Personal Narrative Essay: The Red Death

Improved Essays
Do you have that numb feeling of a scarring moment in your life that haunts you? I’m not taking about those scrapes and bruises when you fell off your bike, but that dismal memory when you feel like you lost everything. I’m Carrie Madison, one of the doctors at Cane Hill Hospital; I have been studying a disease called the “Red Death” that can make you sweat blood and kill you instantly. I want to tell you a story that happened ten years ago and it inhabits me for years. This is the story when the “Red Death” came into my life. It was May 26, 1874, when I was a maid for a happy and wonderful family that lived in an expensive mansion. The father, Jacob, was an outgoing man and would never conceal his feelings to anyone. The children, Alice …show more content…
The problem was that every time the clock rung, everyone would stay quiet and wait until it would stop, and then would laugh nervously. Then at midnight, a man entered the room, but not a normal man, he was a sinister-looking man who wore a torn cloak, that was red as blood and wore a mask that looked like a skeleton that cover his entire face . People began to become scared of the man, but not Jacob, he was angry that a man had the guts to dress that way to scare everyone. Jacob started to yell at the man to leave, but instead of responding, he started to walk around the room. Since no one wanted to unmask the man, Jacob grabbed his keen dagger and ran towards the man. Quickly the man turned around and started at Jacob; Instantly Jacob gagged for air and started coughing up blood. The moment I saw the blood, I ran and grabbed Tommy and Alice and headed for the door. Once we go outside of the room, right away loud shrieks came from the room and I immediately locked the door. All I could hear was the cries of many people dying one by one; I wished I could go in and see what the perilous man was doing to them. Then finally the screams stopped, and slowly, I unlocked the door. When I entered, the floor was covered with nothing but dark red blood, and bodies. As I tried to walk around the bodies, Alice and Tommy grabbed my hands so hard I almost cried. Then after walking around

Related Documents

  • Improved Essays

    Beaudoin_A Black Death DBQ Essay The Black Death is a disease that was spread throughout Europe only in 4 years time. This disease took many innocent lives and great countries. These people living and dead were put through misery.…

    • 796 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Lidtke Mill Short Story

    • 562 Words
    • 3 Pages

    They looked back and they were both gone again. They ran back and the first place they looked was downstairs and they were not there. They went upstairs and they were gone until they heard yelling from outside by the river. They ran out and started talking to them, they were in the cage that was locked up but the key was right there.…

    • 562 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    9/11 Short Stories

    • 1017 Words
    • 5 Pages

    Blood began to gush out of the wound. He began to yell and scream in agonizing pain. He tried many times to pull it out, but he didn't have the strength. She went into the old man's apartment, planning to help him, but he wasn't there.…

    • 1017 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Edgar Allan Poe is one of the greatest literary writers known to man. He is the type of writer who uses symbols in all of his stories to illustrate the main point of the plot. In The Masque of the Red Death, he uses the colors to represent the stages of life. He uses the seventh room to personify death and the clock as a time limit for the characters in the short story. When people read the story they get an idea about how Poe visualizes the way his story should go.…

    • 514 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The mood of The Masque of the Red Death is explained in many ways. The ways that it is showed are by the color of the rooms and to how the main characters are actually being portrayed in the story and how the mysterious figures keep showing up and how everybody is afraid of the mysterious figures. It is also showed when Prince Prospero was trying to get away from the Red Death person. The mood of the story is happy at first but tragic in the end. The mood is portrayed in the story by the color of the rooms.…

    • 590 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Although there are several similarities in the red death and the black death, there are also many differences. There was a purpose behind poe's “Masque of the red death” and The Black Death was the an actual tragic event that happened .In this essay I will be talking about the difference in the symptoms, The different beliefs and the similarity in the actions. The Red Death and The Black Death have several differences in the symptoms.…

    • 492 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The responses of the Muslims and the Christians were very different in how they dealt with The Black Death. Mainly how the Muslims responded was they thought that they now needed to be saved or cleansed, and the Christians were worried about the pope because they had thought for all their life that he could fix these type of things when in reality he couldn’t. So both society groups or religions were panicking just in different ways. The Black Death had two other names the Great Pestilence, and the Great Plague. The Black Death was actually a combination of three plagues from three different bacterial strains:bubonic, pneumonic, and septicemic.…

    • 848 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    “Come along boy, we must hurry,” I said to my son as I ran amok the town trying to keep up with one another. “If we stay out any longer we might catch the plague, and we certainly don’t want that, right? Whatever happens, I will not let you end up like your mother.” I seized my son’s arm and forcefully hauled him with me.…

    • 573 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Essay On The Black Plague

    • 1209 Words
    • 5 Pages

    During the 14th century, around 75 to 200 million people died because of the disease known as the Black Plague. These numbers show that around a third of Europe’s population was completely wiped out. Many terrible changes occurred including the rich and the poor going against each other, blaming one another for causing this horrific disease. The Black Plague was the worst epidemic that has ever been recorded in the world’s history because of the disease’s ability to spread rapidly, the terrible process of infection, and as well as the long term effects that it had on Europe.…

    • 1209 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Black Death Essay

    • 939 Words
    • 4 Pages

    The bubonic and pneumonic plagues of the fourteenth century, most commonly referred to as the Black Death, was one of the worst plagues to strike the world. With estimates of anywhere between a third to half of the population of Europe perishing due to these plagues it was not uncommon for most that survived this terrifying era to have personal accounts of this time. Many first-hand accounts of this era hold many similarities, but there are also subtle differences depending on location and also the time of which the plague had reached certain areas. This paper will specifically focus on two primary sources from this era of the Black Death. One account from Padua, Italy and another account from Vienna, Austria.…

    • 939 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    It is when we are asleep, we are given the power to let our minds wander. To lose all sense of reality and drift aimlessly through our subconscious thoughts and dreams. A time when all of our problems and struggles in the physical world slip away for a brief period of time. It is when we wake, we are forced to face the harsh reality of the world we live in. A world with crime and hate.…

    • 587 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Improved Essays

    James walks out of the restroom mall and hears a pitching scream in the distance he runs towards the sound to investigate when he sees a weeping woman covered in blood run past him. James starts to panic looking around for clues trying to figure out where everyone has gone. He sees a crowd of people running towards him. James noticed some of them were also covered in blood while the others had a look of panic. He decides to run out the mall looking for a hiding spot.…

    • 303 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Masque of the Red Death” is considered to be an allegory about life and the inevitability of death. While it may appear to be a story about a plague and a prince’s response to it, it in fact holds a much deeper meaning and lesson. In “The Masque of the Red Death,” Prince Prospero locks himself into his abbey with 1,000 other people to escape the plague that is ravishing the world outside. However, when Prince Prospero holds a party in his abbey, a masked stranger sneaks in, killing all of the people inside. One allegorical feature in this short story is the colored rooms in the abbey, which symbolize the path of life.…

    • 1420 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Humans try to prevent the inevitable, yet they do not attempt to achieve the uncertain. Throughout history, people have endured fatal invasions, brutal weather, societal regulations, and plagues. During a plague’s outburst, Prince Prospero invites one-thousand companions for protection from the illness by secluding the party in his ‘castellated abbey’ to wait until the plague’s termination. Prince Prospero attempted to use his wealth and reputation to overcome nature. Prospero decided that he would try to have victory over nature by the false thought that he had control of his life.…

    • 1801 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Superior Essays

    In the end, death has the final word. In Edgar Allan Poe’s dark short story “The Masque of the Red Death,” Prince Prospero invites the remaining healthy members of a community to hide away in his quarantined castle while the outside is plagued by the personified Red Death. Once Death enters the castle, it leaves no survivors. In “The Masque of the Red Death” Poe often depicts his characters’ actions as insane, but seemingly normal and fails to recognize that they are ludicrous; he then rejects and contrasts the beliefs in the Bible, in order to arrive at an all encompassing theme of an absolutely ineludible death. Because Prince Prospero behaves strangely, Poe calls his mental health into question by manipulating polysyndeton that forces…

    • 1540 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Superior Essays