Thank You Dad

Thank You Dad is a spooky little story about a group of kids who sneak into an abandoned house and find an old tape cassette. It is supposedly a true story and it happened in Japan.

When I was a junior high school student, there was an old, abandoned house in our neighborhood that was falling into ruin. There was ivy growing thick on the walls and the roof had caved in at some point.

One day, some of my classmates and I decided to sneak into it and explore. It was around 8 PM and the sun was setting. The door was locked, so we had to climb in through one of the back windows.

We went from room to room, finding our way with a flashlight. For some strange reason, there were hundreds of dolls lined up along the walls. Although we were all excited, the atmosphere became tense. None of us spoke to each other and there was an uneasy silence.

Most of my friends were scared and wanted to go home, but I convinced them to stay and explore a little longer. We came to one small room at the front of the house that was empty except for a little table in the middle. As we entered, we could hear the floorboards creaking and groaning under our feet.

I noticed something lying on the table. As I got closer, I saw that it was a letter and there was an old cassette tape beside it. The letter read:

“Thank you Dad”

When I saw the writing, I felt a chill run down my spine and I decided it was time to go. When we got out of the house, everyone breathed a sigh of relief. On the way home, one of my friends and I started talking about the letter and the cassette tape lying beside it.

“What was that?” I asked him.

“I don’t know,” he muttered, “but I brought it with me when we left…”

Curious about what the tape contained, we brought it back to my house, put it in my tape recorder and pressed “Play”.

There was nothing but silence.

We sat there and listened for 10 minutes or more, but there was just silence.

After a while, we figured there was nothing on it, so we just left it playing and started reading comic books. Eventually we forgot about the tape.

Then, all of a sudden, we heard a woman’s voice coming from the tape recorder.

It said, “Thank you dad for killing me…”