small space to the bottom right that was fainter than the rest where the head seemed defined. I tried to give a reason why it was in the mod, and ultimately thought it was a hint at an update. That was also a solution as to why it hadn't been listed as a feature on the mod page; it was an uncompleted feature.

I broke the picture and shut off the game, choosing to go to sleep on my bed facing the computer. I found the face in my dreams, separate from plot or story. It was just there, staring at me.

Days followed and I still played Minecraft. I didn't put down any paintings however. It was a few days after I had downloaded the mod when I found a gravestone in the world. It said Cassandra Marie on it, and that sense of dread crept into my skull. That was my mom's name. I tried to rationalized this, but I ultimately failed. Now that I think about it, I wanted to fail. Though there was fear, there was a sense of tingly fear, like I was in a haunted house on Halloween. My mind did consider the discomforting fact of the name, but resolved for a fantastical fear and mystery instead. It was that feeling of seeing gore in a movie or reading scary stories around a campfire with friends.

All the while, I didn't tell Jack about the mod at school or over the phone. I was waiting until I spent the night at his house that Friday. When that did happen, I brought my laptop with me and showed him the mod. He thought it was really interesting, especially when I showed him the painting. We were both excited, even throwing around the idea that it was paranormal or haunted. He went to the download page on the mod website, and it had an offering for a second version. However, no new features were listed.

He downloaded it, and right when he launched Minecraft, the computer crashed. He loaded it back up, and managed to create a new world in Creative Mode. It lagged so much, so he turned the distance levels down, rendering everything in fog. Through the world's murk, he found a gravestone with a name we didn't recognize, and started placing down paintings to see if the face was still there.

The first picture made us confused. It was just a girl around our age looking slightly down while her face was lit by a faint blue light. The quality was poor, but we could still make out her passive, freckled face. He broke it and put another. This one was of a boy, lit in a similar way. He looked slightly confused and a little scared. We first laughed at the pictures because they were just normal kids, defying the expectation of a scary experience. Then we felt uneasy. Eventually we came across a picture of a kid changing clothes. Our laughter was short for this one.

We weren't saying much to each other because we couldn't find the words to give a solution to the pictures. They weren't downright scary like the smiling man but they had this disturbing quality to them. I felt embarrassed like I staring at someone in a changing room.

The laughter was gone by the time we found a picture of a boy sleeping. Beside him was a dark silhouette, with only slim arms and legs showing. We didn't say anything, just broke the picture and moved on. After a few repeats and some new pictures of recurring kids, we found a picture of another boy sleeping. This time I recognized the wall and the sheets and the brown hair, all lit by a soft, blue glow. It was a picture of me.

Jack recognized me as well, and turned to me confused and afraid. We turned on the lights in his room and closed the blinds to the windows. Then we started createactual resolutions to the pictures. I asked how there could even be a picture of me, thinking of a man or creature hiding behind my desk and taking pictures of me sleeping. Jack told me about the web cam.

We both understood essentially what was happening, but we didn't want to say it. We just deleted the mod from our computers and tried to sleep with the lights on. My mind couldn't rest enough for dreams or nightmares. It never lost focus of reality.

A few days later, I tried to find the download page of the mod, but I couldn't find it anywhere. I went onto the Minecraft Forums and asked if anyone knew of that mod, but only got one response. Yes. The user was name Prestotac. I became scared and deleted the post and eventually my account, and tried to forget about it. I would spend hours in fear, constantly looking out my window and being afraid to go outside. I would try to cram a sense of day into night, sleeping with the lights on.

I talked to Jack about it later on, and it was a secret between the two of us for a while. I deleted my YouTube account because I was to afraid I would be contacted by Prestotac, and after a year, I had practically stopped playing Minecraft.

Years went by, schools went by, friends went by. Jack became only a nice memory and this situation only became a scary story to tell people at parties. I suppose I wrote this story to a faceless crowd because an unseen audience is the best way for me to tell about an unseen thing. I try not to consider whether I was in actual danger, and because I never told an adult about this, I never received a mature guidance on what to do.

Sometimes I find myself afraid of Prestotac when I struggle in life. That face has become an icon of intangible dread that can't be expressed. It's irrational and frankly stupid.