Previously: “The Company I Work For Has A Wonderful Christmas Tradition.”
I love a good bus-centric urban legend, so this week, let’s take a look at one together, shall we? This creepypasta is called, simply, “On The Bus.” Set in Bogota, it follows an unfortunate protagonist who… uh… let’s say that they manage to board the wrong bus home one day, to disastrous result.
This one is credited to Lucas Llinás Múnera, although there’s a lot about its origins that have been lost to the sands of time. The oldest version of it I’ve found is dated December 2012; that was when it first appeared at the Creepypasta Wiki, with a number of reposts on other sites arriving soon after in 2013.
[Like what you read? Check out Dangerous Games To Play In The Dark, available from Chronicle Books now!]
However, even the 2012 upload looks not to have been from the author themself — it was from Creepypasta Wiki user LOLSKELETONS, a prolific uploader and archivist of creepypasta tales who noted at the time, “I noticed that this hasn’t been posted yet, so I decided to post it.”
In any event, there’s a lot that makes this one stand out. First, it’s a second-person narrative — that is, you, the reader, are effectively the protagonist, with the story telling you exactly what’s happening to you as you go. Second person is a difficult tense to pull off, but it’s done beautifully here.
And second, there’s a really terrific style convention used to convey some…. oddities involving time. I don’t want to say too much more than that, as it’ll spoil the story — but I will say this: While the time-based trope in question is easy enough to convey with through film, it’s a little harder to do in the written word. Here, though, it’s enormously effective, using the medium to its full advantage.
Be careful boarding the bus on your way home today.
You wouldn’t want to end up in the wrong place, now, would you?
Read an excerpt below, and check out the full story “On The Bus” over at the Creepypasta Wiki.
***
The streets, roads and dusty lanes of Colombia have been fertile territory for myths and legends since before the arrival of the Spaniards. Tales of La Patasola, a one-legged wailing banshee that forever sought her child, and of El Duende, a backwards-footed goblin that led travelers to their doom, nibbled at the corners of journeymen’s ease for centuries. Although these stories mainly troubled those living in or passing through rural areas, the growth of cities brought with it a new breed of urban legend rooted in the primal distrust we still harbor, somewhere deep inside, of modern technology.
An example of this is the phantom bus that allegedly roams the city’s streets at night. Supposedly, young women who board it alone are found mutilated in overgrown outlying fields a few days later, a frozen look of abject terror illustrating the moment of their last, tormented breath.
That being said, given that you’re certainly not a young woman (at least not last time you checked) and that it’s 5:30 on a Tuesday afternoon, phantom buses and handicapped gremlins are the last thing on your mind. You’ve been using Bogota’s public transportation system for over two decades, and your greatest concern is that traffic levels have become all but unmanageable since the latest mayor took office. However, home is about 80 blocks away, so your only choice is to wait until the right bus comes along.
***
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[Photo via StockSnap/Pixabay]
What a wonderful Creepypasta!
The use of second-person is really effective here – and remembered me of one episode of “Welcome to Night Vale”, The Story of You, I think? – and the convention trully make this a masterpiece.
As a horror writer, this is the kind of work we all wished to had written before XD
Now, one thing that made me curious here is the proximity of this story with one we have here in Brazil. Our story, however, is about Setealém, a city that can only be reach, most commonly, by bus. The city, as the subject of all those stories, seems to be a parallel reality, where time and space work in a different way.
Even though there are different stories, the connection between both of them not only via bus, but via geographical proximity (Colombia is relatively close to Brazil, being one of our country neighbours) is something that makes me wonder if would be any kind of connection in their motifs.