Archive for the ‘Scary Stories’ Category
Tuesday, March 1st, 2011
The American highway system is the largest in the world with four million miles of road. Every year it claims the lives of roughly 40,000 people. For those who don’t make the trip home, there is sometimes another road they must travel, a dark and lonely road that traverses lands unseen and leads to destinations unknown.
Carlos writes to tell me the story of an event that he witnessed late one night in 1991. Carlos drives a big rig and spends a greater part of the year on the road. His job usually takes him from the west coast, where goods are unloaded at the Port of Oakland, California, to the distribution centers that dot the Midwest.
On that fateful night in 1991, Carlos was running a load east along Interstate 80. It was late and very dark as Carlos drove along the nearly deserted highway. “I was in Wyoming, heading toward Cheyenne,” Carlos tells me.
There are stretches of roadway in Wyoming that are downright beautiful, gorgeous examples of the planet’s natural wonders. There are times, however, when those same places can send a cold chill down a man’s spine.
“There’s a place, it’s after Green River but before you get to Rawlins,” Carlos says, “that is a sight to see in the daytime. But at night, it always gave me the spooks.”
Carlos was driving this stretch of roadway one night when he found himself to be the only driver on the road. “It’s not like it doesn’t happen,” Carlos tells me, “but out there, you can see a long way up and down the road, and I didn’t see nothing.”
It was late and Carlos was trying to push through to Cheyenne, and the dread he felt out there alone were helping him stay awake. And then suddenly, he saw the headlights behind him.
“Maybe I dozed off, who knows,” Carlos recalls, “but all at once there was a car right behind me.” As headlights flooded the truck’s mirrors with light, Carlos slowed his rig. The lights grew brighter, brighter than any kind of car Carlos had seen before.
Suddenly, the lights dimmed and raced forward. “I thought it was a maniac trying to ram me,” Carlos remembers. “But then they came up alongside.”
Carlos could see a black sedan coming up beside his truck. It was an old fashioned model, a classic in good condition. Trying to keep an eye on both the car and the road, Carlos was distracted enough not to notice the speed that the car was traveling.
“This was like a Model T car or something,” Carlos tells me. “I look down and see that I’m going 80 and it’s passing me fast.” As the vintage roadster roared by, Carlos caught a glimpse of its passengers.
“There was a man and a woman inside,” Carlos tells me. “And the only reason I could see them was because there was this strange glow inside the car.” It seemed to Carlos that the passengers were lit from below with an unearthly green light, a pale fluorescence that cast deep shadows, making the car’s driver and his passenger appear gaunt and skeletal.
The old car charged past Carlos’s truck and then everything went dark. “It’s like they shut off their lights,” Carlos recalls, “but I knew that car was gone because it was a ghost car being driven by ghosts.”
Before Carlos could process the strange event, another set of headlights suddenly appeared in his rear view mirror. This time, Carlos could see right away that it was another rig coming up behind him.
“I was calling on the CB to see if this guy saw what I saw,” Carlos tells me, “but it was just dead air.” The rig started coming up fast, faster than any truck Carlos had ever seen before. Carlos started to worry.
The lights drew closer and Carlos could hear the sound of the oncoming truck’s engine groaning and screeching like a wounded demon. Carlos gave his rig a bit more gas, trying to put some distance between him and whatever was coming from behind.
It was no use; the truck changed lanes, moving to pass Carlos, so Carlos slowed down to oblige. In the brief moment that followed, Carlos wished he had raced on to Cheyenne or driven off the road or, at least, closed his eyes.
For, although the truck that passed by looked like any ordinary tractor trailer on the road today, the driver, lit from below by the same ghastly green light Carlos had already seen, was of another order of phantom than Carlos had previously encountered.
The truck’s driver was huge and pale, sitting high in his seat like a giant; his skin was like the surface of the moon, pitted and gleaming, reflecting the ghoulish light, and from the scars that covered his face, blood trickled and oozed. He turned briefly in Carlos’s direction and his eyes glimmered with a baleful red light as he smiled.
“I stayed on the road somehow,” Carlos tells me, “but I don’t know how.” Reeling in shock, Carlos had no time to react before he was hit with the image that still haunts his dreams and unsettles his waking hours.
As the cab of the truck passed him by, Carlos could see the dismal load its fiendish driver was hauling. “It wasn’t a regular trailer, it was a fenced-up one,” Carlos recalls, “like what they use for cattle.”
The great bulk of the truck slid by in the night, and, lit by the running lights of his own rig, Carlos could see the hands and fingers and faces – some rotted and bleeding, some stripped of all flesh, some just ghostly shades – through the small openings in the trailer’s enclosure.
“I try not to drive at night anymore,” Carlos tells me. “But I have trouble sleeping at night anyway.”
Although Carlos refuses to drive that particular stretch of road anymore, many millions do. How many of those drivers pay attention to the cars that pass in the night, the ones that seem to come from nowhere and quickly speed off to their fates? How many of the cars that pass by are weary travellers heading home and how many are travelling a different kind of road, a road that is crowded but lonely, a road that cuts straight through the night but never arrives at morning?
Friday, December 10th, 2010
When Eva and her brothers took off for a walk in the woods, they were looking for a way to kill a boring afternoon. What they found, however, was something they couldn’t explain, something they would never forget, something that didn’t expect to be found.
Eva writes to tell me about growing up in rural Indiana with her two brothers. The boys were two and four years younger than Eva and when she was a teenager, she got stuck babysitting when her mother had to work. “I tried to get out of it everytime,” Eva tells me, “but now, of course, I really miss those days.”
When Eva was fourteen, she and her brothers spent the summer exploring the vast tracks of woods and fields that surrounded their small community. The boys built forts and played hide and seek, all the while being led by their older sister. “I was a real tomboy,” Eva recalls.
Although the trio ranged far and wide through the countryside, there was a particular stretch of woods that they had failed to explore. It was a small, dark valley that lead off from their main stomping grounds. In all their adventures that summer, they had passed it by without any reason they could articulate.
Near the end of that magical summer, the school year’s fast approach had the children feeling anxious. “We were off to hunt for bird’s nests or build a castle or something,” Eva remembers, “but then I stopped and I pointed to the little valley and I said, Follow me.” The brothers eyed their sister nervously, but they quickly regained their courage as she led the way into the growing mist.
“I don’t know why I decided to go that way on that day,” Eva says. “But I know that I should’ve turned back when we found the skull.” As the siblings walked the valley path, they were surprised to see the sun fade as the sky grew dark and overcast. The birds seemed to stay away, too, as there were no sounds to hear except their own footsteps. The trees before them were gnarled from age and stood forlornly in the mist. Then they saw the skull.
Sitting on a pile of small rocks was a bleached-white animal skull, its twisted horns curving skyward. “I knew there were some wild pigs around, so I thought it was just one of those,” recalls Eva. But still the trio pushed on, unhindered by the strange sign. “Now I know to pay attention to road signs,” Eva says.
The children walked and walked and the woods grew cold and pale. It seemed that the forest around them – the trees, the rocks, the very ground – had been so drained of life and energy that it was barely clinging to the real world. What would happen if it no longer could?
Eva began to fear that she had led her charges terribly astray. What would her mother say if something happened to the boys? With her mother’s answer echoing in her mind, Eva turned her brothers around and headed for more familiar territory.
As the siblings tried to retrace their steps, they all began to experience a sudden and inexplicable feeling. Although the eerie woods were reason enough to feel afraid, the sensation was strangely palpable, as if the valley’s enervating nature had suddenly noticed them. “It was like that feeling of being watched,” Eva recalls, “but the something doing the watching was right in front of you and you could smell its bad breath.”
The boys began to feel slightly sick and very afraid. Eva turned her head back and forth to the endless tracks of trees, trying to get a handle on the weird feeling and making sure they weren’t really being watched. As they passed between two ancient specimens, the air seemed to stand still for a moment and then suddenly rush forward. As Eva turned her head to look past the two trees, she saw something that was not there a moment before.
Standing just off to the left of Eva and her brothers was a group of people, half a dozen figures in a semi-circle around what appeared to be a large goat. “There was nothing there and then we walk past these trees and, Bam, there they are,” remembers Eva. The people wore long black robes with pointed peaks, their faces sunk deep in shadow. It seemed to Eva that the meager sunlight didn’t seem to touch them, as if it didn’t know they were there at all.
The robed figures didn’t move. They didn’t turn to face their unexpected witnesses rigid with fear. For a moment it seemed that this encounter would remain frozen in some lost corner of time. “And then, an even weirder thing happened,” Eva tells me. “The goat stood up.”
Rising up on its hind legs, the goat – if we can call it that – turned to face Eva and her brothers. As it did, Eva saw that its legs were not goat’s legs at all but human legs and that what she thought were hooves – what she knew were hooves – were not, they were human toes and human fingers. And as the goat walked toward her, she saw that its black hide was a long black robe like the others and that its face, partly concealed in the fabric’s shadow, was a human face. “Mostly human,” Eva recalls, “because it still had these giant horns sticking out of its head and it’s eyes were black and red like they were on fire.”
The goat-man stared the children down and advanced on their position. Eva instinctively grabbed her brothers and tried to get them moving, but before she could get all of them running in the same direction, the goat-man waved his arm in great arc before him and spoke: “You’re not supposed to be able to see us,” he said. And with that pronouncement the goat-man and his fellows simply disappeared.
“We ran all the way home,” Eva tells me. “We spent the rest of the summer around the house. We couldn’t wait for school to start.” Eva and her brothers never went back to the cold valley, of course, but they wondered what they had seen and what it had meant. Did some foul demon rise from the underworld to truck with mankind? Was the very nature of reality rent in the cold valley by some unspeakable crime buried in unholy history? Or did the Devil himself make the trip from his hellish kingdom to spend the summer in Indiana? Eva is not one to speculate about infernal affairs, but she has her own take on the goat-man’s strange statement that long-ago, late-summer day: “I like to think he was apologizing for scaring us,” says Eva.
Tuesday, November 30th, 2010
Amy and David couldn’t sleep. The old house their parents had recently bought was drafty, musty, and cold, but that wasn’t what kept the siblings awake almost every night. It was the sound – distant and soft – of someone walking around inside their closet.
David writes to tell me that when he was 12 and his sister, Amy, was 9, their parents moved them from Maryland to western Pennsylvania. The new house, which was really a very old house, was once a farmhouse. David had always imagined a farmhouse would be as big and as spacious as the farm itself. David was wrong.
On the day they arrived at their new home, the sky was bright and the air was just beginning to take on an autumn chill. “The house looked huge. I wanted to start exploring all the rooms,” David recalls. But once inside, the old house proved to be small and stifling. “I guess it just looked that way from the outside, because once I went inside, I wanted to leave right away.”
David’s family always seemed to be running out of space in the new house. No matter where they put their belongings as they unpacked, they always ran out of room before hey were finished. “It’s like the house was running out of space…like it was shrinking,” David tells me.
Because the house was so small, David and Amy shared a large bedroom on the second floor. What David remembers most about the spacious room was the tiny closet placed right in the center of the long wall. “It was weird because the room was pretty big, but it had this really tiny closet, like so small that we had to have a dresser in the room to fit our clothes.”
After long days of unpacking and getting used to their new school, David and Amy were too tired to do much exploring in the house. They usually fell asleep without a problem. As summer faded and the trees exploded in fall colors, David and Amy lay awake at night talking about their new school and new friends. That’s when they started to hear the footsteps.
“At first, we thought it was our parents and we didn’t really give it much thought,” said David. But then one morning, Amy asked her mother what she was doing walking around at night. Amy’s mother gave her a blank look, “What do you mean? Your dad and I were out by 10 last night. You must have been dreaming.” David and Amy exchanged a look across the kitchen table that seemed to confirm what they were both too afraid to admit.
That night they anxiously got themselves ready for bed. There would be no talking and probably no sleeping that night. “We didn’t do a lot of late-night talking that first night,” recalls David, “and for a week, we barely slept.”
The siblings found sleep impossible as they lay in bed and listened to the sound of the faraway footsteps, footsteps that now sounded so clear and distinct that there was no doubt as to their source. “They were coming from the closet,” says David. “There was something walking around in our closet.”
David and Amy were losing too much sleep and their parents were starting to become concerned. “I was making friends at school and, because of the way the house made me feel, I wanted to be away as much as possible,” says David. David’s mother laid down the law: go to sleep at bedtime or no more hanging out with his new friends. David was too tired to do anything but prepare to confront his fear.
David didn’t tell his sister what he had planned to do that night. “I should have told her. I didn’t think she could handle it, and I guess I was right.” David and Amy got ready for bed. They waited silently as the room grew dark and quiet. Then the footsteps began. They were hard and clear like someone with heavy shoes was walking through an empty warehouse. But instead it was a tiny closet only a few feet away from their beds. After listening to the noise for a few minutes, David slowly rose from his bed. Amy saw her brother in the half-light. “David, what are you doing?” she whispered. David didn’t answer, but carefully made his way between the piles of clothes and toys on the floor toward the closet door.
Amy sat up in bed and her eyes went wide. She was about to implore her brother to stop but before she could get the words out, David froze in his tracks. Amy listened and heard what her brother had already heard. The footsteps had stopped. David turned to look at Amy and she could see the concern on his face. Amy started to pull the covers away and ease herself out of the bed. Just as her feet touched the floor, the footsteps started again this time louder and faster than ever before. Amy ran toward her brother and tripped on the mess on the floor, falling into her brother’s arms. The footsteps were getting louder and louder now. Amy looked up at her brother and saw the shock on his face as they both realized that the footsteps were coming towards the door. Whatever was walking around inside the closet was now just on the other side of the door.
For a moment David considered running as fast as he could for the safety of his parents’ bedroom. But as he struggled to help his sister to her feet in the dark, he knew he had to help her first. Before David could react, the footsteps suddenly stopped, the closet door made a clicking noise and slowly started to open.
“It happened really fast,” says David. “It seems like slow motion – the door opening and me pushing my sister behind me. I saw it walk towards me, a shadow. There weren’t any footsteps now, just this figure, black on black, kinda peacefully floating through the air toward me.”
The next morning David woke up next to his sister on the floor. The footsteps were never heard again, and for ten years they went about their lives, never talking about that night. David spent more time with his new friends but Amy was a different person. The formerly happy, outgoing child became a withdrawn, frightened teenager. After interventions and counseling had failed, Amy confessed to her brother that she was leaving for good. “I told her I would help her any way I could,” recalls David. “I don’t know why I said it, but I told her I was always going to be her big brother and I would always help her, just like I did that night when the shadow came out of the closet.” Amy stared at David in disbelief. David assumed that the young girl she had been had blocked the memory all these years so he recounted as delicately as he could what had happened that night. Amy began to cry as her brother spoke. “No, David,” she said, “I remember it, I remember it all.” Then Amy told David that when he pushed her behind him to protect her from the thing in the closet, she came face to face with the wall opposite the closet door, the wall of their bedroom with the full-length mirror.
Some stories say that monsters cast no reflection, that evil is revealed only by its absence. But some stories get it wrong. What Amy saw in the mirror was no shadow, no floating blur, but a figure cut in the regalia of Hell’s own finery, a vaguely human image of inspired despair, loss, and death. While David had always believed that some poor soul had found release that night, Amy had wondered why she and her brother had been unfortunate enough to share a closet with the King of Death himself.
Tuesday, November 30th, 2010
Michael was already regretting his decision to walk home after work: the night was cold, the fog was thick, and Michael was just beginning to realize that he wasn’t the only one out for a stroll that night.
Michael’s route home that cold, September night skirted the edge of a minor Civil War battlefield. Although the skirmish between the Union and Confederate soldiers had been a bloody, hard-fought affair, the battlefield displayed, in the present day, a peaceful calm. When he was a boy, Michael had heard stories of the battlefield, about the brave men who fought and fell generations ago, about the dead and dying who littered the field for days, and about the odd shadows and lights that tour guides and tourists would occasionally witness.
But as Michael walked along the old road that night, thoughts of the battle field were far from his mind. Instead his thoughts were turned to the coming weekend and the football game he had planned with his friends and the date he had on Saturday. Absorbed in his thoughts and plans, Michael didn’t notice the dark shadow in the fog before him.
“I heard it before I saw it,” Michael tells me. “Tap, tap, tap.” The sound was somewhere in front of him but slowly getting closer. “I figured it was an animal, like a dog or something, or maybe some late night walker like me.” Then Michael saw a figure emerge from the blank, grey slate of thick fog.
“It was just a shadow at first,” Michael recalls, “then I saw him walking towards me.” The figure in the fog was tall, maybe eight feet, and wore clothing that seemed to spread out like wings behind it. Michael watched as it got closer, growing darker and blacker, rather than more distinct.
Michael slowed his pace as his eyes struggled to focus on the figure. As it approached him, the figure continued to make a strange tapping sound on the old road. “I wasn’t sure what freaked me out more,” Michael says, “the scary shadow coming at me or the weird sound it was making.”
Michael continued through the fog, determined not to let the strange traveller unnerve him. “I squared my shoulders, started walking faster, and kept right on going.” The walking figure advanced, becoming more distinct as the fog rolled away in great drifts. As it did, Michael saw the source of the strange sound: the figure carried a cane and tapped it on the road as it walked. Fixated on the cane and its rhythmic spell, Michael only looked up as he came side by side with the figure.
“I looked up, I looked at its face,” Michael recalls, “and I couldn’t believe it.” The figure was dressed in a dusty, black suit with a long, flowing cape trailing behind. On its head it inexplicably wore an old-fashioned top hat, giving it the illusion of added height.
But the stranger’s clothes were not the reason Michael told me his chilling tale. Rather, the face of the walker froze Michael’s blood cold: sharp fangs protruding from a drooling, blood-stained mouth, a hairy snout like a wolf’s rather than a nose, and yellow bestial eyes glaring back at Michael. “It was like some sort of kid’s Halloween mask,” Michael says, “but it was real, it was alive.”
As Michael and the monster passed each other on that dark, lonely road, it seemed to Michael that the creature slightly nodded. Deeply shocked and terrified, Michael broke into a frenzied run, but not before turning his head to make sure that the monster had not done the same. But the figure was gone and only a wall of fog greeted Michael’s gaze. Close by, however, Michael could hear the tap, tap, tap of the creature’s cane and, as he was running home, thought he could hear a strange high laughter echoing through the fog.
Michael kept his tale to himself for several years until a chance encounter with a book of local tales convinced Michael to speak out. Although the area where Michael had encountered the beast was known for its Civil War history, it seems that the Native Americans had long ago encountered a creature out of their own legends in the area. This creature, known as the Walker, haunted places where great numbers of men were left to suffer and die. The old legends said the Walker was not a ghost of men, yet it fed upon them and their fear; that it looked like a great black wolf, or it swooped out of the sky on monstrous bird wings; that when it claimed a hunting ground, it could sometimes be seen patrolling its territory, measuring the ground and marking the border. Although no authority can say for sure, legends tell us that the Civil War battlefield was also the site of a mass slaughter of Native families nearly 300 years previously. If these stories are true, the Walker may have a grand feast on its table and a territory to jealously guard. Michael tells me he sometimes wonders what would have happened that night if he had stepped off the road and onto the battlefield where the Walker took his ghastly meals.
Tuesday, November 30th, 2010
Old Tim crouched in the grass at the edge of clearing, listening to the deep, heavy breathing as he considered his options. Tim’s trap consisted of a jury-rigged cage made of ropes and old pieces of the family still. It was strong enough to hold something, but not for long. The shed door was slightly ajar and the trap Tim had devised was not visible in the feeble light inside the shed. He had to decide what to do quickly, but Old Tim could only imagine what was waiting in the dark.
Feeling the courage that his hunting rifle provided, Old Tim began to quietly make his way toward the shed. The sound of the Tall Man breathing was the only thing Old Tim could hear in the sun-speckled clearing. Tim timed his footsteps to the Tall Man’s exhalations, and one slow step after another, Tim had made his way the the shed. But of course animals can smell as well as they can hear and, as Tim got within a few yards of the shed, the Tall Man sharply inhaled. Old Tim froze as a snort blasted the shed and the creature began a throaty growl.
“Old Tim had his bark on that day,” Mark tells me. As the Tall Man rattled the makeshift cage inside the shed, Old Tim quickly knocked back a large swig of moonshine from the flask in his pocket. His attempt at subterfuge thwarted, Old Tim addressed the matter directly: “Don’t be crying now, I’m coming for ya.” His rifle steady and his flask empty, Old Tim charged forward and flung the shed door wide open.
Back at the bar, Tim reached for the bottle one more time. “His hand was shaking so bad I had to take the bottle before he dropped it,” Mark remembers. After two snorts of whiskey, Old Tim described the scene inside the shed. He opened the door and a great shadow rose up higher than Tim thought possible. The hastily constructed cage was distended and broken; in a matter of moments, it would be useless. The thing that stood before Old Tim, the Tall Man, was trapped in the cage due only to the cage’s small size and the creature’s girth. As the Tall man began to struggle in earnest, Tim could see that the cage was twisted around its body and wedged firmly inside the shed. The shed’s ancient wooden frame began to buckle as Tim leveled his rifle at the hairy arms reaching through the doorway. In the sunlight Tim could see the caked blood from the deer carcass on the Tall Man’s wicked claws. He fired his rifle, and in the smoke and noise, everything exploded.
Old Tim awoke in a pile of debris that was once his old shed. The Tall Man had freed himself, and Old Tim had been buried under the shed’s remains. “Of course, I asked him if he hit the thing or not,” Mark says. Old Tim had fired point blank, but all he could remember was looking into the Tall Man’s burning red eyes. When he awoke, he heard in the distance, high up on the mountain’s peak, a terrible scream like a curse from Hell in some ancient tongue. He didn’t stick around.
In the weeks that followed, Old Tim returned to his hunting and his traps and it seemed that the Tall Man was gone. But a year later, Old Tim up and disappeared and some folks said they had seen him on the road leaving town, that Old Tim had packed up and left the mountain where his fathers were buried. No one knew why, but some said that Old Tim’s bullet had flown true that day on the mountain and the Tall Man had staggered off to die in the untraveled knolls and gullies. They say that things were peaceful for awhile until Tim’s traps began disappearing again and he knew right away that it was no bear, that it was the Tall Man returned and Old Tim, bold and ornery as he was, could devise no trap that could catch a monster’s ghost.
Source: ScaryTrue
Tuesday, November 30th, 2010
Steve loved his grandfather, and on the night the old man died, twelve-year old Steve ran away from home in his grief. What he found in the dark Ohio night was proof that not only his grandfather’s spirit lived on, but that some spirits linger on and on and on.
The night his grandfather passed away, little Steve was inconsolable, and in the confusion, he slipped out the back door and into the night. “I wasn’t really thinking about running away,” Steve says. “I just wasn’t thinking about anything except my grandpa.”
Steve found himself among the dark trees of the local woods, unaware of how lost he was. “I started to realize that I didn’t know where I was,” Steve recalls. “I wasn’t sure if it was the darkness or what, but the woods didn’t look familiar anymore.” With only a child’s flashlight to guide him, Steve pressed on through the night, hoping he would come upon some remembered landmark.
“Some of these trees were just huge,” Steve tells me. The forest that little Steve found himself wandering that night was an ancient woodland, older than any other forms of life on the continent and untouched since Europeans came to live there. Among the great stands of ash and oak, little Steve seemed a fleeting shadow.
As Steve became more aware of his surroundings, the woods became more and more terrifying. The trees took on a peculiar menace and every sound, real or imagined, sent the boy’s imagination into dark corners.
Suddenly everything went quiet and still as if the woods were holding its breath. In the distance, Steve could hear what sounded like music. He stopped and tilted his head in the direction of the sound. There was a lone pipe playing somewhere in the woods. Steve turned his head again to locate the sound, but he couldn’t tell from which direction it was coming. Just as Steve was beginning to lose it, the shrill piping ceased and the forest was silent.
Steve was getting tired and, with no idea where he was, he began looking for a place to spend the night. “After everything that had happened that day, I was just ready to fall over,” Steve remembers. Stumbling through the trees into an open clearing, Steve saw what he thought might be a good place to bed down.
“It was like a hill, but a really small hill,” Steve says. At 15 feet high and twice as wide, the hill seemed perfectly symmetrical and perfectly suited to Steve’s needs. “In hindsight, I should have realized what it was,” Steve says. “But I just thought it would keep me away from the spooky trees.”
Steve clambered to the top of the mound and laid down. As he studied the stars and moon above him, Steve drifted off to sleep. “I was dreaming about my grandpa and how we had walked these woods together,” Steve recalls. And then Steve’s dream abruptly ended and he awoke to the sound of the mysterious piping. As he rose from sleep and remembered where he was, Steve could hear a heavy drumbeat accompanying the pipe. The music was loud now and growing louder.
Steve sat up and crouched at the top of the hill. In the sparse moonlight, he could just see the edges of the clearing but little else. The music of the drums and pipe were unlike any Steve had heard before. “The drums sounded like they were huge, like war drums or something,” Steve tells me. “And the pipe was just going crazy, man.”
Steve stood his ground and waited. Soon the edge of the clearing began to blur as it filled with shadows. Steve could tell the music and its makers were out there in the dark, standing guard at the treeline. Their shadows seemed to waver and melt in the half-light, but Steve had no idea who or what faced him across the clearing.
“I thought, This is it,” Steve says. “These people have come for me.” Steve waited for the shadows to claim him, but they never came. Instead, the nighttime players clung to the treeline and as their music intensified the ground beneath Steve seemed to change. “I don’t know how to describe it, except that it just kinda melted,” Steve remembers.
The top of the mound began to slide and crumble, and Steve slid down the side to the bottom. The dirt at the top came down after him. “Like something was pushing it’s way out,” Steve recalls with a chill. Trapped between the shadows at the clearing’s edge and whatever was escaping the strange mound, all Steve could do now was watch.
At the top of the mound, a figure slowly appeared, illuminated in a strange green light. Steve couldn’t tell if it had dug its way up or had somehow materialized in the spot. It rose up and seemed to fill itself with a wavering, shadowy substance. Adorned in flowing robes, the figure was capped in an elaborate head-dress of obscure feathered and bony protrusions. Its face was a mask or an eagle or a skull, Steve couldn’t say for sure, but when it looked at him with eyes black and old and awful, Steve knew it had been in this place for a long, long time.
The figure began to make its way down the mound toward Steve. Frozen with fear, Steve couldn’t move, but the phantom merely floated by without regard. In the mound’s greenish glow Steve could see that the shadows at the clearing’s edge were somewhat similarly dressed, but not as elaborately as the former occupant of the mound. There were dozens of them, more than Steve had realized. And just as the floating phantom reached the treeline and joined the others, the music stopped and they vanished.
Left alone in the dark, Steve took off running as fast as he could through the woods, running all night until he found his way home again. Although he spoke little of his experiences to his family and friends, he did tell them about the msyterious mound in the woods. It was his uncle, a retired park ranger, who told him about the Indians who lived there long before Columbus came, about the cities they built and lost, about the strange gods they bowed before, and about the mounds they raised to bury and revere their preeminent dead. Steve tells me that he isn’t sure what he encountered that night – be it ghost or godling – but he knows now that the important things in this life are not always bound by it.
Source Scary True
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