They say that one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. But sometimes,
one man’s trash is another man’s deadly curse, and is best left in the trashbin.
Following the 2008 global financial crisis, many Americans were out of work,
and had to find ways to cut household spending. One such person was Janet Smith, who’d just been
laid off from her job at a law firm and, unable to find work, had to move from San Francisco to
the smaller college town of Chico, California. Needing furniture for her new house, Janet spent
her first day in Chico exploring the centre of town, looking for some affordable options. While
she browsed the selection of pre-loved furniture at the local Goodwill, she saw that immediately
caught her eye: an antique wooden rocking horse, just like the one that had been in her
grandmother's house when she was a little girl. It was in good condition except for the worn
paint, and Janet found it so charming that she was compelled to take it home with her.
Little did she know that she'd just brought a force beyond comprehension into her new home.
In previous videos, we've explained the terrifying, faceless monster known as Sirenhead,
as well as the impossibly cruel, reality-warping Cartoon Cat, both creations of Canadian horror
kingpin Trevor Henderson. Today, we've got something a little different in store, because
while the being covered in this episode might not be as threatening as Sirenhead or Cartoon Cat,
it's easily one of the most memorable and bizarre of Henderson's beasties. This is the story of the
enigmatic entity known simply as Long Horse. While the creature is most often called Long
Horse, it's really not an accurate description. Long Horse isn't simply a long horse, rather,
it's an entity that resembles the mummified head and neck of a horse. It has an almost skeletal
appearance, with no eyes, lips, or lower jaw, but with a scraggly mane still growing from its neck.
The neck itself is where the creature gets its name, as no matter the angle it's seen from,
it stretches beyond the field of vision of whoever encounters it.
Long Horse's body, if it even has one, is seemingly always hiding behind a corner,
and the creature's neck can stretch as far as it needs to. The bones in it are,
according to Trevor Henderson's blog, more like finger bones than vertebrae, allowing for its
unnatural degree of bending and curving. Henderson has also explained that the bends in Long Horse's
neck can be as many or as few as needed. In contrast to Henderson's more outwardly
malicious creations, Long Horse has been called 'generally non-hostile, but persistent',
and Henderson has also called it the “patron saint of forewarning, of disaster averted,
of curiosity, for better or worse”. Its origins are a mystery, but it seems to be able to travel
through different planes of reality. For the most part, though, it only appears in dreams.
As soon as Janet brought home her new rocking horse, she noticed a few things.
She started to smell cinnamon around the house, which didn't bother her very much,
considering that she had always liked the smell of cinnamon. She was also easily able to write
off the strange dreams she started having. Every night, she would dream of waking up
and walking out into the hallway of her new house. She would stand at the top of the stairs and watch
as a skeletal horse's head would snake around through the arch that led into the living room.
The horse never did anything, it just looked at her. Sometimes in
the dream she would try to see the rest of its body, but no matter how hard she looked,
she would only see more of the horse's neck, curving out the window and off into the darkness.
Janet paid no mind to these dreams at first, but they started to become more frequent as
time went on. That was when her run of bad luck started. It was little things at first,
like misplacing her keys, running into traffic, or ripping her favourite dress.
Janet didn't make any connection in her mind to her minor misfortunes and the mysterious horse in
her dreams. But one night, the horse appeared to her again. This time, she was sitting in her car,
parked near a wooded area that she used to walk through in her old neighbourhood.
The horse's neck was curling around the trees, gliding silently as it came closer and closer to
her with a sense of urgency that Janet had never seen from it before. She realised that in this
dream, she could hear the horse's neck bones cracking as it wound itself through the trees.
She woke up the next morning, unsettled by the dream she'd just had. But still, she chalked
it up to the stress of the move and her new job, and she got ready for work the way she always did.
That's when she got a call - her mother, who still lived in San Francisco, had just been
admitted to hospital after having a heart attack. Janet took the first day she could off of work to
go and visit her mother in the hospital. When Janet got there, she was stable,
but still in a considerable amount of pain. Janet asked her mother how she was doing,
and all her mother could say in response was “I was having dreams about a horse.”
The doctor said it was just the morphine talking, but Janet knew better.
When she returned home, she resolved to get rid of the rocking horse, knowing that
all of her strange dreams and bad luck had started with her bringing it home. However,
when she tried to take it back to the thrift store, the store's owner had no record of the item
ever having been in the store's inventory. He couldn't remember ever having seen it before.
On her way home from the store, she took a detour to the nearest dump and threw the horse away,
hoping to be rid of it once and for all. But her attempts were useless, as that night,
she again dreamed of the Long Horse. In her dream she screamed at it to leave her alone,
but the horse didn't respond. She could still hear its neck cracking, and the sound was even louder
than it had sounded in the other dream. The next day, with no explanation,
the rocking horse was back in her living room where it had been before, and once again she
noticed the smell of cinnamon around her house. Janet tried every possible way to get rid of the
rocking horse. But no matter if she smashed it to pieces, burned it, or even just tried
to donate it somewhere else, it would always come back the next day, and every night she would have
another dream about the mummified horse with an impossibly long neck. Every night in her dreams
she demanded to know what the entity wanted. The only response she got was a blank, eyeless stare
and the sound of the horse's neck bones cracking as its neck stretched longer and longer.
She felt convinced that whatever it was, it had been responsible for her mother's heart attack,
and if she didn't get rid of it, something even worse would happen. But still,
the feeling the creature gave her was not a threatening one, rather, a feeling of urgency.
What Janet couldn't understand was that the Long Horse was not the cause of her recent misfortune,
it was trying to warn her. Trevor Henderson has stated that the cracking is Long Horse's
attempt at communication. Hearing the sound in a dream is a sure sign that a tragedy is about
to happen in the life of the person hearing it, and the more bends that person sees in
the horse's neck, the more urgent the message. Eventually the dreams got so bad that she feared
sleeping at all. Janet stayed up as late as she could, knowing that to fall asleep would mean
having to see that long, twisted neck and hear the horrible crack of its bones. She just couldn't
take it anymore. She put on a pot of coffee and resolved that if she could avoid falling asleep,
she would. But it was impossible for Janet to stay awake forever, and eventually she
passed out on her couch at around 4 AM with the empty pot of coffee on the table next to her.
The next day, Janet woke up in a panic. She hadn't meant to fall asleep! She looked at the clock and
saw, to her horror, she was 3 hours late for work! Janet rushed to get ready and ran to her car.
She started driving as fast as she could, hoping that her boss wouldn't fire her on the spot for
being so late. As she got closer, she started to hear fire truck sirens and realised she could
see smoke coming from the office building where she'd been working since she'd moved to Chico.
To her horror, she realised that the whole office was on fire. She asked the fire
fighters what happened. They explained that a gas leak, combined with an electrical fault,
had triggered a huge explosion that had caused most of the building to catch fire. They told
Janet that she was lucky to have slept in when she did, because her office had been completely
destroyed. Had Janet come into work on time, there would have been no way she could've survived.
That night, when Janet dreamt of the long horse, it was in her stairwell again.
Its neck was much shorter, and its bones no longer cracked. She approached it, holding
an apple. She held the apple out towards the horse's snout, and it started to rot and wither,
signalling that the horse had accepted her offering of thanks. After that night, Janet
never had a dream about the long horse again. So, that's the story of Long Horse - a silent,
mysterious, but apparently benevolent entity that appears in dreams to warn of impending tragedy.
It's another excellent concept from the mind that brought us Cartoon Cat and Siren Head,
and just like those two characters, Long Horse is entirely fictional, right? Well,
you might be surprised. Myths and legends of creatures similar to Long Horse go back centuries.
The word 'nightmare' itself even originates from one such legend - in medieval Europe,
the mare was believed to be a demonic entity that could 'ride', or possess horses while their
owners were sleeping, resulting in the horses being mysteriously exhausted in the morning.
The mare was also said to be responsible for sleep paralysis in humans, hence the word
'nightmare' becoming the name for night terrors or bad dreams over time. While the demonic
mare wasn't initially thought to be horse-like itself, the fact that the word 'mare' is also,
coincidentally, the name of a female horse, the two concepts eventually became combined
in the public consciousness when Henri Fusili painted The Nightmare in 1781. (use this image:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nightmare#/media/File:John_Henry_Fuseli_-_The_Nightmare.JPG
) The painting, which was hugely popular in its time and has been recreated by dozens of other
artists, depicts a sleeping woman with a demon crouching on her chest. On the other side of
the room, an ethereal white horse not unlike our long friend watches through the curtains.
Long Horse also has similarities to the Mari Lwyd - another folkloric character originating
in Wales. The Mari Lwyd, or Grey Mare, is a type of macabre puppet constructed of an articulated
horse skull on the end of a pole, covered in a long white cloth that conceals the puppeteer
and creates the appearance of the head and extended neck of ghostly horse. Despite its
gruesome appearance, in Wales, the Mari Lwyd is actually associated with the holiday season.
Its mane is made of green and red ribbons, and its eye sockets are usually filled with ornaments,
and in parts of Wales, groups of locals will carry the Mari Lwyd with them from house to house,
singing carols, telling jokes, drinking, and looking for Christmas parties to crash.
Much like the Long Horse, the Mari Lwyd appreciates kind offerings from the people
it visits, but unlike the Long Horse, the Mari Lwyd is a party horse who definitely
prefers mulled wine and eggnog to apples. Long Horse also shares a lot in common with
the story of the Mothman, a creature that silently haunted the residents of one West Virginia town in
the months leading up to a catastrophic bridge collapse. Mothman was a terrifying figure, but
like Long Horse, most people believe that Mothman was warning people of the impending disaster.
We'd lay out more similarities here, but the story of Mothman takes a whole video to explain-
check out 'Could the Legendary Mothman Actually Exist' after this for more information.
So, has Trevor Henderson created Long Horse based on this storied history of harbingers
and horse demons, or was he just the most recent in a long line of artists to be inspired by dreams
and visions of a ghostly, skeletal horse? We might never know the answer. But whatever the truth is,
Long Horse has captivated the internet. And after watching this video,
there's a non-zero chance that you might dream about Long Horse yourself. If that happens,
just remember that the horse means you no harm. Just offer it an apple,
and pay attention to the sound of its neck cracking. You can never be too careful.
Scared yet? Why not check out Cartoon Cat Explained and Siren Head Explained
for more creepy content based on the monstrous creations of Trevor Henderson.