25/05/2026
She thought the red soil was a growth hack until the people around her started breaking in ways no algorithm could explain.
TITLE : The Soil of the Unclaimed Dead
The first nosebleed happened during a livestream while I was filming content in my apartment in Nairobi, and at the time I thought it was just another technical problem I would have to edit around. I had a ring light balanced on a stack of books, my phone propped against a cup, and my friend Brian sitting just off camera helping me keep the setup steady because my tripod had broken earlier that week.
Everything looked normal on screen, even though behind the scenes it was barely holding together.
I was reading comments while trying to act natural when Brian suddenly stopped talking, and I remember thinking he was messing around because he had that habit of freezing mid-conversation to joke with me. But when I turned my head, I saw blood running from his nose in a steady stream that immediately soaked into his shirt, and his expression shifted from confusion to panic in a way I will not forget because it did not look like fear at first, it looked like he did not understand what his own body was doing.
He grabbed the counter for support, tried to say something, and then his knees gave out and he collapsed hard enough to shake the camera feed before the livestream cut out.
At first, people online thought it was staged, and I saw comments calling it acting or fake blood within minutes, but I was already on the floor trying to wake him up while calling emergency services, and by the time the ambulance arrived, he had started regaining consciousness but could not explain what had just happened to him.
By the next morning, the clip had spread everywhere, and my account gained hundreds of thousands of followers almost overnight, which should have felt like success but instead felt like something attaching itself to me that I did not ask for.
The strange part was that Brian collapsing was not even the beginning of it.
It started three weeks earlier when a delivery rider showed up at my door with a plain cardboard box that had no sender information and no company branding, and inside that box was a small black pouch filled with reddish soil that looked too fine to be normal dirt, almost like powdered clay, along with a single note that simply said “Use it before recording.”
I remember laughing when I first read it because I assumed it was some kind of strange marketing stunt or prank, and at that point I was desperate enough for attention online that even a weird brand activation did not seem impossible.
So I used it.
I was filming a basic makeup video that night, nothing special, just another attempt to stay consistent, and I rubbed a small amount of the red powder onto my hand because I thought it looked interesting on camera, and within hours that video started climbing faster than anything I had ever posted before.
The next morning it had hundreds of thousands of views.
A few days later I received another identical package, and I used it again, and again the video performed far beyond anything I had experienced before, and after that it became a pattern where every time I used the powder my content would suddenly explode online regardless of what I was actually posting.
It did not matter if I was filming myself sitting in traffic eating chips or complaining about rent prices or recording something completely pointless, the engagement kept increasing to levels that did not make sense for someone at my size.
At first I thought I had finally figured out how to grow online, but then people around me started reacting strangely during shoots.
A photographer I hired became dizzy halfway through a session and suddenly smashed expensive equipment while shouting at someone who was not in the room.
A makeup artist refused to come back after saying she could smell something rotten every time she entered my filming space.
And then Brian collapsed during the livestream.
After he left the hospital, he stopped responding to me entirely until he finally sent a short voice note late at night telling me I needed to get rid of whatever I was using, but he refused to explain what he meant.
That was when I started digging.
I searched everything I could find about red soil, rituals, and strange incidents around Nairobi, and most of it was useless noise online until I came across a local article describing a highway construction project outside the city where excavation work had exposed what elders believed was an unmarked burial site.
The article said several workers fell violently ill after the soil was disturbed, and one line described the exposed ground as having a distinct red coloration that did not match the surrounding earth.
When I read that, I was sitting in traffic on Ngong Road, and I remember stopping the car without even realizing it because something about that detail did not feel like coincidence anymore.
Then my phone rang, and it was my mother calling in a state of panic.
I could barely understand her at first because she was crying so hard, but eventually I realized she was talking about my younger cousin Kevin, who had been in school when something violent happened that no one could explain.
She told me Kevin suddenly stood up during class, smashed a chair into a window, and attacked another student with no warning until teachers physically pulled him off, and what made it worse was that Kevin had been completely normal earlier that same day.
He was a quiet child, not aggressive, not troubled, the kind of kid who avoided conflict completely, and the only unusual detail my mother mentioned was that he had visited my apartment a few days before the incident.
That was when I stopped treating it like a coincidence.
That night I gathered every pouch of red powder I had and drove out toward the edge of the city, eventually reaching an unfinished construction area where there were no lights and almost no sound, and I used a tire iron from my trunk to dig into the ground until I had a deep enough hole to bury everything I had left.
While I was digging, I had this constant feeling that I was being watched, even though every time I looked around there was nothing there except empty road and distant city noise.
When I finally buried the powder, I stayed there for a moment longer than I should have, then got back in my car and drove home thinking it was over.
But when I unlocked my apartment door and stepped inside, I immediately stopped because there was another package sitting in the middle of my living room floor.
It was identical to the others, sealed in black tape, and when I looked closer I could see a faint red dust leaking from the edges as if it had already started breaking down from the inside.
I knew I had locked the door.
I knew no one had been inside.
Still, I opened it.
Inside was another pouch of the same red soil, and beneath it was an old photograph of highway workers standing beside a large excavation site somewhere outside Nairobi, all of them smiling as if it was just another day of work, except for one man near the back who was staring directly at the camera with blood running from his nose.
And behind him, partially obscured by shadow, was someone wearing the exact necklace I was wearing at that moment, even though I had never seen that photograph before in my life.
If you want more stories like this, follow me now for new ones that blur the line between what’s real and what shouldn’t be.
