Random Creepypasta 3 (Creepy Creatures Pt. II)

I live across the road from three retirement homes, in sequence, and they are sprawling enough that they take up about 1/6 of the suburb, total. I've lived in the same house for about 19 years or so, so I'm quite used to seeing elderly people meandering around in various states of mental lucidity, and they're all rather lovely (except for the guy who looks like Gandalf on a mobility scooter, because he's rather rude and drives it on the road). As a whole, the places are well-organised and clean.

The center in question for this story has three gates. The first is a road, for the "assisted living" drivers. The second is the entry to a dropoff loop for the returning elderly and connected to a carpark for visitors. The third is a black metal thing with bars, pretty much standard swimming pool fencing.

One evening, as I was walking home from the local Scout hall (this was Australia in the summer, so essentially full daylight still), I was rather surprised to hear myself being called. The person who had spoken was standing behind the third gate and, in fact, essentially pressed right up against it. She was a little old lady. I don't remember exactly what she said, but it was something along the lines of "Excuse me, can you please help?". Being a good little Rover Scout and all, I went over to see what I could do. The gate was an ordinary pool gate, complete with child-safe lock. I figured that it was perfectly normal for this woman to want out (although I'm sure that they have a curfew and some method of signing in and out, there are wandering elderly up and down the street throughout the day and into the evening on a regular basis) and also perfectly normal to have trouble with one of those gates. The latches get sticky so easily, and I've had functional ones that I can't open readily.

When I went over, though, she seemed a little odd. Her hair was salt-and-pepper (and not as though her dye had been washing or growing out, either), and her eyes were that queer shade of brown which is almost yellow. She looked at me intently, then said "Help me" again. I tugged on the latch with relative vigor, but it wouldn't move. It was a little bit rusty, so I thought that that might have been an issue. I smiled down at her, as reassuringly as I could, and told her I was still having trouble with the latch. She gripped the bars of the gate more tightly and stared. I noticed that she had rather long, sharp fingernails. I tried to pull on the latch a little more, but it wouldn't move. Looking at her again, she had pulled herself even closer to the gate. Her eyes had narrowed and she seemed angry and hungry. Although she was small, fragile and not particularly hairy, there was something about her that spoke to me vividly of werewolves. I'm not much given to that kind of fantasy, but this was incredibly potent and quite terrifying. I was suddenly very glad of the thick metal of the gate and that she was such a small woman. With the most polite smile I could muster, I apologised for not being able to open the gate, said that it was getting late, that I was wanted at home, and that I hoped that she had a lovely evening. I am afraid that fear made me rush my delivery slightly.

I looked back a minute later, and she was still gripping the gate and staring at me.

Now, this was probably a locked gate, a confused old lady and an overactive imagination, but I figured it was fitting for this thread.
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Way back before I was born, my mom and dad were driving cross-country for some reason. I think they were in Utah when this happened.

It's the middle of the night, hundreds of miles from anywhere, my mom has been driving for awhile and my dad is fast asleep when the highway suddenly shrinks down to a single-lane dirt road in the middle of the desert. My dad later used this as evidence that mom was hallucinating, but having very recently driven from Austin, Texas, to El Paso and then Austin to Seattle, I know many interstates do this randomly due to construction, or road repairs, or passing through the middle of towns, or accidentally ending up on an access road which meanders off a bit.

My mom of course slows way down immediately and is only going about 40 or so when she sees animals in the road ahead. She slows nearly to a stop. My whole family is made up of animal-loving people, so there was no way in hell she was just going to run them down.

As she's crawling along, she notices they're acting very strangely. Initially she had assumed they were coyotes or feral dogs, because they're about that size and on all fours, now she sees that they're rising on to their hind legs for a few moments before dropping back down... and they're trotting toward the car.

They gradually surround the car as several dozen more materialize out of the desert. She said all told there were about thirty, although that maybe an overestimation that comes from suddenly being surrounded by things.

They aren't afraid of the car at all, and are doing their absolute best to block the moving car, all while bobbing up and down on their hind legs, looking directly into her window, looking her straight in the eye. She had no intention of hitting the breaks and said once a few of them had been nudged jarringly out of the road by the momentum of the car, they gave up blocking her, and loped alongside the car for several miles, always peering into the windows.

The closest she could describe them was that they looked like giant weasels. They had long bodies, but not long necks, and did the bobbing on their hind legs thing like weasels do, and weasel-like tails. But they were the size of dogs, lived in the middle of the desert, and their eyes glowed red in the headlights.

My personal theory is either that someone knows about them and feeds them, and they might not actually be scary mutants - or more unlikely, but makes for a better story, that someone else had stopped for them and was never seen or heard from again.

They were completely confident that my mom wasn't going to run them over. There is just absolutely no reason for wild animals to act that way with a car. Not the lack of fear part so much, as lots of predators can be really curious about strange objects - although if they live along side a road they should know cars are far from harmless - but that they knew a person was in the car and that she could be seen through the windows. This is not something most animals understand unless they have been in cars or have seen people getting in and out, which should not happen in the middle of the desert 300 miles from civilization.

I did some googling and tayras are hella aggressive dog-sized weasel things, but they definitely should not live in the desert or the States, though with exotic pets being brought into the country all the time, nothing is impossible. Maybe zoo escapees.

I'm still going to hold out hope there's a giant pack of mutant coyweasels haunting the desert of Utah, occasionally killing cars full of travellers.
Don't drive with your windows down in that desert, kids!
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Late one Sunday night, I was driving home from visiting a friend at a nearby university. It was late (11:30 or 12:00) and snowing very hard. These were all 2 lane, country roads which were very snow-covered and for most of the way I was the only one on the road. About half way through my trip, a car passed me going VERY fast and coming from seemingly out of nowhere. I hadn't noticed him coming up behind me, which you normally would, especially when the roads are that empty. But I might have just been concentrating on the road ahead. Anyway, within minutes (if not seconds), he was out of sight and I was alone on the road again.

About ten minutes later, I came on a man standing in the middle of the other lane, facing away from me. The car that had passed me was about 30 yards out in the field on the other side of the road. As I was only going about 20mph, it took me a few seconds to get to him. He never turned around or looked at me. As I came up next to him, I rolled my window down and asked him if he needed a ride or anything. After a very long pause (long enough for me to consider driving away and leaving him there) he turned to me and nodded his head up and down. Didn't say a word - just walked around the car and got in the passenger side.

It immediately struck me that something was very wrong, but at that point I thought he might be in shock or something. I started driving again, making small talk, seeing if he was okay. He said he was fine and then didn't say anything else at all no matter what I said. At that point I tried to casually look at him without being obvious and it really hit me that there was something wrong, not only with how he acted but how he looked - sort of "put-together" somehow. Needless to say I was getting very uncomfortable as I still had at least an hour of driving left. Suddenly, he said very loudly "STOP! STOP! STOP!" This scared the heck out of me and I slammed on the brakes, almost sliding off the road in the process. As soon as the car stopped, he got out of the car very quickly and started walking towards a deserted barn that I hadn't even noticed about 15 yards off the road. He walked to the front of it and just stood there, looking back the way we had come.

Now I was really confused. Not wanting to just leave him there in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the night, in a snowstorm, I rolled down my window and asked him what he was doing. Again after a long pause, he turned to me and said "They'll be here for me soon. You better go." This was so out of context I didn't know what to say next. There were no cell phones in those days so there was no way he had called anyone - how could anyone know to come for him? Then he turned towards me and suddenly began walking, almost running, towards my car. That was enough for me - I hit the accelerator and took off but with the snow, my car kept sliding and I thought for a second he was going to catch me. The last I saw in my rear view mirror he was just standing in the middle of the road again. It took me a couple of days to get over the whole thing and I don't think I ever drove that route again by myself.
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It was around 7 pm. and I was walking from my house to my girlfriend's house. The sun was still shining and the early evening air was still warm. As I passed the town's small and pokey police station on the opposite side of the road, I walked by a small, white, old-fashioned car parked up on my side of the road. I didn't take much notice of this; after all, it wasn't exactly out of the ordinary. The engine was running, which I thought was strange as did not appear to be anybody in the car. Perhaps the driver had popped into the police station or something, or perhaps taking a leak in a bush, I thought. And thought no more of it. An hour later, walking back over the same route with my girlfriend to my house, the car was gone.

At my house, we watched a few DVDs. Although she didn't want to stay that night, we stayed up late because neither of us were at work the next day. At about 1 am. she said that she was getting tired, and we set off walking toward her house in the chilling night air. We were walking quickly because she just wanted to get home (and so did I, truth be told). The roads were lit by a pale yellow moon. This is where it starts to get weird.

That same old-fashioned car that I had seen earlier was parked up in the exact same spot, opposite the police station. Again, it seemed as though there was no driver present, but we could hear the dull roar of an engine left running. I told my girlfriend that I had seen this car when I was on my way to her house, in the exact same spot, but of course it had not been there later when we walked to mine. She seemed a bit freaked out by this. I wasn't; to my mind, there is always a rational explanation.

As we passed the car she screamed. She told me that she saw two dark faces with "odd" expressions peering out of the windows, but when I looked, the car was empty. She swore that she had seen two big burly males sat in either seat of the front of the car. I told her that it was her overactive imagination. But, now about 10 yards in front of the car, the headlights flashed on onto our backs and we heard what sounded like muffled shouting coming from within the car. Still, I could see nobody, but then again the brightness of the headlights made it impossible to make anything out. By this point I was freaked out too and we both started running. And I am not a person easily scared by anything. The whole situation was just so... unnatural.

We reached her house without incident. I made her a drink and reassured her that there is a rational explanation to everything. I even reassured myself. Once she had calmed down, she fell asleep, and I locked her doors from the outside and put the key back through the letterbox. I set off walking back to my own house. When I saw two glaring car headlights at the top of her street (which I had not noticed a very short time earlier), I once again started to freak out. Or imagined that somebody was playing games with me. I started to run in the opposite direction to the car, which was incidentally the opposite direction to my house.

My heart was racing, but I didn't know why -- there was just something strange about this car. I can't explain it in words. I could feel it, and so did my girlfriend. Now it was my turn to start panicking. I ran down a number of alleyways and snickets, gradually working my way around the outskirts of the town back toward my house, and at the same time trying to avoid the roads. There was nobody to be seen anywhere or any other cars.

I really, really started to get scared when I came close to a road and the strange car rolled by. It was as if it was looking for me. I ducked down below a hedge and hoped that I hadn't been seen (that is how serious it was getting), but before I did, I caught a quick glimpse of two fat faces with the "odd expressions" my girlfriend had remarked on. The really were eerie. Like, melted. I don't know how to put it into words. Perhaps they were wearing masks? Nevertheless, it continued to drive on by me, so I assumed that I remained unseen. But it must have been a close-call.

Over the next half hour, there were four more "close-calls," but I think that I managed to remain hidden well enough behind trees and bushes and by keeping as far away from roads as possible. But in the distance I could still see it driving around the town in circles, as if looking for me. All I had to do was get home, lock my doors, get a baseball bat, ring my girlfriend and maybe 911 and warn them of creepy prankster motorists stalking my town....

Eventually, of course, I had to come back onto the roads to get home. I sprinted across street after street and soon came to the police station. But the police station was dark and empty as it was unmanned at this time of night (it is only a small rural town). There the car was waiting, and I was suddenly caught in its headlights like a small animal is frozen by headlights with shock and fear.

This tale now takes its paranormal twist. Up until this point, I had assumed it was some youths playing a prank with me. But one of them got out of the car (the passenger side). The horrific "melted face" was just not human. The figure was clad all in white and was of a burly build, and stocky... but unfeasibly tall at the same time. I mean, really tall, like seven foot. And he started to race toward me, arms outstretched, making a kind of wailing, screaming noise. I screamed myself and found a sudden acrobatic ability in me when I scaled a metal fence taller than myself into my own street, and within seconds was in my house and was frantically locking the door behind me. I've never ran so fast in my life.

On the inside of my doorway, in darkness, it took me a while before I could get my breath back or even move away from the doorway. I was exhausted after my flight. Perhaps it was a good thing as the house lights remained off until the car had passed away into the distance, and was gone, maybe looking for me in another street. (I heard the engine noise disappear, much to my relief. I almost cried with the relief!)

I waited for what seemed like an eternity, a million thoughts racing through my mind, and then without turning on the lights moved to the phone and called my girlfriend. She was fine, just angry that I had woken her up. Her attitude changed when I told her what had happened. We stayed on the phone to each other for hours and hours until the sun's rays shone through the windows, and outside we could both hear the hustle and bustle of daily town life starting up around us. I guess we just wanted to know that each other were okay. She asked me to phone the police, but I decided against it. What did I have to go on? I couldn't describe my pursuers, or the model of car they were in. It was hopeless. She then reminded me of something that happened a few months ago. A teenage lad was seen being pulled into a white car and was never seen again. The motorists involved, nor their car, was ever discovered. The witnesses' description perfectly matches that of the car that chased me all over town.
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This is something that happened around when I was 5 or 6.

I had just started school, and was overly excited about going, so it had to be pretty early on.
I don't remember much about the day. I recall someone in the family had passed away, and my grandparents were attending the funeral. I lived with them, so it was normal for me to go with them. This day, however, I remember wanting very badly to go to school, and not deal with the boredom of a bunch of mourning people. So it was suggested that I spend the night with a friend of the family who would drop me off at school in the morning on her way to work. I really don't think the death in the family had anything to do with what happened - it was just the reason I went to her house.

Anyway, I assume the night spent at her place was uneventful. I don't remember anything about it, in fact.

In the morning, I remember her sitting me on the sofa while she got ready for work. I know I was already dressed, and had already eaten breakfast. She lived in an old house, so I sat there looking around and saw a tiny mouse hopping across the carpet. My grandparents had mice in the winter too, and I always considered it a treat if I was awake early enough and was quiet enough to spot one. I sat there watching this tiny mouse cautiously hop along when suddenly it stopped, perked up, and looked around. I'd say it was about a meter away from me. I assumed it had heard me breathing and was about to run. Suddenly, it flew up into the air and was literally torn apart before my eyes. I had never seen anything so horrible in my life. Its head flew off and landed near the foot of the sofa, and most of its body a little way away from that.

But there was nothing near it. There was no cat or dog or anything, not even in the house, nothing. Nothing that could have done that to a mouse anyway, and nothing I could see. I felt sick and so afraid that for a moment I could only sort of stare at how awful this was.

Finally I screamed, after what felt like a long time but was probably only a few seconds, and the family friend came running. She too was stunned at the mouse and started asking me what happened.

I couldn't stop looking at the body of the mouse. It moved. I swear, the front legs were there and it started dragging its body across the floor. I screamed, the friend looked and saw it too, picked me up and took me directly to school without another word.

For a long time, I thought this was some kind of nightmare, until I ran into the family friend. She asked me if I remembered anything "odd" happening when I was little. Of course I did, and she confirmed what had happened. Apparently she took me to school because she was scared to death and refused to go back into the house until her husband came home. The mouse body was still there, but it was against the wall, and they couldn't find the head. She said it had seriously upset and she insisted that they move ASAP. She also said that there had been other weird things happening - like hearing growling in the basement, finding blood spots along the hallway, etc. They had no pets.

This left a huge impression on me, and I get chills to the point of getting tears in my eyes even now from thinking about it.
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My story begins in the Autumn of 1984. I was 6 yrs old and I only just remember the chain of events, my elder brother remembers this part much better than myself.

My father had picked us up from school and we were driving towards a town called Whitham, in Essex. He needed to get some cash so he could take us swimming. He pulled the car over round the corner from the bank and left us while he went inside. About ten seconds after he left a man opened the passenger door and got in. My brother and I went silent, he was wearing some kind of black wrap around his head and just sat there looking straight ahead faintly mumbling something.

Suddenly there was a loud crash and I looked past the man out of the front windscreen and saw that two cars had collided at the junction ahead. At this point the man opened the car door and got out, I was crying and didn't see what happened to him and my brother was trying to comfort me. My father doubted our story.

In May this year, my father phoned me. He said he had been crossing the road in a town called Colchester. As he reached the other side of the road he noticed a badly parked car, as he walked past the side of it along the pavement to his amazement he recognized the black wrapped figure sitting in the passenger seat as the one we had described seventeen years ago. He said he just froze. He was jolted out of this by a loud banging noise, and looked across the junction to see a three car pile up taking place. When he looked back to the car the door was open but the figure had gone, and sitting in the back was a crying five year old boy

Two months later, my brother was driving through Gloucester. He stopped at a red light and saw the figure sitting in a parked car about ten yards away. Fearing the worst, when the lights went green he put on his emergency indicators and didn't move. Three cars from behind him passed honking their horns the fourth went straight into the back of him.

I think I've witnessed him on other occasions, but I can't be certain. I also think I've seen him in the background of a TV news report. He's about six foot tall and the black wrap around his head covers his eyes and all. He wears a black tunic which joins the head wrap and there is something under his tunic on his back, something bunched or folded somehow, or just covered, yet somehow he blends in, it's almost like you don't want to notice him.

If anyone else thinks they've seen something similar please write in. I only found out about this site through my girlfriend and I'm hoping people will keep their eyes open and hopefully witness this man. I don't feel he is especially linked to my family, I just think we had an earlier experience with him and that makes it easier to see him somehow.
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This happened one night when I was about ten years old, around 1996. I am currently 26 years old, but I remember this night vividly. We had just arrived to Warsaw, Indiana to visit all of our family members, which consisted of my aunts, uncles, and cousins. My aunt and uncles' house is in the middle of the woods, where the closest gas station would take at least ten minutes to drive to.

I have always thought their house was very creepy, but I never had any reasons to justify why I felt this way. By their house, about fifty feet away, was a lake where we used to going fishing when I was very young. After visiting with my family for about two hours, all of the adults decided that they wanted to go to a fancy restaurant and eat while the younger side of the family, including me, wanted to stay home and play video games because it was very rare when we were able to see each other.

All of the adults agreed that I was old enough to look after all of them, so they allowed us to stay behind. After about an hour of playing video games with my cousins, I realized that I hadn't taken a shower all day because of the long drive to get to Indiana, so I decided to get cleaned up.

After grabbing fresh clothes out of my bag, I told all of my cousins to stay in the room until I got back because I was responsible for them. I went into the bathroom and turned on the shower and was waiting for the water to get hot.

This bathroom was one of the weirdest bathrooms I had ever seen. Inside of the shower, there was a window that had a perfect view of the lake. Near the window, there was a large air conditioner. After the water had gotten warm enough, I entered the shower and just stood their for about ten minutes because it felt so good. This is where my night turned terrifying.

As I was taking a shower, in the corner of my eye I saw something move. I had that feeling that someone or something was watching me through the window. The hot water was steaming up the window so I really couldn't see out of it. I took my hand and I wiped the steam off of the window. What I saw made my drop my washcloth and made me freeze.

I saw what looked like a man that was about seven feet tall, with long hair, standing by the air conditioner right next to the window that led to the shower. I couldn't move a muscle. The man had very long hair which covered his face. He also had long fingers, and his nails looked like they hadn't been cut or cleaned for ages.

His skin was the dark yellow color, the kind of yellow you see when you mix brown and yellow together. His eyes were a normal looking shade of brown. He was just standing there holding something watching me as I took a shower. I couldn't figure out what is was but it looked like a flask because he was taking sips out of it.

As he stood there, I was scared out of my mind, but all I could think about was my cousins' safety and that I need to get to them. After about two minutes, the man got really close to the window and started to smile. His teeth were as disgusting as his fingernails.

To this day, I still can remember his face as if it had happened yesterday. After he looked at me for about 30 seconds with his face pressed against the glass, he backed away and just sat on the air conditioner, drinking whatever it was in his hand, staring at me like I was the only thing that existed in the world.

The only thing I could hear was his laughter and the water hitting my back from the showerhead. I slowly used my left hand, which he couldn't see, to grab the towel off of the rack. I quickly threw the towel over the window to hinder his view of me and the bathroom. I quickly ran into the room where my cousins were with just my towel on, and quickly told them to get out of the room and go to the back room and lock the door.

The back room was the farthest away from the bathroom and was one of the few doors in the house that had a lock. After they all ran in the room, I got the phone and called 911. I told them that a man was watching me through the window and I was scared. They said they would be there as soon as they could.

After getting off the phone with 911, I reluctantly went back into the bathroom. I slowly took the towel off the window and to my horror, the man was still there. But he wasn't near my window or on my air conditioner, he was near the lake behind the house. He stared at me for about a minute longer, with a malicious smirk on his face.

By this point, I was terrified, but I knew my cousins were safe. Then, like he was being controlled or something, he quickly did a 180 degree turn and walked straight into the lake, his body descending until I could only see the top of his head, then nothing. He was gone in a second. I could not believe my eyes. This only made me more terrified. I had just watched a man walk right into the lake like it was his home. I figured he would come back up after a minute or so. After five minutes, he never came back up.

To this day, I can't explain it. The police came right after that. They searched the area and found nothing. I have never been more terrified since.
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It was a standard middle school weekday I suppose, early autumn nights were always the best nights to relax in a public park or just outside in general (I live in NYC). Me and a friend were on the swings of a park, shooting the shit and talking about pretty standard 13 year old boy things. We were approached from the park fence by two appropriately aged girls, wearing short shorts and tank tops on a frigid night.

Apparently my friend knew these two and they hopped over the fence and started to converse with us. It was really quite boring and awkward until they randomly asked if we wanted to head back to their place and hang out there. Being stupid 13 year olds, we obliged and began walking there. I vividly remember the path we took to their house. The first oddity of course, was the fact that they had a normal looking brownstone house in the middle of two tenements in the West Village. It was an oddly laid out house, having a straight long central hallway connecting every room in the bottom floor. We were near the back of the house, sitting on a couch near the entrance to an open backyard area. They told us to wait while they grabbed something to drink from the kitchen. Curiosity got the best of us after around a minute and we wandered into the back yard. The back yard was completely devoid of plant life, and had only dirt and a couple benches. We noticed something strange at the bottom of the back wall of the back yard, and went closer to examine it.

Along the 3 walls of the back yard were dead (and mutilated) finches. Each finch on it's side, eyes open dead. Some were decapitated, some without wings or feet. Some with their side just cut open. My immediate reaction to seeing this in a strange person's house? Run the fuck away. I can still remember running down the long hallway and out the door, not even looking back. Me and my friend ran all the way back to my apartment (granted, it was only 5 or so blocks away) without saying anything.

While we never spoke of it again, the next year I decided to go back to the house, because to be honest I had no idea if it really happened or not. Where I remembered the house was an ordinary apartment building, so naturally I thought it was just a figment of my adolescent mind. I believed this up until junior year of high school when my friend called me. He wanted to know if I remembered it happening, and he recalled every detail exactly like I had remembered. I legitimately don't believe the story myself, and I can't believe my friend verified it. It's pretty much the only abnormal thing to ever happen in my life.
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My Aunt lives in a large, 19th century farmhouse in New York. It sits on about 14 acres of land, largely forest. There was once a good deal more surrounding it, but the last five years have seen that cut down and replaced with condominiums. Still, it's pretty thick, and parts of it are well separated from humanity. A year or so ago, my aunt and uncle (both retired) put up some small barns and purchased goats, chickens and horses, creating a nice little mini-farm. In the back of the land is a much more recent cottage, probably from the 80s or 90s, in which my grandmother lives.

I love it up there, and still visit as often as I can, staying over on weekends or during the summer. It's generally very peaceful, but there are a few distinct places on the property that feel Wrong. Big, capital W wrong. Believe me, I know how cliche that is- it's actually kind of a running joke between my friends and I, most of whom have visited at one time or another- but it's really all that can describe it. I'm a very rational, scientific, atheistic person, but when I approach these places I get a slow, thrumming anxiety in my chest. If I keep pressing on, it blooms into complete terror, and I can't breathe.

Some very odd things have happened to me here, mostly in or related to those places. It's comparatively very rare, but seeing as how I go up there quite often I've collected a number of weird shit events. The most recent took place two weeks ago. I had driven up on Saturday afternoon, up the long, uphill driveway, and parked out front of the cottage. I was a little earlier than I'd expected, and the cottage was empty. I stopped into my aunt and uncle's house and bullshitted with them for around twenty minutes; they told me that my grandmother had just driven down to the grocery store a few minutes ago and would be back soon. They left after, leaving me alone on the property

I let myself into the cottage and sat down in the kitchen, a bright, sunny room in the back of the house. To get there, you have to pass through the foyer and the living room; it's easy to hear someone come in. I was wrestling with my grandmother's laptop when I heard the distinctive sound of the storm window door opening, then the heavy front door, then the foyer. None of them sounded like they closed after, except the storm window door which does so automatically. I called out "Hi, Gram, I got here a little early. I'm in the kitchen," without looking up.

I heard footsteps move through the living room, and stop at the door to the kitchen. I looked up to see my grandmother, wearing a heavy coat and a very weird expression. I can't really describe it; it was something like a combination of anger and confusion, but it screwed her face up into something disturbing.

I said her name again, and she was silent for a long moment before replying in a quiet whisper, "You're not supposed to be here."

At that moment, one of the horses whinnied loudly. I glanced out the window beside me to see two of them chasing each other and playing. When I looked back, my grandmother was gone. There's no way she could have walked away; I would have heard it. I got up right away and looked around, but she was gone. I'd only looked away for maybe a few seconds.

I didn't really feel afraid because it hadn't set in as being that weird, until I again heard the two doors open and my grandmother stepped in again, wearing the same coat. She said she'd never come in earlier.

My grandmother has bad knees, and is not very fast. Even if she'd sprinted away while I was looking out the window, I would have heard her.

This has bothered me for the rest of my life.
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This happened to me about sixteen years ago right after I had gotten my drivers license and got to use my dad’s car by myself for the first time.
My girlfriend and I were excited to go to a dance at our high school that Saturday night - and I was more then a little nervous about driving the stick shift without Mom or Dad in the car with me as I had a habit of killing the engine when I tried to start it.
It was early October, but the air was still warm and the moon was yellow and in a sickle form. There were dark storm clouds looming over the Wasatch Mountains and moving closer into the Salt Lake valley.
My girlfriend and I went to the dance and had a great time - staying way into the night. When the dance was over and after everyone had been sent away by the dance/school staff we moved on. We drove around looking for some place to go - as the newness of being on our own with the car would not wear off for several more months.
I picked the old grade school that we had both gone to when we were children. We were fairly close to where we lived so we felt safe and there was nothing to worry about except the looming rain clouds. We parked in the parking lot behind the school and walked into the huge grass playing field and the play ground behind the school. The field was lit by one huge stadium type lamp that cast a circle of dim light on the playground and playing field surrounding it.
She and I sat on the swings talking WAY late into the night. It started raining a cool mist that was very pleasant. But after an hour or so it was enough rain to make the ground under us muddy - so we were careful not to stick our feet in the mud (this is important in a minute).
It became quite and we were both very tired by then. We suddenly looked up at the same moment... the hair stood up on the back of my neck... as we both felt the need to look back and over our left shoulders. Something had caught the corner of our eye. About two hundred feet or so away there was SOMETHING crawling on it’s stomach out past the shadows edge of the light that the giant stadium bulb gave off.
We both stared in horror not saying anything. We watched as the thing MOVED towards us, just keeping on the boarder of the light shadow. It was humanoid looking - a dark color with no clothes on. It was laying flat on it’s belly... it’s arms down, held close to it’s waist.
But what frightened me the most (besides the fact that it had been coming up behind us) was the way it moved and the structure of it’s legs... It was inching forward moving NOTHING but it’s feet to push it forward. And the legs... If you look at a normal humans knees - the knees bend forward... This things was reverse - the joint bent BACK and away. (Imagine laying flat on your stomach with your hands pulled in at your sides to your waist and your knees are UP OFF the ground instead of against it.)
We stared for several seconds... we both had stopped breathing and the only sound was the rain falling. The head of the thing looked up and I saw nothing but black pools where the eyes should be...
My girlfriend and I JUMPED off the swings onto the wet grass and lunged into the car about 50 feet away. There was several seconds of panic when I couldn’t get the car to start - and I was terrified to look up. I didn’t want to see "IT" closing on us - I didn’t want to see those knees bending in the wrong direction and the black, soulless eyes. I was afraid I would pop the clutch in the car and not be able to start it again. I kept my head down and looking at the steering wheel. The car engine turned and caught - we tore off into the night.
I called my folks from my girlfriends house and told them about what had happened. They allowed me to stay there with her and her Mom until the sun came up in a few hours. We waited and passed the time by telling her Mother our story - which scared her (as well as my parents) badly.
When the sun came up early that Sunday morning - we drove back to see if "it" was still there. This time bringing weapons. But there was nothing as we searched the field. As we poked around the swings we had been sitting on earlier... there were large bare foot prints that had tracked through the mud ALL AROUND the very swings we were on. We both had - had our shoes ON and as I said before, we were careful NOT to get mud on them. And we HAD NOT walked around and around like these tracks had. We found nothing but those bare tracks.
Every once in a while I get brave enough to go back to that field late at night (never alone though). I sit by the school field side in my truck with the high beams on searching the area, but I’ve never seen "IT" again...
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I used to live in Washington State right in the foothills of the west side of the Cascade Mountains. This was around three years ago, June or July after my senior year in high school. That spring, my high school jazz band went down to Disneyland to play a concert and one day, the guitar player was telling his brother and me about this weird house that he and his friends had gone up to a couple times on Cougar Mountain. He said that the minute you get close at all, this horrible screaming would start. The first time he went up there it scared him off. The second, he was able to ignore it and take a walk around the house to get a better look at it. The house was little more than a shack, he said, with boarded up doors and windows. The only look he got at any inhabitants was this old lady that peered over one of the wood planks. He said the screaming never stopped, but when he saw her face, it was clearly not she who was making the noise. He told us that she was a witch.

I didn't believe him.

That summer, I was working at a party supply store when the phone rang. It was a friend of mine, Tom, who had heard the story. He told me that after I was done working, he and I would go up to the house and see ourselves. I wasn't doing anything else that night, so I agreed. After I closed up the store, I saw him in his truck waiting for me. I got in and we headed up towards the mountain. At first there wasn't much to mention, just a zoo, a school, and housing developments. After a while though, things seemed a little less normal. Most striking was that we hit a point after the housing that all the plant life died. We looked around and we could not see any green in the forest on either side of the road. A little creepy, especially for summer. We kept on heading up the mountain and eventually came to a dead end. After a little looking around, we found a gravel road, barely wide enough to fit his truck.

After turning into the road, we could see the end of it, and we could see that it went nowhere. All around the road were dead trees and plants. It took us a few seconds of looking until we saw a pallet laying on the ground inside the woods directly outside the driver's side. I turned on a flashlight that we had brought along and saw a little wooden sign, pounded into the ground that said, "Leave Parcels Here. Don't Come Into Woods." To the left of the pallet and sign I saw signs of a makeshift path into the woods. I told Tom to roll his window down and I shined the flashlight down the path as far as it would go. The light revealed a shack, probably not 20 feet from us. The windows and doors were boarded up. In front of the house was an old car. It was covered in rust and it looked like it had no tires, from what I could tell. The passenger side window was shattered and it looked like some kind of cans were pouring out from the interior. I turned off the flashlight and Tom suggested that we get out of the car and look around.

Then we heard the scream. It was more horrible then it was ever described to me. It sounded like two women, and did not stop for over a minute although it was completely unchanging in volume or pitch.

I immediately turned my light back on and looked around the car. Slightly in the woods in front of us was an old lady dressed in an extremely dirty white dress just standing. I yelled at Tom to get us out of there, and he tried to find his keys. The lady just stood there amidst the screams, although her mouth was shut tight in a scowl. Tom finally found his keys and started the car. When the headlights went on, the old lady began to walk towards us, slowly. With every step, her left hand rose slightly, seemingly to reach out for the car, or us. I couldn't take my eyes off her as Tom backed up, and out of the gravel road. As soon as we were back on the road, speeding away from that house in the woods, I saw the woman appear at the gravel entrance, only to turn back, finally ending the screams. Neither of us ever went back.

Newport Witch: Same as The Witch in the Woods? By dabman

I believe I know the EXACT location of what you are talking about. In fact, I bought a forums account (how many else have done so just because of these ghost threads?) for the sole reason of imparting my experience with the "Newport Witch", as it is commonly called by those who know about her. This is the GoogleMap location of the house, posted because someone wished to know what it may look like (so they would never dare see it in life): (Admin Note: If you do not wish this photo posted, contact me and I will remove it. I know how some of these maps can be a touchy subject.).

If this is the same house that you (MasterofUnlocking) were talking about, some things could be said to verify their sameness. In the upper left of the picture, at the crossroads, there is a gazebo on the side of the road (not visible in the google image). The street labeled 60th St has the entrance to the yard of the supposed witch, which is in the center of the map. The other side of the road is a forest, along with a gravel road that forks from the main street. The street perpendicular to 60th street is a low-density suburb (upper right), with a side-ditch large enough to park several cars onto the yard of the supposed witch, which is in the center of the map. The other side of the road is a forest, along with a gravel road that forks from the main street. The street perpendicular to 60th street is a low-density suburb (upper right), with a side-ditch large enough to park several cars onto.

My experience with the inhabitant of that house was different, though resulting in a frightful ending nonetheless. To do a brief summary of the event, my friends and I traveled up the winding, forested road on Cougar Mountain. I did not think it as barren, but MasterofUnlocking could have had his experience during a colder season. Reaching the top and taking a left onto 60th, my friends parked by her driveway, which was more like a degraded hole creeping into a forest. On the image, you can kind of see it wind through the yard based on the darker contours. We slowly walked along the driveway, taking notice of a complex, overgrown trail which weaved in and out of the forest on our left side. My friend who was familiar with the rumors of this witch warned us that she used these trails to sneak up and catch trespassers as they fled her yard, screaming throughout the entire chase. Completely scared shitless, we continued. We finally reached the end of the driveway, which opened into a grassy, moon-lit yard. Immediately to our left was a car that had seen its driving days end decades ago. Its back right window had been boarded up, hiding the contents of the interior. Re-centering our attention to the yard, that is when we saw the house.

It was not initially visible. It creeped out of the midnight shadows, revealing the faint lines of its structure. The sight of the dead house, with vines and such crawling all over its front, was more than enough for most of our crew. We all ended up running off back to the car. Just as we were recovering our wits, another car slowly approached us on the road. About to split fearing the worst, we took notice that they were young teens just as ourselves. Relieved, we began to chat and learned they were here for the same purpose. We exited our cars with our new companions, and with their boldness reviving our hearts, we reentered this Old Lady's yard. Arriving at the front of the house, we watched as these two newcomers approached the old door. On we looked as one of their hands slowly reached up to the rotting wood. Forming a fist, he knocked twice on the door. There was silence. All of us were on the edge of terror. The newcomers looked at each other, and with great force this time the knocker knocked again. The door creeped open, having been unlocked the whole time.

This was enough for us. We hastily began to run back to the cars along the driveway. Just seconds after leaving the house and while still inside the wooded trail, out from within that opened doorway came a screech that would paralyze even the bravest hero. It was long, inhuman, and loud; loud enough to pierce through the forest and then some. We stumbled over the uneven driveway, got in our cars, and bolted out of that terrible place. Minutes later, we opened the windows of the car. Though already a couple blocks away, the blood-curdling scream of the witch could still faintly be heard coming from her driveway. I think we still have the audio of the scream on a video camera somewhere.

Well, this was my only experience with the supernatural (that is, trespassing on some poor old woman's yard). I was startled to find that someone else on these boards had the same experience on what just might be the *same* house. Did you ever explore the rest of her yard? We came back another day and went through some of the trails, but most of the creepy stuff we did find was just random junk. We did, however, find a smaller shack deeper into the woods, but no sign of a witch that time.
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I was very young, about 4 years old. I’m 39 right now, which makes the year 1976. I know it was long ago, and kids can have weird perspectives. All I can say is that I have remarkable long-term memory. I’ve amazed my parents with my memories of houses we lived in when I was 3. And what happened was so vivid that I’ve kept it with me ever since, without a detail changed. Anyways, I definitely remember a lot from ‘76. It was the summer of the Bicentennial, and everything was red, white, and blue; stars and stripes. Life was a little like the start of a Spielberg movie- the quiet, idyllic midwestern suburb part- and back then I thought that was just how life worked. My mom was still young, and was desperately holding on to her social life. Her habit during that summer was to visit friends and spend the afternoons at their houses, probably drinking cocktails or something. Since she could never get a sitter, she would drag me along. Sometimes there’d be kids there, and we’d play, but usually I was on my own in a childless couple’s house. I would generally just sit around, bored out of my mind, waiting to go home so I could ride my bike.

It was late July, and we had just driven over to another friend’s house. It was surprisingly large suburban two-story; maybe today it would’ve qualified as a McMansion. The most vivid part of the memory starts with me and my mom standing in her friend’s rec room on the first floor of the house. It was a huge, windowless, mostly empty room, with fake wood paneling. The fake wood was a '70s staple, but usually it was a light honey color (maple?). Here, it was ebony, and it made the room incredibly dark, especially after the blinding noon sunshine. The walls just ate light.

Her friend was with us. She looked like another young '70s housewife. They were chatting for a bit, while I idled around the room. I guess they decided to adjourn to another room, but first, the woman looked at me and said “You can go anywhere on this floor, but don’t go up the stairs. My grandfather is very sick and he’s trying to sleep.” Her tone of voice was off-putting, like she was giving me orders. I was a pretty obedient kid, but only my parents had ever spoken to me like that. I looked at my mom, and for a moment she was just staring blankly, like she wasn’t aware the friend had said anything or had even looked at me.

So they left me in that fairly bare, over-air-conditioned dark room. After a little bit, I started exploring. I found nothing exciting on the first floor. Everything was bare and poorly-lit. There was a room that my mom and what now sounded like a group of friends were in, with the door closed. It just sounded like chit-chat on the other side of the door. Several times I passed by the staircase to the second floor. Well, of course I went up it. I remember three distinct things about it- it was flooded with natural light from a big window in the wall halfway up the staircase, the stairs were hard wood planks (as opposed to the carpeted steps I’d seen everywhere else) and the stairs and walls were all painted “institutional green” like a hospital or old school.

I carefully climbed the stairs on all fours so that I wouldn’t make a sound. When I got to the top, there was a short hallway running perpendicular to the stairwell, with a few doors. All the doors were closed, except for the one right in front of me at the top of the stairs. Through the door I could see the foot of a bed with a fancy wrought iron frame (another thing I’d never seen before), and a large window with a curtain drawn over it. Unlike the stairway, it was dim and shadowy in the bedroom. I walked through the doorway, and immediately saw there was a figure in the bed. It was a man sitting upright. It was shadowy enough that I couldn’t tell if he saw me, or if he was the grandfather. The me today wouldn’t have ever entered the bedroom, but back then I just up and walked to the foot of the bed, and looked right at the man. I could now see him more clearly: he was old and bald. But more than that, he was wearing clown make-up. Nothing fancy- white facepaint all over his head, a big red frowning mouth, and large dark blue smears over his eyes. And he was pissed. He started waving his arms at me, like he was trying to tell me to leave. He was shaking his head from side to side, and started to make this guttural howling sounds, like he wanted to shout at me, but couldn’t form words. “Hraaagh, gaaar, GRRAAAAR!” I don’t know why, but the noise he was making sticks with me most. To this day I’ve never heard anything like it.

Well, I wasn’t the sharpest kid, but it suddenly dawned on me to get the hell out of there. I ran down the stairs and back to the rec room, and sat there for what seemed like hours. Finally, my mom came to get me. Her friend wasn’t with her. We went straight out of the house and to the car. Once we were on the way home, I asked her about the clown. My mom just looked at me and said “what? was there a toy clown?” I said no, the clown in the bedroom at the top of the stairs. She just got super-pissed at that. Looking back, I think she thought I was calling a dying man a clown, in addition to breaking her friend’s rule. She said the only one there was her friend’s grandfather, that he was sleeping and was so sick he might not wake up. I never heard anything more about it. We never went back to that house, nor did I see my mom’s friend again. I tried to ask my mom about it for a few years after, but she wouldn’t say anything beyond “oh, yes, I hadn’t seen her in forever.” And that’s my story.
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So I'm walking home from a night with a friend, and I'm forced to use our bikepath. This bikepath is creepy enough by itself, but I figure since there's a good amount of snow on the ground and the moon is full enough that I can see pretty well, there's no problem in walking on it.

Well naturally i start to get creeped out. I get to about 100m from my turn off to go home, and I see two white shapes in the middle of the bikepath 150m ahead of me. I slow down in case it's a cop or a biker and they can't see some tall skinny kid walking alone, but then it starts to catch my eye. I'm getting closer to my turn off, and I notice these two slender object are about 2m tall, and they're entwined with one another. To make matters worse, they're moving about in the center of the path in very unnatural ways. Imagine the armless walking things from Silent Hill. Then imagine two of them walking around each other, slamming into each other and quivering.

I slowed my walking down and got a lot quieter. Turned off my iPod and put my phone on silent, since I'm a rather paranoid guy. Well I get to my turn off, and just as I begin to go, they stop whatever they were doing and they turn to my direction. I have never run as fast over a hill and train tracks in my life, let alone in snow. I have no idea what those were, but I'm so glad I haven't seen them since.
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My dad worked in the timber industry his whole life. His father was a logger, and he grew up in and around the woods. My dad started his own logging company when he was eighteen, and has owned and operated shake and shingle mills from Oregon clear up to Thorn Bay, Alaska.

He is an intelligent man and holds over a dozen patents for various pieces of equipment he has designed and built over the years. He has employed dozens of people over the years, all of them spending extensive time in the wilderness.

When I was a boy, I remember hearing bits and pieces of conversations among some of the men at the mill. Although nobody would tell me directly, I understood that something had gone on before I was born, and it involved one of the foremen, ‘Jon’. They weren’t joking around, they were genuinely afraid, and wouldn’t talk about it with a kid.

When I was young, my dad wouldn’t tell me about it because I would often go out into the woods cutting blocks with him on the weekends, and he didn’t want me to be afraid of the woods. While I was speaking with him last weekend, I told him of a couple of strange events that happened to me later in the wilderness, and that reminded me of the hints at a story I heard when I was a boy. After some prodding he told me the following story.

In the mid 1960’s, my dad owned a large roofing product mill in Aberdeen, WA. He had teams of men that would cut the fallen old growth cedar salvage left after a logging operation. He had permits to salvage a large amount of wood in the coastal areas of Grays Harbor County, primarily in the area around Copalis Beach. Several of the men on his cutting crews lived in and around Copalis Beach. His foreman, a man I will call Jon for the story, was a bright, down to earth hard worker. My dad trusted him with thousands of dollars of vehicles and equipment, as well as the safety of his crews. He was not the kind of man to make up stories.

On a Monday morning sometime in July, Jon was several hours late for work. This was highly unusual as he was always there early, getting the saws and trucks ready for the day. My dad said he was visibly shaken up, and when he asked him what was wrong, he asked my dad to go in the office so the others wouldn’t hear them. They went in and sat down, and Jon simply said “Something destroyed our house this weekend.” My dad thought he said “someone” broke into the house, and asked Jon if it was someone he knew. Jon said, “You don’t understand, this wasn’t a person. It was a… I don’t know what it was, but it completely trashed the house. The family is going to stay with my brother in Elma for a while.”

My dad asked him to explain what had happened. Jon said that when he got home from work Friday evening, his youngest son Tim, who was around four at the time, told him he saw a big “Cowman” walking at the edge of their field that afternoon. He thought the boy meant “Cowboy”, because some of his neighbors wore cowboy hats when they were out in the sun. He asked him if the man was wearing a cowboy hat, and the boy said, “No daddy, he was a Cowman, furry and stinky like the cows.” He asked his wife if she knew what he was talking about, and she said Tim was playing on the porch that afternoon, when he came running in and said the cowman was stuck on the fence. He was very excited, so she went out to see what he was talking about. She said as she opened the door, she was hit by a horrible smell, like wet dogs and garbage. Tim was pointing across to the field opposite their house and said, “He got loose!” She looked where he was gesturing and could see the top strand of barb wire bouncing up and down, as if somebody had just pulled on it really hard and let it go. She didn’t see the “Cowman”, and noticed nothing out of the ordinary except for the smell.

She told Tim to come inside to play for rest of the day, she felt uneasy and a little scared. Their older son, Jon Jr. who was twelve at the time, was at a friend’s house and walked home a short while after Tim saw his “Cowman”. He told her somebody had followed him home, walking in the woods off the right side of the road. He never seen who it was, they never left the woods, but he said it had to be a really big man. He would hear large sticks cracking, and the footsteps were very heavy. Once he got to the driveway of their house where the woods stopped at the field where his brother had his sighting, the footsteps stopped and Jon Jr. never saw anything. He was pretty shaken up by the event, and wanted his Dad to go out to the woods and check it out with him.

Later that evening, Jon strapped on his .357 and took his older son out into the field to have a look. They first walked to the area where the “Cowman” was supposedly stuck on the fence, and walked down the fence line looking for anything. They came upon a large clump of long, reddish brown hair tangled in the top strand of barbed wire. He tried to pull it off but it was really tangled up, so he pulled out his buck knife and sawed it off. He said the hair was over a foot long, real coarse and stringy. There appeared to be a bit of flesh matted in the clump, and the top wire was pulled loose from one of the posts. Whatever was hung up on the fence was very big. He handed the hair to his son to hold, and they climbed through the fence and walked toward the woods. He said he was looking for any sign of tracks on the ground; the hair kind of looked like it was from a horse’s mane or tail. The ground was a solid grassy field, and there were no hoof prints or any other tracks he could see.

The edge of the woods began about ten feet from the fence line, and they entered on a small game trail that deer frequented. It was around eight at night, and in the woods it was getting to be fairly dark. They walked for a ways, and soon began to smell the rotting garbage/wet dog odor his wife reported earlier. Jon said he got the feeling they were being watched; the hair on the back of his neck was standing up. He told his son they should head back before it got dark, and the boy didn’t argue. As they began walking back out, they could hear heavy footsteps off to their left. They stopped, and the footsteps stopped. They walked on nearly to the clearing, and Jon whispered to his son to run like Hell to the house on the count of three. Jon Jr. nodded, and Jon whispered, “One, two…Three!” and gave his son a push in the back to get him started, then spun around and raced off the trail in the opposite direction, toward the footsteps with his gun drawn.

Off the trail, the underbrush was dense with ferns and bushes; he had a hard time making headway. But as he got closer, he could hear it moving away from him, deeper into the woods. At this time, he told my Dad that he thought it was a vagrant camping out in the woods and possibly scoping houses out to rob at night. Jon was a big man and capable of taking care of himself in most any situation and he had a large caliber handgun so he wasn’t too worried about confronting a vagrant in the woods. He was a few yards off the trail in deep brush when he heard the movement stop just ahead of him. He stopped to look and listen, and thought he saw movement by a large tree, like someone was trying to hide there. He leveled his gun and said “Come out nice and slow, or I swear to God I’ll come back there and shoot you!”

It was silent for a moment, and then he caught movement out the corner of his eye and spun around to his right for a better look. He said it looked like a huge bear moving through the brush, he could only see bits of it through the dense ferns, but it was moving quietly away from the tree on four legs. It was about fifteen feet away from him. At first he thought it was a bear, and then suddenly he saw a huge hairy arm with a human like hand reach out of the brush and grab a small alder tree. The tree was about four inches in diameter, and it grabbed hold about five feet up. He said it happened so fast it was a blur, but the thing pulled itself upright out of the brush by holding the tree. It stood on two legs and turned its upper body to glare at Jon. It was enormous; he couldn’t believe how bulky it was. He said it was well over seven feet tall, and at least half that big through the chest. It was too dark to make out many features, but its eyes seemed to glow a deep red, and he thought he could see teeth, like it was curling its lips back.

It stood for just a brief moment, and then lunged ahead, pushing back on the tree with tremendous force. The tree snapped loudly and crashed into the trees around it, getting hung up in the branches and not falling to the ground. It then disappeared into the deep brush with frightening speed, sounding like a bulldozer with no engine sounds. Jon stood there in shock, his gun temporally forgotten, and then he realized it was heading toward the house, the way his son had went. He turned and ran to the trail, hoping to gain ground on it and cut it off before it reached the clearing. He hit the trail and ran as fast as he could toward the clearing, all the while hearing the creature thrash through the brush on his side.

He burst into the clearing and looked franticly about for his son. Jon Jr. was standing just inside of the fenced field, waiting for his Dad. Jon screamed at him to run to the house, then he saw the thing crash out of the woods about fifty feet to his left. It crossed the ten foot clearing and stepped over the fence in two strides, and was running through the field parallel to his son in a matter of seconds. Jon screamed at his son to run faster, and took aim at the creature. He didn’t fire because he was afraid to hit his son or his house, so he vaulted over the fence and ran in pursuit of them. He could see it angling toward his son, and knew there was no way his boy would make it to the gate before it cut him off. In desperation, he pointed the gun to the ground at his side and fired as he ran, hoping to scare it. It veered more sharply toward his son, and put on an enormous burst of speed. He heard his boy scream as they seemed to collide, he saw the creature dip its shoulder down a little bit and suddenly Jon Jr. was airborne, he flew about ten feet then hit the ground rolling.

The creature never paused; it continued to run at an amazing speed in a loop back towards the woods. Once the line of fire was clear, Jon stopped and squeezed off the remaining five rounds at the retreating creature. He was pretty sure all the shots went wild; the creature never made a sound or slowed down, and was soon over the fence and back in the woods. He reached his son, who was shaken up but not physically hurt. He asked his Dad
if it was a bear. Apparently, little Jon was so busy running for the house that he didn’t see the creature running after him, he said something big and black suddenly ran into him, and he felt a huge paw hit his bottom and he said he felt like he was falling.

Jon pulled his son to his feet and they ran through the gate and into the house locking the door behind him. They were both out of breath and white as ghosts, his wife was screaming at him, demanding to know what the gunshots were for and if they were all right. When he could catch his breath, he told her to make sure the back door was locked, he was going to call the Sheriff. He went to the phone and began to dial the number; this was before 911, then stopped and wondered what exactly he was going to say. He hung up the phone, realizing what an idiot he would look like if he told the Sheriff the boogie man just chased them out of the woods.

He told his wife that it was a large animal, possibly a bear. He didn’t know how to begin to tell her their four year old was right, his Cowman was real and it was more frightening than anything he could imagine. He told them all to keep the doors locked, and stay away from the windows. Around ten o’clock that night, both boys were in bed and Jon and his wife sat down to watch the news. They soon heard a loud moaning cry, kind of like the siren on the volunteer fire department. It would stretch out for a long time, and then end with a “whoop whoop” sound. It was coming from the woods opposite the house.

His wife asked “What the Hell is that?”
Jon answered truthfully; “That is Tim’s Cowman.”

He then described to her the full details of what had happened, and she immediately wanted to call the Sheriff. He persuaded her that they would sound crazy, and that he would handle it himself. She reluctantly agreed, and told him she didn’t want either of the kids to go outside until this thing was gone. The howling went on until around midnight, when it got quiet again. Jon wanted to stay up through the night and watch over the house, but he had a long day at work and the excitement earlier had worn him out. They went to bed around one in the morning, and had no further problems that night.

They slept in that morning, and the boys were already up and watching cartoons when they got out of bed. The first thing little Jon said was that he had heard the bear rubbing against the house last night. He said he was too scared to get up and tell his parents, and fell back asleep soon after.

Then Tim said “The Cowman talks funny.”
This stopped Jon cold. He asked his son “When did you talk to the Cowman?”
Tim replied “Last night, in my room.” Jon asked: “The Cowman was in your room?”

“No Daddy, he’s too big for my room, he talked to my window.” Tim said, and turned back to the cartoons. “What did the Cowman say, Tim?” Jon asked.
“He talks funny; I don’t know what he said. He talks like this…OOH AHH AHH OOH!” Tim said, and started making strange monkey like noises. “Did the Cowman try to get in your window?” Jon asked, breaking out in a cold sweat.
“He’s too big for that. He made funny faces, he has Lincoln Log teeth!” Tim said with a smile.

Jon later learned Tim meant it had square teeth that looked the same size as the small blocks in a Lincoln log set. It apparently spent quite a while “talking” and making faces outside the boy’s window. Tim said it lay down and went to sleep outside, and he could hear it snoring. Jon walked to his younger son’s room, and cautiously peered out the window. No sleeping Cowman. Jon told the boys to get dressed; they were going to go visit their uncle in Elma for the day.

After his wife and kids left, he called one of the men from his crew, and asked him to come over. I’ll call him Patrick, he was an ex-State patrolman and my Dad said he was kicked off the force because of his drinking problem. He was a good worker and never got drunk before dark, so Jon figured they would have most of the day to look for this thing. When Patrick arrived, Jon greeted him at the door and said, “Are you up for some hunting?” Seeing how it was not hunting season, Patrick told him he doesn’t poach, and doesn’t even want to know about it if Jon did. Jon told him it wasn’t deer he was after, and went on to explain the previous night’s events. Patrick didn’t really believe him, but could see he was sincere and still shook up. Jon had his pistol and a bolt action 30.06, Patrick had a .38 in his car and Jon loaned him a 12 gauge. They first circled the house looking for any signs of a nocturnal visitor.

At the back of the house, there was a spigot for the garden hose, and it always leaked. There was a patch of ground worn bare of grass under it, and it had turned to mud. In the center of the mud, there was a huge, clear imprint of what looked like a bare human foot. Jon said it was at least 18 inches long, and very wide. It was so clear that he got the feeling it was left there on purpose. They found no other prints around the house, and in places in the field and woods where a track could be made, the creature seemed to avoid them. Off to the side
of the track in the mud were four straight lines about eight inches long. He said it looked like someone had raked their fingers through the mud. When they circled around the side of the house and got to Tim’s window, they saw what it was for.

Above the top of the window, a good seven feet up, were four muddy streaks. And on the window itself were dozens of large, muddy fingerprints. The glass wasn’t cracked or broken, just smeared with mud. By this time Patrick was fast becoming convinced something strange had indeed happened the night before.

Before going out into the woods, Jon wanted to feed the families pigs. They had two of them apparently fairly young weighing around 40 pounds each. The pig pen was about a hundred yards away from the house, behind an old barn. As they got closer Jon became concerned because they couldn’t hear them making any noise. Usually they squealed like crazy when they knew food was near at hand, but this morning it was completely silent. They rounded the corner and the pen was empty. No sign of damage or struggle, the pigs were just gone. They searched the barn but found nothing out of place, so they decided to hit the woods and try to kill this thing.

They entered on the same trail Jon and Jon had used the day before, Jon showed Patrick the broken fence wire and told him again about the hair. It was a bright summer morning, and Jon was surprised at the difference from the previous evening. The night before had been still and silent, now the woods were alive with birds and small animals. He showed Patrick the broken tree, and they followed the creatures’ trail and found several more trees and large branches twisted and broken. They could see large, faint impressions of footprints where the ground was soft. They followed the deer trail further into the woods, and encountered nothing unusual. By noon they were both getting hungry, so they hiked back to the house for lunch. They spent the rest of the day poking around, but saw nothing more out of the ordinary.

Just before dark that night, his wife and kids drove up. He and Patrick were sitting on the porch with the guns, watching the woods. His wife asked if they had seen anything, Jon told her about the footprint and mud on the window.

Patrick had retrieved a pint of booze from his car and was well on his way to getting smashed. Jon decided he didn’t want a frightened drunk with a gun around his family, so he suggested that Patrick could go home, nothing was going to happen anyway. Patrick agreed and drove off, and Jon continued to watch the woods. His wife brought out a plate of food and a Coleman lantern and a flashlight. He told her he would stay out here and watch the house through the night. Before they went to bed, he went into their bedroom and with help from his wife, pushed the king sized bed as far from the windows as they could. They agreed that his wife and kids would all sleep in that bed for the night and he would keep watch around the house. She had grown up hunting and knew how to handle a gun as good as him, so she insisted on keeping the shotgun in the room with them. He agreed after making her promise to ask for a name before shooting anything. If it replied “Jon”, please don’t shoot it.

There was a full moon that night, and Jon could see across the field and into the inky dark of the woods. The night air was filled with the sound of thousands of crickets, and the pond behind the house was full of croaking frogs. As the moon rose higher, clumps of weeds in the field began casting sinister shadows, and before long Jon was seeing big hairy creatures sneaking up on him in each of them. He stood up and lit a cigarette, trying to shake the fear and concentrate on the task at hand. As he smoked, he wandered to the end of the porch, and stood looking at the darkened barn. Something was different, but he couldn’t quite place it. The front of the barn facing the house was open, and the moonlight was hitting it from the side, casting the interior in deep shadows. He stood watching the black opening as he finished his smoke, thinking about the missing pigs. He then realized what was wrong. All the crickets and frogs had gone silent. It was as quiet as the inside of a mausoleum at night; he could hear the minute shrill buzz of his own nervous system. As he turned to walk back to his chair, he thought he saw movement in the barn. He looked intently at the opening and could make out nothing, then turned his head a bit to the side and saw what looked like two red eyes hovering about eight feet off the ground. He couldn’t see them if he looked straight at them, but when he averted his eyes a little, they became clearer. They were a deep burning coal red, almost invisible in the dark. Every few seconds they would disappear when the creature blinked.

His heart began thudding in his chest, and he waited for it to leave the barn and approach the house. He slowly backed up to his chair, never looking away, and picked up his 30.06. He walked back to the end of the porch and watched and waited. He stood looking at the blinking red eyes for what seemed like hours, and then the eyes blinked out and never came back. He watched intently but could see no movement. He thought for a moment, then grabbed the flashlight and shined it at the barn. The flashlight was too small to penetrate the darkness of the barn from this distance, he had to get closer. He was none too keen about leaving the relative safety of the porch and confronting a glowing eyed monster in his barn, but he was damned if he was going to live in fear in his own house.

He left the porch and began slowly working his way toward the barn, taking his time, building his courage up. He got closer and could still see no movement; it had gone further into the dark. He got within 20 feet of the opening, and his flashlight would now penetrate the gloom in the barn. He moved the feeble beam of light over the contents of the barn, an old tractor, and old pickup, boxes and buckets. Too many places for something to hide, even something big. He cautiously walked closer, now shining the flashlight down the barrel of his rifle. He stopped at the entrance and shined the light all over, searching the corners and under the vehicles. He stepped into the barn, every sense straining for sound or movement. He walked around the pickup, tensing for a huge, hairy arm to reach out and grab him at any second. He made his way clear to the rear of the barn without seeing anything, and slowly turned around to leave. He felt both relieved not to have encountered it in the dark barn, and frightened and somewhat confused about where it could have gone.

As he was walking out he glanced at the wide stairs leading up into the hayloft and froze. He knew with complete certainty that it had climbed those stairs and was waiting for him to walk out under the hayloft and jump down upon him. He couldn’t move, he was literally frozen in fear. He swore he could here the floorboards softly creak above him as an enormous weight edged stealthily closer to the edge. He stood with his heart pounding in his ears, unable to move or act. Suddenly there was the booming explosion of a shotgun from the house, followed by his wife screaming. His paralysis broke and he bolted out of the barn toward the house, completely forgetting what may have been in the hayloft.

As he ran toward the house, he heard an inhuman roar coming from the woods behind the house. It sounded pissed off and in pain. It screamed again and he heard branches breaking as it plowed through the forest, thankfully away from the house. He got to the house and almost knocked down the front door in his hurry to get inside.

He ran down the hall to their room and found his family huddled together on the bed, sobbing. One of the windows was blown out, and his wife was still pointing the shotgun at it. When he burst into the room she swung the gun in his direction and screamed and he hit the floor. He waited for the blast but it didn’t come. He slowly stood up and she had put the gun down and he went to the bed. He asked her what had happened, but she was too shook up to answer just then. Tim started crying: “Why did you shoot the Cowman Mommy, why?” Jon Jr. Had his face buried against her shoulder crying. After they calmed down a bit, he told them to get up and follow him. He led them to the living room, then went out the open front door and looked carefully around. He could see no sign of it, all was quiet again. He told them to come out and get in the car. They ran out in their pajamas and piled in the car; he got in and drove them to his brother’s house in Elma.

On the way there, they had calmed down enough to tell him what happened. She said a couple hours after they went to bed, she finally dozed off. She was awakened by Tim talking to someone, and this bizarre clicking chirping sound. Tim wasn’t in the bed; he was standing in front of one of the windows. The moonlight was shining through both windows illuminating the room pretty good, but there was a large shadow, like a tree obscuring the window in front of Tim. She knew there were no trees close enough to cast a shadow, she told to get away from the window. “Mommy, listen! The Cowman can sound like a bird!” Tim said pointing excitedly at the dark figure in the window. “Timmy, get away from the window.” She said, trying to keep her voice quiet. Right after she spoke, the noises from outside changed, it went from a soft chirping, to a strange gibbering, almost like human speech with an occasional pig-like snort thrown in.

At this time, little Jon woke up and said “What is that?” rather loudly. This seemed to incite the creature and it hit the side of the house with its fists hard enough for the walls to tremble. At this, Little Jon screamed and Tim yelled “Quiet, you’re going to scare him away!” She yelled at Tim to get away from the window again, and reached up on the headboard and grabbed the shotgun. She got out of the bed and started toward Tim; the creature leaned down and looked straight in the window at her. She screamed and raised the shotgun, afraid to shoot because her son was so close to it. She started forword to grab Tim, and there was an explosion of breaking glass; a gigantic hairy arm reached through the window toward her son. She screamed again and fired over Tim’s head, blowing out the rest of the window and hitting the creature with .00 buckshot. It jerked backwards out of the window and disappeared into the dark. A few seconds later she heard it screaming in the woods. “It was trying to get Tim, it was trying to grab my baby!” she started crying again and he comforted her as best he could while driving.

They stayed the rest of that night and the following night with his brother’s family. He told his brother about it, but could see he didn’t really believe him. He agreed to ride back to Jon’s house with him early Monday morning before work. They had left the front door open in their haste to leave, and he was afraid animals or vandals would have got into the house. When they arrived, the house looked like a tornado had gone through it. The couch was upside down. They had a large, heavy console TV and it was apparently thrown across the room, lying in a spray of broken glass. The kitchen was trashed, the refrigerator knocked over and food everywhere. The doors to both of the boy’s rooms were left closed, and the rooms were untouched, same as the bathroom. The master bedroom was torn apart, the pillows ripped up and feathers everywhere. The chest of drawers was knocked over and the large mirror smashed. Jon’s brother looked around in awe, and said “You better call the police!” Jon looked at him and said “And tell them what? Bigfoot destroyed my house?”

They left and closed the front door this time, and drove to my Dad’s mill in Aberdeen. Jon’s brother waited in the car while Jon went in and told this to my Dad. After he was done, my Dad said, “Well, let’s go have a look at it then.” They drove back out to the house, and Jon showed my Dad the damage. He pulled the clump of hair from his shirt pocket and let my Dad look at it. As they were walking through the house surveying the damage, my Dad pointed out cracks in the ceiling where it had apparently stood up and hit its head. Jon told my Dad that they couldn’t live there anymore, even if the creature was gone, they would always be afraid. Their homeowners insurance wouldn’t cover the damage; the adjuster claimed Jon must have done it in a drunken rage. My Dad helped them find a place in Aberdeen, and gave him a loan for new furniture and stuff. The house was eventually fixed up and sold, and my Dad never heard about another problem there.

A few observations about this story; My Dad lost contact with “Jon” and his family in the mid eighties. They moved out of state and my Dad hasn’t heard from them since. His brother died around the same time. Why didn’t they call the cops? Jon had a lot of pride as well as a lot of common sense. He knew he couldn’t logically explain what had happened to the authorities, and he didn’t want the story to get out and have him branded a nutcase. I asked my Dad if they saved the hair, he said Jon never mentioned it again and my Dad never asked him about it. I asked my Dad if he saw the footprint and muddy fingerprints, he said he did. He said it looked like a giant barefoot man had stepped very carefully in the center of the mud. He’s not a tracker, but he said it was the clearest print of any kind he had ever seen. I asked my Dad if the neighbors had heard any of this. He said if they did, none of them ever mentioned it again. I also asked him if he thought it was possible Jon had made it all up. That he HAD trashed his house in a drunken rage, and made up this elaborate cover story. My Dad said Jon and his family were terrified of that place; they didn’t even want to go back and get their clothes.
If was just an elaborate story, what did he stand to gain? To profit from a story in any way, you have to share it with people. My Dad and the other folks mentioned in the story are the only ones who ever heard it, until now, of course. He also said that whatever trashed that house was no man. The TV had to have weighed close to 200 pounds, and it was obviously thrown across the room with great force. He said that even after two days, there was still a wild animal smell in the house.

I asked him if thought there might have been two creatures involved, considering the incident in the barn. He said he asked Jon that same question, and was told that Jon felt there was only one, that it lured him into the barn then snuck out the side door to the house. The thing he thought he heard in the hayloft was either his imagination, or some common animal like a raccoon.

For whatever reason, this critter seemed focused on their four-year-old son. Their son was the only one who never showed any fear of it. He seemed to think of it as his friend. And although the sex of the animal was never determined, it was referred to as a male because of the predatory stalking type behavior. That and the conspicuous lack of breasts, or perhaps it was just not as well endowed as the Patterson Film Subject?

Anyhow, its behavior almost seems indicative of a mother that has lost her little Bigfoot and is looking for a replacement. I rather facetiously asked my Dad if little ‘Timmy’ was a particularly hairy child, perhaps suffering from that rare condition that causes uncontrollable hair growth all over the body. He said ‘Timmy’ was a normal little boy, with normal brown hair on his normal head. I didn’t ask if ‘Timmy’ regularly reeked of rotting garbage and wet dogs, didn’t seem a polite course for the conversation to take.

He told me of other possible Bigfoot encounters he and his crews had in the woods around Grays Harbor. None of them are quite as titillating as the ‘Cowman’ story, but interesting nonetheless. Perhaps I’ll share them if there is an interest here in them.

So in the end I was left with no leads to follow, no new evidence of anything, but I did come away with a pretty damned good story. And I guess that’s better than a poke in the eye with a filthy encrusted hypodermic needle. Those of you who actually read this far; I give you a big thumbs up, you are truly an ardent and stoic follower of all things Bigfoot, or like me, recently underemployed and in desperate need to fill the endless empty hours of your life.
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God, there was all sorts of weird shit over there, but only one thing that happened to me personally. One of the big things that the people talk about over there, especially out from the major cities, are these "Well Tricksters", which is what we called them. They were described to me as a 'big ass lizard thing' that crawls backwards into wells at night, so that most of their body is underwater and only their head is above water. The tip of its nose has a pattern like a human face on it. The next day, when people drop the buckets in, they come up dry because they landed on the lizards nose.

The lizard also has a more sinister side. When it is hungry, it will start calling out in a voice that you know. Soldiers, trained soldiers, would say they heard their wife or kids calling out to them from inside of the wells.

I would like to say that I wasn't a believer in the supernatural, but I was nuts at that time about ghosts and what not, so I took every opportunity to walk around wells. Nothing happened for a long time, until...

I think I was just on the Iraq southern border, either that or we were still in Kuwait, I don't really remember where it was. I remember the event well though, we were walking along when AK fire started up, sending us scattering against walls and corners and whatever we could get behind. I got behind a well. We began returning fire.

For some reason I started thinking of my sisters, there in that fire fight, especially the youngest one. For some reason I thought I could hear her calling my name. My body was on autopilot, popping and shooting, then covering up again. But deep in my brain, I could here her calling me, telling me she was in trouble. The fight stopped as soon as it started, like most did over there, and I found myself leaning over the well. I could almost see an outline of a face in the water far, far below. I dug through my jacket and pulled out a glow stick, popped it, and threw it in. The face disappeared, and the glow stick floated there for a few seconds, then vanished with a splash. The face reappeared. I decided I didn't want have much to do with Arabic superstition after that.'
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When my dad was in the army, one of his buddies was Navajo, and had grown up extremely poor on a reservation. He had something like six brothers and sisters, and all of them slept together on the floor of their cabin. One night my dad's friend woke up out of a sound sleep to see a strange woman tiptoeing silently between their sleeping bags. She got to one of his little brothers and kind of crouched over him, whispering or singing something. Dad's friend must have let out a gasp or something, because the woman looked up at him, smiled sadly, and put a finger to her lips. He passed out almost immediately, but not before noticing that she was very beautiful, with long, shiny black hair and a loose white dress that seemed to glow in the dark. When he woke up, he vividly remembered it, but passed it off as a dream. However, within a week, his little brother, who had been a perfectly healthy kid, contracted a terrible fever and died. He said the woman, whoever she was, hadn't seemed malevolent in the least, but he never slept too well after that.
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In the last decade and a half it's become infinitely easier to obtain exactly what you're looking for, by way of a couple of keystrokes. The Internet has made it all too simple to use a computer to change reality. An abundance of information is merely a search engine away, to the point where it's hard to imagine life as any different.

Yet, a generation ago, when the words 'streaming' and 'torrent' were meaningless save for conversations about water, people met face-to-face to conduct software swap parties, trading games and applications on Sharpie-labeled five-and-a-quarter inch floppies.

Of course, most of the time the meets were a way for frugal, community-minded individuals to trade popular games like King's Quest and Maniac Mansion amongst themselves. However, a few early programming talents designed their own computer games to share amongst their circle of acquaintances, who in turn would pass it on, until, if fun and well-designed enough, an independently-developed game had its place in the collection of aficionados across the country. Think of it as the 80's equivalent of a viral video.

Pale Luna, on the other hand, was never circulated outside of the San Francisco Bay Area. All known copies have been long disposed of, all computers that have ever run the game now detritus buried under layers of filth and polystyrene. This fact is attributed to a number of rather abstruse design choices made by its programmer.

Pale Luna was a text adventure in the vein of Zork and The Lurking Horror, at a time when said genre was swiftly going out of fashion. Upon booting the program, the player was presented with a screen almost completely blank, except for the text:

-You are in a dark room. Moonlight shines through the window.

-There is GOLD in the corner, along with a SHOVEL and a ROPE.

-There is a DOOR to the EAST.

-Command?

So began the game that one writer for a long-out-of-print fanzine decried as "enigmatic, nonsensical, and completely unplayable". As the only commands that the game would accept were PICK UP GOLD, PICK UP SHOVEL, PICK UP ROPE, OPEN DOOR, and GO EAST, the player was soon presented with the following:

-Reap your reward.

-PALE LUNA SMILES AT YOU.

-You are in a forest.There are paths to the NORTH, WEST, and EAST.

-Command?

What quickly infuriated the few who've played the game was the confusing and buggy nature of the second screen onward — only one of the directional decisions would be the correct one. For example, on this occasion, a command to go in a direction other than NORTH would lead to the system freezing, requiring the operator to hard reboot the entire computer.

Further, any subsequent screens seemed to merely repeat the above text, with the difference being only the directions available. Worse still, the standard text adventure commands appeared to be useless: The only accepted non-movement-related prompts were USE GOLD, which caused the game to display the message:

-Not here.

USE SHOVEL, which brought up:

-Not now.

And USE ROPE, which prompted the text:

-You've already used this.

Most who played the game progressed a couple of screens into it before becoming fed-up by having to constantly reboot and tossing the disk in disgust, writing off the experience as a shoddily programmed farce. However, there is one thing about the world of computers that remains true, no matter the era: some people who use them have way too much time on their hands.

A young man by the name of Michael Nevins decided to see if there was more to Pale Luna than what met the eye. Five hours and thirty-three screens worth of trial-and-error and unplugged computer cords later, he finally managed to make the game display different text. The text in this new area read:

-PALE LUNA SMILES WIDE

-There are no paths

-PALE LUNA SMILES WIDE

-The ground is soft

-PALE LUNA SMILES WIDE

-Here

-Command?

It was another hour still before Nevins stumbled upon the proper combination of phrases to make the game progress any further; DIG HOLE, DROP GOLD, then FILL HOLE. This caused the screen to display:

-Congratulations

—— 40.24248 ——

—— -121.4434 ——

Upon which the game ceased to accept commands, requiring the user to reboot one last time.

After some deliberation, Nevins came to the conclusion that the numbers referred to lines of latitude and longitude — the coordinates lead to a point in the sprawling forest that dominated the nearby Lassen Volcanic Park. As he possessed much more free time than sense, Nevins vowed to see Pale Luna through to its ending.

The next day, armed with a map, a compass, and a shovel, he navigated the park's trails, noting with amusement how each turn he made corresponded roughly to those that he took in-game.

Though he initially regretted bringing the cumbersome digging tool on a mere hunch, the path's similarity all but confirmed his suspicions that the journey would end with him face-to-face with an eccentric's buried treasure.

Out of breath after a tricky struggle to the coordinates, he was pleasantly surprised by a literal stumble upon a patch of uneven dirt. Shoveling as excitedly as he was, it would be an understatement to say that he was taken aback when his heavy strokes unearthed the badly-decomposing head of a blonde-haired little girl.

Nevins promptly reported the situation to the authorities. The girl was identified as Karen Paulsen, 11, reported as missing to the San Diego Police Department a year and a half prior.

Efforts were made to track down the programmer of Pale Luna, but the nearly-anonymous legal gray area in which the software swapping community operated inescapably led to many dead ends.

Collectors have been known to offer upwards of six figures for an authentic copy of the game.

The rest of Karen's body was never found.
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When I was a young fella, growing up in Brisbane (Australia), my family lived in a house typically known as a "Queenslander". It had a big verandah out the front, and another out the back. In the back yard was a Hill's Hoist kind of clothesline, you know, the ones that spin around.

I grew up with two older brothers, and when you're a kid, there's nobody bigger and tougher than your big brothers, except your dad. So living in a house with these tough bastards, I wasn't afraid of much.

Except for, of course, the clothesline man.

I saw this guy several times from around the ages of 5-10. It would always be in the middle of the night, when I'd woken up and found I needed to go to the bathroom. This was a harrowing experience in itself, as just above the bathroom door was a fairly detailed painting of Jesus' crucifixion. It really was a freaking awful, gory painting - not something a kid needs to see in the middle of the night, but I digress.

The first time (actually, every time) I saw the clothesline man I was taking a whizz, staring out the bathroom window over the back verandah and into the back yard. He would be there, holding on to the clothesline and walking in circles, spinning it, with a grin on his face. Not looking up at me, just watching where he was walking.

I didn't know how to describe the feeling I got looking at him back then, but I do now. Foreboding - I felt a dreadful sense that something terrible was going to happen when I saw this guy.

Especially if he looked up and saw me.

Thank Christ he never did.

I didn't see him every time I got up to go to the bathroom, but I told my dad about him the first time. He had a look around the yard, didn't see anything, and told me to go back to bed. I never mentioned it again. The old man, did, however, eventually get rid of the Jesus painting above the bathroom door, for which I am forever grateful.
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She told me when her and her husband first got married they moved into a small "starter home" where they knew they would be able to raise a family and be comfortable. Two years after she and her husband moved in baby number one came along and shortly after baby number two. Now when baby number one was about three she began noticing that when it rained he would stare out the big picture window they had in their dining room and smile and talk with what appeared to be the window. Thinking nothing of it she just left him to his devices thinking he was just watching some wildlife outside or talking to an imaginary friend. After the rain would stop he would beg to go outside like most kids do to step in mud puddles the rain left behind, but she noticed that he was very aggressive and tedious about making sure he stepped in every mud puddle and sloshed most if not all the water out. After two more years though of this constant behavior, she became curious and asked him why he always did this every time it rained.

She said what he told her sent shivers up and down her spine (also gave me the creeps too). He informed his mother that when it rained "the rain lady" came up out of the puddles and came to the window and stared inside at him and his family. He told his mother if "the rain lady" caught him not looking she told him she would come into their home and never leave, so he had to watch her and protect his family. She eventually put two and two together and reasoned that, this was why he was so adamant about stepping in every mud puddle after it rained and making sure that most if not all of the water was sloshed out of them. Well she shook it off as a child with an overactive imagination and thought nothing more of it.

She said that she left all that he told her alone for about four or five more years until he was around 9-10 years old. She said she noticed that he would still perform the rain ritual of watching out the window and immediately going outside after the rain to empty the mudpuddles. She finally asked him again about "the rain lady", this time though she asked him to describe her for her. What he described sounded like a general description of a young Native American girl, tanned skin long black hair. Now during this time period she said she noticed him having a lot of nightmares and not being able to focus in class. She said they had ended up putting him on Ritalin at the time because they thought he was suffering from ADD, but nothing was really helping.

Also, around this time some new homes were being built in their subdivision. She said there was a great deal of dirt work going on beside their home preparing to lay the foundation for a new home. While some of the construction workers were preparing the dirt to lay the foundation they unearthed several arrowheads and potsherds. They called over the local university to do some excavation and the university declared the place worth doing a full excavation, which lasted a good two years.

She said that once the excavation work started her son's behavior became very irrational. To put it in her words "I began living with the devil." His behavior became so erratic that many times during the week she would stay with her mother for help in keeping him under control. Now i asked what kind of behavior she was talking about and she said the worst was when he actually strangle his little brother to the point of him passing out and just leaving him without telling anyone. She confessed that she actually considered putting him into a mental institution for protection for the rest of the family, but she noticed that as long as they were not at their home he was a perfect little angel.

After battling with this for another two years she spoke with her husband for the first time about "the rain lady" and her son's irrational behavior and told him that she was not comfortable in her home anymore and wanted to move. Since her husband was not home very often he wanted his wife and children to feel safe, and with much dismay gave in and decided to try and locate a new home. They finally did "a long six months later" and to her surprise all of her son's irrational behavior stopped and they were even able to take him off of Ritalin for good.

As for "the rain lady" after they moved into their new home she noticed her son did not run to the windows and stare outside, he did not even go out after the rain to splash through the mud puddles. She said she asked him about her and he told her very nonchalantly that "the rain lady" was not at their new home and that he felt sorry for the new family that moved into their old home.
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I just remembered another one I had a while ago. Once again, I typed it up just so you can get the idea: I had a nightmare once that began with me sitting on the computer, browsing the internet, as I usually do late into the night. I noticed that something didn't look "right" in my room, something with the lighting. Then i noticed that there was a large standing shadow in the corner which, considering the moonlight was shining in the window across from it, shouldn't have been there. I blinked my eyes a couple times, to clear my vision in case my contacts were fucking with me. I looked back, and the shadow was still standing there, directly across from me, in the corner. I stared at it for quite some time, unsure how to handle this. It just stood there, defying the natural world by being partly in a patch of moonlight. I looked back over to my monitor and noticed this message written in all caps: "CAN YOU MAKE IT TO THE LIGHTSWITCH BEFORE I GRAB YOU?" That's where the dream cuts out.
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My grandmother told me this story once years ago. She swore it was the truth. I'll share it here just the way she told it to me.

My grandmother, her sister Dorothy, her mother, and her stepfather were dirt poor people living in the country. They did not have a lot of money and when they stumbled into this nice big farmhouse for rent, they did not pass up the opportunity.

The house was a two story. At the top of the steps there were a set of heavy, ancient french style doors. They didn't lead to a landing or anything, just a straight drop off. My grandma said she had never been a sleepwalker before but it suddenly started once they moved in that house and stopped after they left. She said they woke her up one night trying to open those doors. She would have probably died had she fallen off the ledge.

My grandmother and her sister's portion of their bedroom were divided by a big archway. She had been asleep for sometime probably when she awoke with a start. She had an odd creepy feeling that something was watching her.

She rolled over and saw what she described as the ugliest and most horrible looking face you could imagine. She said she was scared at first but then annoyed because she thought it was her sister trying to scare her. She told Dorothy to take off that stupid mask and go back to bed. The thing never moved. She rolled back over and tried to fall back asleep but she could still sense it there. She again told Dorothy to take off that mask. She wasn't scared and she wanted to go back to sleep so she rolled back over and tried again to go back to sleep. The thing never moved. By this time my grandma was getting really annoyed and angry. Nobody in their right mind wants to be woken up in the middle of the night for a stupid prank. She told it to take off its silly mask and go back to bed and by golly this time she meant it. It just sat there and stared at her. She reached up meaning to shove her sister away and her arm went right through it.

She pulled the covers over her head and lay there cowering and shivering till morning. She said they moved out of that house a short time later but she never saw that thing again.
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My wife's grandma is from Mexico city. One day while she was visiting my mom in law got her to tell stories from when she was a little girl. One of which, "The demon dog story" took a lot of convincing.

When she was about seven, little Teresa's mom, my wife's great grandma, had Teresa, my wife's grandma, run some food over to another family across town. The whole way there Teresa was muttering under her breath how unfair it was and wishing bad things on her mom. She got to the house ok, and left the food ok, but on the way back she saw something bizarre. The streets which are usually busy were empty, and coming across towards her from a side street was a big black dog taller than her with glowing red eyes. It was Walking on it's hind legs and making "weird noises." When it saw her it started walking faster towards her. It growled and made a lunge for her. Teresa screamed and ran for it with this thing following on it's hind legs. She got home ok and the first thing she did was apologize to her mom.

To this day she believes that the big black dog was the devil and it had come for her because she had disrespected her mom. After telling that story she had to go outside into the sun because she was so freaked out by the memory of the dog.
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When I was around 12, I lived in a three bedroom house in a Danish suburb, with my parents and my little brother. I had shared a bedroom with my brother which had originally been two smaller rooms, but the wall had been torn down before we moved in. As I grew older, and wanted more privacy, my parents built a very sturdy dividing wall between the two halves of the bedroom. The original wall hadn't been torn completely down, and had about a foot of brick wall remaining on each side, which we used to build up the wall around. These were solid brick outcroppings, with some kind of dry-walling around it, and wall-paper around that. In other words, pretty much two pillars melting in to the outer wall on one side, and one of the load-bearing inner walls on the other. The newly erected partitioning wall was built with some heavy wood planks, very thick slabs of dry-walling, and the space between was filled with some heavy insulation materials. All in all, though it wasn't brick, it was almost as good for stopping sound from travelling through, and only if my brother or I were banging on the wall would the other hear it.

I'm not sure of the exact point in time all this started, but I remember clearly the first time it happened. I woke up to complete darkness, disoriented by the late hour (around 2 AM I'd say), and I heard a distinct scratching sound. I was a pretty hardcore kid, so I decided to find whatever it was. I got up, turned the light on in my little room, and started trying to follow the sound. I quickly realized, that the sound had been coming from the outer wall my bed was placed up against. I couldn't really place it more than about the height of my bed, moving along the wall. It was a faint scratching, that first night, and my first thought was that an animal of some kind had gotten into the room between the bricks, and was moving through the insulation.

I figured that the best way to get it to stop was to bang on the wall. So, I started pounding the wall in different places (never directly on top of where the sound seemed to come from - I wasn't THAT brave), and rather quickly it stopped. I went to bed, a bit creeped out, but mostly by the thought of some pest nesting that close to me. The next morning, I mentioned it to my parents and my brother, and none of them had heard me banging, but my father said he'd take a look in the attic. It wasn't really used for anything - not even storage - so it was completely open. He went up there, saw absolute no signs of animals, and came back down. I figured whatever it was had been scared away from a momentary respite, and that I wouldn't be bothered anymore.

A week or so later, I woke up in the middle of the night again, and the scratching was back. But this time, it wasn't just the sounds of some small animal scratching, it was a very loud and distinct sound. In fact, it was so loud that it scared me straight out of my room. The first time, it had been sort of moving slowly back and forth across the wall, and had been almost discreet, but this time, it was right next to my head, inches from my face when I woke up, and it sounded like something was scratching its way through solid brick to get to me.

Freaked, yet embarrassed at the same time by my fear, I slowly tip-toed to my parent's room. It had been years since I'd knocked on their door and told them I was scared, and they sensed right away that this wasn't just some kid's nightmare. My mother came to my room, but by then it had stopped. She asked me a bit about the sound, and I tried to replicate it, but trying to make it appropriately loud was beyond my puny human nails. Even on the rough surface of the wall-paper in my room, my scratching sounded weak compared to the deep, strong scratching I had awoken to. Agreeing that it was probably over for now, we both went back to sleep.

We discussed what it could be over the next four days or so, and while I didn't experience anything odd, both my parents and my brother told me to wake them up if I heard it again. Obviously, they were just as clueless as me as to what it could be, but since I seemed convinced there was SOMETHING there - normal or paranormal - they were curious. This wasn't something I'd make up, and though I was genuinely freaked by the last event, the whole family treated it much as we would a wild deer suddenly in our living-room, or a fox stealing our sneakers left outside (were some damned fine sneakers as well!). It was an experience beyond our control, but which seemed harmless enough, and unique enough, that we were more curious and maybe even excited than anything else.

The third time was around midnight, and I had been reading before falling asleep. This time, the scratching was just as loud as the last time, and again, as close to my head as possible. I leaped out of bed, and ran to the living-room where my parents were watching TV. They followed me back to my room, and this time could clearly hear the scratching. I could see from their expressions that the volume of it, and the location had a queer effect on them. Their reaction wasn't as it had been before - there was a streak of worry mixing in with the former curiosity. We talked rather loudly, and started banging on the wall like I had done the first night, with no effect except waking my brother in the next room. He was 9 at the time, and after hearing the scratching for a few seconds refused to stay in the room while you could hear it.

After about an hour pounding on the wall and making loud noises, the scratching went away, but I was too scared to sleep in my room. I just couldn't convince myself that it was a rat or some other small mamal anymore, and I ended up sleeping in the living-room. The following night, having distanced myself from the experience a bit, I was sound asleep, and again awoke to the sound of scratching. This time, only my mother came in to hear the sound, and we quickly agreed that it came from two different spots on the wall. Mainly, the sound would come from the spot next to where I usually had my head, but sometimes the sound would sort of 'leap' to another location on the wall, usually much higher and towards either the dividing wall or the outer corner of the house. At first, there was some delay between it scratching from the two locations, but soon they would overlap slightly. The distance between the two locations on the wall, and the volume of it, as well as its total lack of reaction to our sounds, seemed so wholly uncharacteristic of any Danish wildlife of the size necessary to squeeze in there, that we were quite disturbed.

Somehow I managed to fall asleep that night after the scratching stopped, but already the next night it started again. This time, it moved from the location next to my head, all over the outer wall, and - and this is what puzzled us most of all - into the dividing wall. Remember, this wall was completely bordered by either solid brick or hardwood floors. My father and mother both agreed that there was no way anything could move into that dividing wall, and once again the speed that the sound would switch between what seemed its main location, and other points on the wall had a disturbing quality to it. The scratching sound was loud enough to make us raise our voices slightly to talk, and yet, when we went to my sleeping brother's room, we couldn't hear a sound. Not even when the scratching was coming from the wall between our rooms. The phenomenon - whatever it was - was completely isolated to my room.

For the next two years or so, that scratching would wake me up in the middle of the night, continue on for an hour, maybe two, always centered from the spot close to my head, and seemingly oblivious to my knocking or swearing at it. It wasn't every night, but it was at least a couple of times a week, sometimes more than once a night. That same infernal scratching, as though something was trying to gnaw through the red brick wall to gnaw at my face. We had a pest-control guy come out, and he said that not only did the behavior seem extremely unlikely for any wild animal, there was also no evidence at all besides from the scratching. No small holes for access to the walls, no disturbed insulation, no droppings, nothing.

When I was 15, we switched rooms in the house, and tore down the dividing wall to make it one big room again. It wasn't until I started removing the first slab of dry-wall that I thought about it, but this was the best chance to see what had been going on inside the walls I was going to get. The thought of finding some rodents living in there freaked me slightly, but what freaked me even more was the fact that the insulation, drywall, support-frame - everything was completely undisturbed. There wasn't as much as a scratch-mark on the inside of that wall, the insulation was completely in place, and the wall-paper on the brick pillars was perfect as well.

To this day, we have no idea what it was, or even what it could have been. It remains unexplained to me - an experience that lasted two years and went as suddenly as it came. The sound never reached my brother - even when it came from the same dividing wall his bed was placed against. We laugh about it now, but I still remember that building terror of waking up, with the sound of something strong and determined scratching right next to me. I wish I could just believe it were some animal, but there is no proof of it being anything, and that's probably the worst of it for me. I can't rationalize myself out of the shiver running down my back just remembering that awful scratching.
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There was also the scarecrow. I saw him for one day only. Remember that this is the country -- our closest neighbor was a quarter of a mile down the road, and between our properties there was, on the far side of the road, a cornfield, and on the closer side a sheep pasture. One day while playing on the front porch I happened to look in the direction of the neighbors’ and saw, emerging from the cornfield roughly half the distance between the property lines, a scarecrow. It wore an old pair of denim coveralls, a patched flannel shirt with straw protruding from the neck and cuffs, and a floppy orange hat. Now what’s this, you say, an orange hat? Could it perhaps have simply been a lost hunter? Well, perhaps. Except no one saw it but me.

I was young, but even then I knew scarecrows shouldn’t be walking around. And that’s exactly what this bastard did: it would walk out of the cornfield, look from side to side, and stride diagonally across the road to the neighbors’ driveway, as if he was going to drop in for a visit. Instead of continuing, though, it would turn around and disappear back into the cornfield, only to return and repeat the process a few seconds later. I freaked out and called my dad onto the porch, fearing for our neighbors. Dad squinted into the distance while I wildly shouted and pointed beside him… and he told me to stop goofing around. I could see the scarecrow, clear as day, right there, but my dad saw nothing, only an empty expanse of road. My suspicions were confirmed when my neighbor exited his house, walking down his drive to check his mailbox: the scarecrow was stopped not three feet from him, but my neighbor didn’t even react. Only I could see the scarecrow. After a time, it walked back into the cornfield and didn’t come back out. And after that, I never saw it again.
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My story is second hand, from my father.
He use to work for the RCMP, and we're native, so he was stationed on a reservation (I believe in British Columbia).
As he tells it, one late afternoon, he got a call to go to a house that was situated some-what away from all the others, the women didn't speak good english at all and all the dispatcher could make out from the women was it sounded like someone was in her house. When he arrived, there was an old women standing on the front porch waiting for him. He asked her if she was alone, and she shook her head no, so he asked if her husband or any other family was in the house and she shook her head no. She started rambling, and the only thing he could understand was "little people". So, he entered the house, and slowly room by room, searched, calling out that the police had arrived, and that if anyone was inside, they had to identify themselves. As he searched, the old women was almost right on his back, peering over his shoulder. There wasn't much furniture, and it was quite obvious she lived alone. The house was 3 stories, and as he approached the last room, at the end of the hall, on the 3rd floor, the women remained at the stairs, and begin speaking even more frantically, "little people, little people"; pointing to the closed door. My dad took this as there were teenagers in the house and they were hiding in this room. So he knocked, identified himself as the police and tried to open the door, but it was blocked. After a few minutes of struggling, he managed to get the door open wide enough to slip through. The room was enclosed, no windows or anything, and the bed, dresser and desk that had been in the room had been stacked against the door to prevent entry. The women peeked in behind him and pointed at the closet, so, he opened it up to nothing, no clothes and no people. The women, standing behind him pointed to a small, 2 inch high gap at the top of the back wall of the closet, and muttered "little people". There were small scuff marks at the top and a faint light coming from the crack.
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Back in Suzhou, China, I lived with my grandparents in apartment. There was old abandoned heating stove outside in the hall, between our apartment and neighbors'. I don't know why is it there.

One day, my babysitter took me out for shopping. As we came out, I pointed at the stove (I am deaf-mute) as if I asked her to light it, just out of curiosity. She took out match and lit the stick.

When she opened the stove, something appeared; it's a human barefoot. I looked at the babysitter. She didn't seem to see it. I turned back to the stove and watched the foot wiggle toes as she sticked the lit match in the stove. Then the match got burnt. She dropped it and closed the stove. We left.

I never go near the stove again. I never ask/tell my family about it.
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I lived in this apartment complex for about a year after moving to the town that I am currently living in. My family and I were from a few cities over so I didn't know anybody in my new school and I spent a lot of time running around on my own. Not being a total social retard though, I managed to make a few friends at my new school and was surprised to see one of them running around my apartment complex one day during my wanderings(we'll call him D for the rest of the story).

After talking to him, I learned that D and a friend of his, J, lived in the apartment complex next to mine. They had come across the fence that separated the two complexes to play in the fairly large forest that sat behind my apartments (it was a pretty popular hang out for kids and there were multiple tree house like structures scattered throughout the place).

D and I (as well as his friend J on a few occasions) began to meet up regularly to play after this, usually at their apartment complex. We didn't have a lot of variety in our play routine, it was usually tag or hide and seek. The day all of this took place, we were playing hide and seek, D was it.

During school that day, I had been coming up with creative places I could hide during that afternoon's game. My best idea was to run to the rock wall that ran across the back side of the apartment complex, climb the wall, slide between the wall of short fir trees that lined the top of the ledge, and hide between the trees and the fence that served as a division between the apartments and the rural homes that were behind them (the apartments were on the outskirts of a fairly small town so there was a lot of farm land around them).

Once up there, I realized it was as good of a hiding place as I had hoped. The narrow path between the trees and the fence was just wide enough for me to walk down comfortably and the trees would completely hide all but my feet from D. I waited for a long time, we played the kind of hide and seek where you would stay in your spot until the seeker gave up and yelled for you to come out or he found you. It was taking forever so I figured D was just being abnormally persistent today. To waste time, I decided to explore this narrow ridge, see if I could follow it all the way along the back of the apartments.

I got up, dusted the bark dust of myself, took a quick piss on a tree, and began walking, taking careful note to try and cover my feet by stepping only behind the thin tree trunks. After a few hundred feet I found a wooden barrier that stopped me from completing my trip along my hidden walkway. The barrier only extended to the tree though so I figured that if I pressed myself up against the fir I could slip through to the other side. It would shake the tree pretty badly and possibly give away my position but I was sick of hiding so I didn't care much anymore and went for it.

It did work, I slipped to the other side of the barrier and was rewarded with a layer of sap and a continued walkway on the other side of the barrier. I immediately noticed that, unlike the fence I had been following before, the fence on this side of the barrier was chain link so I could see through it. What was on the other side is what weirded me out, I'll call it the Farm even though there was no evidence of it being a farm. I don't know what it was really.

The best way I can describe it is that there was something off about the Farm on the other side of the fence. First off, it was dark, kind of how it looks right before the sun rises really early in the morning, gray and shadowy. This confused me because it was only a bit overcast that day with the sun peeking through fairly frequently, to verify the weather hadn't radically changed since I had climbed into my hiding spot, I poked my head through the tree line and checked the sky...still sunny and significantly brighter than the Farm which was behind me. There was no reason for it to be so dark, there were few trees so it wasn't because tree were blocking the light, it was just dim for some reason.

Another thing was the fog, I know, fog is a huge scary story cliche but it was damn foggy on the Farm. I could only see about 200 yards back into the Farm because any place past that was obscured by thick, damp fog. Closer to me, the fog swirled around the ground whenever it was disturbed by the three black goats that were walking around on the other side of the fence, everywhere else it just sort of hovered over the ground. There were weeping willows everywhere, short ones though, not enough to cause the dimness. The ground was also covered by a solid carpet of moss which I thought was weird. This place just mystified me for whatever reason and I reached out to grab the chain link fence (which was warped and all bent out of shape) so that I could climb over and explore when I realized that the fence too was covered by moss in places and was dripping wet making it extremely slick and difficult to climb over. No matter how many times I tried, I fell off before getting to the top. Keep in mind that it had been SUNNY and WARM all day long, we hadn't had rain in at least a week so where all this moisture came from is a mystery to me. The contrast is what freaked me out though, it was just so radically different than how it should have been, it was like the farm had its very own special climate and time zone. I decided to break from my hiding place to show my friends.

I climbed down from the wall and spent a few minutes looking for and found them both hanging out in the playground in the middle of the apartment complex. When I approached, D asked me where I had been and said he had stopped yelling that he gave up about 15 minutes ago. Not sure why I didn't hear him but I told them that I had found something that I wanted them to check out. I figured that they would give me crap about it because we always gave each other crap and I felt a little crazy showing this to them but when I brought them to the fence separating us from the farm they were just as silent and mystified as I had been, they even did the same check to make sure it was still sunny on the other side of the tree barrier that I had done earlier. We all attempted the fence but were unable to get over it no matter how hard we tried, the fence was all warped like a wet piece of paper and made climbing all but impossible.

We left and they agreed that it was definitely creepy, after that I don't remember us ever going back.

Years later I was taking a fiction class at a local community college. I wrote a story based on that place and changed the events surrounding it but tried to describe it as I remembered it. We had peer writing groups in that class and we would exchange stories so that we could make grammar corrections and give ideas to the writer on how they might be able to improve it. After the guy who read mine gave my story back to me he said that he liked it and we talked about ways that I might be able to end it (I hadn't been able to come up with an ending I liked). He was a few years older than me, as was most everybody at the school since I was doing these classes as part of a program out of my high school. He chuckled a little bit as he read a section over again that he wanted to take another look at.

"What is it?" I asked.

"Oh, it's just weird." He handed my paper back to me. "I used to live in some apartments when I was little and there was this weird place that was just like what you wrote about."

I confirmed that he had actually lived at those same apartments years before I did and that he had run across this place and had the exact same experience that I had. We chatted about it until class ended.

Again, not a ghost story but it still freaks me out a little bit even now. Maybe it's the kind of thing that you would have to be there for but there was just something wrong with that Farm. I still don't live very far away, maybe I'll go back and take a picture for you guys, see if things are the same all these years later. I've been meaning to check it out for the longest time anyways.
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One day, my mom went to school relatively early because her teacher needed to talk to her. She went into her classroom and waited, completely alone. As she waited, she noticed there was a sound coming from behind the bookcase next to her desk. She listened intently and realized it was a heavy, ragged breathing, getting louder and louder with each breath.

"Who's there?" she called out, obviously nervous about the unseen intruder. The breathing stopped; not really stop as much gasp in surprise, then chuckled a somewhat sinister laugh. After that, the schoolday was mostly uneventful, though what happened had shook her up.

Like a lost puppy, it followed her home.

When she went to bed that night, she settled down and closed her eyes; within seconds, that same heavy, labored breathing from earlier that day started again, right beside her. Like any 10-year-old kid, she screamed and ran to her parents' room, crying that there was something in her room. Like any parents, they didn't believe her and told her to go back to sleep.

That day began a series of horrible things happening to her family. My grandpa was trying to become a pastor, but that all went downhill (not sure of the details on that part). Both she and her younger sister developed scoliosis almost immediately after the creature followed her home. Being from West Virginia, my grandpa was a coal miner, and many of the mines started laying workers off, he included. There were mysterious illnesses, money problems, dogs running away or dying, the works.

Every single night, that thing hovered over her, breathing heavily. Some nights, it got so close it her face that she felt a hot breath on her skin. A couple of times it ripped the covers off of her as she slept. She endured this for a few years, just closing her eyes and pulling the covers over her head.

Not once did her parents believe her.
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I can't quite recall how old I was, but I must have been roughly 6. Reason being, my family was into archery at the time (we aren't hicks or anything of the like, hah), and at the time, I believe I used a bow for fun. I can not imagine someone letting a child under 6 using a bow. Anyways, before we went out to the archery range, I remember stopping at the store and buying some candy (jawbreakers to be exact). I believe that day was a tournament at the archery range. It was an all day event and the time period was roughly September. When the day had ended, we went back home.

I remember going directly to my mothers room to fall asleep. I was tired enough to not take my jacket off in the entrance to our home, but rather in the bedroom right beside where I decided to sleep. My mother decided have a nap as well and she fell asleep beside where I was laying. I set my jacket down and proceed to try and doze off. Now, this part is a bit fuzzy. I can not recall if I ever did fall or sleep or not, but the first freaky event was about to happen. The jacket I had set down beside me had it's pockets left unzipped. A jaw breaker rolls out. I proceed to grab it and it disappears. Something then caught the corner of my eye at the entrance to the bedroom. I turn to look over and there she is. Walking in the hallway is my mother in her wedding dress. She briefly turns her head and looks at me and continues walking. It ended there.

Now, there is one thing I am almost 100% certain of. I WAS NOT dreaming. My parents actually recall the day that this happened. They both believe I was sick that day. But would they let me out if I was sick enough to hallucinate? They could have underestimated my sickness I guess, but still, if it was bad enough to hallucinate, I am sure they would have noticed it somehow and would have taken me to a doctor or whatever.
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The Van Meter incident actually happened over a series of 5 nights, from early morning Tuesday Sept 29th – October 3rd 1903. On the first night, at about 1 am., respected businessman U.G. Griffith noticed what he thought was a spot light moving around on the rooftop of one of the downtown buildings. At first he thought it might be a burglar, but when he approached it jumped to another rooftop across the street and disappeared.

The next night (again around 1 am.) Dr. Alcott, the town doctor, was sleeping in a room at his office when he was awoken by a bright light shining into his face through the window. He rushed outside with gun in hand only to discover the source of the light was a tall humanoid with bat-like wings. The blinding light came from a blunt horn in the creature’s forehead. He fired five shots at the creature at close range. After seeing the shots has no noticeable effect he fled.

The bank where Clarence (Peter) Dunn encountered the creature

The next night local banker, Clarence (Peter) Dunn, had an encounter with the Visitor. After hearing about the previous night’s encounters, Mr. Dunn felt he should watch over the bank. Fearing burglars, he brought along his shotgun for the night’s watch. Around 1 am he heard a “strangling noise” outside. Before he could investigate he was hit full in the face with a blinding beam that shone through the font window. The light suddenly switched off and then back on again as if scanning the room, finally swinging back at him. He could make out “some kind of great form” behind the light. Dunn fired his shotgun at the mysterious being, right through the bank’s front window. Then it vanished. In the morning he noticed sets of large three-toed foot prints outside the bank and claimed to have made plaster casts of them.

By the following day the previous nights events had circulated around the town. Later that night local hardware store owner O.V. White had an encounter with the Visitor. He was jolted awake by a metallic rasping sound outside his 2nd floor room above his hardware store on Main St. He grabbed his gun and moved toward the window. Outside he saw the Visitor perched close by on the crossbeam of a telephone pole. White, a known marksman, took deliberate aim and fired at the creature. It had no effect, and only seemed to awaken the Visitor. The creature emitted a stupefying odor that overpowered White, knocking him unconscious.

The shots awoke White’s neighbor Sidney Gregg, who raced outside to see what the commotion was about. He watched in disbelief as the “monster” descended the telephone pole after the manner of a parrot, using its huge beak. Upon reaching the ground it stood erect, and by Mr. Gregg’s estimates it was “at least eight feet high.” Whatever it was, the light from its forehead was as “bright…as an electric headlight.” The light again darted about just as it had the nights before in a “searching” motion. The creature paused only for a moment before taking off towards the old coal mine.

The following night strange sounds were heard coming from the abandoned coal mine at the edge of town described by a local as “though Satan and a regiment of imps were coming forth for a battle.” The Visitor, accompanied by a second creature, were spotted emerging from the mine and taking off into the night. A large crowd of armed men gathered at the mine to ambush the creatures when they returned. They were reported as having enough firepower to “have sunk the Spanish fleet”. Shortly before dawn the creatures returned. The crowd opened fire on the creatures. To their bewilderment, the creatures were totally immune to their assault and only gave off the terrible odor as a response before they crawled back down into the mine. The next day it was reported that “a force of men has been set to work to barricade the mouth of the mine” sealing the creatures inside.

The creatures were never seen again.
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This just happened about two hours ago and I'm still shaking. I live on the coast of SC and my backyard is directly on the marsh.
I woke up and went down stairs to use the bathroom. I kept having this weird nagging feeling like I was forgetting something or something was off. So I went to find my mother, she's a night owl and stays up super late doing gardening stuff and she likes to feed the raccoons.
I went to the backyard and I saw her about 100 yards from the back door facing the marsh. I called out to her but she didn't hear me so I started to walk out to her. Once I started getting closer she turned to face me with a completely blank expression so I asked her what was wrong. I was about 12 feet away from her and she turned back towards the marsh.
Then the fucking back door opens and I turn to see my mom standing on the deck and she called out to me asking what I'm doing. I've never run so fast in my life, but I looked back to marsh and I could see that thing disappearing. It looked just like my mom!
I yelled at mom to go inside that there was something out there. I told her what I saw and I've been crying and shaking. We woke up my husband and my dad and they think I must've just still been in a sleep state and I dreamed it or something? I can't stop shaking. What the fuck just happened? Am I crazy? Did something try to lure me out to the marsh? I must be losing my damn mind, but I know what I saw!
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Reminds me of this story I heard from an acquaintance a couple of years ago, who was taking a driving trip from New Brunswick to Philadelphia.
She was driving at night through a relatively forested area when she reached a clearing and saw something running parallel with her car but among the trees then out into the clearing: tall, human-shaped, featureless black. Like a moving silhouette, but it filled her with the same kind of instant, inexplicable dread. She had this very strong feeling of "DON'T LOOK AT IT", when the thing abruptly stopped. She glanced in the rearview mirror and saw it standing staring back at her. She had such a horrible feeling in the pit of her stomach, she slammed on the gas and hightailed it out of there way above the speed limit.
She was reluctant to tell me this, but I'm glad she did. I love stories like this. As long as they stay stories for me.
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I'm glad I saw this post. My senior year of HS my buddies we're exploring the waterfront in Tacoma, WA. Being in places we shouldn't have been and ended up walking through a big ass train tunnel.
Just a bit into the tunnel, we saw what we thought at first was a purse but couldn't tell, until a few more steps down the tunnel we found the other half of a deer that must've been hit by a train. The tunnel was long and slightly curved so there was a point far enough in where there was no light coming from either ends so it was pitch black, the only light was coming from our phones which were pointed down to watch our steps. I had a galaxy S4 at the time and my battery was really shitty so I didn't have my flash on. It was slightly cold and water kept dripping from the ceiling which really added to the uneasiness of the whole situation.
It was a group of five. One of us had been through the tunnel before with his other friends so he took lead and the rest of us walked in pairs. By my side was Mike (not a real name), and we were in the back of the pack. Nearly the whole time Mike had his phone shining on the ground except for one moment that seemed spontaneous to me, he flashed it toward the wall on our right, only for a second, and then back at our feet.
In the second that my eyes followed the light I saw what I could only think to be a decomposing body. Since i never got a good look at it I don't have many details but I saw the shape of a body laying on its side. The head looked alot like only a skull, however the eyes lit up like the eyes of a cat. Trying to process what I saw I kept quiet hoping Mike would say something about it to confirm he saw it too but he didn't say anything. We all just kept walking. I was the biggest, most out of shape guy so I didn't wanna startle the group and fall behind if they decided to run so I didn't speak up until we were out of the tunnel.
At the other end of the tunnel there was a small hill that you walk up and jump the road barrier to get dumped back on the streets. Once we were back on the street it was a small walk to the car and then we went to Shake Shake Shake, a local burger and milkshake place where I brought up what I saw expecting Mike to back me up. Mike did say he saw something but he also didn't get a good look at it, but refused to agree it was a body. Nobody else believed me either.
Now about 3 years have gone by since that adventure and recently I was up at the waterfront with my girl friend and now on the road barrier I spoke about earlier there's a cross. Not sure what happened there but I always wanna believe it's related to the train tunnel we went through.
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Near my apartment, there is a very windy road with a river on one side and a very steep hill covered in brush + trees on the other. Once while driving on this road late at night, I got a sinking feeling in my stomach for what I assumed was absolutely no reason, until I took a turn.. Standing in the middle of the road in the light of the only street light for yards was what looked like a very tall, emaciated, and deformed black dog. It had spindly legs that looked to have each been twisted, his coat was patchy all along his body, and he was at least three feet tall. I froze and immediately stopped the car. My lights were on him, but he just wasn't moving. I flashed on my brights, honked a little, and tried to move closer until his head suddenly flipped around to glare at me, and then bolted up the side of this extremely steep hill. I did some light research on the lore of black dogs, and found that finding a stranded black dog in the middle of the road/following you somewhere is a sign of death. Must be true, because my grandmother died shortly after this occurrence.
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This reminds me of something kind of similar. The farm I lived on was in an area surrounded by gravel roads. I would drive down one, Lilac Avenue, to town and back without seeing anyone else (save for the occasional truck or tractor). One dark, early winter morning, as I was driving to school, I came up and over a hill to see some sort of amorphous blob swirling in the middle of the road. I slowed to a stop only to find a few feet before me 3 or 4 HUGE black dogs encircling this scraggly, wild-haired, hunched over woman. The dogs paid me no attention, but the woman stood straight up (if you could call it straight), turned around, and stared directly at me through the headlights. I could tell where she was looking because, although she wasn't wearing glasses, her wide eyes were gleaming/reflective like a cat's. My heart was racing, and I didn't feel like I should get any closer to her, but I had to go. I slowly started to go around her when she lurched at my car and hit my hood with her hands! I floored it and sped away as fast as the gravel would let me... I'm not the only one who has seen her either. My sisters were driving home one night, and they saw the same anomaly I had. My cousins were riding their horses down that road one day, when they "saw a crazy-looking woman walking down the road away from them." She walked into an abandoned house, they said, and when they tried to ride their horses by, the animals wouldn't move and they started to act up. Eventually, they just had to turn around because the horses were too spooked to go any further.
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I don't know what I saw, or if it counts as folkloric, but I was walking home a city away, in a neighborhood of hills at night, maybe 9:00 with no one else around, not even any cars driving. However, just as I cross a street, there's a parked car up ahead and as I'm passing by it, I get like a gut feeling that I should really get out of there. So without even thinking I turn on my iPod's flashlight, shine it into the car's window (I would normally NEVER have done that at all) and saw what I've continued to describe as a bald barbie doll turn it's head at me, like a man sized barbie with black holes for eyes. It had a weird round head shape, a thin neck, it had those weird thin lips, it was pale, I only saw its face and bare shoulders, and I know for a fact that those weren't glasses. I don't even remember if it had ears, I just saw it slowly turn its neck to look at me with those black holes. I booked it out of there up a steep hill, after 5-6 seconds of looking at that thing. Those eyes and the way it turned its head so slowly and unnaturally, I still don't know what it was, a ghost, black eyed kid? I ruled out alien since, you know, what would one be doing in a car?
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I was a TC in a scout platoon in anbar province, just south of ramadi, iraq. Ran route security and HKT missions along route michigan, long island and boston. While posted up in our hide along one of the MSR's at night, my gunner informed me he was seeing some weird shit through the LRS3 (long range scout surveillance sytem) (big ass thermal optic that can see for miles) so he shows me what hes seeing. I shit you not, a old time cigar shaped object was showing up just under a mile from us. Weird thing is, its showing up super cold in the thermal. We could not see anything through our night vision, even the night optic scope on the M24 sniper rifle couldnt detect this thing. So it was basically invisible to the naked eye. I told him to laser range find it with the LRS3 and he confirmed it was like 1600 meters away from us up in the sky, so it was a legitimate hard surface capable of reflecting the laser. As soon as he did that he said it disappeared off thermals a few seconds after it was lased. Nobody took a nap that night.
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I was walking alone in the desert late at night in Arizona when I saw what I thought was a toddler standing there. Being concerned that there may be a little kid alone in the middle of the desert at night I walked to it. As I got closer I realized it wasn't a kid but a 3 foot owl white as snow with a peachy white almost human looking face. It stared at me and didn't flinch or move an inch. It scared the shit out of me so I slowly walked away from it backwards until I was about 50 ft away then high tailed it out of there. Every time I looked back it was just standing there staring at me. I looked online and couldn't find any documentation about an owl that looks like that in Arizona or anywhere else.
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My girlfriend's dad is an ex EMT and police officer so he's got a ton of stories. One day we were sitting around and he was telling me some of the more messed up ones and I asked if anything really creepy had ever happened to him. So he starts to tell me about this one late night call from when he was an EMT.
Him and his partner are called out to this guy's house, who is a pretty wealthy and well off guy. That'll make sense later, and he's complaining about chest pain but is otherwise fine. So they load him up to go and have him looked at and they start transporting him to the nearest hospital. My girlfriend's dad is talking to the guy and everything's fine but then all of a sudden the guy screams and start's to go into cardiac arrest out of nowhere, no warning signs, nothing. And he's screaming about big black dogs chasing them and to drive faster or they're going to get him. Then the dude just flat lines. He's DOA when they reach the ER
His partner pulled him to the side and told him he was going home because that motherfucker just got snatched up by demons and he was done for the night.

When does the part about him being wealthy make sense?
It's a reference to the crossroads demon. I'm implying that he made the deal to become wealthy.
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I had just turned 22 and my parents had sold their house and purchased a place out in the country. On the property there was a big shed not far from the house that I decided to turn into my place, now I felt kind of uncomfortable in the shed sometimes but my dog kept me company so it wasn't so bad. Anyway I had been in there maybe 2 weeks and one night I'm on the computer, my dog asleep at my feet and I need to pee so I get up and go outside to piss. It's a beautiful clear night and the stars were incredible, next thing I hear the shed door slam behind me. I turn immediately and try to open it but it won't budge. Now from inside the shed I can hear my dog start to growl, quietly at first then louder, now he's barking and I'm panicking trying to get the door open. I must mention that I'm 6 foot 5 and well built, play sports etc but even ramming my full weight into the door won't open it and I'm really panicking now as my dogs barks turned into whines, then whimpering, then silence and with all my might I slam into the door and it flies open. The light is off inside now and it's pitch black, it won't turn back on and I'm in complete darkness. Can't see my dog anywhere and I stumble around trying to find a torch, finally i find it and pick it up and turn on my torch and I wasn't prepared for what I'd see next... My dog had literally squashed itself into the furthest, darkest corner of the room, eyes closed and is shaking violently. I immediately moved towards him and as soon as I got within reach of him, he leapt at me into my arms and wouldn't move. I picked him up and I swear I've never ran so fast in my god damn life. I never stepped foot in that shed ever again and my dog wouldn't even go near that part of the property. I don't know what happened in that shed that night but I'll never forget it.
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A few years ago, 2012 or 2013 I think since I was still in high school then, I was at a party with some friends and as the night goes on, maybe 11-12 at night, one of my friends and I go outside to have a cigarette.
The second we get outside there's just this completely awful, foul smell. Like just blood, vomit, piss, and death all at once. Now this was somewhat the middle of nowhere so we just figured it was a dead animal and went on with having that cigarette.
Less than a minute later we hear something moving in the dark and sure enough, a deer comes hobbling into the very edge of the porch light. So we just mention "aww how cute" and the like. But then I noticed something, one of its front legs was messed up in someway. And I'm talking like broken in multiple places messed up.
So my friend and I are slightly off put by this (less than we should have been since drunk) and finish up our cig and go to head inside. However, right as we start to do that, one of the two porch lights goes POP and goes out. So now it's less light outside and this deer is back into the darkness.
So, a bit giddily, we both do this like fake scared squeal at each other and turn around to go inside. And that's when we heard it. That undeniable sound of nails on the concrete patio.
We both slowly turn around to see this hunched over, rotten coyote doing this very slow, very unnatural crawl towards us. We go from 0-600 paralyzed with fear almost instantly until another one of our friends playfully pulls us through the open door telling us to get back to the party.
To this day, I have not experienced anything like that and it's one of the most horrifying things I've ever experienced.
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i have a cottage on rose lane. one night, i was walking my dog up rose lane, then he just tore-ass back to the cottage with his tail between his legs. i've never seen him do that before. then i look around and saw something like a very long, spindly buck walking on its hind legs with enormous antlers walking in a SE direction. i was scared. i crouched down until i couldn't hear it walking anymore then ran back to the cottage. never saw it since.
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Cold weather survival training. 3 days in the mountains with the occasional below zero temps. 12 students, each .5 miles apart. We were given a kind of flare gun in case you hit a ohshitimgonnadie moment and you were supposed to head to it if you saw one go off.
Anyway, Im in my shelter freezing my ass off and I see a flare go off. My heart sank and I grabbed my gear and rushed there. As Im getting closer I see 3 more go off at different sites. Now im kinda panicking. 1 is bad, 4 is a shit show.
I get within 100 feet of the first site and see the other students shelter. I warn him im approaching and walk up to find him fine, fire going and everything. I ask him if he fired a flare or saw the others. He said nothing and shows me his flares, none had been fired. I check him out, looks fine. Still doesnt say anything which is wierd as fuck. Thought he might be in shock so I stayed a while until he points to the door. I take this as my cue and I just say im gonna leave if he's all set and he nods.
I walk back toward my site and get an eerie feeling. The whole way, hairs are standing up. I start getting back into my shelter and THERE IS SOMEONE IN THERE. I tweak a little and think it must be another student until he looks up and just stares, expressionless.
It took me a second to realize it was me, like looking in a mirror. I have never had a more terrible, scared, I should not be here feeling in my life. I bolted out of the shelter, tripped and fell. Next thing I know, im waking up in my shelter to a cadre member asking if im ok and if im ready to hike out. Think everything that happened was a dream. I get up and get my stuff together.
As we are walking to meet up with the others, he asked me why I didn't respond to the flares last night. Terrifying.
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I was walking home late one night in the alleys of the old city in Damascus. I turned down one and came across a circle of what must have been around 20 cats all meowing at each other. They clocked me and went silent. There was an awkward pause, then I, and to this day I'm not sure why, raised my hands like I was under arrest, and slowly walked up to them. I had to step through the circle to get by, and just as slowly edged my way, hands still raised, around the corner.
As soon as I was out of sight I heard them all start meowing again.
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I grew up in an area with a lot of Amish people.
A few years ago, late in the summer, I was taking my mom’s dog for a walk. There was a road behind her development that sloped downhill, with a lot of fields that eventually turned into barns and houses that bent into a wooded area. My mom worked second shift and I felt bad for the dog being cooped up in the house so I decided to take the pup for a long walk for some exercise.
As I started walking down the hill, a cat came out from behind a house. Then another. Then more. From fields, houses, until I was being followed down this road by no less than half a dozen cats. The dog was still relatively calm, which was weird for her because she usually spent the nights running in circles around my mom’s modular home, jumping over people and couches to make sure she could still run in a perfect circle.
I kept going down this road, which stretched out for probably a mile in front of me before bending into the trees. The sun was beginning to go down, and that’s when I started to hear yelling. At first I thought it was Amish folks just bringing in livestock for the evening, but then I noticed a pattern, and it evolved into this weird, indescribable chanting/singing. Someone had a drum. I started slowing down, and I heard dogs barking from all over the place. Then a few people opened the front doors to their homes and were just staring at me.
I noped the fuck out of there and ran the whole way up that hill with the dog, cats still following until we got to the main road.
Never went that way for a walk again.
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Due to an overwhelming response in a recent thread of comments, I have decided to give one of my experiences with Uncle Dudley its own post.
The first time I met Uncle Dudley I was 6 years old. I was in the attic space of my childhood home one day (as I usually was on a weekend) exploring and just being a kid. Uncle Dudley was just, there. Sitting in a large wooden chair. He had frizzy white hair and was bald in the middle. Large eyes wide open. His clothes were old and worn and appeared to have been very colorful at one time. He had a cane leaned up against the chair and held a wooden pipe in his left hand. We didn't really talk... I'll touch on that later. I wasn't startled or taken aback. I am now beginning to understand why....
What couldn't have been more than a day or so later I asked my sister if she knew about the old man in the attic and she immediately replied something like "you mean Uncle Dudley?" I asked her who that was? She couldn't really put it into words as she was only 3 going on 4. I remember just accepting that there was an uncle I didn't remember who was now living in our attic.
I'm not sure how much time passed but it couldn't have been long. Maybe a few days. My sister and I were playing in our room. We were in our closet. We somehow managed to move our toy box away from the wall in the back of the closet. We both looked down and saw a large hole (though now would be quite small) in the wall. We knew somehow that Uncle Dudley was waiting on the other side.
We crawled through the hole which was more like a tunnel that was cold and smelled like rain (think pirates of the Caribbean-fresh air). On the other end I could see dim light. When we got to the other end there was what I can only describe as layers of sheets or curtains. Many many layers. We had to push through them and once we did, we were somehow back in our closet. Only our closet was..different. My vision was somewhat obscured, if that makes sense. Almost like a veil was over my eyes.
Our room architecturally speaking was the same except empty. We made our way out of the room to find the rest of the house was also empty. And in the middle of what I remember to be our living room was Uncle Dudley. Again, no fear, no shock. I started to feel warm in the cold atmosphere of my "other house". The closer I got to Uncle Dudley, the warmer I felt.
I don't recall in vivid detail what happened for the rest of this visit but I do know that this is when I learned the first of many funny sayings Uncle Dudley would recite often. "Don't be sad, lad! Don't be glum, chum! Let's go find Mr. Jellybum and join the circus!"
I know there must've been other things he told us but I don't remember the rest of this visit. Most likely due to the fact that this was very new to us both.
The funny thing about Uncle Dudley is that he didn't talk. Verbally anyway. It was more like it was his voice in our heads. I never really remember his mouth opening. Unless it was to puff his pipe.
After some time we knew it was time to go back. We went back to our "other room" and through the layers of curtains. Through the hole in our "other closet" and back into our room. Everything was just as it was before our time spent at the "other place".
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This happened when I was about 13 or so. It was summertime and I was on vacation with my parents, we had hit the road and driven quite a ways to visit my older sister who lived across the country. After spending time together and sharing supper we decided to call it a night. My parents slept in my sisters bedroom and she slept in the neighbouring room with her small son.
It's important to note a few things at this point. My mother is a round, short woman with very delicate, feminine features. She has round glasses and that night went to bed in a long, blue night gown. My sister on the other hand, is very tall and athletically built, taking after my dad in regards to her facial features. She too has glasses but unlike my mother, hers were square shaped. She went to bed in a shorter, orange and striped nightgown. These small but substantial differences are key. Now, since all of the bedrooms were full, I was given a blanket and pillow to sleep on the couch with. Of course like any kid, I watched TV for a few hours, well into the night.
At around 4 am it dawned on me that we had plans for the next day so I should try and get some rest. After tossing and turning for about an hour or so, I gave up an just laid on my back staring at the stars visible from the near by window. As the natural light flooded the room from the sun rising I flipped through some photo albums. I did this for a while, not having slept at all the entire night. At this point I was pretty bored and lonely, hoping someone would wake up soon and talk to me.
Around 8 am, I heard a door slowly open and someone came out into the hallway. At my sisters house, the living room is sunken in and a small staircase of maybe 3 steps leads to the raised kitchen and dining room. The hallway is also in this raised area and connects to the bathroom and bedrooms. In the living room there is a doorless archyway that leads down to the basement and laundry room. This means that I could look up and see what was going on in the dining area from the couch. This person hummed a little and then was caught off guard by a table in the dining room, full of framed pictures of family my sister had on display. I don't know how to describe the way they looked at the photos besides saying they were bewildered by them. Maybe even enchanted, letting out an occasional "Oh!" and "Ahh!".
I could tell it was a woman but I wasn't sure if it was my mother or sister. This was strange because like I said, they looked alike but were also very distinguishable. I also felt this weird feeling because everyone in my family has seen these photos many times and I'd even say may own a few copies of their own of those exact same photos, so why act so amazed by them? I said "Hey! Ma? What're you doing?" in a nervous yet warm voice. No response. Okay then, it was my sister. "Hey, Good Morning _____! What are you making your dear sibling for breakfast?" No response. Huh. I knew I was definitely loud enough, they had heard me for sure. That uneasy feeling in my stomach grew stronger now, and I had no idea why. The likeness of my sister and mother was there, so it wasn't like a stranger or something.
Then I noticed something very off, they were wearing a knee length, blue and orange striped nightgown. Their height wasn't short but it wasn't tall either, it was average. They had a muscular build but could not be called skinny either. The hair was the same colour as both my sister and mothers and so was the skin colour. My heart slkipped and I thought who the hell is this? Maybe someone stayed overnight? But how could they have, I had laid right beside the front door all night.. When they turned around and went to inspect another photograph on a wall near that staircase, their face made my heart sink. It was a hybrid of my mother and sisters most discernible features, with glasses that were round on the bottom but squared on the top.
Their eyes were not my mothers or my sisters. They were very wide and unnerving and darted all around the walls very quickly. Very excitedly. It was as if my mother and sister had been Frankenstein-ed together into one person.
My knee jerk reaction after seeing their face was to scooch my legs in and pretend I was sleeping. I could feel the veins in my neck beating very hard and my breathing became very loud and laboured. Whoever the hell it was, came down the stairs and looked around the living room with that same excitement. I don't know how to explain how scared I was as it came closer to me. I thought maybe if I stayed quiet it would pass by me. I was also scratching and pinching myself now, in case I was asleep without realizing it. The pain was very real, I was awake. The thing, I watched with my eyes squinted, took up an interest in a photo album I had left on the table, very close to me. Then, probably the worst thing that could have happened, happened. My sisters portable home phone rang. My sister had answered a call last night and had put the phone on the couch's frame between the wall and it's cushions. The things face became very alarmed and it turned in my direction and saw me and became very, very angry. I opened my eyes and looked at her in her face and just stared back, with my entire body trembling. It's eyes were pure black, total darkness like two huge pupils staring right at me and furious. It opened it's mouth unnaturally wide and screamed NOOOOOO at me, then turned and darted down the stairs to the basement where I heard a door slam shut and it kept yelling NO NO NO NO NO!.
I stared at the archway for a long time, still shaking and digging my nails into my arm, begging to wake up because I was so afraid it would come back, wishing I was just dreaming. I literally could not move because I was too scared to get up in case it came back or was waiting at the arch and I could not speak for the reason. :( my brain abandoned me.
An hour must have passed like that, I did not move. It had stopped yelling and this was for some reason even scarier than when it had been yelling because at least then I was sure it was downstairs and not slowly climbing back up the stairs to fillet me alive.
I heard a door open again from the hallways upstairs and stared at it, full of adrenaline at this point. It was my mom, exactly herself and in the right nightgown. She was humming as she put on coffee and started making toast. another door opened, my sister this time. Fully as she had looked before heading off to bed. She and my mom talked for a bit and I just stared at them. My sister eventually saw me staring at her over the banister and yelled "Haha, what the hell! Why are you just staring at me, why didn't you say something?" I replied back in a very shaky voice "I did... twice." They looked at each other as if to say Huh? and I told my mom I hadn't slept yet and she said that was a big mistake, etc. I are breakfast with them and then realized eventually I was awake and had really not slept at any point that night.
I decided against my judgment to tell them what had just happened, in case it came upstairs to hurt them. They pretty much laughed at me and told me I had just fallen asleep and imagined it/ Told me I was nuts. My sister told me to go sleep with my nephew and asked me to try and fix the screen in her room as it had somehow fallen out of the window onto the floor in the night.. :'| On my way to her room, I walked by that table in the dining room and noticed all of the frames were moved and in different places than last night. I pointed this out very excitedly like SEE!? SEE? and my sister just shrugged it off and said her son liked looking at them. I kept pressing the issue so my sister (much to my hysterical protest) went to the basement in every room just to make me shut up about it. She didn't see anything unusual.
I laid in the bed and did not sleep a wink. I still think about it from time to time and did not ever sleep on that couch again, opting instead to sleep in the floor of the room my parents were in and locking the door. I have been questioning reality since haha.. :(
TL;DR: A demon hybrid of my mother and sister screamed "NOOOO" in my face before running downstairs and never reappearing. My thirteen year old world was irrevocably rocked from that point on.
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Location: Tuscany, Italy Date: 11th August, 2016 at 6:00 AM
We were hanging around smoking weed in an abandoned tuscan villa we found on Google Maps, and suddenly I hear someone crying. I almost had a panic attack as this titanic pale insanely anorexic teenager sees us sitting in the villa's garden, wearing nothing but a pair of black pants. I could clearly see his entire vein wireframe covering all his body like he had no actual flesh It was disgusting i could see his intestines twitching in his skeletral hip bones. He started shouting with the deepest voice I had ever heard. I am not italian so I did not understand a single word. As we were running I turn around and see his eyes glowing against the first morning lights as a moth. How the fuck is this possible? I thought I was hallucinating but my girlfriend also saw him and I had to calm her down after that because she was simply terrified. Sadly we were in the countryside, and had to run to the closest town which was 1 mile and a half away. Nobody knew how to speak English and people at our camping thought we smoked too much. Can you guys believe us? I am genuinely freaked the fuck out. Everybody thinks we're going insane.
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If you live in a highly wildlife populated state such as Montana, and there seems to be something larger than a cat on the side of the road, that most likely means a deer and a damaged vehicle. So as they slow down, they are both leaning forward in their seats trying to get a good look at the thing. It's eyes reflected off of the beams of the car but it wasn't long like a deer.
They finally get close enough to where the creatures body begins to take shape. It looked like a... child. Just on the side of the road near the lake, a short, humanoid figure was standing there, facing the road. But there was something wrong. Not just in the fact that a possible child was standing on the side of the road at nearly 1:00 am in the middle of nowhere but they were beginning to make out his clothes about ten yards from him by this point. He looked like he had walked out of the 1800's. He was wearing a long black coat that was so long it slumped down past his feet, dragging in the grass and he had on a tophat.
As his friend began to exclaim in a multitude of "What the hell's" and swear words they finally got to the point in which they were both staring right at it's face as they were passing it. And what they saw, had his friend hitting the gas pedal with all his might, screaming.
It's face was old. Like a 100 year old man's face might look. His skin was sagging down unnaturally. But his eyes were too big for his face. And they were jet black. Like a sharks eyes almost, but no whites around the iris at all. He just stared at them with unblinking eyes.
So Mr. Newtonss brother starts screaming "Go, go, go!" and they peal away from the curb as if their lives depend on it. It gets worse though. It start chasing them. Not in a way you would think though. As they pass by it, it's head follows the direction of the truck, turning almost like an owls head would turn. It then starts running... but it never actually turns and run. It bounds in these disgustingly large leaps, but it's head is still twisted around.
His friend is screaming to get the gun out of the back but before Mr. Newtons brother can even start to look for it, it's gone.
As soon as they get home, that when he goes to call his parents, bawling. No one ever saw it again. But his brother never drove at night in that area again.
I guess that for some reason, after Mr. Newtons parents got off the phone, their little seven year old son wanted to know what happened and annoyed the until they finally told him. Apparently he slept in their room for two months after that, too terrified to sleep alone at night.
Anyone ever heard of this kind of creature in Montana? Or just in general? I have always been curious about it.
TL;DR: Creepy midget looking thing on the side of the road in the middle of the night in Montana during the 80's. Wasn't human.
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When I was living in Australia for a year, I was once in a passenger carrier travelling through towns to get to the next destination I was heading to.
We’re passing through rural towns in NSW, that are small but are still well populated (we weren’t out in the middle of nowhere). We pass by a field / park where families are having picnics, enjoying the day, kids are running around playing, etc.
While I’m looking at the park and all the people in it with my head on the window, I all of a sudden see what looks like a grey zombie walking through the park. It’s walking right by families and people sitting down, but no one seems to take notice of this thing that is sticking out like a sore thumb. NO ONE is looking up at what I assume is a freak in a Halloween costume when it's not Halloween. It is moving slow, and limping like a zombie would, but has a dead look in its eyes and its skin is GREY. If my memory serves me correctly, even its clothes are grey. It’s wearing tattered clothes and has a Frankenstein monster kind of air about it. That’s the best way I can describe it, like a grey zombie Frankenstein monster.
My eyes follow it the entire time while my bus passes the park, which is only for a moment, but the thing that freaks me out the most is how it’s passing by all these families and NO ONE is paying any attention to it. The thing is, it didn’t necessarily seem evil to me, just sad. It didn’t make eye contact with me - it was just walking slowly and sadly through the park. This huge grey guy is dressed up as Frankenstein's monster painted GREY on this sunny day, and NO ONE is taking notice to him, even when he walks right in front of them.
I don’t know what to make of it. A very short 10 second psychosis on my part? Something supernatural?
-----
I grew up in a somewhat rural suburb of Dallas, Texas. Exact dates elude me now, but I was twelve with the following incident occurred, which would place the events sometime in the summer of 1988.
Erected while much of the surrounding area still teemed with flora and wildlife, the home of a childhood friend stood among the first buildings constructed for a developing neighborhood on the outskirts of town. We spent untold hours there when young, zealously clamoring up trees or navigating brush fields by the light of stars. Not at all unusual were the fugitive echoes of coyotes tousling in the night nearby, or the regal silhouette of a great-horned owl perched atop the weathervane.
We'd spend the night out at his home on alternate weekends; I curled up in my sleeping bag on the bedroom floor while he snored away on the twin mattress. Often the door lay open, allowing me a view of the upstairs hallway where a small night-light threw a shaft of pale yellow across the carpet. The family's two colossal Labradors were usually given the run of the house after dark, though they seldom disturbed anyone.
On the evening in question, I lay awake upon the floor long after the rest of the household had shuffled off to sleep. A soundless movement caught the corner of my eye from the hallway. I turned to see what appeared to be one of the dogs lumbering towards the bedroom door from the opposite end of the hall; catching a brief hint of its contours as it sauntered furtively past the nightlight. A moment later and the squat, innocuous shape -carved in dark relief and indistinct- trudged across the threshold, paused to consider me and then moved in my direction with scarcely a noise. Presuming this to be one of the dogs, I thought nothing of reaching out my hand to pet it.
Imagine my horror to have my hand met with what can only be described as the skin of a reptile!
The terrifying anomaly registered only after I ran my palm down the length of its "torso"; my first thought being that I must have something on my hands, or perhaps the dog is wet, etc.. When suddenly the gruesome epiphany dawned on me, I recoiled with a scream to wake the dead. Startled, the creature flitted from the room, all stealth and shadow. A violent, thundering scuffle of claws on wood issued from the stairs as my friend lunged from from the bed in answer to my shriek. His father burst from the master bedroom down the hall seconds later. Before I could offer anyone an explanation -stunned as I was- a window crashed on the ground floor.
The police were called, but apart from a upturned houseplant in the den and a kitchen window shatterd from the inside out, they found nothing to shed any light on our bizarre intruder. Curious, too, was the fact that all doors and windows to the house had been locked. We were confident that the culprit was not one of the dogs, as they'd been asleep in the master bedroom at the time. The police, however, barely supressed a chuckle at my description of the creature, suggesting the "reptillian" detail to have been the vestiges of a dream imposing itself on my experience of the prowler. But as I hadn't been asleep that night to begin with, I harbor little doubt of my wakefulness in those moments.
There isn't much else to relate, unfortunately. The bewildering episode never repeated itself so far as I'm aware, nor has anyone with whom I've come into contact with over the years had a similar experience. I'm holding out for an informed opinion.
-----
I live in the country just outside Memphis, TN. One autumn afternoon three years ago, I was relaxing on the patio and enjoying a beer while grilling some steaks, when I was overcome by the strangest feeling or compulsion to walk to the corner of the house and look into the front yard. At the same time, I heard a rather strange rushing sound, like a strong wind, only there was no wind.

Just as I reached the corner of the house and the wind noise reached its loudest level, a large gray cat, about three-feet tall at the shoulder and with very long legs, bounded across the drive and raced over the top of the hill bordering our property. With its disappearance, the rushing sound of wind also faded into silence.

I gave chase and reached the hilltop within seconds, but the cat (or whatever it was) was nowhere to be seen.
-----
When I was about nine (that's 1988), I was engaged in a game of "poke the stick in the muddy water" during recess at school. There were about two or three boys there with me, and we all bore witness (although I would be mightily surprised if any of them still remembered this). The puddle we were playing with was a sinkhole at the very edge of the playground, a temporary result of some construction, and naturally strictly forbidden to us. Also, the water was milky white, not brown, which added to the interest.
The hole was two or three feet deep, with a drain at the bottom; there was a deep ditch nearby, so it was worth looking for animals there. Once the water had settled slightly from our poking, we saw, on the bottom. a thing.
This thing was as colorless as a dead squid. It appeared to be evenly covered with suction cups. It might have been a living creature; it might have been a tentacle. Its hoselike shape was neither quite round nor quite oval; more than anything, the shape vaguely resembled an infinity symbol. Unlike a real tentacle, which tapers at the end, this thing had a blunt end with three large suction cups on it, which to a child looked like two horrible eyes and a mouth.
And so it "stared" at us for a while, and we stared back. Finally, someone poked at it with the longest stick, and it vanished, retracting itself abruptly. Before we could make plans to find it again, a teacher yelled at us, and we scattered.
As quickly as the next week, the hole had been drained and paved over with concrete. I made inquiries, of course, but I was nine, and the best I could do was "I heard they found a turtle in there." Turtle, hell.
I am fairly familiar with snakes and cephalopods, and I can think of nothing that even a little girl would mistake for this object, especially not anything naturally occurring in the Mississippi Delta. Perhaps it was a piece of construction detritus, some kind of specialized hose, and its rapid movement was a coincidence or an illusion. Who ever knows? Can anyone guess?
-----
I grew up very happily in an old farmhouse in the Gordano Valley, near Bristol, England. My childhood days were spent building dams and playing happily with my friends. Family life was very stable and I had a care-free existence with two loving parents. The only bad part was sleeping. Night after night I would have the same terrible dream.
Just up behind the old farmhouse was a little track that widened out with a little cottage on the left and then the rolling fields behind. To the right of the cottage was just an open area with a few trees separating it from our orchard, no buildings - just a piece of flat earth about 15 feet by 15 feet.
Only, in my dream there was a little wooden shack there. In my dream I would be magnetically drawn towards this shack and although I wanted to run back down the track home I could not stop my body from slowly stepping ever forward. As I got nearer a horrific looking woman would lean out of the window and I knew she wanted to do something horrible to me. As I got closer I could see little leg bones and arm bones sticking out of the ground as the snaggle-toothed woman lured me in. I would always wake up screaming just before she could get her hands on me. Even in daylight the place would give me the creeps and if I was on my own I would always run the rest of the way home.
I only remembered the dream a few months ago for the first time since I had them. I must have put it down to just being a very bad recurring dream and forgotten about it. You might think so too apart from one thing. Now, at the age of 28, I can categorically state how rare it is for me to  dream about real places, they are almost always fictional places from the creation of my own mind.
Even when I dream about work we are always in a different unrecognisable building. I truly believe that sometime in the past that place did have this shack on it and there was an evil couple that lived there and they did do unspeakable things to children. I am generally a very rational person and I have mulled this over in my head for the last few months trying to find some other explanation. I have had other dreams where I want to run and my legs feel like lead but never again have I dreamt of a real place.
-----
Was driving my son to a friend's house so they could watch a football match together. At that age, my son had achieved quite a degree of emotional distance from me; he was growing up and one of the ways he sought to demonstrate this was to contradict me at every opportunity.

The road on which we were travelling passed through a rural area; cow paddocks and off to the left a golf-course. It was around eight at night, so cows and golfers were all gone. No lights apart from one or two farm-houses off in the distance. It was raining, but we had the car-radio on and were feeling quite cheery. Admittedly, that section of road always felt odd, even in daylight, but there were a couple of cars ahead of us, and one behind us I think, so there was quite a bit of light from all the headlights and no reason to feel nervous, that particular night.

We came to the old, one-lane bridge. so that slowed things up a bit. I drove onto the bridge, following the car in front. Then, on the passenger side, I saw a figure, hugging close to the bridge railings. There was no footpath or pedestrian walkway on the bridge. I'd never seen anyone walking across it before in fact, so it was a shock to see someone there now, especially in the dark, in the rain. I took extra care to give the figure a wide-berth.

As we passed, I got a clear glimpse of the figure; it was an old lady, very thin. She was dressed incongruously under the circumstances; in thin, summery floral dress, a light short sleeved cardigan and a white, brimmed hat. Her face was similar in shape to that Munch painting, 'The Scream'. Something about her appeared so genteel, so pathetically frail, that my heart went out to this old woman at the same time as the hair stood up on my arms. There was just something about her that was wrong; didn't fit; didn't feel right. Then we were past her, across the bridge and roaring up the road again.

After a few seconds, I turned to my son, wondering if I should say anything about the weird old woman. I hesitated because I was sure he wouldn't even have noticed her. On the other hand, if he *had* seen her, he would probably claim there was nothing at all unusual about her, simply in order to disagree with me. But as I turned to my son, I discovered he was already looking towards me, an expression of horror on his face.

I said: 'Did you see that old woman? Did she look wrong to you?

He replied: ' Yeah ! '

Then we both spoke at once. I said to him; ' For some reason I had the feeling that if we stopped for her, to give her a lift .... she'd turn into some sort of alien monster or something, once she was in the back seat ...'

My son looked at me as if I was crazy ... ' Give it a lift ? Are you nuts? It scared the sh*t out of me ! No way is it getting in this car !'

But I was struggling with a combination of fascination and pity for the old woman. She'd certainly made an impression on me. We couldn't work out where she was coming from, or going, especially in the rain. The nearest shop was a few miles away, and I realised she'd had nothing in her hands anyway. Where was she going? There were no houses at all in the direction she'd been walking. We travelled that road frequently and knew the area well. There was no explanation for the old woman's appearance. Initially, she'd appeared to be looking ahead of her; but as we'd passed alongside her, she'd suddenly swung her head to face us and had looked directly into my eyes. My son said she'd looked straight into his. Whatever the case. it had given both of us a very uneasy feeling which remained.

When I'd seen her face, thin and odd as it was, it was as if I'd also seen a much larger, very powerful hairless monster alien-type thing -- with red, slimy, glistening skin and large muscles. Now under ordinary circumstances, if I'd confided that to my son, he would have doubled up with laughter, pointing at me as if I were crazy. But this time he simply nodded. To the point I began to think he was having a reverse-joke on me by pretending he'd sensed the same thing about the old lady.

When I dropped him off at his friend's place, the football had already begun and my son and his friend were immediately involved in that. I spoke for a few minutes with the friend's father, and then began to leave. My son was still absorbed in the game on TV. Then, just as I was making my way along the path to the car, my son called out after me; ' Mum -- don't you go back via the bridge. Take the other road.' I nodded and waved, because I wanted to get out of the rain and into the car. But he called out again; ' Mum -- I mean it. Don't go back across the bridge. Don't go looking for her, Ok? Don't go that way. Don't you dare give her a lift.'

That was probably the longest conversation my son had had with me for ages, because he was going through the 'man of few words' phase. And I was very surprised he'd shown concern for my welfare in front of his mate. But most surprising of all was the fact that he'd actually interrupted his footy game to warn me. It was at that point I realised I hadn't imagined something odd and frightening about the old lady. Clearly, she'd made quite an unpleasant impact on my son, too. I waved back and told him I wouldn't go near the old lady. He called back;
' Promise?'. I replied, 'Yes, I promise. Bye'. I was quite touched.

But as I headed down the road to the cross-roads, everything in me was urging me to take the turnoff to the bridge road. I couldn't get the old lady out of my mind. I felt so sorry for her, alone in the dark and rain. I told myself she was a poor timid old thing, and that my son and I had just got carried away with our wild speculations about her. To try to make up for the injustice we'd done her, I decided I'd take the bridge road and catch up to her, and offer her a lift. The need to do this was very strong.

But I'd promised my son I would take the other road and that I wouldn't seek out the old woman. So I kept my promise.

All this happened fifteen or so years ago. I thought my son would have forgotten about it. But on the few occasions I've mentioned it since, he's given me that same look and has actually broken his 'man of few words' silence in order to describe the event to his twin sister. If my practical, no-nonsense son has retained that memory so long, I think I should accept that my impressions of that night were not 'just imagination'.

My own suspicions? That was no 'old lady'. It was as powerful as hell, was highly intelligent and would very probably have transformed into a carnivorous monster the moment it was in the car. Not that I believe in such things of course.
-----
It was 1961, and three joyriding teenagers, Bernard, Glenn and Tom were hotrodding around the countryside north of Necedah, stopping at beer joints and raising a little hell. It was October, the air getting crisp with the onset of winter, the fall foliage past its peak, riotous reds and bright yellows fading to rust and brown, leaves dropping and piling under maples and oaks. It was one last gorgeous day in fall; the last exhale before months of cold and snow. The three were out having a good time, jamming in as much fun as possible in the fading warmth, knowing too well this was their last carefree opportunity for several more months. Or maybe ever. They were becoming men, and with that new responsibilities, new paths.
Aimlessly following the county roads, today not a care in the world, they found themselves in the town of Armenia, near Petenwell Lake and south of the present day National Guard Bombing and Gunnery Range. They chanced upon a cemetery, and pulled up to the gates to decide what to do with themselves for the remainder of the evening. It was a convenient stop, quiet, no one around. The moon was high; the night still warm. You could take a leak, joke with your buddies, dream of your futures.
Motion caught their eyes.
Soundlessly, unaided, the closed cemetery iron gates swung open. Open-mouthed, they stared.
No one was there; the breeze gentle. Yet the gate had swung back, with no visible agent. Though getting dark, they could see the gate quite clearly.
Did you see that?
As suddenly, an inhuman howl splits the air from deep within the cemetery. Again, in another corner. And again, in another. The screaming howl seems to be coming from everywhere at once. Their eyes dart, trying to pinpoint the source in the dim light.
Only tombstones and trees.
Shadows.
Then stillness.
No doubt made bold by beer and youth, the trio decide to investigate. They're afraid, yet it's the strangest thing.
What is it?
Curiosity drawing them on, they cautiously creep through the open gate, holding their breath, searching the gloom.
Again, howling here. Howling there. Howling everywhere, ringing all around them.
Bernard sees the apparition first. At least six feet tall, hunched near a crooked leaning headstone, a black human-like shape without noticeable neck. The figure is completely black, a three dimensional shadowy blotch against the fading light.
It disappears. Reappears by another headstone, howling all the while.
They all see it, now. Riveted by fear, they watch the shape's disappearing trick.
Here; there; darting; howling.
The featureless shadow suddenly appears astride a fresh grave. They see the low mound in the moonlight. Though under a brightly shining moon, the shape is featureless. "We were seeing it, yet we weren't," Bernard later recalls.
The howls turn to screams as the shape begins jumping and landing on the freshpacked earth. Up, down, screaming.
Everything unhinges. The teens scrabble back to their car, fishtailing and squealing tires out of the drive. They chatter nonstop, trying to make sense of what they had witnessed.
Naturally they take refuge, pulling into one of their haunts, a saloon they often frequent, where they find a couple of other guys they know. Over beers, they tell their wild story, interrupting one another to interject details, interpretations. Their pals are skeptical.
Intrigued, or maybe on a dare, the original trio and their two friends return to the cemetery in two cars. It's either a joke or a hoax or the boys can't hold their beer, the two friends can't decide. The trio's fear, though, seems genuine.
At the cemetery gates both drivers kill their engines, but leave on the headlights. In the glare the shadows are blacker, longer. Tombstones poke up everywhere, a few trees, but nothing else.
All is silence.
In the hush, the five slowly enter through the still open gate. In a corner stands the locked cemetery storage shed. The caretaker keeps his equipment and tools here. The door yawns wide.
One thinks he sees movement inside the shed. They all strain to peer into that darkness, but cannot discern any shape or movement.
Cautiously the five creep forward through the stillness.
As they near the door, nudging one another forward, a soul-searing howl explodes from within the tiny shed.
Falling all over one another to get away, Bernard later claimed his hair stood on end at the horrific noise. A sound he claims to still hear thirty years later, but never wants to experience again. In blind panic they stumble back to their cars, fumble with keys, nearly colliding cars in their haste to get away.
Later all claimed that the shape, whatever it was, had been standing just inside the shed door as they crept upon it. Watching them looking for it. All claimed an uncanny feeling of overwhelming terror as they fled.
Bernard returned the next day with his brother, this time under full sunlight. It had bothered him all night, and he wanted to see what was there. Under the clear cold light of day.
The fresh grave where they had seen the shadowy form jumping and screaming appeared undisturbed. Untouched, no footprints.
It remains a mystery these many years later.
Glenn refuses to speak of the incident to this day.
A friend of Bernard's passed away in the intervening years. He was buried in this quiet cemetery in the town of Armenia. Though more than willing to talk about that terrifying October night in 1961, Bernard doesn't much care to visit his friend's grave. He's still uneasy.
Though over the years he's gone over it again and again in his mind, Bernard has yet to find an explanation that satisfies. It wasn't a bigfoot. It wasn't a projected image. It wasn't a Hallowe'en prank played on them. The three had randomly arrived at the cemetery in the first place. And they hadn't had that much beer to drink, and besides, how could five people be similarly affected?
Maybe we'll never know what the five young men saw that day. Is the black shadow still out there, sometimes howling and dancing atop fresh dug graves in the town of Armenia?
Are you brave enough to find out ...?
-----
A couple of years ago I was driving home at night after teaching a class. I lived 8 miles outside of a small town and there was a long country road that ran alongside some foothills. It was common to be stopped by elk, deer, horses and cows in the road, so I was driving with my eyes peeled.
I saw something in my lane up ahead and slowed down. At first it appeared to be a large bump and immediately my heart sank - I assumed it was roadkill - a large dog or one of the animals I previously mentioned - it was at least 150 pounds.
I was squinting my eyes trying to make it out, and I noticed that it actually was moving, although quite slowly. As I got closer, I still couldn’t tell what the hell this thing was and my heart started beating really fast. It was grey in color with a soft-looking skin, almost like a greyhound. It had a large curved back and the entire creature was low to the ground, like an anteater. The way it slinked off the road was one of the creepiest things I’ve ever seen. It moved like a worm or a seal, scooting itself along, skin rolling. It’s neck and head hung down like a sleeve.
To this day, I still have no idea what that thing was, only that it was not anything I’ve seen before, and I still get creeped out if I drive that particular stretch of road at night.
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I've told this before and it always gets buried. We were driving in the mountains in Colorado with some friends on our way to a ski lodge in Telluride. On the way to our hotel we were driving up and down these winding roads deep deep in the mountains which seemed like forever. It was pitch black outside and around 3AM and we had to at least be 45ish minutes from the nearest town, and it was cold, like see your own breath below 10 degrees freezing cold. As we were driving along, my friends and I all see 4 figures walking on the road coming towards us. We all get weird feelings inside but I did especially, and the hair on my neck stood up. Something didn't seem right. We were way too far away from a town and it was wayyy too cold for hitch hikers or hikers of any sort. We get closer and closer and as we got right next to these "people" we slow down and we realized that they had NO Faces! 4 people walking in the dead of the night wearing black hoods and cape like gowns and they literally had no faces. And by no faces I mean like no eyes, mouth, ears, just blank white pale faces. I'm familiar with ski masks and these were not ski masks. They had hoods on like something from Scream almost. My friends and I all freaked the fuck out speeding away, and my toughest manliest friend of us all was crying, mind you he was in his late 20s. It was the most afraid I've ever been and it still scares me thinking about and typing out. No idea what they were or anything. Demons maybe? It will forever be a mystery. We didn't sleep well the next few nights/months.
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I was driving very late at night through a pretty big park in NYC but not central park. Now this was after an all night film shoot for one of my friends in college and I had been up for a very long time. As we were driving past the rec building with the pool I see a person(?) galloping on all fours like a crab. They were moving so fast and I thought I had just been imagining it, but when I got home my boyfriend at the time who was sitting in the front seat asked me if I saw the crab person. It was super spooky and I just can't explain it.
This reminds me of a story three of my friends told me a few years ago: Driving home one night through rural roads in North Hertfordshire, UK, their car comes round a bend on some heavily wooded roads and the lights catch the light of a creature sat in the middle of their path. It stares straight into the headlights then scuttles off with a crab/spider kind of motion pretty sharpish. The part that freaked them out was that they all recall that the face was like some sort of human/pig hybrid. They named him Pigboy. I've been keeping an eye out for him ever since.
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Just what is lurking in the tunnels of the Glasgow Subway? A lost child, a feral ghoul or the product of an over worked imagination? After hearing of a strange occurrence at West Street Station, I discovered a ghost story that extends through Glasgow’s history, but may just be very much alive today. Whatever it was that was spotted, West Street station will forever unsettle me slightly after this mysterious sighting.
Coming out of Hillhead Station a few months ago I overheard a lady saying “Gina swears she saw a wee boy on the tracks the other night”, so as any nosy so-and-so would do upon hearing something like that, I did my best to eavesdrop for the short while we were headed in the same direction. I learned that this had happened at West Street Station, and that the mysterious boy had apparently scurried off through the tunnel towards Shields Road after being seen.
As you’d expect I was more than a bit taken aback by the story and I couldn’t get the image of it out of my head. Clearly she must have been mistaken, one too many late nights at work catching up with her or something. But nonetheless, I was intrigued. Something didn’t quite sit right with me about the whole thing. Naturally enough though, I eventually forgot about it.
Now you might be asking, why write about this now if it happened a few months ago? The answer is that just the other day, while reading about the history of the Glasgow subway, I came across a few mentions of various ghost stories that surround our subway. Given that some of the construction of the subway involved the fairly grisly task of clearing what had been areas devoted to plague victims, there were bound to be a few.
What piqued my interest though was how often the stretch of track between West Street and Shields Road was mentioned. A menacing orb of light, the ghost of a grieving widow and various other strange occurrences were all attributed to this area repeatedly. However, one story above all caught my attention. Dating back to the 1950s, was the story of a ghoulish looking child who many workmen at the time claimed to have seen in the tunnels. According to the legend, he would always be seen eating ravenously from a hunk of meat, before disappearing into the tunnel. Workers claimed that although resembling a boy from distance, he was part animal. This lead to the speculation that he was some kind of demon that haunted the tunnels.
Outlandish as the story was, given what I’d heard just a few months ago, I couldn’t help but wonder, had ‘Gina’ encountered the ghoul? While I don’t necessarily believe any of it is true, I would actually encourage people to keep up the stories and the myths whether they believe them or not. They’re part of what gives our subway the unique character it has and only adds to its rich history. Have a look into what kind of things make your station unique, and be proud of them. Chances are that your station has a few spooky goings on as well.
In regards to the West Street ghoul, I’ll certainly be keeping a lookout because maybe, just maybe, there’s some truth to the legend this time.
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I've had a handful of creepy things happen in my life. Here’s one when I was around eight years old and I lived on a military base in Hawaii.
My older brother and I used to explore all over the woods and streets but the oddest place we kept coming back to was this sort of concrete sewer opening that had a metal grate over it. It was located at a dug-out ditch by the side of the road. Standing over it looking down you could see it was a pretty deep drop.
So me and my brother used to talk to this "thing" that lived in the sewer. It started one day when we were dropping rocks down inside it to hear the echo, and then we started yelling into it and something answered back. It was this echoed noise that sounded kind of like faraway water running in a pipe, but also kind of like the songs whales make, all mixed together. It's really hard to explain. It sounded very faint but very distinct.
So we yelled again and it responded again. The noises lasted for maybe 5-10 seconds then stopped. Some answers were longer than others. We kept testing it, we were asking it questions like "do you live in the pipes?", "are you a ghost?", etc. and when we were finished speaking it would make the sound again. The space of time between our questions and the corresponding sound varied, sometimes it was immediate and sometimes there was a short wait.
We weren't even freaked out though, we were kids and we just thought it was really cool and weird. So we said goodbye and left, but we checked back the next day and it was still there. We waited in silence before we initiated "conversation", trying to listen for the noise but there was nothing. Then we started yelling and it started back up again.
And so we just kept coming back and talking to it. We always said hello and goodbye. We would experiment with the things we said to see if we got different reactions. Sometimes we would insult it and then say "just kidding!" right afterward, being dumb. I would bring my friends to show it off but they would get creeped out and want to leave. Once my brother and I brought a whole group of kids but the noise never came back, we were just hollering into emptiness like idiots and they all thought we made it up. THEN when I went back to basically ask, "where were you dude?", it took like ten minutes to hear it again.
Weirdly I had forgotten all about this incident until a couple of years ago. I was so young when it happened that I just accepted it as a bizarre but mundane part of my life. I had entire meaningful chat sessions with this thing. My brother had forgotten all about it too, until I brought it up a couple years ago. The memories came flooding back and he recalled the same thing I did, but we still have no idea what it could be.
I spoke to it all the time, and the last thing I said to it was when I said goodbye because our family was moving.
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I was born and raised in East London in the Eastern Cape, South Africa. I can confirm that some unbelievably fucked up creepy shit happens in the bush out there. The cities are pretty first world and cool but in the deep rural areas things can get spooky as hell. So I thought I'd share another story about a creepy thing, now that I am off my phone and at a computer. One of the court buildings I used to visit (in a smaller town outside of where I lived) had a hobo who lived in the bushes nearby. This guy was crazy a hell and completely dysfunctional. He almost always smelled of shit, his clothes were basically rotting off him, he had all of these weird little talisman type things made of twisted wire and other random trash dangling from his dreadlocked hair and clothes. He would walk around, mumbling and generally acting crazy.
So, the creepy thing about this hobo was "his" dog. Everywhere he went, and I do mean everywhere, he was followed by this pitch black dog of some indeterminate breed. It would stay about 3 meters behind this guy at all times. It ignored everyone else except him. And I do mean ignored. you could touch it, pet it or anything and it would not react in any way. I never saw it eat, even when someone threw sausage or meat down in front of it. It didn't react in any way like any natural dog I ever saw. The only person it had any reaction to was the hobo. If he walked towards it or acknowledged its existence in any way it would go insane snarling, foaming, snapping at him. His hands were constantly ripped to shreds because of this dog. He hated that dog with every fiber of his being. Half of his insane rants were directed at the dog, but he was always to scared to go near it. And it just followed him, always the same distance away, ignoring everyone else.
Finally, I asked some of the Xhosa people who worked at the court about this hobo, because they always looked seriously uncomfortable whenever he was around. They finally, after repeated questions, told me it a "evil dog" or a "devil dog". After more asking, someone finally told me that the hobo used to be a highly respected member of society, a teacher or something. He cheated on his wife, who went to a witchdoctor to put a curse on him. Straight after her visit this dog appeared near him and eventually it drove him crazy. I don't know if their story was true or not, but I can tell you that was the creepiest damn dog I ever saw.
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My entire childhood, my father and I used to take late night walks due to his insomnia from shift work. Our neighborhood is considered very safe and ultimately was an urban neighborhood besides one of the roads towards the back of the neighborhood being lined with thick forest for about a mile and about a quarter deep which made a circle back in its self. All of these walks are very dear memories of mine except one and it ended being the last one. Along the road with the tree-line, there was a single street light to illuminate a small plot of land that someone owned but was very overgrown and ill kept. It was very common for us to walk this road to enjoy the sounds of the forest, the lack of illumination, and the ease of circling back. One ordinary night as were walking and making conversation, my father abruptly stops, pulls me close, puts a hand over my mouth, crouches with me, and points towards the single illuminated plot roughly 100 yards away. At first, I didn’t see anything and thought he was pulling my leg but just as I began to protest his grasp, I see a very small humanoid figure, roughly 3 feet in height, scrawny, with long limbs, materialize out of the plot’s brush line and cautiously take in its surroundings before signaling towards the brush. After a few seconds, two other small, humanoid figures materialize as well. After a brief moment of what looked to be a discussion, all three make a dash for the forest tree-line. Once this happened, my father picked me up, threw me over his shoulder and made a break for our home which was roughly a half mile back. Mind you, my father is 6”5, 220 lbs and I was roughly 120 lbs at this time and he never showed signs of slowing due to his fear and adrenaline. After this night, we never took late night walks, he installed four bright motion detection lights around our acre plot, and brought home a dog. The few times I’ve tried bringing it up, he doesn’t want to discuss and made it clear he never wanted too. Those figures still give me chills and the image of the three huddled together is very vivid 15 years later.
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When I was little (like 5 or 6) we went to a park near our house that had a pond. I was always fascinated with the small creatures; water bugs, fish, algae, everything so I was squatting down staring at this incredible little universe completely enchanted with it all. Suddenly something green came out of the water grabbed my little shoe and pulled. It happened in an instant. My foot slid forward into the water and I fell backwards onto my butt. It was back in the water with a tiny splash as fast as lightning. I blinked then got up and ran to my mom saying, "Something grabbed my foot and tried to pull me in the water!!" My mother tried to console me saying my foot simply slipped on the muck but I know the truth. So heads up to anyone who lives in Milwaukee. The pond in Kozy park on 7th & Lincoln has a grindylow.
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I'm 45 years old and this is something that happened to me when I was 4 years old. I have always been able to remember this memory extremely clear, unchanging and not fuzzy like remembering a dream. We lived in a trailer situated in a cowfield out in the country of McMinn Tennessee. My sister and I slept in a bunk bed with me on the bottom. The hall light outside of our bedroom was always left on for us and there was plenty of light in the room at night. I woke up in the middle of the night and the closet door was open about 8 inches. My eyes had just opened up staring straight into the black of the closet without moving my head. I could sense something moving in there. A very tiny little man was holding hands with a tiny little woman behind him and they were sneaking out of the closet. They were being very slow and careful in their movements. I did not move at all but stared transfixed. They stopped and looked around puzzled. I think they could sense someone staring at them. He looked up and locked eyes with me for a good two seconds. It scared them to death and they ran underneath my bed. I instantly became terrified. I laid on my back for the longest time till I finally calmed down a little. I slowly looked under the bed, but they were gone. There was a shoe under my bed and I assumed they were in the shoe hiding, but I didn't dare touch it. I laid awake in my bed for the longest and eventually fell asleep. They were about 10 inches tall. Their hair looked like it might have been brown. I'm not sure how long it was. I also can't remember exactly what their clothes looked like. When you are 4 years old, you just don't think or care about style of clothes. They just looked like tiny normal people. They didn't have wings or some odd skin color. I remember them looking like white people, but they "could" have been indian. Again, this isn't something that really registers when you are 4 years old. I've told this story to friends and family all my life. It was extremely weird because this was 1975 and I never had any books about fairies when I was little. It wasn't till I went to college I could find decent books that covered myths about fairies and brownies. Then when the internet came along I was able to find out that the Cherokee Indians that lived here in east Tennessee do have myths about little people.
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I'm not sure if this is the right place to post this, but i thought I would start here and get some insight. I was maybe 4 or 5 at the time and was at home being babysat by my grandma. My parents would go out fishing for the day and she would spend time with my younger brother and I.
Our house had huge windows that looked out into the forest that surrounded the house. The windows were maybe 6 ft by 6 ft.
My grandma, brother and i were sitting at the dining room table eating lunch. I remember looking out one of the windows to a huge spider on the outside of it. It was the size of the entire window. It was like a daddy long legs or cellar spider, the small body and long, thin legs. I remember standing on a chair and tapping the window. My grandma brought my brother up to see it and he cried and was upset. After 5 minutes or so the spider climbed up the window, up the outside wall, and onto the roof. That was the last we saw of it.
I remember telling my parents and they just thought i was weird. When i got older i remember this moment and asked my grandma, who said she remembered it and how strange it was.
What do you think it might be? I've always wondered about it and have been curious to find out about it.
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A bizarre report came to light on September 21 2010 from Egg Harbor, New Jersey, as witnesses claimed to have seen a ‘person’ falling from the sky on Tuesday. Kelly Hale told Egg Harbor police that she and two co-workers at Shore Veterinarians were looking out their office window when they saw someone plummeting ‘straight down, no parachute, no paraglider.” Ms. Hale didn’t think the person---who was free-falling headfirst, at a slight angle- --was wearing a parachute. Reports said three also saw a small plane pass by, and that there were no reports of missing skydivers. From NBC Philadelphia: “You could see the arms and legs flailing and his clothes were blue, a dark blue like a navy, black and gray,” Hale said. “There’s no doubt that it was a person. We’re 100 percent sure.” Egg Harbor police, with in the air help from U.S. Coast Guard and New Jersey State Police, searched the area on Tuesday. “We didn’t see any signs of debris, we didn’t see any broken branches...of something like, falling through the tree-line,” U.S. Coast Guard Lieutenant Commander Paul Whitmore told NBC Philadelphia. “We didn’t see anything out of the ordinary, but that’s not to say it didn’t happen.”
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Last Monday, a Thai man working in Salla, Lapland as a berry picker was waiting for a lift back to his apartment. He called his contact and during this conversation he stated "Something weird is following me, it's like a dog or something" after this despite being afraid of the weird creature he hung up and immediately his cell phone was switched off either because he ran out of battery or he turned it off. After this the man disappeared without a trace. Police stated they haven't found any tracks whatsoever from the area he disappeared from, human or animal like. Despite happening this week, police announced today that they are stopping all efforts to find the man except starting an "official investigation"? The man in charge of the operation first made a statement that this is a total mystery but later stated that it is an animal attack and nothing else, almost wanting everyone to lose their attention to the story and called back all the search parties from the area. The parties were mainly made of Finnish military and police personnel and just a few of co-workers were allowed to contribute in the search despite knowing the man and speaking his language. Later they were all called back to work and for the last few days it seems to have been strictly a military/police operation. They found a berry bucket and intact clothes identified as belonging to the man at the scene but the police quickly announced that they had been brought there by the man's co-workers which seems a bit odd...why not just hand them over to officials instead of taking them into the deep forest and just leaving them there? They found no trace of the man, no blood, no tracks, nothing. No one has any clue what could have happened to the man. The particular area has some bears and wolves but bears usually tend to avoid humans instead of following them and wolves hunt in packs. So what was this weird creature he saw and why did he hang up the phone call despite being afraid of this creature? Only specs of this creature so far is "a large, dog like dark animal". There is no information whether it was bipedal or not. The Finland national broadcast network YLE (owned by the Finnish state with a 99.98% share) has removed all stories related to case from their website. Finnish media have been very quiet about this except for tabloids which is rather strange because our country is so small that even small events make it to national news. For example, just a week ago every paper was reporting about a "hippie camp" with "hundreds of naked hippies" in southern part of Finland and they covered it for days.
P.S. Now this could be just an animal attack but it's really a strange one if it is. For example, ending the phone call to his Finnish contact person who is from the area and is familiar with the local fauna, the heavy military presence, removing the information from the news and ending the search in just a few days. Also, the description of the creature does not make any sense, or the lack of tracks. Only logical options for a large dark creature on that area are a bear and maybe a moose and as I stated before bears don't attack people often, I personally can't remember any cases. In all the cases involving bears the bear has stumbled upon someone and then left the scene very quickly.
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I have been trying to gather enough courage to write this for a good while now. I keep telling one of my friends, also a Reddit fan, that I will submit it, but I always back out. Partially because I wasn't sure which subreddit it post it under (so let me know if I'm in the wrong place), but mostly because every time I type it I freak myself out. This story is probably going to sound fake. My husband thinks I'm nuts every time I try to tell him about it. No one ever believes us because it is quite possibly the craziest thing that has ever happened to us or anyone we know. But here goes nothing: When I was in second grade my family moved us into this rental house. It wasn't a new home but it wasn't considered "old" either. During the year that we lived there my mom, my two brothers, and I all experienced something "out of the ordinary" at least one time. My dad, at the time, worked nights and volunteered in the local fire department, so (lucky him) he was hardly ever home. This event that took place is my mother's experience, but we were all, with the exception of my father, at home at the time. It was about 2 am and my mom was sound asleep in her room when she heard a knock on her bedroom window. She was freaked out but decided to look behind the curtain anyway. There stood a friend of my dad's who happened to be a police officer. We will call him Sam. Sam asked my mom to meet him at the front door because he had something to tell her. Worried a bit, my mom headed to the door because, even though it was weird, she did know the guy and he had never done anything odd before. So she meets him at the door and he tells her, "Jane, your car has been broken into. We need you to come outside to make sure nothing is missing." My mom looks behind him, and sure enough, the door to her car is wide open. But something doesn't feel right. It's 2 am and she's tired and a little freaked. She tells Sam, "Just shut the door and I'll check it out in the morning." But Sam decides to be oddly persistent, "you really need to come check it out so we can file a report. It's important." Red flags are flying up every where and now my mom is just down right scared. Something is very weird about the whole situation. "No. Shut my car door and I will give you a call in the morning." They "argued" about it a little more before she finally convinced him to leave and she locked the door and went back to bed. Fast forward to 7 am. My dad comes home from the night shift and wakes my mom up. "Why is your car door open?" My mom, at this point, is just annoyed. "Sam came over at 2 am this morning and told me the car had been broken into. I told him to shut the door but he didn't listen to me, I guess." My dad looks extremely confused. "Sam? Sam Davis?" My mom nods, "Yeah, Sam. Your cop friend." My dad then tells my mom that last night around 11 pm/midnight (2-3 hours before he showed up at her window) Sam was called out to go check out something at someones home in town. He ended up falling into an empty well they had on their property and had been in the hospital since. Sam ended up being fine and neither my mom or my dad ever asked him about it. My mom checked out her car and nothing was missing, and Sam, and no other cop, ever asked my parents about their car being broken into. Seventeen years later, and it still scares all of us to think or talk about it. My mom says she really feels like if she had followed him outside that night she wouldn't be here to talk about it today. We had a lot of strange things happen the year we lived in that house, but this event takes the cake.
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Location: Cours Les Barres, Cher, France.
Date: May 20, 1950.
Time: 4: 00 p.m.
A woman walking on a road along the steep banks of the River Loire, suddenly found herself within a brilliant, blinding light, and she saw two huge black hands appear in front of her. Each one had five fingers, of a black color with a yellowish tint, somewhat like copper. These hands did not come from behind her, but from above, as if they had been hanging over her head waiting for the proper time to “catch” her. The black hands did not immediately apply themselves to her head. She probably took two or three steps before they touched her. The hands had no visible arms.
The two black hands were applied to her face with violence and squeezed her head, as a bird of prey rushes on its unfortunate helpless victim. They pulled her head back against a very hard chest; one that seemed to be made of iron, she felt cold through her hair and behind her neck, but no contact with clothes. The hands were squeezing her head like a formidable vice, not abruptly, but gradually. They were very cold, and their touch made her think that they were not made of flesh. The large fingers were placed on her eyes, and she could not see anymore, on her nose so that she could not breathe, and also on her mouth, to prevent her from crying out.
When she was surrounded by the strong, blinding light, she had the feeling she had been paralyzed, and when the hands touched her, she had the very distinct impression of a strong electric discharge, as if a lightning bolt had shaken her. Her whole body was annihilated, helpless, without reflexes.
For a little over a minute, she felt “his” hands tightening very strongly on either side of her throat. It was horribly painful. Then he began to swing her forward and backward several times, still fiercely squeezing her head against his chest. She had the distinct impression that this being wore armor or a steel carapace, or some very hard and cold material. She felt his two (invisible) arms pressing heavily on her shoulders.
It was at that moment that she heard his “laugh” a strange laugh, she could not explain, it was as if she heard him through some water, and yet it seemed quite close, above her head. At first it sounded rough and hushed, then rather strong and rolling. It made her shudder and hurt her.
After a few seconds the laugh stopped, suddenly cut off. Then a knee hit her on her back, hurting her very much, as if it were made of steel. This blow made her fall back and the unknown aggressor made her lie down, still squeezing her head against his chest. Then it dragged her along the path, by her head, and it seemed in a great hurry. She did not hear “him” breathe.
He pulled her into a brush filled with brambles and nettles and acacias, still going backward at an incredible speed, holding her head. At this moment she heard his voice above her, and it said, “There she is. We’ve got her.” As if he were talking to someone else, some accomplice who had stayed inside the bush, this voice, like the laugh, seemed close by, although hushed by some obstacle, and it was short, rough, sharply cut.
She was choking and felt she was going to die, her whole life passed before her in a few seconds. Her aggressor pulled her through the bushes until they reached a small pasture, and suddenly he stopped. His hands had gradually slipped down her face, and she tried to call for help but she had no voice left but a tiny, shrill cry. After a while she was able to sit among the brambles.
She had a very hard time breathing. Her bag was still in her hand, with the money it contained. At last she was able to get up in spite of her weakness and then she heard some noise to her left inside the bushes. She thought she was going to see her aggressors and recognize their faces, but she saw nothing. Only the branches moved, waving in the air, she saw and heard the brambles scratching the empty space, and the grass being pressed as if under the steps of some invisible being. She was terrified, so then took to the path again, walking with difficulty. Her legs were lacerated and bleeding.
She felt a strange sensation of nervous exhaustion, indefinable, as if a strong current had electrified her. In her mouth was a sickening, metallic, bitter taste; her muscles did not obey her. Over her shoulders she felt something like a bar, and in her back a painful heat, as if she had been exposed to flames or to a burning ray. She must have walked like that for five or six minutes.
At the end of the path there was a turn and from there she could see houses, and then the pains ceased a little bit. Everything had lasted a quarter of an hour or 20 minutes.
Abruptly she heard a great noise, like a violent wind during a storm, a sudden displacement of warm air or a violent whirlwind. She saw the trees bending as if under a sudden storm, and she was nearly thrown down. Almost simultaneously there was a strong, blinding white light. She had the feeling that something flew through the air very fast but she saw nothing. Soon everything became calm again. She felt discomfort and nausea.
Later investigation revealed that in some places the brush was black and scorched, at some other places it was pressed and flattened. The fences in the pasture, which were made of wooden posts and barbed wire, had suffered also. Some posts were burned, others pulled out, and the barbed wire had been wrenched away and broken. The previous day in the evening the witness in this case had observed a “kind of shooting star,” which stopped abruptly, then appeared to go up and stay among the other stars for a while, then it grew bigger and took on a kind of swinging motion, its light alternately on and off.
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Location: Manila, Philippines.
Date: May 10, 1951.
Time: Evening.
On a sultry May evening, the Manila police patrols were expecting trouble. There was the smell of it in the air and it was a safe prediction as the storm warning made by the distant rumble of the approaching thunderstorm. A patrol car received a message of a crowd gathering outside of the waterfront bars. The car skidded to a stop as a terrified scream rang out.
Forcing their way through the watching crowd, the officers saw a girl rolling about on the ground. She kept shouting, “Keep it away from me! Keep it away, Oh, please won’t someone help me, I can’t stand the pain!” But no one around her could see anything near the girl. The shocked police officers clearly saw teeth marks appearing on the girl’s arms and neck.
As nobody else moved to help her, the officers sprang forward and carried the frantically struggling girl to the car, manacled her and drove at top speed to the police station. All during the trip, the girl fought against the manacles, screaming and sobbing.
At the police headquarters, the police doctor suspected that the girl, Clarita Villanueva, had been taking drugs or drinking. Another doctor thought she was having an epileptic seizure. She was then taken to a cell, ignoring her pleas not to leave her alone. A few minutes later, she started screaming uncontrollably and this time the two police officers came running.
The distraught girl moaned to them “The thing is coming at me; It’s coming through the cell door.” She described the unseen entity as resembling a man with large bulging eyes and wearing a cape over his shoulders and it floated in mid-air. The police officers went inside the cell, but still could see nothing. As they watched stunned, more and more bite barks began appearing on the girl’s arms. They summoned the doctor and the chief of police. The doctor determined that the bite marks were not self-inflicted.
Eventually the exhausted girl fell asleep and in the morning as she was being led away she began screaming that the “thing” was back. She eventually collapsed.
Later while being taken away by ambulance she reported two creatures attacking her this time, both with large staring eyes. Witnesses watched teeth marks forming on the girl’s neck and arms. They eventually reached the hospital where the attacks ceased.
She was guarded 24 hours a day for several days then was eventually released. Clarita described one of the beings as “big, black, hairy and human like,” very tall, with two sharp canine teeth and a long beard. Its feet were three times the size of normal human feet. The second entity was about 3 feet tall, and also black, hairy and “ugly.”
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Location: Saint Adele, Quebec, Canada.
Date: Summer 1951.
Time: Various.
There were several encounters, possibly related to a strange Bigfoot or werewolf type entity, which had been reported in the area for centuries and called ‘the Windigo’ by the native Abenaki tribes. One night a child told his mother that he had seen a strange bear-like creature looking at him through the window. Later that night the young child disappeared from his crib and was never seen again. Around the same time a hunter named DesJardins went out to hunt on in beautiful moonlit night and disappeared. Only his rifle and pieces of his leather outfit were found. Also two woodcutters who had previously mocked the Abenaki legend went camping, later one was found dead, horribly mutilated. The other had gone insane and died two days later. Another woman went to visit her mountain cabin and returned the next day totally insane, her cabin had been destroyed by a mysterious fire. She is rumored to have been sent to an institution in Montreal.
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Location: Brovst, Denmark.
Date: September 12, 1953.
Time: Night.
A woman was returning home on her bicycle on a deserted roadway when suddenly two ‘individuals’ jumped out of some bushes and knocked her down from her bicycle, they then tried to drag her by force into a nearby field. As she struggled with them to escape, she felt on them neither ‘fabric nor skin’ but something “cold and rough like fish scales.” She struggled so vigorously that she eventually escaped and threw herself in a ravine where she managed to hide the rest of the night. She told her story the next day stating that her attackers were not men, but “monstrous beings whose body was luminous and gilded” and who did not utter a word.
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Location: Near Zanesville, Muskingum County, Ohio.
Date: November, 1953.
Time: Morning.
James Greer and Albert Greer and a hired hand were in a field when James was seen to levitate into the air. There was a strange object in the sky above him that seemed to be sucking him up. Albert, James’s brother, and the hired hand tried to pull him back by tugging on his legs but were unsuccessful. They could not pull him back. Suddenly there was a blinding flash of light and James and the UFO vanished to the north. James was never seen again.
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Location: Kirimukuyu, Kenya.
Date: June, 1954.
Time: Evening.
11-year old Laili Thindu told authorities in Nairobi that he had seen strange lights coming from the direction of Mount Kenya and flying close to his home. The lights then hovered above a nearby village from where one could hear the sound of drums celebrating a marriage. The objects then projected beams of light towards the village and the drums became quiet. The next morning it was found that the whole population of the village had been incinerated, including the cattle and other animals, apparently by the beams of light.
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Location: Camperville, Manitoba, Canada,
Date: Winter 1930.
Time: Late night.
On a cold winter night as the whole family slept, they were suddenly awakened by the keen howling and frenzied barking of their dogs. Several family members rushed out after quickly getting dressed. The dogs acted as if they were rabid but never approached the figure of a strange man that was standing by the fence next to the road. He was not wearing proper clothing, in the dead of winter with temperatures below 30. This figure wore only a black tailed tuxedo and a white shirt. He stood there watching the dogs, and then he looked at the family. They walked towards him to see what he wanted but he backed up to the dirt road. Two of the uncles walked towards him. He watched them approach him and then walked backwards down the road. No matter how fast the men walked they could not get close to him. He seemed to be walking backward one step at the time but no matter how fast they ran they could not reach him. The men gave up and returned home. They never saw the stranger again.
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Location: Near Orange, Texas.
Date: 1933.
Time: Around noon.
The main witness, Solomon, a teenager at the time, was exploring the woods with a couple of friends and fishing in several small ponds that they happened to stumble upon. By noon, the trio of adventurers had retreated to the edge of a winding stream that cut through the woods, and sat and ate a small lunch that his mother had thoughtfully prepared for them. The friendly chatter of Solomon and his two friends came to an ominous halt however, when all three of them suddenly developed an ominous feeling of “being watched.”
Indeed they were.
Upon glancing across the stream they were shocked and terror stricken to see a huge wolf-like head partly protruding from out of the dense undergrowth. And, explained Solomon; when the beast “realized we had seen it,” it fully emerged from its hiding place and “paced along the edge of the water, one way then the other, five or six times.” And while the creature was certainly wolf-like in appearance, in no way could it be considered a conventional one. Rather, explained Solomon, the creature was quite literally a monster: easily ten feet in length, it appeared to be incredibly powerful, and possessed huge, muscular limbs, a very thick neck, an overly elongated jaw, and a “hump on the top of his neck.”
While keeping Solomon and his friends in sight at all times, the nightmarish beast issued forth a continuous guttural growl and occasionally wrinkled its jaw, as if poised to launch an attack.
Yet, no such attack came.
However, something else occurred that, in many ways, Solomon said was even more frightening. After a few minutes the animal “sat down” and “started to shake.” It was at this point that matters became distinctly surreal. The creature, that was undoubtedly four-legged in nature, became enveloped in a slight “green fog” that lasted for but a moment, then suddenly reared up on to its hind legs. Still definitively wolf-like in appearance, its stance was now that of a large man!
Interestingly, Solomon said that he got the distinct impression that the creature meant him and his friends no physical harm as such, but seemed to achieve a perverse delight and satisfaction in scaring the boys out of their collective wits. For perhaps 20 seconds the mighty creature which, having adopted an upright stance, seemed even bigger than it had while walking on four legs; snarled and snapped in what was perceived as a malevolent, hostile, and even sinister fashion.
Most bizarre of all was the fact that the paws of the creature seemed to have shape-shifted into large, man-like hands, albeit a pair covered in a thick coating of hair. Then, without warning, the animal turned and headed into the dense trees, looking back in the direction of the boys only once, and just before it finally disappeared. Not surprisingly the stunned trio exited the woods at high speed and breathlessly headed for Solomon’s house.
The boys decided not to tell anyone of their unearthly encounter; probably correctly assuming that they would “get a whipping” for making up fantastic tales. Nevertheless, Solomon was adamant to the end of his life that his story was completely and utterly true.
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Location: Near Jefferson, Wisconsin.
Date: 1936.
Time: Night.
Night security guard; Mark Schackelman, was making his rounds when he came upon a strange creature that was apparently digging a hole at an old Indian burial mound. The creature turned around and looked at the witness that was now terrified and began to pray. The creature seemed to show some fear and uttered something that sounded like; “Gadara.” The creature was described as huge, black in color and emitting a putrid smell, it had long finger-like claws; a man-like build, pointed canine like teeth, pointed ears and a muzzle-like nose. The creature slowly disappeared into the nearby woods.
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Location: Sal Saflieni, Valetta, Malta.
Date: August, 1940.
Time: Unknown.
Tradition holds that before the British Govt. sealed up several tunnels, one could walk from one end of Malta to the other underground. One of the labyrinths, discovered by excavators, is the Hypogeum in which excavators discovered the bones of over 33,000 people who had been sacrificed by an ancient pagan Neolithic cult.
National Geographic magazine reported that several school children disappeared without a trace in the Hypogeum.
British embassy worker Miss Lois Jessup convinced a guide to allow her to explore a 3ft square “burial chamber” next to the floor of the lowest room in the last (third) sub-level of the catacombs. He reluctantly agreed and she crawled through the passage until emerging on a cavern ledge overlooking a deep chasm. In total shock she saw a procession of tall humanoids with white hair covering their bodies, walking along another ledge about 50 feet down on the opposite wall of the chasm. Sensing her, they collectively lifted their palms in her direction at which a strong “wind” began to blow through the cavern and something big, “slippery and wet” moved past her before she left in terror to the lower room, where the guide gave her a “knowing” look.
Later she returned after the 30 school children and their teachers had disappeared in the same passage that she had explored, only to find a new guide who denied any knowledge of the former guide’s employment there. She heard reports however that after the last child had passed through the “burial chamber” and out onto the ledge, a “cave-in” collapsed the burial chamber and the rope connecting them to the lower chamber was later found to be “cut clean.”
Grieving mothers of several of the children swore that for a week or more following the disappearance they could hear their children crying and screaming “as if from underground.”
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“When Mum went to bed she had to bandage on a metal splint on her leg, as her only way of getting about was to hop. It was always an unwritten rule that if I needed her, perhaps because of sickness, I would always go to her, except for when I had a visit from what I can only describe as ‘horse beings,’ who always entered the room from out of the linen cupboard, next to a window over the stairs, when I would scream and shout for her. By the time my Mum had reached the bedroom they had left via either the window, or the linen cupboard. I kept telling Mum what I had seen. She insisted horses could not physically get into the house, but I knew they were real because, on at least four occasions, they actually hurt me. I would end up with flesh gouged out of my left leg on the shin bone, about the size of a five pence piece. The injuries to my leg (which always happened when the shortest one came into the room) frightened my mother. She thought, to begin with, that I had caught the leg on a loose mattress wire on the bed spring. She and a neighbor thoroughly checked the bed but could find no trace of what was causing these injuries to occur, always in the same place on the shin.”
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Location: Sainte Miande, near Toulouse, France.
Date: September, 1900.
Time: Midnight.
When a freak storm lashed the Gulf of Lyon and the inland villages were battered by winds of ferocious force, a farmer on the outskirts of the village was awakened by an insistent tapping on the window of his downstairs bedroom. At first he dismissed it as the wind rapping a twig on to the glass but finally he got up and went to the door with a lantern. A strange sight met his eyes.
In the doorway stood a boy, aged about ten, wrapped in a piece of sacking. His hair was long and yellow; quite unlike that of the local boys; and his face almost luminously pale. He appeared to have no clothes apart from the sack and as he stretched out; his arms towards the light, the farmer noticed that there were only three fingers on each of his long slender hands.
As he stood there uncertain of what to do, his wife’s voice roused him into action. She had come from the bedroom taken one look at the strange tableau and told her husband to bring the child into the house. She roused the fire in the kitchen, placed the shivering boy before it and covered him with a blanket. He slept the night on a mattress in front of the fire. In the morning the couple found him some clothes belonging to the oldest son, but it was soon apparent that he didn’t know how to put them on.
At first the farmer took him for some dumb waif; a simpleton, but it soon became apparent that he could speak, but in a language they had never heard before. Even the most commonplace things appeared to astonish him. He was bewildered by a cup containing warm milk, and had to be shown how to drink from it. A knife and fork were complete mysteries. When a farm cat strolled through the door the boy backed away, apparently in fright.
The farmer and his wife, totally bemused by their uninvited guest, told the story to the village priest, Father Rene Mouville, a retired Lyons University professor who had entered the priesthood at the age of fifty. Once the priest met the boy, he knew there was no obvious solution. The child was quite unlike any human he had seen before. Even the construction of his body seemed, exceptional: his hips were extremely narrow and his rib-cage almost an inverted V-shape, quite the opposite to a normal chest structure. Just looking at those delicate, three fingered hands made the priest feel a strange sense of foreboding. The next day he took the child back to his house to be cared for by his housekeeper. He soon found that the boy had a fantastic intelligence.
Unable to communicate by any form of language, Father Mouville began by drawing simple diagrams of everyday objects, which received no response. Then one day he wrote down a series of numbers in the form of clustered dots. Immediately the boy took the paper and pencil and began writing dots at high speed. When he passed back the paper, Father Mouville found that he had worked out the cube root and square roots of all the groups of numbers.
As the weeks passed the boy’s confidence grew. He began to master simple words, and to go out with the priest on his rounds. He began to be accepted in the village as almost ordinary instead of a curiosity. Basic physical phenomena fascinated him. He would sit for hours by moving water or watching birds in flight and the movement of clouds. It was as though he had never seen such things before. Then after Christmas, 1900, he became ill. At first the symptoms seemed to be those of a heavy cold, and after a few weeks he seemed to have recovered. But by February he was sick again, this time with a high fever and a deathly pallor. A doctor was sent for and confessed himself mystified. The child’s heart was the slowest he had ever heard, almost half the speed of a normal human. He should be taken to a hospital, but in his condition such a journey could well have been fatal.
So the boy who came from nowhere became weaker and on the second week of March he died and was buried under an ash tree in the graveyard of Sainte Miande.
See also: Green Children of Woolpit; Kaspar Hauser; Little Strangers of Aisne; Ravely Jack.
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Location: Near Preston, Texas.
Date: September, 1904.
Time: Various.
Nearly a year ago the people living along the river front near Preston were set agog by the appearance in the woods of a strange being in human form. When discovered by a party of hunters on his all fours pawing and neighing like a horse, their attention was first attracted by what they took to be the whining of a startled horse in the undergrowth. When advanced upon, the strange being ran off on his hands and feet but the pursuers gained upon him so rapidly he sprang to his feet and quickly covering the short distance to the river, plunged headlong from a rather high bank into the water and swam to the Indian side. When he reached that bank he stood up, shook himself like a horse just out of a bath, and with what might really be called a horse laugh ran off into the woods.
Some months later he was seen under much the same conditions but this time west of Woodville, on the Indian side. Only a few weeks ago a man crawled across the road in plain view of several people not far from where the horse-man was first seen but disappeared, the pursuit being somewhat tardy. Since Sunday last the people living near Colbert, ten miles east of Preston, Grayson County Texas, have been hunting for a strangely acting man who crawled about like a snake until pursued, when he would jump to his feet and outrun the fastest horses ridden after him. Others who pursued him on foot say they shot at him at close range but the bullets, if they struck their target, seemed to have no effect.
As late as last evening, children claim to have seen the crawling man again near the Varner place, six miles from Colbert. A phone message from Colbert this afternoon confirms previous reports sent out from Durant about the state of excitement and the gathering of several parties for pursuit, but states that public interest has received something of a chill because some of the parties who were present when the close range shots were tired say that although the peculiar being was in the open and very close, that he disappeared with the smoke of the powder.
At the Varner place he crawled into the henhouse. It is stated that out in the field a dead chicken, bitten in the neck, and from which there was the appearance of the blood having been drawn, was found. Though with somewhat reduced enthusiasm, the people of the Varner neighborhood are preparing for another big roundup this afternoon and tonight.
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Location: Barranco de Badajoz, Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain.
Date: 1905.
Time: Daytime.
A young girl was sent by her parents to gather fruit in the area just before supper. However, the girl never returned and a massive search was conducted all over Tenerife for her. She was never found. However three decades later (in 1958), the young girl reportedly returned; looking exactly the same as the time that she disappeared. To her, only 15-20 minutes had gone by. (!) According to the girl; as she was collecting pears from a pear grove, she noticed a very tall figure dressed in white standing near her. Strangely she felt no fear but instead felt a strange attraction towards the figure. The entity then invited the girl to follow him and she immediately accepted. The girl accompanied the humanoid into a nearby cave where there was a descending set of steps which the girl followed the white-clad stranger down. At the bottom of the steps there was a garden in which there were other similar white-dressed entities. The girl remembers speaking for a few minutes with the strange group and later was guided back up the steps by the initial entity which then bade farewell to the girl. Incredibly to the girl, it had only been 15-20 minutes but in actuality 30 years had gone by. (!) Apparently the investigators were frustrated by the lack of cooperation by the local authorities about the event; only one local elderly woman came forward and suggested that the “Girl of the Pears” might still be alive.
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Location: Smolenskaya region, Russia.
Date: 1914.
Time: Unknown.
A local family living in a cabin in a remote area of the woods in this region of central Russia experienced a frightening encounter. They saw what appeared to be a strange fog or mist with sharp edges descend from the sky into a nearby meadow. Both witnesses; a woman named Nastya and her husband Demyan (a forester who worked in the area) saw the strange fog descend in the same place where their two children; a girl named Anastasiya and a boy named Herman, had been playing. Moments later, the fog suddenly zoomed up and vanished into the sky (the fog was apparently camouflaging some type of object). The two children were now nowhere to be seen, and despite desperate attempts, they were never found; they had dissolved into thin air. Being Christian Orthodox, the parents began to pray, but later concluded that their children had been taken away by “wood goblins.” In 1918, the family moved to the Krasnogvardeyskiy area of Crimea, Ukraine.
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Location: Spike Island, Cork Harbor, Ireland.
Date: June, 1914.
Time: Afternoon.
The witness was walking along a path located next to the sea, absorbed in her memories with her eyes mostly on the ground. She happened to look up when she was about five yards away from the wall of a local doctor’s house and saw something bizarre. A strange figure was looking over the wall across the harbor to Cobh. She walked a few more steps nearer before she realized what it was, and then she became rooted to the ground with fear. It was not ten paces away and she could see it only too clearly. It must have been a very tall creature that was looking over the wall, because she could almost see it to its waist; and the wall was at least five feet high. It was in the rough shape of a human being; that is, it had a head and shoulders and arms; though she did not see the hands, which were behind the wall. Except for two dark caverns, which represented the eyes, the whole thing was of one color; a sort of glistening yellow. As the wall was parallel to the road and on her left, the thing was looking past her; across the little road and straight across to Cobh. As the witness stood petrified, the thing began to turn its head very slowly toward her. At this point the young witness heard a voice in her ear; “If it looks straight at you, Eileen, you will die.” Her feet seemed to be anchored to the ground by heavy weights, but somehow she managed to turn and run. She ran into a nearby cottage about 15 yards away. Her next memory was of Mrs. Reilly (the owner of the cottage) sponging her face with water, as she shook all over with shock and terror. She told Mrs. Reilly that she had seen something dreadful in the Doctor’s garden. Mrs. Reilly told the young witness that she was not the first to see it and would not be the last.
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Location: Lawton, Oklahoma.
Date: February 27, 1971.
Time: Early evening.
Matt Dickson heard something out in front of his house. In the dark he caught a glimpse of a vaguely human-like figure kneeling on the front lawn, near an empty fishpond. Curious, Dickson decided to find out who the stranger was. He then stepped out on his front porch for a better look and was terrified to see a wolf-like man attempting to scoop up puddles of water from the bottom of the fish pond, crouched on its hands and knees. The sight was so shocking that Dickson suffered a heart attack and had to be rushed to Comanche County Memorial Hospital. In a report to the police, Dickson described the creature as tall, with a lot of hair all over its face and body and dressed in an indescribable manner. Others saw the same or similar creature that same night.
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Location: Old Swan, Liverpool, England.
Date: September, 1971.
Time: 6: 45 p.m.
At a terraced house in Fitzgerald Road, a 45-year old man, Ernie, was watching the television one evening when there was a heavy knocking at his front door. Ernie answered it and his 9-year old son Donald ran into the house in tears, and his hand was streaked with blood. The boy flew into the kitchen and put his injured hand under the cold water tap and turned it on.
“What happened to your hand?” Ernie asked his son, and Donald could hardly get his words out because he was so upset.
He said he’d been playing with a toy on Prescot Road East when a gang of “horrible-looking” children had chased him. One of the gang members caught up with Donald, seized him by the arm, and bit his hand deeply, drawing blood. Donald told his father that this boy and the others had ‘horrible’ eyes.
Ernie put antiseptic cream on the deep cut on Donald’s wrist and then got the first aid tin from the cupboard and bandaged the wound. “Do any of this gang live around here?” Ernie asked Donald, because he intended to go and have it out with the father of the lad who had inflicted such a horrific bite to his son’s hand. Donald was a very small child, even for his age, and the lad was quite inoffensive and trusting as well.
Donald said he had never seen the boys who had attacked him before and started to sob again, when suddenly there was a heavy knocking at the front door. Father and son went to the front room window and looked out and Donald shrieked, “That’s them!”
Three boys stood there; one on the doorstep and two on the pavement immediately in front of the house.
The frightened child then ran out of the house via the kitchen door, which led onto the backyard. A furious Ernie opened the door, and as he did, a passing neighbor, a Mrs. Hammond-Davis, saw Ernie come out and shout at the children, and she noticed something which chilled her to the bone. Two of the three boys standing on Ernie’s doorstep looked to be about 11 or 12 years of age, and they turned to look at her. Mrs. Hammond-Davis saw that the eyes of these boys, who she had never seen before, were jet black; their entire eyeballs were ‘like blobs of melted tar,’ and their faces wee ‘white as milk,’ that is how Mrs. Hammond-Davis described these boys, which backs up the descriptions given by Donald, that they were ‘horrible-looking’ children.
Donald ran all the way to his grandmother’s home on Derby Lane, where his mother Sheila was looking after her because she’d recently suffered a stroke. Donald told his mother about the strange gang, and she thought he was exaggerating about their ‘horrible faces’ and black eyes. However, when Sheila and her son went home to their house on Fitzgerald Road, they found the front door ajar and there on the floor of the dark hallway lay Sheila’s husband, dead.
The official cause of death was later given by the coroner as ‘natural causes’ but Donald thought the sinister black-eyed children were somehow responsible for his father’s death. When Donald told the source this intriguing story in 2012, he showed him the crescent-shaped scar on his wrist where one of the black-eyed kids had bitten him all those years ago. Donald never saw them again after that day and has no idea why they attacked him.
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Location: Tiskavilla near Davenport, Iowa.
Date: July 15, 1885.
Time: Early morning.
A man named Richardson lived on a small farm near this village. He was industrious and well-liked by his neighbors. On Wednesday of last week his youngest child, a daughter, ran screaming to a neighbor’s before daylight, saying that a huge man, all covered with fire, had come into the house and carried off all but her. It was supposed that the house was on fire, and aid was quickly afforded, but the house was found to be all right. Nothing at all was disturbed, but no one was about. The horse and buggy remained in the stable. The clothing left off by members of the family on going to bed was found where it had been left. The vicinity was thoroughly searched, but without avail. No train had stopped, and no water was near. It seemed as if the ground had opened and swallowed the family up. A neighbor’s family moved into the house to take care of the things and the child and was nearly scared to death the first night. They assert that suddenly the house was filled with a strange white light and the voice of Richardson was heard calling his daughter. She responded and instantly the light disappeared and a great shower of small stones fell upon the roof. The same scene has been enacted nightly since and the whole community is aroused. The child does not appear to be in the least alarmed at the voices.
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Location: London, England.
Date: 1913? Time: Unknown.
At the WC1 (Greater London), Old Chambers, Lincoln’s Inn (no longer standing) Charles Appleby was found dead in his room there, with large claw marks on his arms and neck, the door and windows were locked from the inside. Witnesses outside the building who could see into his room through a window said they could see the man fighting a shadowy bird-like creature, though it was at least the same size as Appleby. Reports of the creature continued for a while afterwards, and one team of investigators, who put down chalk dust during their stakeout recording finding large claw marks in the powder the following day.
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Location: London, England.
Date: April 16, 1922.
Time: Night.
In 1922, a giant bat-like creature had been seen in the vicinity of West Drayton Church. An old man who claimed he had seen the giant bat twenty-five years previously, maintained that it was the spirit of a vampire who had murdered a woman to drink her blood in Harmondsworth in the 1890’s. No one took the oldster’s tale seriously.
Then, on the 16th April, 1922, so began a series of attacks on the general public which bore all the marks of a blood-sucking assailant. Several people witnessed a tall black creature with wings (similar to Mothman) flying around a church. They said that it went into the church cemeteries and ran around the graves. Two policemen chased it and it led out an awful scream and flew away. For a short period, the bustling metropolis of London was on vampire alert. It was 6:00 a.m. and a local clerk was walking to work, heading down Coventry Street. Suddenly he was accosted from the shadows by an unseen form which bit him in the throat. The man collapsed unconscious to the floor, and awoke in Charing Cross Hospital where he told the surgeons of his grim encounter. His tale seemed too farfetched to the doctors, they believed he’d been stabbed in the neck. Then, just over two hours later, another attack took place. A second man rushed to the hospital and had the same encounter to speak of as blood trickled from his throat. He’d been attacked by an invisible predator at exactly the same spot.
As the hospital staff attempted to solve the mystery, during the late evening another man was attacked, his throat punctured by an unseen assailant at exactly the same spot; the turning just off Coventry Street. The police could not fathom as to what had happened and the press was quickly to lap up the grisly rumors that a vampire like attacker was on the loose, with the Daily Mail reporting on the sinister encounters. A reporter boldly and yet sarcastically asked the police if a vampire could be on the loose, and the officer replied nervously, “That’s all!” and left the conference. As hysteria rose in the area, there was a rumor that the police hired a vampire hunter, where he chased the being and stabbed him in the heart with a stake. The corpse being taken to High-gate Cemetery; soon after the attacks stopped.
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Location: Ghaziabad, India.
Date: May 18, 2001.
Time: Night.
A railway worker and a homeless man were both killed within six hours of one another in this city. Both men were found with punctures of 2-3 inches deep and 5-6 inches long in their skulls and abrasions to other parts of their bodies. Witnesses in both cases reported seeing “a shadow” attacking each of the men.
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Location: Laguna Saquixpec, Guatemala.
Date: August, 2004.
Time: Evening.
At this small lagoon located about 15 hours as the crow flies, from the capital of Guatemala City, locals report that the waters of the lagoon are inhabited by some kind of beast or as some call it, “a water spirit”. In one occasion a local youth spotted a duck swimming towards the center of the lagoon and killed the unfortunate bird using a slingshot. (The lagoon is about 50 meters in width at this point). He decided to swim towards where the body of the duck floated, so he could take it home with him and cook it.
While others watched from the shore, as the young man grabbed the duck, something or somebody grabbed him from under the murky waters and dragged him down. Locals waited for the body of the young man to surface for several days but it never did. But according to witnesses six days later the body of the young man was flung out of the water violently, according to a man named Pedro the body flew up into the air approximately 4 meters and then fell on the shore of the lagoon.
When authorities arrived, including forensic medical personnel it was determined that the young man had been deceased for only a few hours, (!) despite the fact that he had apparently been underwater for six days. Later some men attempted to measure the depth of the lagoon where the young man had disappeared and using a small canoe and a long rope (30 meters) stunned the men had to tie two additional 30 meter ropes to the original since they were not able to touch the bottom of the lagoon, at 90 meters depth they gave up. At that same moment the men noticed that from the shore of the lagoon a strange creature was watching their actions, the bizarre creature was about 3 meters in height, hairy and canine in nature, it quickly jumped in the water and began swimming towards the men in the canoe, who in a panic were able to quickly row back to shore and summon the authorities. A search was conducted but nothing was found.
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When I was in Afghanistan I used to see these weird dark shapes moving around when I was on patrol we called them wraiths because you could barely see them with NVGs and they just showed up as cold on thermal. When we tried to tell others about them they attributed it to sleep deprivation or stress. Since I have been out I have heard stories about locals summoning demons or djinn to protect the villages. Maybe the stories were true.
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I'm driving back from the gym one night at around 1 Am, decently foggy. I pass by a crosswalk for our local trail called Iron Horse trail that has sensors that light up if someone is going to cross. They go off right as I pass it. I look back in my rear view and there's a person standing right there in the middle of the crosswalk. He's not even ten feet behind the car and it would have been impossible for him to be there with my having just driven through. I fucking punch it.
I get to a stop sign about 100 yards away. I take a deep breath and look behind again. The same person is now under a sidewalk stoplight not even fifteen feet behind me. I floor it again. I'm freaked out.
I drive. I just drive. I run a stop sign and keep going. I'm way past the turn for my house and I'm at least five turns off. I just stop at the next stop sign to back track And turn right.
I fucking lose my breath because mid turn I see him In the middle of an unlit street with his back turned to me. I just feel thousands of shivers go down my spine and hold the gas down. I blow right past him or what I thought was him.
I keep going down this long stretch and I look back. He's just standing there. I stop. I watch this outline just stand there and suddenly I blink and he's gone.
I don't even have a second and I feel something land on my roof with a metallic clang while the car violently shakes. I gas it. I see a person roll off of my roof and off my bumper. I just drive and drive for half an hour and hurry home when I calm down.
I finally fall asleep in my bed(I was still living with my parents) and wake up the next morning to my mom saying "Matt were you racing around last night? I heard you car a few blocks away. Why does the roof look like something fell on it?" I'm groggy but get up thinking it was like a bad dream.
I go into the garage with her and look at the roof. It's got marks on it like something like landed on it. Light dings and small dents like hail. I look at my rear window and see a very clear hand print on it and a boot scuff on my rear bumper with finger marks trailing by the bottom of it on the accumulated dust. I lost any and all words I had.
I didn't tell a fucking soul. I still get shivers thinking about it and couldn't drive that way for weeks.
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Have posted this before, but for anyone interested: I used to live in a rented house that sat across the street from a fairly bustling city park. At night, when the park was deserted, I would walk out my front door and sit on my porch and look at the trees and the stars. One night, around 1am, I opened the front door and started to sit down. That's when I saw a man standing in the deserted park. He was directly in front of my house. The man was dressed all in black and was wearing a Halloween skull mask. The mask seemed fairly intricate but was most definitely a store bought cheapo. The sight of this guy sent a chill down my spine. He didn't move at all--although I know he saw me. The entire neighborhood was silent and still and we just paused there holding our ground. We watched each other for a long time and then he sauntered away. I ended up calling the cops because I figured this guy was casing the neighborhood. Cops came, took my statement. Nothing ever came of it. Couple of months later, I'm doing some yard work around the side of my house. I'm pulling a huge tangle of weeds out from a thicket underneath my kitchen window. I see something that looks like trash, pick it up: it's the mask I saw that night.
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Marine infantry in Iraq.
I was halfway through my deployment. Myself and one other pissed off our platoon commander and I was put on base guard for two months. Boring as hell.
One night around 2 or 3 am in the middle of winter it got super cold. Colder than what the forecast said. And I felt a presence. Apparently my buddy did too as we both looked at each other at the same time.
We then heard someone walking up the stairs to our post. To our surprise it was an Iraqi woman in full on traditional clothes. All black.
We both stood there for about a minute before I asked, "Are you ok?"
She looked at me and asked for water.
"Yeah, sure." I handed her a bottle of water. She walked away and off our post and disappeared. Creepy as FUCKING SHIT.
***
That was a demon, son.
No, I'm being very serious. ANY thing dressed in all black, asking for water, is a God damn demon.
Offering it with your right hand means that you offer in peace. Offering with your left hand means you're with the devil... or some other type of blasphemous bullshit, I don't know. Stay safe out there.
“We wrestle not with flesh and blood, but against principalities & forces of darkness.”...Ephesians 6
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My little brother (now 17) had night terrors regularly from the time he was 4 until he was almost 12. I must have been in 6th or 7th grade the first time it happened. I woke up at around 11pm to some fast footsteps in the hallway. I open the door to my bedroom and it is pitch black in the hallway.
For some context to the layout of our home, we have a staircase with my parent's room directly at the top to the right. If you turn left, you pass a bathroom, my brother's room and then my room is at the very end facing the stairs.
I fumbled to find the hall light and turn it on. I see my 4 year old brother, eyes glassy, staring motionless down the stairwell with his toes curled over the top stair. Freaked out, I said his name and ask if he is okay. He slowly turned his head towards me and without hesitation let out the most hellish screech I had ever heard. Then, he spun on his feet towards my parent's bedroom and began sobbing uncontrollably while furiously scratching at the door. I just stood there in shock while all this happened. My mom quickly opened the door and scooped him up trying to figure out what was going on. I shit you not, within seconds of picking him up he just went limp and fell back asleep. She put him in her bed and closed the door behind her without even giving me a chance to explain what I saw. I could not sleep the rest of the night after that.
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I get insomnia. It was one of those nights, and I was sitting out on my back porch at about 4 AM smoking a cigarette. It was one of those eerie nights where there is absolutely no breeze and it's just completely quiet out. We have woods behind our house, and as I was sitting there I see this person making his way through the canopy of the trees, like jumping from tree to tree, 30 or 40 feet up in the air. I was absolutely stunned and just sat there dumbly, too afraid and confused to even get up and run inside the house. This person or thing or whatever it was stops directly behind my house and looks at me. At this point it's about 50 feet away and maybe 40 feet up in the air. It pauses for about five seconds staring in my direction.
I'm absolutely certain that it wasn't an animal. Its body was human shaped and it definitely wasn't a raccoon, bear or any of the other things people have suggested it might have been. But the way it was moving through the trees definitely was not human. No human, I don't care how adroit they were, could move like that. It was too dark to make out much detail of the face, clothing, or anything like that.
After about five seconds of looking at me, it turns away and takes off the same way it had been going before, just leaping from tree to tree at a fast pace. Within a few more seconds it was out of sight.
The one thing that has stayed with me more than anything else was how silent it was. I remember thinking it was strange I couldn't hear anything as it passed by, because like I said in my other post, it was a perfectly quiet night and you could have heard a pen drop. Nothing though. It was completely silent. Even a squirrel would have made more noise than this thing did.
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Holy. Shit. I think I've seen that! My grandfather used to take me camping and hunting with him in Arkansas, in the forests just outside of the Ouachita National Forest, and I distinctly remember one night laying down after we'd let the campfire gutter out, we were just talking back and forth,and all of a sudden he made that "hhheennt" noise that meant shut your mouth NOW. (Usually it meant he'd spotted game)
So I immediately clammed up and started listening and straining to see what had gotten his attention.
A few moments later I saw a black man shaped figure walking through the treetops.
The tree limbs didn't bend or even move, neither did the leaves, but this black, man shaped figure..it didn't even really walk, it sauntered..and it almost skipped from tree to tree. Like it had no weight. I remember being scared and whispering "Grampa, what is-" And he very quietly said "Don't you DARE call it to you. Shhhh"
So I shut up and watched it, while it almost frolicked back and forth through the treetops..there is NO way those tree limbs could have supported the weight of something that tall without bending or even creaking.
I asked my Grandfather about it the next day, and he said " I've been hunting and sleeping in these hills for most of my life, and I've seen that damn thing since I was a kid. Most people round here have. Never heard of no one ever talking to it. But I've known plenty who came out here and never got home."
I have no clue what that thing was, and you are the first person I've ever heard who actually saw it too!
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This happened two years ago. I was half asleep and felt like I was being watched, looked out my window, and saw a old man hunched over with a walking stick and a crow on his shoulder standing in my front yard about 150 feet away. He looked right at me and I saw this bright blue color from one eye. I rubbed my eyes and he had disappeared and there was a murder of crows left standing around where he was. This was in the early hours of the morning.
Last week I was setting up my winter camping spot on my property and I heard a growl behind me and saw two coyotes staring at me. I picked up the firewood axe and yelled and they whimpered and laid down. I took a step forward and they ran. It was very fucking weird because that is totally abnormal behavior for coyotes.

 - Dude, you saw Odin.

That seems to be the common consensus, yes.
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I was laying in my bed sleeping one night and I woke up feeling uncomfortable. My daughter has health issues and years of worry about her condition caused us to be light sleepers. When I woke up this night I watched a white figure come down the hall from my daughters room and go by my door. At the same time my dog slid off of the bed (he didn’t get up just slid) and followed the white figure.
I was freaked out so I got up and followed the dog to our front door. The dog was facing the door looking out the glass in the door down the street. The moon was lighting up his face and I noticed his eyes were completely shut. I put my hand on his neck and he jumped...He was 100% asleep.
I checked my daughters room and she was happily sleeping and in good health. I’ve often wondered what visited and how often its visited our home. I've also wondered if I’ve ever been the one staring out the front door instead of the dog completely asleep...
I checked my daughters room and she was happily sleeping and in good health. I’ve often wondered what visited and how often its visited our home. I've also wondered if I’ve ever been the one staring out the front door instead of the dog completely asleep...
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Back when I was 15, maybe 16, I was at my Grandparents house where the whole family would get together pretty often. So, there were 17 of us all hanging out and no reason for anything creepy to happen or let imagination create things. Anyways, I was in the kitchen which is on the second story and is connected to a balcony. As I was walking past the sliding doors that go outside I see clear as day a man sitting on one of the railing facing outwards. He was silhouetted against the sun, so I couldn't really see colors, just darkness, but he was definitely a three dimensional person and not just a shadow. It was only a glance that I saw him and had to do a double take, but when I looked back for my second look he turns, looks at me over his shoulder, gives a smirk, then puts his hands together and dives off the edge. I quickly went out and looked over the edge, but obviously found nothing. It's just one of the weird things to happen in that house!
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The campus on which my building is located is the old Massillon State Hospital. The Massillon State Hospital was, for lack of a better term, the insane asylum. We have three of the old buildings, two are occupied and one is empty. The empty building is McKinley Hall. The entire campus is private property, we have and will prosecute trespassers due to safety concerns and privacy laws.
Well. On to the story.
One night, I notice a rustling near the building while I'm doing a grounds check. I radio my co-worker and tell him what I saw. He responds, I grab my flashlight and we walk over to the building. It's around 10pm, so it's pretty dark out. We figured someone had probably broken into McKinley Hall again. As in, we're telling people to leave and escorting them out probably 5 out of 7 days a week, unless it's September/October, then it's 5 or 6 times a day. ANYWAYS.
We creep over to the building and light up the doorway. Sure enough, the door is open. It HAD been locked and chained. It no longer was and there was no sign of the lock or chain. So, we creep in to the building and are making sure to stay right next to each other, because it's dark and it's creepy and I'm not about to be something's snack. We clear the basement, the ground floor, and the second floor. Nothing but some rats and a whole lot of dust and broken shit. The third floor is where it gets a little hinky. We start at one end and work towards the other side. It's dark, it's creepy and I do NOT want to be there. Suddenly it's cold as shit. Now, we've all seen those movies, and we've seen enough of to know that as soon as it gets cold, it's time to go. But, we have to finish securing the building. As were walking towards to other end of the hall, we see someone. I call out, tell them to leave. They keep walking towards us. My co-worker calls out, tells them to leave. They keep walking towards us. We stop and this time yell for the to go.
By this point, I decided to use my (incredibly bright) flashlight to light them up and at least disorient them with the beam. The person is probably six feet away by this point, so I flick my light up, and THAT IS NOT A PERSON.
All we see is the distorted face of what may have one point been a human and we fuckin lose our shit. I chuck my radio at it. Radio passes right through its head and it screams, this deathly, piercing scream that can only be made by the unholy spawn of hell it seems to be. So... We turn and run, screaming like small children. It chases us, screaming the whole time, and we barrel down the stairs through the other floors, which are dark as fuck and ungodly cold, and finally slam through the now closed door that we had left open. As we're running across the campus, I hear my co-worker holler at me and he all but shoves me through another door to one of our occupied buildings. So here we are, on the floor of a building, having tripped over each other trying to get in. He had a handprint on his upper arm and long scratches down his forearm, and apparently I looked like something tried to suck my soul out.
We went back the following day to retrieve the radio and there was absolutely no trace of us having been there the day before, where there should have been. No footprints, nothing. However, on the wall, there was writing that had NOT been there. It read "what did you do to me". Haven't been back since.
Fuck. That. Shit. Photos of the site:
https://imgur.com/gallery/kQZmC
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I was kind of depressed and lonely one night and I was all by myself in the house, so I went outside to smoke a cigarette. Was just wandering around my back yard when I decided to walk out the gate and walk on the road in front of my house since it was incredibly quiet outside, and there was not a car in sight. As I was slowly walking across my front lawn I look to my right and see a dark figure standing maybe 4 or 5 houses to the right, also standing on the lawn. The streets were really well illuminated by street lights and that yard would have had the most light, but the figure was completely black. Not just that, it was kind of blurry and staticky, too and I couldn't really make out who or what it was, and for some reason I started getting terrified. I felt this horrible heaviness and just kept staring at it in almost shock. Then it took a step towards me, faster than any person I've ever seen move- like one second it was just standing there and then I blinked and it was like 20 feet closer. I fucking bolted back inside and locked all the doors and didn't sleep until the sun came up.
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Not my story, but my two friends of mine was driving down a back road, and these are the kind that are dirt and one lane only. It's late at night and they're kind of just exploring whenever they come across a house that looks abandoned but all the lights are turned on. My one friend recalled that they could see the fridge door open and nothing was inside, but that was it. They kept driving until the road ends in front of a large garage for a house. The garage door is open but it looks pretty vacant. They get pretty creeped out and as they start to get ready to turn around, they said that something came out of the garage. My friend described it as a dog's body but it looked like it had a human face. I try to call bullshit on him, but he swore up and down that's what he saw. (He and I love the paranormal, and I trust him immensely. He was very very obviously freaked out by the incident.) He told me that whatever the creature was, it just calmly stood there and stared at them. I thought maybe it was a pitbull or bulldog, something with an oddly shaped face, or a dog with a disfigured face, but he denied any of it. Said it walked like a dog, had the face of a man.
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I'm a truck driver and we tend to see some of the most beautiful things this great country has to offer. However in contrast we see some of the most gruesome, from mangled road kill to cars and people equally unrecognizable. I will never forget what I saw that night. I was driving at around 0300 MDT along Wyoming's desolate I-80. That's when a thick fog rolled up on me seemingly out of nowhere and the air was almost electrified. I didn't pay much mind to it at that point just slowed down and put on my 4-ways and just kept truckin. That is until I thought I saw a person staggering away from a vehicle broken down on the shoulder. I was about to stop and call 911 when I saw it, a chunk of flesh fell from his face, then he turned and just stared with these bright red eyes. I was going about 5mph and quickly got it but up to 45mph when I saw another 20 or 30 walking along the interstate all with these bright red eyes and rotten flesh. I didn't dare to stop until I got to Ft. Bridger. It was then that the fog cleared and I noticed an Army convoy breaking at the truck stop I was at. They then proceeded out in the direction of what a couple other truckers told me are known as the Wyoming zombie walkers as they will walk any given stretch of highway or back road in that state, looking for their next human victim. A lot of weird things out on these roads and any trucker will tell you if you can stay home at night do it, cause ya never know what's around that next corner or waiting just beyond the reach of your lights.
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I’m writing this because I made an account here ages ago so I could ask this and get some insight but never have had the courage. I finally feel like doing it today because it’s heavy on my mind again. Ok, so I grew up in an old old house in the south kinda out in the middle of nowhere. The house was laid out somewhat circular as you could walk from the living room through most other rooms just by walking in a complete circle and end up back where you started. When I was around 5, me and my younger sister were chasing each other in circles while my mom cooked dinner. I was in front of her and we were laughing and carrying on. When we got into the dining room, in the inside corner there was a small greenish creature with a dark cloak(?) on. It had pointy ears that stuck out and sharp teeth. I was young but it was still very small so i’d say maybe 2ft? It looked kind of like it had been at the bottom of a pond or something. Very old and tattered. It put its finger to its lips and was grinning. I slammed to a stop and my sister was chasing so close, she ran right into me which pushed us both around the corner into the kitchen. We both started screaming and my mom ran to us to see what was the matter but the thing was gone. This has haunted me for years (I’m 25 now) and although i’ve done tons of searching, i’ve never found anything that really fits what we saw. For a long time i thought maybe i’d imagined it and if it weren’t for my sister also seeing it or my mom remembering our very real terror i probably would’ve just written it off. Any ideas what this could be? There were a lot of weird things happening in that house when I was young. Disembodied voices, things moving, super weird dreams, but that was obviously the weirdest and most unsettling. Any feedback would really be appreciated. We still talk about it from time to time to this day and it always makes us feel kinda yuck.
Edit: Let me mention, this thing didn’t look like a little man or gnome or anything like that. It was more akin to a gremlin type with no hair I could see and green skin.
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The most haunting sound I can remember was in an old cathedral at night when I was practicing the organ for a forthcoming recital.
I heard this "howling" and "sighing" coming from the high altar area, even though I was alone and high up in the loft at the other end of this vast Gothic building (doors locked).
Something told me not to go investigate the source of the howling and sighing, but to keep practicing and hope that it would go away.
Perhaps it was the wind in the louvers of the tower - I'll never know. But I was glad to get out of there that night unscathed.
Some cathedral vergers I know have similar stories about being alone in these buildings late at night.
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In the summer I sometimes volunteer as a cabin leader at a summer camp for youth, some of whom are “troubled”. Last summer we had a kid who got random fits of rage and he would take it out on anything he could. (We later found out he had hid his meds from the staff nurse because he came on a bus without any guardians. Obviously this withdrawal had major side effects.) His fits started to get more and more extreme, and one day During the daily nap time he erupted at full force and started breaking everything he could and ran out of the cabin and I was sadly the only person there at the time due to a staff meeting that was occurring. I called another cabin leader who was in the cabin next to ours and he ran out to find the camper because at this point my whole cabin of about 10 kids where panicking and worried, so I felt uncomfortable leaving them alone.
During, and after the fit a few of my heavier sleepers stayed asleep and about five minutes later one of them woke up crying and screaming. Most young boys have a sort of pride issue with crying in front of other boys their age, so he asked if he could talk to me along on the cabins porch, I agreed and walked him out telling the other campers to try to go back to sleep. He ended up telling me that he was having a nightmare about a skeleton, he didn’t say much else about the dream because that wasn’t the bad part. The bad part was that he ended up describing to me what was essentially sleep paralysis. I told him about it and he had no idea what it was and was begging me to call his mom to come get him because he said he felt like something was there trying to get him. I ended up researching sleep paralysis with him and showed him everything I could to assure him that nothing was out to get him and explained the science behind it.
Here’s where it gets weird and still freaks me out to this day. We later had a staff meeting for those who missed the earlier one, and I found out that while all of this was happening, another boys cabin, and a girls cabin on the other side of camp each had a camper wake up with sleep paralysis both describing different nightmares both having to do with a skeleton. I also later had found out that the cabin leader who had went looking for our ‘runaway’ camper had found him in a grove of trees talking what he called “gibberish.” and he was hitting a stick against a tree. We called his parents who explained his situation in more detail and we found out about him hiding the meds and we got him calmed down and the rest of the week went smoothly. After he left we ended up finding a small drawing pad we had seen him using through out the weeks with very [strange] drawings in it. Nothing looked like anything, there wasn’t anything graphic or anything about them that was threatening, but for some reason it just seemed unsettling to us all. Almost like the drawings extremely young children do when they scribble. We called his parents and we offered to ship it to them but they said he didn’t want it. A more sceptical cabin leader ended up burning it because of the situations that happened in the week.
I don’t really get scared by supernatural stuff but this was honestly the weirdest/scariest thing I’ve ever seen my entire life and I wouldn’t even believe it had I not witnessed it myself and the horror in everyone’s faces that were involved.
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In this university I used to go to, we have extra curricular activities wherein sometimes we're required to sleep over in the campus to catch up on some deadlines for an event. So around 12 midnight, people started going to sleep while I pretended to go to sleep, because I do not want to be up all night chatting with friends, like what the rest usually do. About around an hour after, I overheard friends talking about going to the nearby bakery (its open 24 hours a day) to grab some midnight snacks. I didn't bother joining them, but somehow my insomnia kicked in and I just couldn't sleep no matter how tired I was. So then I decided to join them but I was already left behind. I went out alone and it was really dark with barely street lights on. At the end of the block, I had to take a turn to dark alley because that's the only path leading to the bakery. There was this strange humanoid figure with big bat-like wings just swaying in the wind (real life Batman?) on top of the building right in front of me. Right when I was directly under it, a strong gust of wind blew towards me vertically from above. It was kind of like screeching this kwa kwa sound. For the first time (and maybe last time) in my life, I felt this cold rush of fear in my spine (like my entire body was screaming 'run like hell'). I panicked and ran as fast as I could. When I caught up to my friends in the bakery, they asked me why do I look I saw hell or something. Thinking that no one would believe me anyway, I just said that nothing happened. After that one of them brought up that they heard this kwa kwa screeching sound coming from this dark building. I didn't tell them that I saw it though. That was about 8 years ago. Some time after that, I would hear similar stories from other students describing the same thing.
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I used to work at Philips, up near Sleepy Hollow in New York. At my lunch breaks, I liked to wander through the forest on the work property. One beautiful October day, I was admiring the autumn leaves when I saw a buck standing in front of me. There’s a word, numinous, for feeling in the presence of something spiritual, something unworldly. That’s how I felt. I quietly and carefully stepped closer to get a better view. I was able to approach quite close: almost close enough to touch him. At that moment, though, the deer turned, and I felt all the hair on my arms rise. The deer’s eyes were red and dripping with blood. It must have had some disease that had blinded it and its blindness allowed me to get so close. In the moment, though, it was terrifying and uncanny.
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I had an experience like that as a teenager, that I still can't understand. In my old house,there's two flights of stairs to go up and you have to turn a corner in middle. Anyway it's the middle of the day, I'm running up stairs, turn the corner to go up the second flight - and at the top of the stairs is a black panther. Just sitting there. I only saw it for a second because I basically shat my pants in fear, leaped/fell back down the stairs and hid. My mom called about 20 minutes later, asked why I was whispering when I answered - she thought I was high on something. I've never done any drugs in my life. I thought it must have escaped from the zoo. Went to look hours later, obviously there was no panther.
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I live on an old farm with a cemetery across the street from my house. Back when I was in middle school, I remember stepping off the bus and staring out across the road into the cemetery.
Now this particular graveyard is pretty old and rather large, with all of the new occupants placed way at the back. I was looking toward the back end when I noticed a headstone with an odd lump of foliage around it. The plant was some kind of tall grass, dry and flesh colored. To my pre-pubescent mind it looked suspiciously like a person peering around the back of the grave, the majority of the grass making up the head and shoulders with an extra sprig as an arm reaching over.
Now I don't know what possessed me to do what I did next but I decided to wave at it. What can I say I was kind of a weird kid. Anyway right after I waved, a gust of wind must have gone by or something because that thing lifted its little grass arm and waved back at me.
I booked it into my house as fast as I could, pretty spooked but thinking that it was easily explainable. Sometime later that afternoon morbid curiousity took over and I peeked out the window of my house. There it was, still peering out from behind its stone, and once again it slowly and methodically waved its little arm. The weird thing is that no other part of the plant moved. Just the arm.
The next day I got off the bus looking for my little buddy and it was gone. Strangely enough the cemetery is very well kept and I never saw any clumps of tall grass before or after said incident.
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I've been waiting a long time to tell Reddit the full story of The Whistler. This story requires many details, but it is unexplainable, creepy, and 100% true. I also have video evidence.
When I was about 8 years old I was taking my dog for a walk through the neighborhood with my mom. It was maybe 11pm. We live next to a swamp/woods area on the edge of our neighborhood in Lansing, Michigan. I remember it being very silent and slightly windy. From down in the swamp we heard somebody whistling at us. It sounded sort of like a bird, but each whistle was different enough where the lack of consistency made it human-like. The whistle sounded higher, then lower. I can't really describe it. My mom had a concerned, slightly terrified look on her face and grabbed my hand and said that we should go inside quickly. I didn't understand because I was too young, but seeing my mom freak out made me freak out too. After a while, though, I kind of forgot about it.
Two years later, I was taking my dog out again, late at night. There is a large bush that could easily obscure a person behind it just next to the front door. As I was finishing the walk, the whistling noise started again, same pitches, same inconsistent, human-like tones. As soon as I heard it, a chill went down my spine as I remembered exactly the feeling of seeing my mom, terrified, looking down into the swamp at something I couldn't see (maybe she couldn't either). I ran inside as fast as possible.
Years went by and I thought about it less and less. I told only a handful of people, and eventually it slipped from my mind.
Fast forward to last summer: I'm 24, started dating my girl Sarah. We moved out to South Dakota for work. For Independence day, we decided to go to Pierre, SD and watch the fireworks along the bank of the Missouri river. There was a free camping spot behind a hospital where you could pitch your tent, hang out, and see the fireworks up the river. We were near the end of the campground and there were very few people around us. As it was getting dark, the fireworks began. They were pretty far away, so the illumination they brought was very little. Thus, we had to sit right at the edge of the river to be able to see them. A huge thunderhead was moving in and a storm was imminent, so the air seemed electric and the wind was picking up. The atmosphere was eerie to say the least.
The police boats herded all the other boats off of the river and had left our area to do that elsewhere. Most of the other campers walked up the river to have a better view of the fireworks, but Sarah and I stayed back and were drinking PBR tallboys and kicking it. Suddenly, we heard the sound of a paddle methodically dipping into the water. We saw a figure steering a canoe about 20m off shore. Sarah decided to go get more beers from the car, leaving me alone to stare at this mystery person. And then, of course, they whistled at me. My entire body was frozen and covered in goosebumps. It was the exact same whistler from my childhood, more than a decade earlier. I looked at the figure, but it was much too dark to discern who it could be. They were wearing a hat. When they were perpendicular to the shore from me, they stopped paddling, turned the canoe to face directly at me, and whistled right at me. I was so frightened I stood up and shouted at them "who are you?!?" They didn't say anything, just whistled a couple more times, turned the canoe 180 degrees, and paddled out of sight.
I'm a videographer, so I already had my camera by my side and was taking video of the fireworks. As the canoe was almost out of sight, I grabbed my camera and got a shot of them whistling as they went away. When Sarah came back from getting beers, she was very confused as to why I was so freaked out. When I explained, she was freaked out a bit too. I was convinced we would both be murdered that night. How did this whistling person follow me, after 14 years, all the way to South Dakota? Was it a coincidence? Why was it the same whistling noise?! Who was that person and where did they go?!?! So many questions still unanswered. To this day I'm more afraid of being outside in the dark where I might hear that whistling again.
I'm open to any explanations.
If there is interest, I will find a plug and edit a little video of the fireworks and the whistling noise and the canoe disappearing. I'm in Uganda currently and the internet is spotty where I am, so I'll do my best.
tl;dr whistling person has haunted me since I was a boy. Can't explain. Halp.
EDIT: Video is coming, I promise. Where I'm at in Uganda the power goes out sometimes so if you don't hear from me either that happened or the Whistler finally got me.
EDIT 2: OK! Finally. I spent all afternoon uploading this video. Here is the link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9OLi6A2rzU&feature=youtu.be
When I was still getting shots of the fireworks I heard the whistling starting. I was too afraid at that moment to point the camera directly at the canoe, so I just turned my microphone towards it and kept a low-key shot facing down river towards the fireworks. If you wear headphones you can hear it better. It's the two note whistle, high then low. You can hear me ask my gf "Are you whistling? Is that you?" She said no but I wasn't sure so I told her "Stop it!" because I was getting scared.
The last shot I boosted the brightness as much as I could and still make out the person in the canoe. It looks like they're wearing a red sweater or something.
** EDIT: It's been a while and I apologize for that. I'm back in the US now and I asked my mom about it. I sat her down and played the video for her. She honestly doesn't remember anything like that happening. I wish I had something more exciting to say. Alas, it must remain a mystery.**
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I'll never be able to explain it, I'm sure, but something fairly similar has happened to me before. When I was 19 I worked as a stocker for Target and had to bike to work early every morning - Around 4am. Worst job ever.
One morning I got on the bike and began pedaling the five miles like usual. After a while I got the weirdest feeling. I could FEEL that something was following me. I can't explain it any better than that. It was like a sixth sense. But here's the kicker - I could FEEL that whatever was following me was following me from the air. Behind me and up in the sky. My heartbeat quickened and I started pedaling faster. Movies were pouring through my head - Jeepers Creepers. Lost Boys. Interview with a Vampire. Any movie that has a scene in which something flies down and onto someone in/on a vehicle.
At this point I'm expecting my rational brain to kick in and do it's usual thing anytime I'm in a dark room or alone in an alley and relax me. It doesn't and the feeling gets progressively more powerful. I am now SURE that something is following me and is getting closer. I can remember my vision almost seemed to blur as my hearing became more crisp. My body was shifting gears from one sensory preset to another. My back felt as sensitive as my palms.
Finally, I get the balls to look behind me. Nothing. Nothing there. I keep pedaling faster and faster. I look behind me again - There is something there. I can't tell what it is. It's dark - A hundred feet up and following me. Now I start to shit in my pants. I can remember being incoherent almost, as if my body had shut down all higher functioning and replaced it with robotic movement. I remember thinking of Discovery Channel shows where the gazelle runs from the lion and I know I'm the gazelle. I was simply waiting for whatever it was to land on me at this point.
Me and my bike eventually burst into an empty but well-lit intersection and start heading down the hill to Target. The feeling lets up as suddenly as it seized me and I knew I was safe. I looked around me and up in the sky and everything was fine - nothing there. I'm not sure what happened that morning, 11 years ago, but as you can see I remember almost every second of it.
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This takes place in march-april of 2013. Me and a friend had just been to the movies and was just walking around, at ~10:45 PM. We decided we would take a shortcut through the schoolyard of our old school which had since been abandoned and was in pretty bad shape. As we walked through the schoolyard we decided to try to get inside the school building and explore a little bit.
Now, the school consists of two "wings", so the building is an L shape if viewed from above. It is three stories tall and has three entrances. The main entrance leads in to a kind of main hall, which connects the two wings. Each wing has staircases in each end of the corridors, which lead to the different floors (this is important later). One of the windows right by the entrance to the lower wing was actually wide open, so we could easily get in. We were now in the basement.
We used our cellphones as flashlights, and made sure not to point them towards the windows to avoid being seen. Even though the building was not in use, there was still a lot of stuff left just laying around. Musical equipment, uniforms, a pool table, chairs, etc. So we were just exploring each room in the basement to see if we could find anything cool. We explored the basement for about 15 minutes before we headed up to the first floor, and we were now in the main hall. There was some kind of tarp or large plastic sheet hanging there to separate the hall and the lower wing for some reason. I assume it was for some kind of construction work. We went down one of the corridors and started exploring the classrooms.
Every classroom had been either vandalised or suffered some kind of water damage, so everything was pretty broken down and rotting. In hindsight I think we were lucky the floors didn't collapse on us or something. We had just come out of the third classroom and were in the corridor when we heard someone moving the tarp/plastic sheet in the main hall. This was not wind or anything, we could definitely tell someone was physically moving it. We could also hear footsteps, although the rhythm of the steps was kind of... weird. It sounded like someone changed their walking pace sporadically, if that makes any sense. We immediately went inside a classroom to hide, as we thought someone had called security on us. We hid behind the door in the classroom for about 2 minutes, dead quiet. We didn't hear anything else during this time, so we figured it had to be the wind or just random noises. We decided to keep going.
We went through the corridor and up the stairs in the other end from the main hall, and explored the second floor. While we were there we would occasionally hear some noises, but we just brushed it off as wind. After a while we had explored the rest of the corridor, and we decided to walk down the staircase that lead from the second floor to the hall. Halfway down the staircase there was this plateau before the second set of stairs, and this is where things took a turn (no pun intended).
We could see the plastic from there, and it was moving. We also heard some kind of scratching noise. We stood there for a second just listening, and I decided to peek around the corner to see what was making that sound. What I saw scared the living shit out of me. It was some kind of.. creature. It was skinny, almost completely naked (couldn't see any clothes at least), had really thin strands of hair, and was REALLY pale. Like corpse-pale, almost completely white. The first thing that came to mind was that this thing looked like Gollum, just bigger. It was crouching down and was scratching the floor or something, and it made some weird growly, groany, breathy noises. It was facing away from us, so I just stood frozen for a good while and watched it. I took a step back and just pointed at this.. thing and looked at my friend. He peeked around the corner and immediately I could see his facial expression change into a combination of horror and shock. It was reassuring in a way, knowing that he saw it too.
We just stood there for a good 20 seconds just watching this thing do whatever it was doing, and the most clichè horror movie thing happened. My friend started backing away slowly, and while doing so stepped on a piece of glass that cracked. This startled the "creature", and it quickly looked over it's shoulder right at me. I just bolted at that point. We ran all the way to the basement to get out, and the whole way there I swear it felt like it was right behind us.
We ran back to my friends house, and when we got there we had a kind of debriefing session, making sure we both saw the same thing. It pretty much looked exactly like Gollum, just with thin strands of hair on it's head.
I understand if you think I'm bullshitting, I would be skeptical if someone else told this story. But I swear this actually happened, and my friend confirms it to this day. We got a good enough look at it to confirm that it was a humanoid creature of some sorts, but it didn't really resemble a human being.
The only explanation I can think of is that it was a homeless dude that for some reason was naked in this abandoned school, but this is in northern Norway during winter; you wouldn't survive very long without clothes. Also, I live in a very small town with very few if any homeless people, so that theory wouldn't really make sense. It could also be some kind of animal that had found it's way inside, but we got a GOOD look at it, and it didn't resemble any animal I've seen before.
I have no idea what that thing was. I am normally a rational/occam's razor kind of person, but we saw what we saw and I have no explanation for it.
Tl;dr: I simply walked into Mordor
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Back in the early 1990's I was a kid, around 13 at the time of this incident, and I used to stay at my grandparents house a lot out in a very rural area in SE Arkansas. When I say very rural, I mean it was a series of networked dirt roads to get out to their house. The closest neighbors besides my aunt and uncle who lived about a quarter of a mile up the road was over a mile and a half away. This was very backwoods and isolated from most civilization. The closest town was a 10 mile trip. It's in the middle of farmland and mostly woods. They had lived in this house since my mother was a child. And had both grown up just a ways down the road.
Anyways, there was a general store roughly 3-4 miles down the network of dirt roads. This was your typical country general store ran by an old lady and her husband and it's only customers really only consisted of the people who lived out there in BFE. One day my grandmother asked me if I wanted to walk to the general store and get her some milk, eggs a few other miscellaneous items and I told her I would. She gave me some money and I headed on my way. It's was fairly early in the day and I had plenty of time to get back before dark, which I always made sure to do when I was out roaming about. Things can get mighty creepy out in the backwoods of Arkansas after nightfall. It's a darkness unlike most people who have lived primarily in cities or towns have ever experienced. Me being a 13 year old, had poor time management skills. I stopped at the bottom of a hill next to this small wooden bridge you have to cross and messed around at the creek catching crawdads and such and I kinda just messed around the whole way to the store.
By the time I left the store I realized it was quickly approaching dark. This was fall and darkness set upon the land pretty early in the day. I didn't want to be walking those lonely, secluded roads through the woods alone in the dark so I hurried as fast as I could. Running and sprinting as much as possible. But it wasn't enough. By the time I had made it back to the bottom of the hill near the bridge, it was almost completely dark, and there was an eerie sort of glow brought about by a very bright nearly full moon that was rising. At the top of the hill the road was perfectly straight and flat, with woods on the left side and a large field on the right. About a half a mile up from the top of the hill is my grandparents house and you can see it from there. As I top the hill I can see the faint glow of the lights at their house, and I feel a sense of relief because I was kinda freaking out a little bit, but knowing I was so close and could see the house offered a little bit of comfort. The field on the right was somewhat illuminated by the glow of the moon and my eyes had adjusted to the darkness rather well at this point.
As I walked up the road, I hear something from the left, behind me on the wooded side of the road. It sounded like leaves being rustled. I turned to look and see nothing at first, but then as my eyes begin to focus I see something in the ditch, a black shadowy shape slowly moving towards me. At first I thought it was a dog, but then realized it was much to large to be a dog, and then I realized it wasn't actually walking on 4 legs, it was crawling, like a person would. I stared for a moment, out of sheer confusion trying to figure out what I was seeing and then a jolt of fear shot through me as it dawned on me, that whatever this thing was, it had been trying to sneak up on me. At that exact moment this thing stood upright out of the ditch on two legs, like a person. It had the shape of a human, long arms, legs and was proportioned as such. It stood roughly 7-8 feet in height and was completely covered in black or maybe dark brown hair. It's face was dark in color, and I can't recall seeing much in the way of features do to it being night. It was no bear for certain, or any other kind of animal I have ever seen for that matter. I immediately dropped the bag of stuff I had been carrying and bolted as fast as my legs could take me towards my grandparents house. I heard a heavy breathing/guttural growling kind of sound behind me and heard this things foot steps running behind me on the gravel as it gave chase. I did not turn around and was certain that it would grab me at any moment. I then heard it crash off into the woods, and let out an earth shattering and ungodly scream unlike anything I had ever heard before or since. I'm positive this thing could have easily caught me, had it wanted to, but for some reason it let me go.
By the time I reached my grandparents my heart felt as if it would explode from the combination of the adrenaline rush I had from being scared beyond any type of fear I had ever felt before or since, and full on sprinting as hard and fast as possible for about a half straight mile. I flew into the house and in an incoherent mess of hyperactive gibberish tried to explain to my grandparents what had just happened. My grandmother didn't really seem to believe me, but did believe SOMETHING had scared me and acted rather weird about the whole thing. She tried to convince me it was just a dog or some other animal.
The next morning I woke up and found my grandpa sitting outside whittling wood underneath the shade tree in the front yard, as he often liked to do. I went and sat down beside him in one of the old metal lawn chairs. He was a very rational man, down to earth, and had grown up in and hunted that area his entire life. He knew every square inch of it, mapped into his mind. He knew every type of critter and creature that lived in those woods, what noise they made, where to find them, how to catch them, etc. I had only been hunting with him for a couple of years, but had been going out into those woods with him since a pretty young age on walks and such. He had passed a lot of his knowledge down to me during those adventures.
I spoke to him about what had happened to me the night before, and told him that I knew what I saw. It wasn't my overactive imagination, I wasn't making it up, and it definitely wasn't a dog. He knew that I wasn't just some dumb 13 year old kid, and he knew that I knew the things he'd taught me. He stopped whittling, looked me right in the eyes and said, "I know what you saw. I've seen it before too. There's things out in them woods that people don't understand, and that a person ought not go foolin with." I remember those words clearly to this day, because it gave me affirmation, but at the same time made me realize that whatever I'd seen was very real in existence, and beyond my understanding.
My grandpa then went on to tell me that far back in the woods, there are some cliffs and at the bottom of those cliffs is a cave. He told me that the cave is where the creature lived. He had once stumbled upon it a long time ago when he was hunting. He said he was standing on the top of the cliff looking at it when a creature fitting the same description emerged and began screaming wildly at him and throwing rocks. He said he took a shot at it, missed and then this thing gave chase to him. But my grandpa was on top of the cliff, so in order to get to him this thing had to go around a pretty good distance and then up , which he said it quickly began to do, so he hightailed it out of there in a hurry.
He said the whole way back home he felt as if he were being watched and kept hearing twigs snap behind him and he was certain that it was following him. Stalking him. He made it home and as he reached his front porch he turned and looked back at the woods from where he'd came and saw it peeking out at him from behind a tree.
Later that night he said that he and my grandmother awoke in the early morning hours to large rocks being thrown at the house and ungodly howling noises from outside and this thing trying to get into the house. He said he could hear it walking around on the front porch, rattling the doorknobs, banging on Windows and it sounded like it was muttering to itself, in a low deep garbled voice, but it didn't sound like a language, just a bunch of gibberish. After a while the thing went back to throwing some more rocks and howling, so my grandpa grabbed his shotgun and fired it out the front door a few times into the darkness and the direction of the howling and said he heard it run back into the woods. He didn't know if he'd hit it or not. He said that was the last he'd ever seen or heard from it, but over the years an occasional farmers cow would be mutilated, or someone's hunting dog would go unexplainably missing, or someone would have a story about some strange creature they'd seen. He also said it scared my grandmother beyond words and she absolutely has refused to ever talk about it or even acknowledge that it happened. Which explains her acting weird about it when I told her what happened to me.
I know it's a pretty far fetched story, and you can believe it or not. It makes no difference to me. I know what I saw and my grandpa knew what he saw, and neither of us had ever felt the need to convince anyone else of it. In fact, until today I have never actually spoken of it to anyone other than my grandpa and he passed away roughly 10 years ago.
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I saw what many would consider to be the Grim Reaper [serious].
I was playing poker on a late Sunday night, when suddenly I got a very bad feeling. Chills ran through me, but I didn't feel sick. I wasn't drunk, tired, or even remotely feeling physically bad. I just had a sudden need to get home and make sure that my mom was safe. So I cashed out my chips and left.
Disquiet followed me all the way home, but I never considered anything out of the ordinary. I figured I was just thrown off by being out so late on a Sunday. The night was cold and quiet, but no stranger than usual.
When I got home, my mother was in the shower (she's an obsessive late night cleaner, a habit beaten into her by her abusive stepmother). I called out to her that I was home, and she was very relieved. I went to hang up my winter gear by my window - and then I saw it.
We lived across from a park and floating down the sloping hill towards my apartment building was a massive hooded figured composed of tattered shadows. It was blacker than the surrounding night and seemed to warp the space around it. It moved fluidly and with clear agency, floating like a squid through water.
I've never felt terror like that. I knew I was seeing something I had no business seeing. It wasn't thrilling, or exciting; it was just awful. This was before smartphones, but the thought of trying to snap a photo with a digital camera never crossed my mind. The truth is, I wouldn't want it. I felt...awareness from this thing, and it wasn't friendly. I felt that if it knew I saw it, something horrible would follow.
So, I closed my shades and hid under my blanket like a little kid.
I had the day off the next day (hence the late night), and a friend of mine came to visit. He told me cops were all over the place downstairs. He saw the look on my face, and I told him what happened. He laughed it off. We went to grab some food, I asked a cop what was going on, but they wouldn't answer.
We came back and found a young guy wandering my hallway. He was a reporter and asked us if we knew where a woman in the building lived. We asked if he knew what was going on...
There had been a murder-suicide. A man shot his girlfriend and then killed himself. The murderer's mother lived on the other side of the building. My friend gaped.
No, I didn't hear the shots and then filled in the blanks with an imaginary specter. I've fired guns since I was a kid, and I know what they sound like. No, I didn't watch a horror movie, or have anything supernatural on the brain. I've never seen anything remotely similar since. I'm open to the idea of things we do not understand, but understand the importance of healthy skepticism.
But I know what I saw. More, even, I know what I felt. It was like peering behind a door that was never meant to be opened. People think they want to see supernatural occurences, and perhaps there's a good aspect to them. But I think the truth is most of us would absolutely freak if faced with something that's not supposed to exist in nature. Things like what I saw go against everything we consider to be right, in a very profound way.
***
For what it's worth, I believe you. My dad (who is not even remotely a joker - he's a very serious man) has witnessed this entity two or three times in his life. He doesn't like to talk about such things so I don't have a great many details. All I know for sure is that my uncle took his own life very shortly (a day or two) after my dad saw this thing.
Two other things my dad noted:
The room in which you witness the entity can be in total darkness, yet the entity will stand apart from the darkness in totality. There is no ambiguity to the form - it is very much there and immediately recognisable.
A monk accompanies the entity, and (details mega-sketchy here) the direction in which the monk crosses the entity denotes the message attempting to be conveyed.
Now, my dad is adamant that this guy never comes for you personally - but all the same, it clearly scares the shit out of him. You can hear terror in his voice and see it clearly in his eyes when he retells these stories. He once half-jokingly said to me "I hope for your sake you never see him", but I could tell he was dead serious.
So, to conclude: Nope, nope - nope.
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A while ago during the NHL lockout I was up at 3 in the morning watching the world juniors and I noticed this van pull into my cul de sac which was strange because I didn't recognize the van because it wasn't any of my neighbors. Then the Van stops right in front of my house and 3 people pop out. 2 goes to my neighbors house to my right and the other comes to my house. They're all dressed in black and they're going pretty quickly. I was pretty much frozen when I heard his footsteps as he came closer to my door and then nothing happened. Literally nothing the van drove away without anyone hoping back in. I never saw the guy leave my door step. It was snowing that night so in the morning I had to go shovel my driveway and I saw his steps go to my front door and stop. The foot prints stopped at my door. There where no tracks leaving my front door nor where there any anywhere else.
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I'd like to tell you something that happened to me in 1986. I was at Brooklands tech college at the time, Engineer day release, I was 17 years young.For some reason that evening I was making my way along the path from the college to the train station on my own. I had either left early or had been delayed.Normally the footpath would have been heaving with students eager to get home.

I had walked about a 3rd of the way along the path, when I decided to relieve myself against a tree. As I did so, I looked back to see if anyone was coming (as you do). It was twilight but light enough to see. Someone was coming from over the brow of the hill but too far to worry about, so I carried on. I looked back again and noticed the figure had gained some 30-odd yards. Thinking to myself, it must be someone on a bike to have travelled that distance so quickly, I took one last glance before finishing and the figure had gained a lot of ground again. Still thinking this was someone on a bike, I walked back to the path and picked up my bag. Taking a quick glance again (thinking I should have heard a chain; tyres; that sort of thing), instead was confronted by what can only be described as "the grim reaper" without the scythe.

The figure was wearing a hessian-type cloak with a hood over the face coloured black. The cloak reached the floor and was hung over the body in a triangular-shaped fashion. Then I had realised that every time I had seen the figure it had been motionless as it was now, standing just 10 yards from me. It was in excess of 8 feet.

Looking back I should have been scared but wasn't, instead finding myself almost drawn to it and found myself taking a step forward (never understood that). We faced each other for what seemed like a few minutes but was probably only 20 seconds. When I came to my senses I turned and as not to act too alarmingly I gingerly jogged away without looking back. I reached a gate where I waited for the figure thinking I may have been involved in a wind up, but nothing turned up.
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'About two years ago, I was alone in my New York apartment with my cat Polly when the telephone rang. An unfamiliar voice told me that ‘’my wife’’ had just called to report that there was a ‘’fire in my oven’’. I told the ‘’doorman’’ that I had no wife and there was no fire in my oven. (Spookily, however, there had been a fire in my electric oven a week previously.) Shortly after he hung up, there was a knock at my door. It was two young white men in their thirties. They were in plain clothes and didn’t offer any identification. They said they were from building security, even though I knew that all building security guards wear uniform. The two men were quite different. One was very calm as he told me that ‘’my wife’’ had called in to report a fire in my oven, I explained once again that I had no wife and no fire in my oven. The other man seemed to be in a violent rage and told the calm man that he was ‘’going in’’, no matter what. His rage was very frightening.

Suddenly, Polly jumped up on a chair in plain view of the doorway. As soon as the calm one saw the cat, he grabbed the angry one by the shoulder and pulled him away. There was no question that seeing my cat had some sort of effect on the calm one. A few moments later an authentic building security guard, with uniform and badge, appeared at my door, once again saying that ‘’my wife’’ had called in to report ‘’the fire’’ in my oven. I denied both wife and fire, he shrugged his shoulders and left. The whole experience is a fortean mystery. Who were these two men, one so relaxed, the other so furious? What was it about seeing the cat that caused them to retreat so suddenly? Who was the woman pretending to be my wife?''
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On the chilly Tuesday afternoon of 22 February 1977, at 4.30 p.m., twelve-year-old English schoolboy Alan Street walked out of his home in the Huyton district of Liverpool to empty the kitchen bin into a dustbin in the garden, when he noticed something which made him stop in his tracks. A white helmeted head with strange staring eyes was protruding from the bushes at the bottom of the garden. Alan felt uneasy, and somehow sensed that the thing peeping at him was unearthly. He dashed back into the house and told his mother. Mrs Street came out and took a look for herself, and she froze in terror. A bizarre-looking entity, about 9 feet in height, was hovering over the bushes at the bottom of the garden. The figure was clad in white plastic and grey metal ‘armour’ and the eyes on its mouth-less face seemed as lifeless as the lenses on a pair of binoculars. The robotic figure had two arms and legs, but its incredible height and towering stature gave it a menacing impression. The thing looked alien, and understandably, Mrs Street and her son withdrew into the house in a state of shock as the mechanical giant defied gravity and floated towards them with a faint humming sound.
The curtains were drawn by Alan as his mother phoned the police, but as you can imagine, the emergency call was not taken too serious. Mrs Street waited for the police to arrive, to no avail, and at one point she heard the low-pitched hum and whirring sound of the sinister trespasser as it came near to the living room window. She dared to open the curtains – and recoiled in horror when she saw the globular insect-like eyes staring in at her and Alan. What did it want? Where was it from? What was it for that matter? Questions that raced through the Huyton housewife’s panic-stricken mind. Then suddenly, Mrs Street heard footsteps outside. She peeped through the window and saw it was her neighbour, May. There was no sign of the bug-eyed robot anywhere. May hammered on the door and was promptly admitted. She was badly shaken, as she had just encountered what she described as a ‘big spaceman’. The thing had floated around to the rear of Mrs Street’s house, May said. Suddenly, the eerie sound of the automated humanoid grew to such intensity, the windowpanes vibrated. Mrs Street told May and Alan to make a dash from the house while she tackled the suburban spaceman with a broom! Mrs Street opened the door and shouted at the figure, but it stared at her without making a move. She thrust her broom at the figure without evoking a single reaction, while May and Alan refused to make a run for it because their nerves had got the better of them. Moments after the brave confrontation, Mrs Street watched in awe as the figure turned a perfect 180 degrees, then rose into the air and started to accelerate sideways. As it was passing over a row of garden walls, a police car arrived, and two constables witnessed the flying simulacrum’s departure in total amazement. More people came forward and said they had also encountered what the media called the ‘Huyton Spaceman’. Several people said the figure was seen in conjunction with a UFO that was hanging low in the sky over a local primary school. UFO investigators subsequently discovered that a boy who lived near Mrs Street had found a sparkling golfball-sized metal globe in his garden that had allegedly fallen from the sky. The boy’s mother later threw the globe out with other rubbish. Was this curious globe the thing that the Huyton Spaceman was searching for?
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I am sorry to say that I do not remember the exact month, but I was 18 years of age, and the year was 1994. I was living in a house located in the east Texas town of Liberty, in an area named Moss Bluff, a very rural, swampy place, where this sighting occurred. It was a horribly stormy night. We had some friends over, and one of these friends, Terri, decided that she wanted to drive into town to rent a movie. The weather was scary as hell outside, and the shortest of the two roads that led to the highway was a winding dirt road with one paved bridge over a lake, and one torn-up wooden one.

Terri was stubborn, and planned to go despite our warnings, so I decided that I would go with her to keep a watch out. No sooner do we leave the driveway, it starts to hail a bit. I couldn't believe we were doing this. She was so stupid to think that a movie was worth risking our lives in this weather! She was driving horribly, due to the fact that we could barely see the road. I don't know what came over me, but in an instant, when I realized that we were going to be approaching that bridge over the lake, I began to scream, "Terri, the bridge, the f-ing bridge! Terri the bridge, the f-ing bridge!"

No sooner had I said this, we began rolling onto the bridge... and suddenly, right before us, on that bridge, stood a giant, glowing yellow, skeleton of what looked to be a pterodactyl! It's wings spanned out across the front of the car, about 20 feet on each side. It had a long spine-like neck with a huge beak and hollowed out eyes. It was all skeletal. With its long neck, it hung its head over the hood of the car as if to look at us in through the windshield. With that neck, it began to bob its head, back and forth, from either side of the hood.

We were terrified! I was in uncontrollable tears, and Terri was just plain shocked. We were both saying, "What the f-- is that!" We were stopped at this point, of course, and for approximately one minute, this thing appeared to us, bobbing its head over the car. We even had long enough to examine whether it was a trick of the headlights or something, but could only conclude that it was impossible, and right before us stood some sort of monster; the ghost of something out of this world.

Then, as if it were never there, it was gone. It vanished! The rain had slowed now. We continued to drive into town. I remained in the car crying, while Terri went to rent the video. The store was closed. After about 15 minutes, we decided that we had to take the same road back to the house. We wanted to know if it would appear again. It did not.

I had never seen it since, but was not so much interested in driving through there after that anyway. This was the most terrifying experience in my life. I have sought out information regarding spirits or demons that match this thing I saw, but have uncovered nothing for the last 13 years, until today when I decided to do some research online about pterodactyls when a friend made the suggestion. To my surprise, there have been many sightings of a similar giant bird, but each mention seems to be of something "alive."

On that night, we clearly saw the animated skeleton of what seems to be the pterodactyl. I believe we witnessed a ghost of this giant bird-like creature that once roamed that region. I still, despite the many accounts of sightings I have found out about today, have not read one mention of a ghost-like entity resembling this animal. I still do not know what to make of it, and this event changed my entire life.
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I swear it is true! I witnessed the death of a fairy! In August of 1969, we were living in the town of Dibling, Texas. I was 16 years old at the time, and my brothers, sisters and I were working in this huge lot where a house used to be. We were clearing all the weeds and garbage. This lot had an old wooden fence that bordered the whole area. It was noon and under the shade of the only tree in the lot we took our lunch break.

I was sitting with my back against the tree eating my sandwich when suddenly something jumped through an opening in the fence down at the other end. It ran toward the center of the lot. At first I thought it was a rabbit, but on second glance it was a small person around one foot tall! I'm not kidding! It had arms, legs and a head that was wearing some kind of helmet. It was smiling as it ran.

Unfortunately, in this town there were lots of stray dogs, and there were four big dogs sleeping in the middle of the lot that woke up immediately as soon as the little figure came through the fence.

Just like that they started chasing the strange creature all around the lot. The poor thing was zig-zagging, trying to keep a lead on the dogs, which it was. This little guy was fast. Its legs were like a blur. All of us were thinking the same thing at this time; we were hoping it would get away. All it had to do was head back toward the opening where it first came through, because the dogs were way too big for that opening.

Then this thing, this fairy, still smiling, turned around and started heading back toward that part of the fence. I was thinking, all right it's going to make it! And as it got closer it made a leap toward the opening.

But its aim was slightly off and it hit the fence, which knocked it unconscious because it just fell to the ground. The dogs caught up and just tore it to pieces! My oldest brother threw rocks at the dogs, but that didn't do anything; it was too late. The dogs were eating it! Each dog took a piece. One of them trotted by us with the smiling head of the creature sticking out of its mouth! My poor sisters were traumatized!

My brothers tried to make that dog drop that piece, but the dog in one gulp swallowed it. I'll never forget it! And this really happened. I swear it!
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A few years ago, my husband and I were driving back from Montana to Texas. Around one in the morning, soon after crossing into New Mexico, we saw a very strange signt in our headlights. For about two miles, Jackrabbits were standing erect on their hind legs, perfectly still along both sides of the road, in single file, and all turned and facing the same direction....they seemed frozen. They stood about five feet from the edge of the road, just a single line along both sides of the road...not a single one out of place. There were none in the road. None in a group behind them. They didn't move or react to our car or the head lights, they stayed in place even after we passed them. We were the only car on this deserted road at that time of night. There were hundreds of them lined up along this two mile stretch. We were creeped out and didn't stop. Now I wish we had. I have not been able to find anyone else who has seen such a thing or can explain it.
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It was Christmas Eve of 2002 in New York City. My parents had invited some friends and relatives over for dinner, sort of like a Christmas Eve celebration. After that, I decided to go to my room to watch some television, but there was nothing good to watch. I then found myself pacing back and forth in the hallway. My house is big, so there was no one with me. Everyone was in the living room watching a movie I wasn’t interested in.

About seven minutes into my pacing, I saw a tall, fat figure scurry away about 20 feet away from me. It was crouched down, too. It was even wearing some sort of Santa Claus suit. I didn’t believe in Santa, but this just freaked me out. There was a strange man in my house! I quickly ran to where my parents were and told them all about it. They grinned at me and said jokingly, “Maybe it was Santa Claus.” I didn’t believe that, so I just sat down in the living room with my family and everybody else.

Then it occurred again on Christmas Eve, 2004. I remember it more vividly than the last one. I was lying on the couch in the living room. My parents were in the kitchen having a conversation about a business blog or something. Suddenly, I saw a huge man, about seven or eight feet tall, crawl underneath the tree and just vanish. Before it disappeared, it looked at me and said, “Shh.” Very strange, so I went into the kitchen and sat with my parents.
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Dawn Collinson, in the Liverpool Echo of Feb. 9, 2008, uncovered an old story of a mystery animal that may have actually prevented a tragic disappearance. Early in November 1953, two boys, David, age 12, and Alan, age 11 (last names withheld), were playing Cowboys and Indians south of Liverpool in a section of forest called Little Woods. At about 4:20 PM they built a campfire. As Alan (with questionable wisdom) fired flaming arrows into the trees, David spotted an enormous tabby-colored cat, 4 feet tall (presumably on all fours) only 20 feet away. The creature said "Hello, children," "in a clear, well-spoken voice," according to Collinson. The boys ran away in terror and stumbled out onto a nearby street, where they were almost hit by a bus. Predictably, their parents did not believe the story.
The boys girded up their courage and ventured out to the woods the very next day, lighting a fire at about 4:20 again. "The enormous cat came slinking out of the woods, arched its back and sat by the fire opposite the boys." It gave its name as "Semeel" and said it was something called a "Guardian". It warned the boys to stay out of the forest because a local man (whose name they recognized) was lurking there, waiting to kill them. Then it padded off into the trees.
The boys' parents were still unimpressed, because the man "Semeel" accused was in Wales at that time. However, several days later the police discovered that the man had returned secretly from Wales. He had built a rough dwelling in Little Woods and was living there while the boys played nearby, unknowing. Furthermore, the man had unsuccessfully tried to abduct a child five years earlier. He confessed that he had been planning to abduct David and Alan.
The boys encountered the Guardian Semeel three more times, but the giant feline apparently did not like the way the forest was being cleared for a housing project, for it never appeared again.
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What must rank has the strangest find underground is the subterranean church allegedly found near Billinge in the late 18th century.

Four children decided to explore the limestone caverns in the area and vanished.

One child survived and told a terrifying tale about small old men with beards who killed his three friends and chased him.
The petrified child stumbled over human bones in the caves and finally managed to scramble through an opening to the surface as a hand was grabbing at his ankle.

The authorities were concerned because a number of people had gone missing in the area near the cave entrances. Two heavily armed soldiers descended into the caverns with torches and claimed that they not only found a heap of human bones, they also found the ruins of an ancient church of some unknown denomination.

The interior of the church was lit by three large candles and grotesque gargoyles formed part of an altar. Throughout the exploration of the underground, the soldiers said they felt as if they were being watched, and also heard voices speaking in an unknown language.
One report said that a child’s head was found in a cave, along with evidence of cannibalism. After a second investigation, the caves either collapsed or gunpowder was used to seal them, and so the riddle of the underground church of Billinge remains unsolved.
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When you name a ship the HMS Terror, you’re already dooming it to a fate that doesn’t include parties or tropical cruises. That was the case with the British warship christened with that name, which saw action in the War of 1812, including being on the losing side of the Battle of Baltimore which inspired Francis Scott Key to write the “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
Failing to quit while it could still float, the HMS Terror was later converted into a polar exploration ship and became infamous as one of two ships lost on Sir John Franklin’s 1845 attempt to find the Northwest Passage – an expedition that resulted in the deaths of all crew members, but not before they resorted to cannibalism. Now, the curse of the name HMS Terror has appeared again with Inuits fearing that the wreck of the ship, discovered on the southern coast of King William Island in the middle of Terror Bay (will people who name things never learn?), has killed six more people. Is this terror of the Terror real? Can it be stopped?
“People are superstitious. They feel there is a connection between the deaths and disturbing the wreck sites.”
CBC News reports that Inuits belonging to the Nunavut community of Gjoa Haven, the only settlement on King William Island, held a meeting to discuss six unexpected deaths that occurred shortly after expeditions to study the wreckage of the Terror. One speaker, Jacob Keanik, said his brother and nephew drowned in a boating accident, followed by two other men dying in an all-terrain vehicle accident, a community elder passing away and a school employee suffering a fatal heart attack … all in a two week period after the expeditions. Keanik also warned that some locals had been having premonitions.
“My late mother told me, even before these shipwrecks were discovered…the whole King William Island has non-human people that we cannot see. It’s a funny feeling when we get on the other side of the island. You sense that somebody’s around you, but there’s nobody around you.”
Those feelings that “the wrecks are cursed and should not be disturbed” awakened a second curse … money. The discovery of the HMS Terror and sister ship HMS Erebus has turned the area into a potential tourist attraction and cooperation with the locals is necessary. Besides, who wants to eat at the local diner when all the waitress can talk about is the ‘invisible non-human people’?
“It is only artifacts that are being found and being taken off wreck sites. There are plans in place that if any bodies are found, they will be left in place. We will not bring up or disturb human remains.”
That statement by Fred Pedersen of the Kitikmeot Inuit Association wasn’t enough to calm their fears. Parks Canada spokesperson Dominique Tessier was told that the wreck of the HMS Erebus had been blessed by the Guardians — Inuit caretakers appointed to monitor the Franklin shipwreck sites — but the HMS Terror never was. That was easy to fix.
“This summer, following the tragedies, elders blessed sand from Gjoa Haven and the Terror Guardians brought it to the wreck of HMS Terror, where they sprinkled it over the wreck and performed a blessing.”
Did the blessing end the latest curse of the HMS Terror? Only time will tell.
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There is a report from the area of Houston, Texas, from a witness who says one evening in March of 2003 his dog had gone to chase something out in their expansive yard, which he at first assumed was some wild animal or stray cat. When the man went to go see what was riling the dog up so much, he claims that he saw a humanoid creature standing a mere 1 foot tall, with a pointed hat, a white beard, and dressed in a “clown suit without the big shoes and nose.” The terrified man panicked, retreated into his house along with his dog, and then looked back outside through the window to see the bizarre creature eating from a bird feeder in the yard. It then scurried to the porch, smiled directly at the witness, and then disappeared behind it, never to be seen again.
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Texas hosts another invisible monster, according to Lone Star historian William Edward Syers. The Ottine Swamp flanks the San Marcos River southeast of Austin and encompasses Palmetto State Park. About 1980, Syers interviewed Berthold Jackson, an A&M graduate and woodsman, one of many hunters and fisherman who have encountered the "thing" in the swamp. "He had never read Ambrose Bierce's masterpiece, 'The Damned Thing' . . . Yet that is precisely what he described to me over early coffee on a fine spring morning."
One night Jackson was hunting with a friend, Johnny Boehm of Gonzales, Texas:
"'Johnny was behind me, maybe fifty yards. I could see his light, and he could see mine. The damned thing got right between us. We could see the brush move.' He gestured the rippling movement of passage. 'We could hear brush snap underfoot. But we couldn't see a thing except that brush moving. Not the thing itself. And that close, an animal's eyes would show like headlights.'
"'You've never actually seen it?' I asked.
"'Just its movement. And I've put a big light on it; so have others, more than once. Nothing!'"
Jackson named several others who had encountered the thing, from Luling and Gonzales. Two men, Billy Webb and Ab Ussery, running a trotline one night, saw an expanse of bloodweeds along the riverbank move as if something large were passing through it, following them. They shone a large light at the disturbance from only 20 feet (six meters) away but still saw nothing.
The "Thing" seems to be attracted to vehicles parked on Lookout Hill, which lies near the entrance of Palmetto State Park. Two young men, Brewster Short and Wayne Hodges, readying themselves to go home from a hunting trip, claimed that something unseen reared up on the back of their car. They fled hastily, leaving their dogs behind. This experience so disturbed Wayne that he moved into his parents' bedroom. Lamar Ryan, Jackson's cousin, was parked one night on the hill with his fiancee when something started shoving his pickup towards the edge of a steep drop-off. Lamar jumped out, but he could see nothing, despite the moonlight. He and his wife-to-be left hastily.
Jackson's son spoke to a couple who lived in a trailer house near the swamp. He was informed that something had once or twice shook the trailer "like a box," and that the couple had come home one day to find the wife's best dress, which had been on a clothesline, "torn in half, and each half rolled in a ball and stuck under each bed." [2]
The unseen being of Palmetto State Park still roams about, at least according to the author of an anonymous letter sent to Wesley Treat, Heather Shade, and Rob Riggs, authors of Weird Texas. "Many years back," after receiving a camera from his wife for Christmas, the author drove out to the park to take pictures. He began to feel that someone was following him. He headed for his vehicle, but the feeling grew so intense that he started running. He tripped and fell, looking back as he rolled over to get up.
"I saw the tall grass off to the side of the trail getting flattened and parting, as if someone was pushing their way through it. But there was no one there. I jumped up and broke out into a full sprint until I was inside my car. I quickly took off, without even catching my breath, and felt something hit the car from behind." [p. 105]
The author wondered if he was going crazy, but eventually he heard the stories about an "invisible man" in the park.
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Student interviewer Hanna Dean turned in the story on December 11, 2000.  She collected it from a friend of hers who wishes to be known only as "Sam".  One winter's night Sam woke from a deep sleep.  His "intuition" insisted that something was terribly wrong in the house and that he must leave.  "It was similar to that ominous, premonitory feeling that sometimes alerts us to a house fire or an intruder."  Whatever it was, it was an overwhelming sensation.  Sam threw on his clothes and rushed out the front door into the ice-cold moonlit night.

The "intuition" came again, surprisingly specific:  Sam was sure that he had to get into his car.  He obeyed the impulse, but he did not go anywhere.  He simply sat there, puzzled and worried.

The woods ran up to the edge of Sam's family's property.  As the young man hunched in his cold vehicle, something even more perplexing occurred:  someone or something emerged from the forest.  As the dark figures stepped into the bright moonlight, Sam realized it was his family.  His father, his mother, and his younger sister traipsed out of the woods and stopped at the edge of an open field.  Utterly confused, Sam climbed out of his car.

His family members spotted him and started waving for him to come over.  Sam left his vehicle and started across the yard.  As he approached, however, a new feeling came over him that there was something terribly wrong.  This was not so much a hunch as the fact that his parents and sister did not call to him or start toward him.  They did not utter a sound, but they waved at him to come closer almost frantically.

The fact that none of them spoke a word finally broke the young man's nerve.  He turned and ran back to the house.  He slammed and locked the door behind him.  He turned to run up the stairs as well, but to his shock his father stood at the top of the staircase, demanding to know what was going on.  In a few moments his mother and sister appeared as well.  They had been asleep inside all the while.  Whatever had come out of the woods and beckoned to Sam, it was not his family.

Some have suggested that Sam simply went sleepwalking.  The young man could only retort that he had no history of somnambulism before or after that winter's night.

This event disturbed Sam so much, in fact, that he would not speak of it for years, until student/ collector Hanna Dean wormed it out of him in 2000.  Dean adds, "What I'm wondering is, what would have happened to Sam if he had gone with his 'family' into the woods? . . . I think he is probably better off not knowing."
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A young man named Tim Marczenko of Dorchester, Ontario, Canada, was shooting basketball hoops one summer evening in 2001 when his father emerged from the house walking their golden retriever.  Tim, 14 years old at the time, watched his father walk the dog down the road into the distance and out of sight.

Suddenly “three digital beeping sounds” came from the woods by their house in the opposite direction from where the father went.  The boy shrugged and continued shooting hoops.  The beeps came again.

A voice called from the trees, “Tim! Come here for a second, I've found something.”  Tim assumed it was his father, and that he'd found a beeper or cell phone.  Yet the voice was very evasive when he asked what was going on, just saying things like, “Just come here, hurry up, I found something.  Follow my voice,” and “Tim come into the woods, I've got to show you something.”

The beeping and the voice's demands continued, and Tim wandered over – only to stop at the edge of the trees.  “I realized that the voice was using only using a certain number of words and phrases,” the youth recalled.  “Almost as if it were automated and only knew how to speak those particular words.”

Then the noises stopped and Dad came back up the road with the dog.  And, of course, he hadn't found any beeping thing or in fact gone into the woods.

“What would have happened to me if I had followed the voice into the forest?” Tim ends.

What, indeed?