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.
