NIGHTMARE IN THE ELEVATOR 
The following creepy tale has been buzzing around the Internet for
years and has also appeared in various tabloids in Europe, but has never
been reported in British newspapers.
In the summer of 1990, police in Russia found a resident in
a block of flats in the Ukraine area dead on the floor of an elevator.
The man had two holes in the side of his neck - which was badly bruised
yellow and blue. At the post mortem, the coroner discovered that the man
in the elevator had died through shock and loss of blood. About 1.5 litres
of blood were missing, yet there had been no bloodstains in the elevator.
It was as if a vampire had sucked the blood out of the dead man, but the
Russian police couldn't go for that outlandish explanation.
A month later, police were called to the same block of flats
because a girl of thirteen was trapped in the elevator, which was stuck
between the fourth and fifth floor. Residents heard the girl screaming
frantically, and when the police arrived with three members of the local
fire service and gained access to the elevator, they found the girl lying
on the floor of the elevator. The girl was dead, and two small puncture
marks were later found on the girl's left breast, which was heavily bruised.
The residents refused to use the faulty elevator, and were convinced that
a vampire was at large in the block of flats.
Police started to play down the seemingly unsolvable deaths,
and one former KGB propaganda minister named Leonid Keerov suggested that
the girl had died after injecting heroin into herself, but the dead girl's
parents threatened to sue the official, because their daughter had never
taken drugs and no syringe was found in the elevator.
To get to the bottom of the matter, a Russian detective and
a sergeant entered the lift and rode it continually up and down. The two
men were armed with pistols and carried flashlights and two-way
radios.
Three days later, the lift was travelling upwards when it halted
inbetween the fifth and sixth floor of the building. The lights went out,
so the men switched on their torches and two-way radios to alert their
colleagues who were playing cards in a police van in the street below.
The two trapped men waited, perhaps wondering if some ghostly
vampire would appear. There was a long silence for about three minutes;
then they heard something scuttling above their heads. Something was moving
along the roof of the elevator. The detective noticed a black square -
almost a foot across - set in the roof of the elevator where an access
panel had come away. The lift was so old, the panel had probably fallen
off because of rust. The detective shone his torch through the square hole
in the roof, and the beam from his torch lit up the lift shaft above and
the steel cables supporting the lift. Something peered through that hole
that made the detective's blood run cold. A small black hairy head the
size of an orange with a bunch of black eyes the size of grapes looked
in at him.
The sergeant was terrified by the freakish-looking animal and
raised his revolver at it, but the detective told him not to fire.
'What is it?' said the petrified police sergeant, trembling,
and almost dropping his torch with nerves.
'Turn your torch off.' the detective said to the sergeant.
'What? No way sir.' the sergeant protested, sweating heavily.
'That thing doesn't like light.' said the detective. 'You keep
your torch on then and I'll turn mine off. Don't make any sudden moves,
and tell the men downstairs to stand by.'
The detective switched off his light, and watched the thing
slide further into the lift. Suddenly, the sergeant's nerves got the better
of him, because he had three phobias: fear of the dark - fear of enclosed
spaces - and arachnaphobia; a fear of spiders, and that horrible thing
hanging through the hole in the ceiling looked like an overgrown spider.
So the sergeant just freaked out and dropped his torch, and his nerves
cost him his life. The torch hit the floor and smashed. Before the detective
could switch on his torch, the enormous hairy black spider dropped into
the lift with lightning agility and bit out at the only thing in the lift
that was moving excitedly. The spider bit the unfortunate sergeant's face
and hung on as it drew out his blood. The detective switched on his torch
and saw the whole nightmarish drama. The sergeant was screaming, and the
spider was like something from another planet. Its body was the size of
a jack russel dog, and its six hairy legs were almost 3 feet long. The
freak insect's mouthparts were embedded into the sergeant's face, and as
it sucked out his blood, the spider's body turned red. The detective took
aim and shot twice at the spider. The first shot missed, and the second
bullet blasted one of the spider's legs off, but when the bullet ricocheted
off the wall, it bounced back and smashed the torchbulb. The lift was once
again in total darkness. The sergeant stopped screaming and his body hit
the floor
| with a thump, and the detective could feel the bristly hairs on the
insect brush against him as the huge spider ran past and climbed back up
to the hole in the elevator's roof. When the police and firemen
opened the elevator, they found the dead sergeant, whose terror-stricken
face was bruised and bloody - and on the floor in the corner, sat the traumatized
detective. Nearby on the elevator floor was a long hairy black leg of the
spider still twitching. The detective remained speechless for a while then
blurted out the incredible story. The authorities quickly hushed up the
incident, but news of the story got out via the internet, and a version
of the story also appeared in a Turkish newspaper, but was quickly denounced
as an exaggeration. It was claimed that the giant spider was a deformed
black widow spider that had been mutated by the radioactive fallout from
the recent Chernobyl nuclear plant disaster. Later reports on the internet
said Russian troops had destroyed the spider with a flamethrower, then
discovered the insect had laid eggs at the top of the lift shaft.
Before you turn the light out tonight, you'd better put the plug in the bath...you don't know what's crawling about nowdays... |
 |
FROM "TERRY LENNAINE READS THE STORIES OF
TOM SLEMEN"
(90-MINUTE AUDIO TAPE)
PRODUCED BY TERRY LENNAINE
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.