Don't Look Back | Campfire Stories with MrBallen

MrBallen frames this campfire story as the kind of tale that belongs in Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark — except, he says, this one is true. One summer night in the 1970s, a young woman named Hana sits beside her husband at a blackjack table in the Genting Highlands Casino in central Malaysia as he bets everything on a single hand. The dealer busts, they double their money, and Hana wants to cash out and celebrate with a hotel room. Her husband instead heads for the slot machines, and within two hours every ringgit is gone — including, after one final defiant pull, the money they had set aside for the room.

Forced to drive home in the middle of the night, they run out of gas on a desolate stretch of road flanked by jungle and swamp. The husband takes a gas can and walks off into the dark; Hana locks the doors and tries to sleep. Then the thumping starts on the roof. She tells herself it is a low-hanging branch in the wind, and for the better part of an hour she sits with the sound, watching for her husband, unnerved when a passing car slows beside her and then abruptly peels away at speed.

Eventually headlights return — a police cruiser. One officer steps out and aims his pistol not at her, she realizes, but at the roof of her car. The other, through a megaphone, gives three orders: get out of the car, come to us, and don't look back. Hana sprints across the road, and once inside the cruiser she disobeys the last order. What she sees — a matted-haired woman crouched on the roof, chewing on her husband's severed head — sends the officers into a barrage of gunfire. The woman drops the head, leaps down on all fours, and gallops into the tree line. Backup never finds her. The rest of the husband's body is recovered near the trees, just up the road from the car.