Winter King back up

   I am reluctant to recount this as my brother was only 6 at the time and claims now he doesn't even remember any of this; for the record I was 16. Also this happened five to six years ago give or take some months depending on when I post this; and it was the winter of 2015 going into 2016; and when these incidents started there was a movie in theaters that made anyone we spoke to think we were just having nightmares about that movie or were my brother was and I was being accused of playing along with it to scare him. To this day our parents think we imagined the whole thing; despite evidence to the contrary; they might just be in denial and come up with their own conclussions; that movie by the way was Krampus. Which really makes me regret posting this as that right there if I read it somewhere else would make me instantly think the whole thing was bullshit. But this isn't about us seeing some horned goat man come down the chimney or killer toys or some weird Holiday themed encounter; this was something else; just with a passing resemblance. Another thing is the real (meat) of these events I feel didn't really happen to us, or was focused on us; but on some neighbors we never met.

   To give some backstory; we live (as in yes still live there, my brother is only now 12 and I'm 21 going on 22 as of writing this in a few months; hey years and overlapping events and birthdays arn't perfect; it happened almost six years ago but my birthday is in like three more as of writing this so there). Anyway, we live in a nice big house on the outskirts of the city, and by outskirts I mean when I was ten there were like six big houses down this winding paved road spaced out by strips of forest and cornfields between hitting a highway and the more house dense area closer to the businesses in town and smaller houses at that. I won't bore anyone with the details of the layout of my house; just know its two stories with a large enough attic to walk around in, and a full carpeted basement with closets and everything...also a back door to a yard, but half of it is technically underground; sort of a house on a hillside going out back kind of deal. A short uphill walk from our picket fenced in backyard and you'd come to the forest, a creek ran through there, still does, just not as much as it used to; pretty sure the new lots up stream put in drainnage and their own personal ponds to collect the fish that messed with the water level downstream out behind our yard. There was some woods there, I even had stick forts and stuff out there back before my brother was born; and looked forward to as an older brother showing him all the cool spots in the woods (it wasn't too terribly deep before you came up to cornfields, really hard to get lost; thinking back maybe 300 feet in till a cornfield going straight back from the house. Going left or tight was alot shorter, as while these woods were apparently no one but the county's property, we did have neighbors with connected yards...and like a skinny string of trees and bushes in a ditch between us and one of them not that far off, like thirty or forty feet in any given direction left or right. Never really told my parents how far in I explored; my fort was right on the other side of the creek, in clear view of the house.

    Now I rarely went as far as the cornfield, not just because I was afraid some of those woods belonged to who ever's field that was or animals, you'd rarely ever even see a coyote around there; but that sort of was the thing, shortly before the cornfield there was this spot, like really eerie feeling and dark no matter the weather with a big ugly black as anything tree trunk. It looked burned out but hard as rock; when I was 12 I thought maybe it was petrified wood, but you could clearly see the roots across the ground. It was very tall and never as far as I ever saw had leaves on it, and in that area you never saw anything. I don't think even bugs were around there; but again i didn't much time there; I knew I had gone in too deep when this thing like some hideous monolith started to peek out between the trees. It was like another thirty feet; so a stone's throw to the field. But if you went around it you could practically mark on the ground where it was lighter and bugs and newts and stuff were in the leaves on the forest floor.

   All of that is important because in 2013 they bowdozed that whole area, not the whole forest, but let's just say the 300 feet of woods got reduced to like 150 feet with a new whole neighborhood put in, like a whole street, yards, a bunch of same looking one and two story houses with garages. It honestly was kind of baffling how much looked to fit into what felt like such a small area before, it was like the woods were just erased and replaced with just more town; including the eerie area which would now be in the backyard of one of the two story houses. I remember spying on it from the woods, white picket fence, in ground pool; I felt kind of weird, and thought as I was 13 or 14 when these were being put in I could get into real trouble if some new people moving in saw some 13 to 14 year old teenage boy wandering around the woods just behind their house.

   We had a dog, which wasn't really important enough to mention till now; but he was a stay in the house kind of dog, my mother's little Yorkie; which I honestly think hated going outside. Well in 2014 the dog had run away; which I only bring up because I thought I had seen its remains in the woods; but I didn't tell anyone about that. Didn't want to upset my mother in further; they thought someone had stolen when it got outside and kept checking the pound; and thinking its living somewhere with someone else is better than thinking a coyote or an owl given how tiny it was, had eaten it up. I couldn't be certain anyway, the carcass was...too torn up, it was just the right fur color and I didn't see the collar or anything around; but it was about the right size. Other than that in the winter of 2014 was when the first really weird thing happened, I found my fort just on the other side of the creek demolished, like someone had smashed it to pieces with a hammer. My father thought it just fell apart after so many years of wet summers and winters and maybe even termites; but you could tell by the way he was looking at the woods he was thinking something else; that something else was clearly vanalizing teenagers; as he told me not to wander past the creek anymore. I recal he made an excuse to check out the new streets not long after when picking us up from school; I am certain he was checking out the neighborhood to see if anyone was near the back of our property and probably keep an eye out for them. My dad was always kinda paranoid, why he moved out to the country in the first place according to my mom, he was always anxious someone would break into the house we lived in when I was too young to remembeer; and now there were all these new people, and between the dog and my fort he was probably on edge for new faces coming around his property and family.

   There really wasn't much else to mention that year, if my brother saw anything he didn't say anything to me, or if he did I didn't pay attention; which is likely given what I am sure he said the next winter when I saw it.