Scary True

The Witch of Brockwayville

2012-09-15T16:03:00.000-07:00

In 1822, Alonzo Brockway stood at the head of Pennsylvania’s Little Toby Valley and looked down. He had heard rumors of the place from the old mountain men. The Iroquois, they said, had avoided the valley for centuries. The Indians feared something that stalked the dark shadows and whispered across the waters; something, it was said, that had lingered too long in this world.

Alonzo was not afraid of stories and shadows, however; he was afraid of failing, of starving, of dying in the forsaken wilderness he now called home.

In 1884, the Ridgeway and Clearfield Railway was opened in Brockwayville, Pennsylvania. The R&C Railroad connected the tiny hamlet to the sprawling Pennsylvania Railroad, and thus to the world.

On June 21, 1885, a young woman disembarked from the afternoon train at the Brockwayville depot. She was unaccompanied. When she took a room at the nearby Kirkpatrick Hotel, she gave her name as Mary Brown.

In July of the same year, nine children were born to the families of Brockwayville. All nine survived and thrived.

Mary Brown soon took up residence in an abandoned property known locally as Allen’s Farm. She had produced papers to the local magistrate, Judge Shaffer, proving her claim to the land. She was a distant Allen relative. As September exhausted summer’s heat, Mary Brown planted a garden.

In 1886, Reynolds L. Buzard began felling the valley’s timber. He built a handsome mill along the banks of the Little Toby River. The timber was sent far to the south, to Pittsburgh, but some remained in Brockwayville. In the years to come, it would build grand homes for Buzard and his partners.

Mary’s garden grew. The frost came and soon the snow. Poking through the white drifts, peas and turnips, onions and cabbage, along with clary sage, monkshood, foxglove, and yarrow.

In 1887 a cube of coal weighing over a ton was brought out of the earth just west of Brockwayville. It was subsequently displayed at the Philadelphia Exposition and later housed at the Smithsonian.

Mary Brown’s garden was laid out in a circular fashion. A lunar plot. Strips of planting beds radiated from a central pivot wherein a single vigorous rose bush bloomed in brilliant yellow.

In Brockwayville, an iron girder bridge was laid across the Little Toby Creek. The streets were paved and lighted, a new school was started, a fire brigade was formed, the telephone came.

In 1896 Norman Lane, a neighbor to Mary Brown, decided that the uncultivated land on Mary’s property would best serve the community if his dairy cows were allowed to graze there. He got Judge Shaffer to tacitly agree or at least to look the other way. After he released his cows onto Mary’s property, Lane found a single yellow rose on his doorstep. Two weeks later, half the herd was lost to sickness.

In 1897 glass was first made in Brockwayville. For the next hundred years, glass would be made and the borough’s fortunes would be governed by its fragile economy.

In 1898 a notorious drunkard named Axel Johnson assaulted a young girl behind the hardware store along Main Street in Brockwayville. Johnson’s well-connected family coerced the woman into leaving town. Two weeks later, Axel’s mother Mrs. Johnson found a yellow rose on her doorstep. She placed it in a vase with flowers she had cut from her garden and promptly forgot it.

That same year, a coal mine was opened in Crenshaw, a short ride east of Brockwayville. The first miners underground reported being overcome by a strange sensation. One described the mine as animate, a living thing whose thoughts the miners could somehow feel. The sensation passed after a few weeks and the mine's operation was brought to full capacity.

Later that year, Mrs. Johnson noticed the still-living yellow rose in a vase of dead flowers. She moved it to a glass vase next to the window in the kitchen.

Mary Brown was sometimes seen in town at the market or the hardware store. She bought little, but was always eager for news of the town and its people. Many townspeople would not talk to her. Her neighbors among the hill farms knew better. Some were happy to find a basket of beans or radishes out of season and unannounced on their doorstep, but others hung an iron horseshoe on their lintel.

In the summer of 1904, Mrs. Johnson relocated the glass vase with the yellow rose from the kitchen to the parlor. She forgot to refill the water for two weeks and, in the heat of August, the water dried up and the rose died. On September 5, 1904, Mrs. Johnson found her son Axel dead in his room.

In 1906 the Brockwayville Machine Bottle Company pressed its first bottle. It would go on to employ hundreds of local residents and become a Fortune 500 company.

Mary Brown said she was a widow but never spoke of her life before she came to Brockwayville. From time to time, men came to court Mary Brown. They were poor farmers or sons of poor farmers, and they came with more desire for her land than her affections. She amiably dispelled their illusions and sent them back down the sage-choked path.

In 1908 the Brockwayville Macaroni Company took over the old Kirkpatrick Hotel and turned it into a factory. They employed dozens of newly-arrived Italian immigrants, mostly women.

In 1909 Mary Brown took an orphan girl into her home. The girl’s name was Anne Hendrick. When the girl’s great-aunt Clara began bemoaning the child’s state around town, Judge Shaffer saw an opportunity. He intimated arresting Mary for kidnapping, corrupting public morals, indentured servitude.

In 1909, the north side of Brockwayville’s Main Street was the site of an unusual spectacle. For two weeks in October a murder of crows perched upon the uppermost cornices from dawn until dusk. They cawed and angled their heads to peer at passers-by as passers-by peered back. The day that no crows appeared with the morning was the day that the entire block was destroyed by an accidental fire.

Judge Shaffer failed to bring any charges against Mary. Anne Hendrick became Anne Brown. Mary and Anne could be seen along the backroads day or night, travelling between farms, delivering their garden’s bounty or tending to the sick and needy. Mary was widely known for her skill in healing the problems of people, animals, and crops.

In 1912 the Brockwayville Macaroni Company’s factory in the old Kirkpatrick Hotel burned to the ground. Two workers, Maria Pizzoni and Antonia Scarnati, died in the fire.

The autumn of 1912 saw a veritable plague sweep Brockwayville as the managers and owners of the Brockwayville Macaroni Company were felled by a mysterious ailment. Residents shut their doors for most of the winter. Some reported seeing strange shadows on their windows and eerie whisperings across the creek water. Dead leaves and yellow rose petals billowed silently down the empty streets.

In the spring of 1913, old Judge Shaffer and his sons went to Mary Brown’s farm. They had no warrant, they had brought no charges. What they brought with them was a lifetime of suspicion and mistrust. No witness has recorded what happened, but the Shaffers left the farmhouse and its occupants untouched. It was remarked upon by many Brockwayville residents that for the rest of his life, old Judge Shaffer kept a vase with a yellow rose on his bedside table. Some thought it marked the memory of a dalliance with Mary Brown or some sort of pact kept between them. Others wondered if it marked something like a debt or a transaction. Others simply said that something taken could never be given away.

In the decades to come, Mary Brown’s garden thrived. Brockwayville grew and prospered and her children were happy. In those days, yellow roses were sometimes spied in dimly-lit rooms, in front parlors, in locked closets, roses that never faded so long as their keepers minded their care, so long as they remembered the kind of effort it takes for something to bloom in the forsaken wilderness.

From the shadows!

2012-09-11T21:40:00.002-07:00

Behold, mortals! The return of Scary True! The inexorable approach of All Hallows' Eve revivifies the dark spirits and what was dead now lives again! Look upon this blog and despair!

Next time on Scary True: A history too terrible to reveal...until now! "The Witch of Brockwayville" rides again!

The Midnighters: Troll Bridge

2012-04-27T15:11:00.002-07:00

For over thirty years, Jerry worked as a police officer in Pittsburgh. In his time on the force, Jerry had seen some bad things, some worse things, and some downright evil things. Cleaning up when people got mad or got crazy was part of the job, but there were other things that Jerry saw, things that most people never see, things that prowl the night, things that refuse to die.

I interviewed Jerry several times in 2002. The following incident is just one of the many stories Jerry shared in hours of audio recordings. I have transcribed them just as they were told to me by Jerry.

“This happened back in the summer of ‘65. Frank and me – that’s my partner, Frank – we was doing night patrols around the Smithfield Street Bridge.

“See, that’s the oldest bridge we got here in Pittsburgh and they were doing some work on the trolleys they used to have on the bridge but every time the construction crew showed up for work in the morning, they found tools smashed and general vandalism-type stuff.

“We figure it’s a bunch of these kids – hoodlums – running around all hours, so we did the stakeout thing to catch ‘em. Only it’s a big bridge so we had to walk up and down the thing and around and under, too.

“We’re out there on the first night and we don’t see nothing. We come up from under the bridge on our rounds and there’s some of the new tracks they were putting in torn off and ripped up. Now this is metal track, right? You don’t just take it apart like that, not unless you got time and some heavy equipment, but Frank and me, we were only off the bridge for ten minutes tops.

“The next night, same thing happens, right? Nobody can figure out what’s going on and the union is starting to make waves about it. Now the only way to stop the trouble is to put like fifty guys on the bridge all night long, but the captain, he don’t want to budget that kinda overtime so he tells us, you better get on this right away and figure it out, Okay?

“So, it’s a real mystery and Frank and me, we weren’t sure what we were dealing with. But Frank, you know, he’s sure the whole freakin’ bridge is haunted, so he wants to do a seance or dredge the river for bodies or something.

“I say, ‘Frank, take it easy, there’s a top and a bottom to the bridge, so let’s split up.’ Frank agrees to give it one more try so that third night he’s down below the bridge and I’m topside at first, then we’ll switch.

“After a few hours, it’s pretty quiet and I head down to trade places with Frank. There’s a street down there under the bridge and that’s where Frank is supposed to be but he ain’t there. Now, that’s not unlike Frank at all, right? But I’m not letting my partner go off on his own.

“There some scrub and grass down there and I see Frank crouched down. He sees something, I can tell by the way he’s sitting there, so I creep up real slow beside him. He’s got his gun drawn, but he’s not pointing it at anything.

“He points off to this big flat rock under the bridge. There’s nothing there, right? I don’t know what Frank is looking for, maybe he thinks that’s where the body is buried, right?

“Finally I say, what is it, Frank? And Frank says, ‘He’s in there, inside that door.’ And I’m like, ‘Frank, maybe you been working too hard ‘cause there ain’t no door there.’

“Frank gives me a look like I’m the crazy one and I look back and, you know what? There’s a door there right where there wasn’t a door a minute ago. And it’s just standing there ‘cause there ain’t no wall around it, and it’s this big wooden thing like you’d see in a castle or something.

“I’m just trying to figure out where in the heck this thing came from when all of a sudden it opens – guess I should’ve expected a door like that was gonna open right then – and standing in the doorway is the biggest guy you ever saw.

“Now, I can’t see him real good on account of it being so dark, but he’s a mountain all right, and he’s just standing there waiting and I think he’s watching us, but then I hear this funny sound like someone got the sniffles and I think, this guy isn’t looking at us, he’s smelling us!

“He takes a step forward and there’s more light so I can see him better, and, remember now, Frank and me, we haven’t moved yet and we’re not too far from this guy, but I don’t think he sees us but he’s moving his head around like he’s listening.

“He’s big, right, and he’s got this long black hair and big long nose and his skin looks green, in fact it looks like a rock with moss on it or something, and he’s wearing some sort of crazy get-up that looks like a sack to me. And his eyes, well, his eyes were the worst part. They were like little lights, like keyholes, right, only there’s a fire on the other side of the door.

“Now, I thought this guy is gonna see us and he’s gonna beat the living heck out of us, but he just sniffs and cocks his head and he says something like, ‘I can smell you sitting there in the dark’ and I realized this guy don’t see too good.

“Frank stands up and says, you know, ‘What do you want?’ and the guy says ‘Tell them to leave my bridge alone’ and Frank doesn’t say anything at first and like the jerk I am, I said ‘You can’t have that door here, it’s against code’ and Frank and the big guy just both look at me like I passed gas.

“I admit, I’m not the brightest knife in the drawer, and I say some dumb things, but this was a real doozy. I’ll never forget how the big guy looked right at me for the first time and he says, ‘The rocks and trees are my code’ in this real creepy-like voice.

“Frank gives me an elbow in the ribs and he says, ‘Okay, Mister, we’ll take care of it’ and this guy gives a little sneer and steps back inside that door and ‘poof’ goes the door again.

“Well, Frank gives me a look like he’s gonna take me up to the bridge and throw me off, right? But I say, ‘Frank, how are you gonna take care of it?’ And for once, I think that Frank has no idea.

“Well, a few weeks later, the trolley work is done without any more trouble and the captain is pretty pleased with Frank but nobody knows how he did it. Turns out, Frank got the foreman to get a crane down there and they put that big rock on the back of a truck and, according to Frank, he drove it 100 miles north and dumped it beside the road.

“Frank told me how these types of things – he didn’t wanna say troll but I don’t care – these trolls like to be under a bridge because something about how all the people coming and going over the water, passing through this kinda in-between place like a bridge causes something like friction, which gives off an energy or something, and these trolls, they can live off of that. I don’t know myself, sounds pretty nuts to me.

“But that spot where they dumped it – that rock – was down a big steep gorge ‘cause Frank was hoping that the troll wouldn’t find its way back. Now, a few years after that and that exact spot is where they put Interstate 80 that goes across the whole state – goes from New York City to San Francisco – and they built a new bridge there, a real big one, and thousands of people cross it everyday and I bet that rock and that troll are still down there under that bridge.”

Trip, trap, trip!

2012-04-20T13:09:00.000-07:00

Next week on Scary True: Who's that tripping on my bridge? Find out in "The Midnighters: Troll Bridge!"
And check out this week's monster story, "Demon Wings."

Demon Wings

2012-04-16T09:26:00.000-07:00

In the backwoods of western Pennsylvania, there’s a little-used highway that cuts through a deserted forest. Across the highway’s cracked pavement the thickly-wooded forest casts long, sinister shadows. The forest is known as Broome’s Quarter and the road is Route 666 and both are haunted.

Jeff writes to tell me how he ended up driving Route 666 one dark September night in 1998. Jeff was a civil engineer in Altoona, Pennsylvania, and, after attending a conference up in Erie, Jeff got a little lost on the way home.

“This was before we had all the GPS stuff,” Jeff tells me. “I had a map but I don’t think I even opened it.”

Jeff was making good time, or so he thought. He steered his car down the twilit and increasingly-deserted road. “It wasn’t that late, but I was the only car out there,” Jeff recalls, “and that made me think I must be going in the wrong direction.”

Jeff decided he needed to turn around. He pulled off onto a side road, made a turn, and headed back down the road. A quarter of an hour later, Jeff realized he had made a mistake.

“I was on Route 219 or something when I turned around,” Jeff remembers, “and here comes a sign saying Route 666 East.”

Jeff has no idea how he came to be on a completely different road, a road he had never seen before. And he wasn’t put off by the ominous sign. “It’s just a number,” Jeff tells me. “I’m an engineer, so I’m not afraid of numbers.”

Jeff considered his predicament. He was lost. He was headed east and he needed to go south. There wasn’t anyone around to ask for help.

Suddenly a figure loomed up out of the dark trees and into the path of Jeff’s car. His headlights snared a young deer and it stood frozen in the road. As Jeff began to swerve his car, a shadow swept in front of his windshield and he lost sight of the road.

“I nearly stood on my brakes as this thing came in front of me,” Jeff tells me. “It all happened in a split second or faster.”

When the shadow passed, the deer was gone. Jeff’s car sat still, his tires smoking. Jeff was breathing heavily and he was surprised to feel sweat dripping from his nose.

“I just sat there stunned for a minute,” Jeff recalls. “I thought I hit the deer and it must have flown over my car or something.”

Jeff got out to check the damage to his car. The night air made Jeff shiver. “I checked the front and the sides but there was nothing there,” Jeff remembers. “Not even blood.”

Jeff thought he must have missed the deer somehow and his thoughts turned to what exactly he had seen. It seemed that something had swept down and then the deer disappeared. “Now, did something pick it up?” Jeff asks. “Did I have a guardian angel? Or did the deer?”

Jeff got back in his car and swung it around so the headlights would illuminate the spot where he had last seen the deer. There was nothing there but one of the rare highway lamp posts flickering with a dim light.

Jeff walked toward the post and scanned the road for signs of the deer. He saw the grim, silent trees and the dark cracks that snaked across the highway, but nothing of the deer.

He paused under the buzzing, orange glow of the lamp post. He thought he heard a noise like running water or cracking very close by, but couldn’t make out the direction. He saw a patch of dark liquid at his feet but couldn’t make out the color. Was it blood or oil?

Then, the bottom half of a severed deer leg landed at Jeff’s feet with a heavy, wet splat, showering Jeff’s shoes with specks of blood.

“I was in shock,” Jeff says. “I didn’t figure out where it had come from at first.”

Jeff staggered back, his mouth open in silent fear as he quickly realized that the deer leg had fallen from the lamp post, that something else was up there in the dark, too, and whatever it was, it had swooped down in front of Jeff’s car, picked up the deer, and was now dismembering it, most likely eating it.

“I guess that deer didn’t have a guardian angel,” Jeff says. “And neither did I.”

Although the lamp’s light made it difficult to discern clearly, Jeff could see a shadowy figure perched at its peak. And the sound he had heard previously, like a wet crunch, was definitely coming from up there, too.

Jeff walked backwards toward his car. The figure on the lamp post moved little, seemingly taking little notice of Jeff.

“I got to my car – fumbled with the door – not taking my eyes off that thing,” Jeff recalls. “But I finally got a good look before I left.”

As Jeff started to turn his car around, it seemed the thing on the lamp post became aware of his presence. Jeff saw the shadow sit upright. “I thought it heard the car or something,” Jeff says, “but I think it realized it had dropped that leg.”

The shadow leaned down and Jeff thought it looked like it was studying the ground with some sense possibly other than sight. Suddenly it fell to the ground right on top of the deer leg.

“It looked like a big black garbage bag at first,” Jeff remembers. “But those were just the wings.”

The body was smaller than Jeff expected: it was child-size, but wiry and muscular, with greyish mottled skin like an old tree. It was human-like, in that it had a head and two arms and two legs, but its arms ended in something more like scissors than fingers and its legs bent backward at an sickening angle and the head was a black stump divided by a teeth-filled maw.

And the great black wings that hovered above and enclosed the creature like a cocoon swayed and quivered in what Jeff could only surmise was a kind of pleasure.

“I couldn’t make sense of it,” Jeff says. “And I was strangely ashamed that I couldn’t make sense of it.”

The creature continued its meal and two pale grey disks watched as Jeff drove away. It wasn’t until years later that Jeff would come across the legend of Mother Meade and the monsters she left to wander in Broome’s Quarter. It was only then that Jeff contacted me. It was the first time he told anyone about his mysterious encounter with one of Mother Meade’s monstrous children, about the night he came under the shadow of demon wings.

“I don’t know what they are or where they came from,” Jeff tells me. “All I know is that I don’t want to run into one of them ever again.”

Read more about Mother Meade's monster children here.

In the sky!

2012-04-13T13:25:00.000-07:00

Next week on Scary True: What's that in the sky? A giant bat? A Mothman? Whatever it is, it rides on "Demon Wings!"
And check out this week's story, "The History of a Bottomless Pit."

The History of a Bottomless Pit

2012-04-09T09:16:00.001-07:00

When presented with evidence of the supernatural, we often find it blurry, anecdotal, or wholly lacking. But, then again, supernatural things are, by their very nature, shadowy and elusive. How then do we follow the history of things that appear so ephemeral, so detached from the physical traces of reality? Where should we begin?

From the March 18th, 2003 edition of The Western Star Dispatch, a weekly newspaper covering eastern Iowa.

“Somerville might be in a celebratory mood next summer if local business owners get their way. The Somerville town council is set to vote tonight on whether to authorize a new holiday based on the local attraction, the Mystery Hole. The Hole, reported by locals to be bottomless, has become a kind of tourist destination after being featured on the national radio program, The Midnight Hour.”

From the October 2nd, 2001 broadcast of The Midnight Hour, a weekly syndicated radio show focusing on paranormal topics. The show’s host, Phil Bart, interviewed a man named Lyle who claimed to know the location of a bottomless pit.

“Phil: Well, I’ve got Lyle on the line. Lyle has faxed us some information regarding a mysterious hole. Lyle from Iowa, you’re on The Hour.

Lyle: Hi, Phil. How ya doing?

Phil: Hey, Lyle. Now, I understand you have a weird hole on your property, is that right?

Lyle: Well, it ain’t exactly my property –

Phil: Oh, well, not exactly, right?

Lyle: – but it is a mysterious hole.

Phil: Now, tell us how you found this hole.

Lyle: Well, it’s always been out there. Everybody out here knows about it.

Phil: And you say that you dump stuff – junk and garbage – out there in the hole. You just throw it in?

Lyle: Yeah, everybody in these parts takes their junk out there and pitches it in. Been doing that for forty years now.

Phil: Now, you say you measured the hole?

Lyle: Well, I didn’t exactly measure –

Phil: Right, you put some line down there? Some fishing line?

Lyle: It’s the kind you use for sharks. My buddy lent me some.

Phil: You get a lot of sharks out there in Iowa, do you?

Lyle: Ha, ha. Not so much, Phil. My buddy used to live in Washington state and do some fishing there.

Phil: Ok, so how much line went down this hole?

Lyle: Well, near as I figure it, these lines come in spools of 5,000 feet, and I’ve gone through about fifteen of ‘em.

Phil: Wait, let’s do that math...

Lyle: It’s got to be a lot of miles...

Phil: That’s fifteen miles, I think.

Lyle: That’s pretty deep.

Phil: Yeah, I’d say that’s pretty deep.

Lyle: Sure is.

Phil: And everybody out there knows about it all this time? Like a local legend?

Lyle: Oh, yeah. And there’s the story of the guy who threw his dead dog down there...

Phil: Oh, really?

Lyle: Yeah, it died so he threw it down the hole.

Phil: Oh, really? What happened?

Lyle: Well, it came back. He said he was out hunting and he swears he seen his dog alive again.

Phil: There you have it folks. Bottomless hole resurrects the dead. Or turns them into zombies, at least.”

From a June 1st, 2010 post on Question the Answer, a blog that takes a critical and informed look at paranormal phenomena.

“When we talk about this sort of experience are we talking about entities that were once alive but are now dead? Or are we talking about a problem with time in the sense that entities from the past (or future?) are showing up in our time? Or are they, following Burke and his research, the result of what we might call cosmic accidents or quantum quirks, events that make something that is impossible suddenly possible.

There is little to base a theory on but let’s take a look at a relatively recent sighting in the US. A credible witness encounters a canine that, for all intents and purposes, is a ghost. It is a Black Dog of fabled British lore, the phantom creature that presages death and doom. But what do we make of it when it shows up among the cornfields of Iowa? Are we going to classify this as a ghostly encounter? The spirit of a dog returned? Or are we dealing with something else? Is there a connection to the vestigial rituals, as detailed by Holman, practiced by Iowa farmers?”

From “The Sacrifice of Land: Pre-Christian Practices in 20th-Century American Agriculture” published in the journal Anthropological Frontiers in 1988 by Dr. Franklin Holman.

“The most striking hints of a so-called non-Christian tradition come from the scant yet provocative evidence collected by Reinhart et al. in eastern Iowa. The anecdotal history suggests an offering of agricultural output ensured the next year’s crop in a familiar cycle of sacrifice and rebirth. Specifically in Iowa, this was accomplished annually by allowing bushels of corn to be thrown down an ominous hole that existed in the middle of the fields. This hole was said to be the abode of a creature or god, sacred to the Otoe natives, who had been displaced by European settlers and, like the Indians themselves, had to be managed in some way.”

From Logos, USA, an essay by the French philosopher Henri Benoit, published in the January 1992 issue of Riot Magazine.

“What can we offer to the pit? The pit is the center – must be the center – everything else must eventually end up inside. But what does not belong in the pit? What does not fill the pit? Is it nothing or everything that the pit lacks? The bottomless can only be filled with itself, but it does not know this, so it will not be filled. It is a chain of reference without end. The Americans swarmed this continent, utterly consuming the frontier, and they managed to erect the most magnificent, the most expensive culture in history: it cannot be filled, it has nothing but desire, it is a celestial Vegas light show, it is a black pit of formless nothing.”

From The Black Pit of Formless Nothing, a semi-legendary text reputed to be a lost book of Atlantis or the diary of a fallen Lucifer. Although most experts agree it was written in America in the mid-18th century, the author remains a mystery. A fragment of the text became the focus of a failed cult in the 1870s.

“All is formless and empty, not touched with hands, not beheld with eyes. The Pit calls to us and the Pit waits for us. We will live forever and forever in the Pit because the Pit is forever and forever. It will swallow what it cannot love. The White Man will go down with the Red Man to the infinite place of eternal rest. There the great gods slumber and dream of our faces, while the Pit’s keeper watches in silence.”

From “The Great Fire’s Legacy,” an article in the August 16th, 1883 edition of the Chicago Tribune.

“After the Great Fire left him destitute, Mr. Jeffrey, like many others, fled the city for the bucolic pursuits of the countryside. He settled among the fertile fields of Iowa and established himself in the farming business as the seasons dictated. Mr. Jeffreys was first made aware of the secret groupings during the harvest of 1874. ‘They was trying to get us to go to a meeting,’ Mr. Jeffreys reports. ‘I thought the fella was a union-man.’ Before he met a preacher and his soul was saved, Jeffreys spent four unspeakable years as an adept in the Ancient Order of the Unending Pit.”

From The Ballad of the Black Prairie, a western folk song thought to had been composed around 1830 but first published in 1850.

“Follow me not to the prairie, my love,

where my bones can never be found

where my spirit, where my spirit

walks deep under ground.

Follow me not to the prairie, my love,

for the devil that rides as the wind blows

will drag you under, will drag you under

where the prairie grass grows.

Follow me not to the prairie, my love,

for all of my grief and all my regrets,

cannot make a home, cannot make a home

where the western sun sets.”

From West Sets the Sun, a compilation of pioneer stories published in 1914.

“We crossed the big river in May of 1845. Little Hiram was terribly affright on account of the fierce storm clouds but Mother held him close. As the wagons came up on the Great Desert, we saw a lone figure silhouetted ‘gainst the sky. ‘An Indian,’ said Father and he and some men went to treat with him. Father returned in an agitated state but related that he had come to some kind of agreement with a very peculiar Indian. Father would tell us no more about the Indian or the bargain they had made. That night, the animals were terribly skittish, and we laid in the wagon as we listened to strange screams and moaning in the distance. Father said it was just a coyote, but I saw a set of glowing eyes – red like the fires of Hell – watching the wagon from the darkness.”

From The Life and Death of Red Coyote, an Indian, a biography of a Sioux warrior written by Chester Peterson and published in 1851.

“When the son of Two Eagles came to my village, many were afraid of the story he told us. His father was desperate and had gone hunting in the Black Land. Alone among the warriors of the village, I was not afraid to go with him to the Black Land. We made the hard journey, but we were too late to save Two Eagles. He had tamed the Black Land by giving himself to the Great Spirit of the Pit. He had gone down and he had died and then he came back.”

From Before the World: Archaic Myths of America, a linguistic reconstruction of what are thought to be the earliest American Indian myths published in 2010.

“When Agochook, the Great Spirit, returned to the Third World, he saw that his passing had left a great hole and that the hole had no place to begin and no place to end. So, Agochook, the Great Spirit, took one corner of the world in one hand and took another corner in his other hand and he picked up the world and twisted it until the hole began at the beginning and ended at the end. And Agochook, the Great Spirit, saw that the hole was in the center of the world and that parts of the world were now falling into the hole. Birds and rocks and trees fell into the hole and, as they did, the hole began to contain the world, and Agochook, the Great Spirit, saw that after everything in the world had fallen into the hole, then the hole would be the world and he was pleased.”

There is no end!

2012-04-06T10:35:00.001-07:00

Next week on Scary True: Beneath the cornfields of Iowa, the history of horror is waiting! Come down and read "The History of a Bottomless Pit."
And check out this week's ghost story, "The Haunted Bathroom of Blood-Red Death."

The Haunted Bathroom of Blood-Red Death

2012-04-02T08:14:00.000-07:00

The following documents were sent to me anonymously and without comment. Over the past few months, I have debated the merits of publishing them. Ultimately, I decided that the document’s unnamed victim would want this story published as a kind of memorial to her grisly fate.

The bathroom of blood!

2012-03-30T11:20:00.000-07:00

Next week on Scary True: On the 3rd floor, in the 3rd stall, a ghost is waiting. Visit "The Haunted Bathroom of Blood-Red Death!"
And check out this week's Bigfoot story, "The Big Gray Man."

The Big Gray Man

2012-03-26T09:03:00.000-07:00

Most people would agree that there exists a clear boundary between the ordinary and the extraordinary, the everyday world and the realm of magic and monsters. As much we may want to rush out and cross that border, we find we must wait until it somehow overtakes us. Sometimes, however, the border between the natural and the supernatural is shrouded in shadow and fog.

John is an avid outdoorsman and hiker. In the early summer of 1995, he set out for a hike up New Hampshire’s Mount Washington, the tallest peak in the northeast. John had made the hike many times in the past, but he had no idea that this would be the last time he would ever set foot on the mountain.

“Washington is a rugged hike but that’s not really where the danger is,” John explains. “The weather can turn on you without any warning.”

Many hikers, unprepared for freezing temperatures in the middle of summer, have succumbed to hypothermia. And the mountain’s strong winds, some of the highest ever recorded, have been known to simply push the unwary off the slopes and to their doom.

But John had been up the slope before and knew what to expect. Rain, wind, and fog weren’t so much a function of the weather as they were natural features of the mountain.

“You have to respect the mountain,” John tells me. “Or it might just shove you off.”

John started up the slope in bright spring weather. Quickly, however, the mountain showed its true colors and the fog and mist closed in.

“I was making good time. I was getting close to the summit,” John recalls, “when I saw another hiker ahead.”

The fog obscured his features, but John could see the outline of another hiker on the path above him. He appeared to be standing still, possibly resting. John figured he would have some company up the slope.

But, as John looked up from the uneven terrain, the hiker was gone. “At that elevation, there aren’t trees and not many shrubs,” John tells me. “There just wasn’t any place to go.”

John reached the spot where he had seen the fellow hiker but saw no sign of life. He looked past the rocks and grass to the dizzy void of mist. John was alone.

He continued his ascent. In the rigid stillness of the mountain, John forgot about the strange figure. Then he heard the footsteps.

“I was walking and I realized I was hearing someone else walking, too,” John remembers. “They were taking a step every time I took a step and stopping when I did.”

It seemed that someone was shadowing John’s footsteps. Every step of John’s was echoed by another that seemed to follow behind him.

John stopped to survey the slope. Down the mountain, the fog hung thickly. Nothing stirred among the scrub and boulders.

Then, at the corner of John’s vision, a figure suddenly moved, sprinting from a large rock. When John looked in that direction, however, he saw nothing.

“The glimpse of it I got,” John recalls, “was something big and gray and ... well, hairy, I guess, like an ape.”

John shook off the fear that had begun to close around him. He knew that hikers had sometimes had strange experiences when the weather turned or they had overexerted themselves. The brain had lots of tricks and it liked to play them.

John remembered the shadows he had jumped at and the strange nighttime howls he had heard when he hiked part of the Appalachian Trail. Most hard-core hikers had stories like that to tell, stories about the strange things one only saw alone in the wilderness.

John played over in his mind the events of those far-off days when he was a much stronger hiker and he could go all day without rest. John heard a crunch directly behind him.

He turned so quickly he nearly lost his balance and fell. There was nothing behind him but a wall of fog. If he had fallen, would he have been swallowed up inside it?

A quick decision and John decided he was going to make the summit; there was plenty of daytime left and only his fear to face there.

John climbed and, as he did, he heard a distant coughing howl followed by menacing laughter that seemed to originate right in front of him.

In the fog to his side, a hairy figure sidled up the slope. “I knew if I looked, it would just disappear or hide or whatever,” John recalls. “So, I just kept going. I think it wanted me to stop and look.”

John was convinced that he was in a struggle, if not for his life, then for his self-respect. The only way to win was to reach the top. The howls and laughter followed him the rest of the way up.

“There it was, the summit, right in front of me,” John tells me. “And there it was, too. That damn thing was right there.”

There at the top of Mt. Washington, in the eddies of soupy fog, stood a man-like figure ten feet tall, eyes alight in angry red. Although its gaunt frame was covered in dirty hair and almost lost in the mist, its regal stance seemed suited more to a gray king than a shaggy beast.

John stopped and waited; he was too exhausted now to resist whatever was about to happen. He doubled over to rest his arms on his knees and, when he looked up, he was alone. The big gray man was gone.

“I had won the fight,” John tells me. “Or at least that’s what I thought.”

John rested at Washington’s summit before the journey down. He looked out across the fog and contemplated what he had been witness to. Had it been a living creature or his own mind he had bested? Then the laughter returned.

It dawned on John that he had misread the situation on the mountain. Maybe the figure he had seen was not an animal, not an apparition, not his imagination. Maybe it was a trap.

“As I was went as fast as I could down the mountain, I was turning it all over in my mind,” John remembers. “It wasn’t a monster following me, it was the fog all around me!”

John believes that the thick fog that smothers Mt. Washington is alive with some kind of intelligence, some malevolent force with the ability to produce auditory and visual phantoms. Is it powerful enough to lure hikers close to precarious cliffs? Is it strong enough to push them off?

Before Mt. Washington was Mt. Washington, Native Americans called it Agiocochook, the Home of the Great Spirit. The harsh weather that constantly pounds the range was taken as a sign that this was a place where gods and spirits walked; humans were not welcome and, if they ignored the warning, they came at their peril.

Big and gray and scary all over!

2012-03-23T07:41:00.000-07:00

Next week on Scary True: At the peak of New Hampshire's Mount Washington, a strange creature slips through fog and mist, stalking unwary hikers! Is it Bigfoot? Is it a ghost? What is "The Big Gray Man?"
And check out this week's monster story, "It Came From Below."

It Came From Below

2012-03-19T09:51:00.002-07:00

Deep below the earth’s surface, dark secrets lie hidden and waiting. When the time is right, they find their way up, burrowing through rock and dirt and bursting into stark sunlight. Is it luck that anyone at all is there to witness the terrible moment? For one young man, simply being a bystander to long-buried mysteries was frightening enough.

About two years ago, Roberto worked as a software engineer just south of Phoenix, Arizona. “I’m kind of a code monkey,” he tells me.

The company he worked for had just moved into a state-of-the-art office complex in a technology development corridor. “Pretty much they laid down some road and water pipes out in the desert,” Roberto tells me, “and we put a building out there.”

Roberto’s company flourished in the desert. Construction started on more office buildings, grass and shrubs were trucked in, sprinklers chugged and sprayed at twilight. The desert blossomed with high-tech industry.

“They were really tearing things up out there,” Roberto recalls. “Everyday they were pushing deeper into the desert. They even found a huge cave system out there.”

Not far from Roberto’s office, a significant speleological discovery was made. While building a new road, a chance rock slide uncovered an previously unknown cave system. A subsequent geological survey determined that it was very extensive and had never before been open to the surface.

“I guess it was like a giant Tupperware container – all sealed up,” Roberto says, “and now it was open.”

One day in early December, Roberto snuck out for a cigarette to one of his office’s many landscaped terraces. “They’re all these weird little balconies and patios,” Roberto remembers. “No one uses them except for a smoke.”

While Roberto smoked, he turned over in his mind the tasks he still had to complete that Friday afternoon. He watched as a bird picked it’s way among the rocks in a dry creek bed that ran behind the office. The bed was blazing in the sun, the only shade being under a small bridge.

As the bird approached this respite, it suddenly screeched and Roberto saw it disappear in fit of feathers and claws. “Crazy as it sounds, what it looked like was a white alligator jumped up and ate the bird,” Roberto explains.

Roberto was at a loss to understand what he had just seen. Nothing stirred among the bleached rocks in the creek bed. Roberto went back inside and did what he always did in these situations. “I googled the hell out of it,” Roberto tells me.

What at first looked mostly like an alligator was, Roberto determined, the claw of something like a lobster or crayfish, or rather, a very large, white one. “It mostly looked like the pics of crayfish that live in caves and are all white,” Roberto says. “Except, of course, for the size of it.”

Roberto estimates that, based on the size of the bird, the claw that grabbed it must have been two or three feet long.

Although most people would be reluctant to come face to face with such a monster, Roberto was not among them. “I was freakin’ excited,” Roberto remembers. “I got my guys together and we got some gear. We were gonna put that thing up on YouTube.”

The next day was Saturday and two of Roberto’s friends met him that afternoon in the office building’s sprawling parking lot. They had spelunking ropes and cameras and rock-climbing gloves and cameras and flashlights and helmets with cameras.

“My one friend, Matt, brought a harpoon,” Roberto tells me. “I said, ‘Dude, why do you even own a harpoon?’”

The three friends descended into the creek bed, the rattle of their equipment the only sound under the unblinking sun. For several hours, they explored the length of the creek bed. The rocks were silent and undisturbed; the tunnel under the bridge was dark and deserted.

‘“The only thing we found was this weird white stuff,” Roberto recalls. “We thought it was plastic until we looked it up on my phone.”

Roberto and his friends suspected they had found the remains of a large invertebrate’s moulting process, specifically a piece of discarded exoskeleton. As night fell, the satisfied friends returned to their cars only to find more evidence waiting for them.

“My friends’ cars were busted up,” Roberto recalls. “Tires slashed, fenders bent – it was pretty bad.” At first, they suspected vandals, but it was hard to imagine who would travel so far for so little.

Then they noticed that all the damage was on the bottom half of the cars; the windows were suspiciously intact. “It looked like something short and strong went apeshit on it,” Roberto tells me.

Roberto and his friends felt deflated; all the time they had spent in the creek bed and the creature they were hunting had been here. In the far darkness between the parking lot lights, they heard a distant scuttling, like the clacking of claws on pavement. Then, they felt afraid.

Roberto and his friends piled into the one car with intact tires and left, never to return to hunt the strange beast. “That was definitely enough for me,” Roberto recalls. “I didn’t really need to be a YouTube star.”

For the next few months, Roberto’s colleagues were warned not to use the parking lot at night alone in fear of wandering vandals. The exoskeleton sample that Roberto had collected rapidly deteriorated. And in December, a flash flood washed and cleaned the creek bed.

“Nobody saw anything after that,” Roberto recalls. “It was all over.”

Roberto speculates that the cave system, closed off for thousands of years, had produced a monstrous version of a cave crustacean. Exploring our world at night, it had inadvertently been trapped when the sun rose and either died on the surface or found its way home. We are left to wonder what sorts of creatures a giant crayfish would prey upon or what kind of monster it might be prey for.

A few months after Roberto told me his story, he contacted me again to report what he thinks may be evidence of the creature’s return.

“So, they just finished this office down the road,” Roberto writes. “A guy who works there swears he saw something weird in the underground parking garage. He said it looked like a white alligator!”

Sub-horror!

2012-03-16T07:32:00.000-07:00

Next week on Scary True: What terrifyingly bizarre horrors lurk in the vast, deep darknesses of America's office parks? Where did it come from? "It Came From Below!"
And check out this week's faerie story, "What Jenny Saw."

What Jenny Saw

2012-03-12T06:50:00.000-07:00

Belief in the supernatural is usually based on one strange, unexplained encounter – a single event that changes a life forever. One glimpse into the world of the paranormal can leave many searching their whole lives for another; for some, however, the glimpse becomes a stare that cannot be averted.

Jenny has been an EMT in Polk County, Arkansas for over fifteen years. In that time, she has seen enough emergencies to fill a hospital many times over. Of all the things she has seen, it was a call about a woman in labor that turned out to the most terrifying of all.

“It was at the end of a long night when the call came in,” Jenny tells me. “Couple’s car broke down and the lady’s in labor.” Jenny and her partner, Dale, fired up the ambulance and sped down the old country roads with sirens wailing and lights blazing.

The dispatcher directed them north towards the sprawling Ouachita National Forest. “Those roads were only used if you was heading up to the park,” Jenny tells me. “And it was pretty late in the day to go out for camping.”

Dale guided the old ambulance down paved roads and then dirt roads until the headlights picked out a car by the side of the road. A figure stood beside it.

“So, the husband was outside waiting for us, smoking a cigarette,” Jenny recalls, “while his wife was in the car in labor, huffing and puffing.”

The man explained that they were out for a drive when his wife went into labor. Jenny registered the story’s holes, but the only thing that mattered was the care of her charge. She approached the car.

“Well, when I first laid eyes on her,” Jenny remembers, “I had a bit of a shock.”

The backseat where the woman lay was dark, but Jenny could see her eyes like two silver plates. She was thin as smoke but had a robust glow and her hair, white as lightning, spread out behind her face. “Help me,” she said to Jenny.

Jenny turned to the man and rechecked his appearance: he seemed normal, very much so. This woman in the backseat, however, gave Jenny a strange feeling, a mix of unearthly alarm and powerful serenity.

Dale gave Jenny a nudge and her reverie fled. They got to work. “It was kind of a blur after that,” Jenny tells me. “There are a few things I remember, but not a lot.”

The birth was long but the woman never complained; she never even screamed. Jenny asked where the couple was headed, but the mother only mentioned something vague about her father’s home in the mountains. “If they were heading into the woods, there’s no one living up there,” Jenny says. “There’s places up there with no trails, no people at all for hundreds of years.”

Jenny remembers the baby in it’s mother’s arms, but she can’t recall what it looked like or even its sex. What sticks out in Jenny’s memory the most, however, is the child’s eyes and how they got that way.

“The mother took this jar out of her pocket.” Jenny recalls. “I thought it was a rock at first.” The mother opened the jar and, using her fingers, rubbed the green ointment within into the eyes of her newborn.

“That baby looked all around after that and its eyes were just shining,” Jenny remembers. “That’s all I remember about it: those eyes.”

The next thing Jenny remembers is the couple getting into the car and driving away. But before they did, the mother touched Jenny’s hand and thanked her.

“That’s when it got weird. They just drove off with the baby,” Jenny tells me. “They should’ve gone with us to the hospital, but we didn’t even try to stop them.”

On the ride back, Dale and Jenny discussed the strange night’s events with growing unease. They didn’t remember much of what happened, but most of all they didn’t understand what had compelled them to ignore all their years of training.

When they returned to the garage, they called the dispatcher to get the details of the call. “Well, the dispatcher said we were crazy,” Jenny recalls, “and there wasn’t any call about a couple that night.”

Jenny and Dale did not know what to do except call it a night and hope they could figure it out in the morning. As they parted, Jenny suddenly clutched her left eye and screamed in pain.

“I was pretty exhausted and I guess I rubbed my eye,” Jenny says. “Well, when that lady touched me, I think she got some of that green goo on my hand and now I had it in my eye.”

A rinse under the sink took the pain away. Dale reluctantly let Jenny go home where she fell into a deep sleep.

The next morning seemed to come suddenly and Jenny awoke to a glorious sunny day. “The birds were chirping away and the sky was so blue and bright,” Jenny remembers, “and there were a lot of butterflies.”

As Jenny drove to work, she was astonished to see the air filled with all manner of insect. While she waited at a red light, a large locust fluttered by the window. “I thought it was my mind playing tricks,” Jenny says, “but I could’ve sworn it had a head and arms like a person and its legs were a bug’s.”

When Jenny got to work, she tried to talk to Dale about the previous night. To her surprise, Dale claimed no memory of the events Jenny described. “I thought I was going crazy,” Jenny tells me, “and things only got worse after that.”

Jenny and Dale headed out on their first call. Passing a large field, Jenny noticed a strange figure walking by the side of the road. “As we came up, I thought he needed help,” Jenny recalls. “I told Dale to slow down.”

Dale gave Jenny a puzzled look and pressed on the brake. As they came alongside the figure, Jenny saw the back of a man wearing a large, dusty black coat and a matching wide-brimmed hat. “And he was, oh, about ten feet tall,” Jenny adds.

Jenny told Dale to keep driving and, as they passed the man, Jenny saw his black eyes set in a chalky face, long jagged nose, and the tusk-like teeth jutting from his jaw. Jenny could tell that Dale had not seen what she had seen.

“It was just a tough day is all I can say,” Jenny tells me. “But I had to do my job while I thought I was going nuts.”

During her lunch break, Jenny went to a friend’s house for some comfort and advice. Jenny’s friend quickly led her out to the back deck so they could take in the sun but before she could even sit down, Jenny got up to leave.

“I looked out to her garden and I saw the weirdest thing,” Jenny recalls. Swarming over the grass and flowers were hundreds if not thousands of tiny red cones. They jostled and twisted, thronging like ants, and then Jenny realized that they were tiny red hats worn by tiny men, busily going about their unfathomable business. The sight made Jenny feel sick to her stomach.

Jenny called Dale. She told him she was sick and was going home early. She had one last stop, however, at the local Wal-Mart. “I had to get the cat some food,” Jenny tells me. “I thought it would be safe.”

Jenny kept her eyes on the tiled floor as she made her way through the light crowd of afternoon shoppers to the pet food aisle. In her haste, she had forgotten a cart, so she filled her arms with cat food cans and headed for the checkout.

“I was walking along with my head kinda down, looking at the floor,” Jenny remembers, “and that’s the only reason I even saw him.”

As Jenny took a shortcut down the shampoo aisle, she passed a curious set of feet. They appeared to be very large goat hooves and they were sticking out of a pair of tan slacks.

“I made it to the next aisle,” Jenny tells me, “before I choked and dropped all those damn cans.” As she bent over to pick them up, she noticed a fellow shopper kneeling to help. His face was lean and sharp and his hair was pulled back in a long ponytail. His eyes were like silvery pools, not unlike the eyes of the stranded mother and her unnatural child. He wore a blue collared shirt and tan slacks. His smile was so wide it threatened to slice his face in half. It was the goat-footed shopper and he stared with keen interest at Jenny.

“You can see me?” he said to Jenny. She nodded. He licked his lips with a long pink tongue, and then he said, “Let me ask you, do you see me with with both your eyes or is it just with one?” Although she felt the gathering danger, something about his eyes made Jenny answer against her will. “Just the left eye,” she told him.

Jenny saw a flash of teeth and then an unbearable pain closed around her left eye. The goat-footed shopper had vanished and Jenny lost consciousness from the pain.

“I woke up in the hospital,” Jenny tells me. “They said I had some kind of mini-stroke, but I know what happened.”

Jenny contends that her extraordinary sight, the sight she had gained from her encounter with the strange couple, had been forcefully removed by the goat-footed Wal-Mart shopper. It had been something she was, perhaps, never meant to have. In the end, the gift of seeing what did not want to be seen cost her the normal use of her left eye.

“In a way, I’m almost glad I don’t have to see those things anymore,” Jenny says. “I see enough bad things in my job that I don’t need the monsters, too.”

What did she see?

2012-03-09T08:19:00.000-08:00

Next week on Scary True: A chance encounter with the unknown leaves one woman with the power to see the hidden world! Find out what happens when the unseen don't want to be seen. Come and see "What Jenny Saw."
And check out this week's ghost story, "Ghost Hunter: The Ghost That Grew."

Ghost Hunter: The Ghost That Grew

2012-03-05T11:57:00.000-08:00

Gail is a ghost hunter. I have known her for a long time, longer than her career as a ghost hunter, and, after years of begging, she has agreed to publish the details of one of her most terrifying cases. We welcome Gail the Ghost Hunter to Scary True.

“The first time I set eyes on the Hooper house was June of 1982. I had never seen such a forlorn, hopeless-looking house, and I have seen some very bad houses in my days, some very mean houses. The Hooper house was a house of despair.

“The history goes that it was built in the 1870s in northeastern Connecticut. By 1915, a young farmer named Clayton Hooper was living there with his wife, Catherine. I don’t know whether Hooper bought or inherited the house because some of those records are missing.

“The Hoopers started a family. In total, they had four children. The last child, a girl, died within a year of her birth, and it seems that Mrs. Hooper lost herself to grief. After the surviving children grew up and moved away, Clayton and Catherine lived in the house until their deaths in the 1950s.

“The house sat empty for many years. That part of Connecticut was not faring well economically, and no one who lived in those parts could afford it. Finally, in the late 1970s, it was sold to a couple up from New York.

“This couple, David and Rachel, wanted to leave the city and settle down in the country, raise a family. They planned on fixing the place up. They were nice folks, but they didn’t know what they had bought.

“I first got the phone call from Rachel after she had heard me on a show about ghosts that a local radio station out of Massachusetts had done. As soon as we began talking, I could tell that there was something extraordinary about this case.

“Her husband, David, spent the weekdays in the city while she looked after the renovations. There had been some strange sounds – footsteps mostly – but Rachel wasn’t bothered by it at all until she started to hear the crying.

“Now, you can get a lot of different manifestations in a haunting, but in my experience, crying is very rare. There was a room – it was going to be a home office – where a lot of the trouble took place.

“Like I said, it was June of ‘82 when I went up to see the house. Rachel invited me in and I immediately felt her warmth and her heart. David wasn’t home.

“I’ve studied ghosts for many years, but I’ve experienced them my whole life. I can sense when they’re around, and I can feel a bit of what they feel. Some folks call me a psychic.

“Rachel took me up to that room, and I knew right away what was there. I didn’t want to scare her because it’s sad, you know? It was that baby, the Hooper baby, and it was still up in that room. I think that room must have been the nursery and that must have been where that baby died.

“I sat Rachel down and I told her about the research I had done on the house and the bad things that had happened there. She wasn’t surprised; she must’ve known from the crying. But she surprised me when she told me that it wasn’t the baby ghost that bothered her, it was the other one.

“She showed me her back. There were four long deep scratches. She said it had happened just before she called me. She was a little embarrassed by it, and didn’t want to tell over the phone. She was moving some boxes in the office and something attacked her, threw her across the room.

“Well, that is not the action of a ghost; that is an inhuman entity, a demon. I thought that was why I didn’t sense more than one ghost; a demon doesn’t register like a ghost does, it comes across on a different kind of spiritual frequency, so to speak.

“We spent the rest of the afternoon preparing ourselves for a cleansing. It’s like an exorcism for the house. I planned on making contact with the entity and confronting it. Usually, calling out a ghost can be enough to send it on its way.

“We opened up all the windows, we salted the doors, we started burning the sage. We started on the ground floor smudging the sage smoke into every room and then we went upstairs. We worked the smoke into every nook and cranny we could find. We had the one last room to cleanse.

“It was cold in the old nursery, bone-chilling cold. As soon we stepped through the door, the whole room seemed to darken and lengthen, like it was growing and swelling with the darkness.

“I took the smoke all around the room and I called down the powers that look after me. Rachel and me could hear the crying start softly in the corner and all the time I was talking, it grew louder and louder. Soon it was just wailing and wailing at us.

“I told that demon it needed to leave. I felt so bad for that little baby, but it didn’t seem like the demon was really responding at all. Usually, at this point, we’d get an entity lashing out at us with noises or psychokinetic activity or even physical attacks.

“The crying was starting to get to Rachel and she shouted back, ‘Please, please stop.’ Now, that seemed to change something, like the ghost recognized something in her voice and the crying starts to fade away.

“But as it did, we experienced a manifestation. The room got so dark you couldn’t see the walls anymore and it seemed like the room was very big, like a ballroom. There was a noise like something coming across the floor, and we could see something coming, something moving like a shadow from very far away, impossibly far away.

“It was a baby, or at least, it looked like a baby. It was pale and it seemed to shine in the dark. It had these black streaks all over it, like oil or something, mostly coming out of its eyes. And as it moved and got closer, it changed, it grew. It was crawling and then it was walking and then it was running. It just kept getting bigger and bigger, closer and closer.

“It was like the room became a tunnel and the tunnel stretched out to somewhere beyond the house, beyond our world. At one end of the tunnel was the baby and at the other end was something that it had become, something it had had grown into.

“Now, I don’t know what the spirit world is like, but I figure there’s no reason that time works the same there as it does in our world. I think what we saw was the time that this particular ghost moved through; all of it, all at once.

“It seemed like it was very close to us now and it certainly was not a baby now. It was truly gigantic, like a giant shadow, and it was barreling down the tunnel at us and it was just full of fear and hate.

“Rachel spoke again and she said, ‘Please be a good baby,’ and this thing, it started to cry again. Then I think I knew what had happened. You see, a baby is like a sponge, it absorbs everything around it in order to grow. In fact, it can’t do anything but learn and grow, and this baby, when it crossed over, was fixed on growing. It didn’t know anything else.

“This ghost had grown up, it had become something else, something spiteful. There never was a demon, it was just the baby all along.

“Rachel, bless her heart, she knew what to do better than I did. She said, ‘Hush, now. Go to sleep, baby,’ and it seemed like the room started to shrink and everything went pitch dark. The crying went away and now we could hear a soft whimpering and then that went away, too.

“The room brightened up, back to what it should have been, with nothing out of place. I didn’t quite sense the baby ghost anymore, but I did get the feeling that something was still there, something just below the surface, so to say.

“I said my goodbyes and had to thank Rachel for her quick thinking. Of course, when I left her that night, I told her, ‘Don’t wake that baby, now.’ She never had a problem with the ghost again, and she went on have four children of her own, and I think that went a long way to keeping things quiet at the Hooper house.”

So true, it's scary!

2012-03-02T09:51:00.000-08:00

Next week on Scary True: A master ghost hunter tells the terrifying real-life tale of a ghost so strange, so bizarre, it could only be true! Get twisted with "Ghost Hunter: The Ghost That Grew."
And check out this week's Mother Meade story, "Giant of Pennsylvania."

Every so often, Scary True would like to spotlight websites, books, films, and other fun stuff that promote scares, creeps, and the heebie-jeebies for the edification of our readers. This time Scary True goes in search of Bigfoot Evidence, your round-the-clock source for Bigfoot news. Bigfoot Evidence has been a favorite site for some time, but it has been especially entertaining lately as the Bigfoot community waits with bated breath for the release of a mysterious scientific paper that purports to prove Bigfoot's existence conclusively. For some reason, this means that every Bigfoot researcher, tracker, and enthusiast is at each other's throats. The best resource for following the controversy and all the fun is the amazing Bigfoot Evidence.

Giant of Pennsylvania

2012-02-28T11:26:00.001-08:00

When I first learned about Mel Dixon and his giant, I knew I had to hear the story for myself. I traveled to western Pennsylvania and begged Mel to tell me the tale. After I heard his remarkable story, I knew there was no better way to tell it than in Mel’s own words.

“I’ve been out in these woods my whole life. Everybody talks about the old stories and the bad stuff like Mother Meade and her monsters, but when I go out, I see what I want to see. If I’m hunting doe, I look for doe. And if I see something that ain’t quite right, I don’t go and make a big fuss about it ‘cause that’s not what I’m looking for. There’s a way you can see and not see if you want to.

“Now, I’ll tell you the story ‘cause you came a long way for it, but it really wasn’t nothing. I go out in these woods a lot, not just for hunting. I walk out to the Quarter to clear my mind and do my thinking.

“This time back three years, I went walking. This was fall and the leaves had turned and were falling. Some of the trees in the Quarter were bare, but not all.

“It was nice and quiet. There weren’t a lot of noises in the Quarter to start, but the only thing I heard that day was the leaves crunching when I walked on them.

“I come up this ridge and was looking out over the valley. I saw some trees moving down there and I thought the wind must be picking up. Thought there must be a storm coming.

“Then I see a tree go down and it went down real fast, not like it fell but like it was pulled. Anyway, I didn’t think much about it ‘cept I ought to be careful of dead trees coming down.

“I started heading down the other side of the ridge. It was after lunch and the light was starting to go already. I was making my way down through the trees there where they all stand real close together and the ground is pretty much bare.

“It was getting dark what with the all the shadows, but there was some sun cutting around the trees ‘cause it was low in the sky.

“I come around a turn in the path and I can see down the hill a pretty good way from where I was walking. There’s rows and rows of trees, almost like they was lined up.

“I’m looking at the trees and there’s a little ray of sun across a couple of them and I keep looking and walking and looking and I notice that something ain’t quite right and that’s why I keep looking even though I can’t figure out what’s wrong.

“There’s three trees in a row and they look pretty much the same: skinny with old brown bark, no lower branches to speak of. I’m looking at the middle tree and it looks like it has some roots on its trunk and I figure that’s what looked out of place. Then I said to myself, ‘Heck, that ain’t a root, that’s a hand.’

“Well, it was like a big old hand – bigger than a man’s – across the tree trunk. I thought something was standing behind the tree, but the hand was the same color as the tree.

“I was still walking all this time. I don’t think it occurred to me that I ought to stop and turn around and go home another way. I just didn’t know what I was seeing but, at the time, it didn’t strike me as dangerous.

“I come down the path and I’m getting closer to the tree, wondering if it’s a carving or some weird tree bark. I get about a stone’s throw from the tree before I look up and see what’s on top of the tree.

“Well, now I said it was dark so I couldn’t make it out at first, but I looked and I thought I saw something looking back at me. There were eyes – two eyes – in the tree and when I studied it, I could see the whole face.

“Now I stopped walking for sure. The whole woods were dead quiet and it seemed to me like everything was just waiting on me.

“I looked up at this face in the tree and I could see the head and some scraggly hair and then the shoulders and the arms and at least one hand. You couldn’t tell it until you looked hard at the thing, and then there it was.

“He was about twenty feet tall at least. He was awful skinny but then again he was pretending to be a tree. I mean, even his skin was like bark, old and tough-looking. He was lean, I would say. And when I looked in his eyes, you could tell he was scared and he was hungry.

“Well, I figured I spooked him as much as he did me. When he saw that I had made him, he just turned around and walked off.

“It all lasted no more than a few seconds. I see him and he sees me and then there he goes, as tall as a house and old as the hills, not making a sound as he walked away.

“I lost sight of him pretty quick ‘cause he blended in with the trees so much. I guess that’s how he hides out here. Sometimes I wonder how many people have walked by him, maybe right under him, and not even knew he was there. I wonder how many times I did, too.

“Now of course the people around here like to say that these woods – Broome’s Quarter – is where old Mother Meade and her babies hid out. They say every one of her babies was born a monster and even though it was hundreds of years ago, they’re still out there.

“Well, I don’t know about monsters or the old stories. But what I do know is that there’s a giant alive in these hills and he’s hungry and you won’t see him before he sees you.”

Read more about Mother Meade's monster children here.

A giant walks!

2012-02-26T13:47:00.001-08:00

Next week on Scary True: Too tall to be a man; too small to be a god. The "Giant of Pennsylvania" is on the move!
And check out this week's UFO story, "The Occupant."

The Occupant

2012-02-20T09:00:00.000-08:00

Life on Earth is sometimes so strange that there’s no need to imagine what sorts of things might exist in other parts of the universe. But when someone says, “I saw them,” and we get that glimpse beyond our own little world, it can be a profound affirmation of the resiliency and ingenuity of life and evolution. Sometimes, however, it can be a terrifying reminder that although they may look very different, people are the same everywhere.

Rebecca was a helicopter pilot working out of San Jose in the late ‘90s. “If you ever heard the traffic report on the radio,” she says, “that was me in my chopper, over the freeway.”

Rebecca loved her job and the sense of freedom that flying affords. “Of course, being above the traffic and not in the traffic was a great way to spend the day,” Rebecca tells me.

There was one particular day, however, when Rebecca’s job made her feel very afraid and very vulnerable. It was late in the year and as the evening traffic wound down, the sun set. “A big shadow was creeping up from the east,” Rebecca recalls, “and soon all the lights way down below me came on.”

Rebecca was waiting to give her final radio report before heading home. “I was over 280, west of San Jose,” Rebecca remembers, “when I saw this real bright light off to the north.”

To Rebecca’s north lay San Francisco International Airport and numerous regional airports. Rebecca assumed that she was seeing some plane off its flight path. As she continued to hover over the freeway, the light grew brighter as if it was heading straight towards her.

“I thought some idiot was way too low and coming right at me,” Rebecca tells me. “So, I got out of the way.”

Rebecca moved off to north west, well out of any plane’s path. To her surprise, however, the light turned in her direction. “It changed direction faster than a plane could,” Rebecca says. “So I thought it must be another chopper, maybe Coast Guard.”

Rebecca was now positioned between the light and the Pacific Ocean, so she moved south this time in order to let what she thought was a Coast Guard helicopter head out to sea. As she did, the light turned again toward her.

“That was when I really thought about the light and how it looked,” Rebecca tells me. Rebecca realized the light was not like any plane or helicopter she had ever seen. “The light wasn’t like a spotlight, or running lights, it was more like a big bright furnace, like a fire in the sky.”

All Rebecca could do was to wait and watch as the light came closer. As it grew more and more defined, Rebecca grew more and more concerned.

“It’s coming at me, getting closer and closer,” Rebecca remembers, “and I keep thinking it must be right in front of me and then it still gets closer. I realized this thing was gigantic.”

Rebecca estimates that the strange object was at least three football fields in length. It nearly filled the helicopter’s canopy, blocking the view of the freeway, the city, and the hills beyond.

“I thought it was one big light, but it was made up of lots of little lights,” Rebecca recalls, “like looking at a thousand headlights all coming at me.”

The lights finally stopped as they got as close to Rebecca’s helicopter as they could. Rebecca could now see that the lights were part of what she could only call a space craft.

“I don’t know how to describe it because it’s like it didn’t fit the specs for something that should be flying. It was just crazy.” Rebecca tells me. “It’s like whoever designed this thing didn’t have two arms and two eyes, wasn’t human.”

The strange craft sat motionless in the air while Rebecca’s helicopter bobbed. Rebecca didn’t know what to expect: the object’s movements were aggressive, but now she found herself overawed by its presence and unable to respond.

“It was like looking into a giant eye,” Rebecca remembers, “like a giant insect eye and it was staring right back.”

Suddenly the lights just in front of Rebecca’s helicopter began to dim. They quickly seemed to slide away, leaving a black patch almost in the strange object’s center.

Another light appeared, this one much softer than before. Rebecca could not see the source of the light, only that it defined a deep rectangular space. She suddenly realized that she was looking at a window or a porthole lit from the inside.

Rebecca noticed that the silhouette of the window’s lower edge was uneven. The light inside was growing brighter and she saw that the bottom of the window was filled with faces, faces that were all staring right at her.

“They were weird-looking with big black eyes,” Rebecca recalls, “but they were unmistakably children, human kids.”

Nearly two dozen children peeked at Rebecca from the bottom of the craft’s window. They stared with blank, black eyes but Rebecca could read nothing in their expressionless faces.

“They seemed like normal kids, except for the eyes,” Rebecca remembers. “They were different – different skin colors, different heights – but they all had black hair.”

The stand-off continued for only a few moments before the interior light began to dim. As it did, Rebecca saw something that she could never forget.

Behind the children, another figure approached the window. Rebecca understood the craft’s impossible design because now she could see the creature that had built it.

“It came up and at first I didn’t know I was even looking at a living thing,” Rebecca recalls. “It was tall and purple and kind of barrel-shaped with a weird starfish-like head, I guess. And it had wings like combs or fans behind it.”

Rebecca cannot say if what she saw was an animal or a plant or something that belonged to another, unknown category. It towered over the children and waved a set of branching tentacles in the air.

The interior light quickly went out and Rebecca stared into darkness. Her sense of position was overwhelmed but she suddenly realized that the craft was moving again. “It was coming right at me again,” Rebecca says. “It was about to smack right into me.”

As Rebecca braced for the impact, she saw the lights of the strange craft pass around her helicopter without damage. “It’s like I passed right through it,” Rebecca remembers. “Like it wasn’t solid, it was just light.”

The lights passed and receded in the distance. Rebecca was left alone in the dark in her helicopter. As she looked around to get her bearings, she discovered that she was no longer above the freeway outside of San Jose but some miles distant, over the Pacific Ocean.

“I got back home quick,” Rebecca tells me. “I almost got fired ‘cause I never did the traffic report.” Rebecca’s supervisor would later tell her that repeated calls to her helicopter went unanswered and even a radar check by the local airport came up empty.

What did Rebecca see? If it was a UFO, where did it come from? If it did come from another planet, why was carrying human children? Were these children kidnapped or were they produced by some other means? The answers to these questions are unsettling at best, unutterable at worst. The only thing we can be sure of is that, although visitors to our planet may be disturbing to behold, they share with humanity some very inhuman qualities.

Welcome our space brothers!

2012-02-17T09:20:00.000-08:00

Next week on Scary True: What does an alien look like? Bug-eyes? Tentacles? Five spatial dimensions? No words can describe "The Occupant."
And check out this week's Midnighters story, "The Midnighters: Black Dog."

The Midnighters: Black Dog

2012-02-13T09:13:00.000-08:00

“I remember this happened back in the ‘60s, I’m thinking it was ‘65 or so. Frank and me – that’s my partner, Frank – we were cruising down Penn Ave in Lawrenceville and it must’ve been almost midnight when we get a call about a dog.

“Now, Frank and me, we weren’t the captain’s golden boys any way you cut it, but we were cops – beat cops – and we weren’t no dogcatchers.

“Dispatch says they need us to go over to this house and keep things under control just until the dogcatcher gets there. They were having trouble finding him on account of he wasn’t at his regular bar.

“Well, we’re pretty steamed about it, but we go over quick as we can ‘cause dispatch says there’s a little girl involved. They ain’t ordering up any ambulance so we know she ain’t hurt, but we don’t want things to get outta hand.

“Nice little place just off Butler. Teenage girl answers the door and says she’s the babysitter. The mother is a widower, works nights at the hospital. So, this babysitter’s scared outta her wits, going on about a dog nearly bit her arm off. I’m like, I don’t see no dog, and she says it’s in the basement.

“Frank and me, we ain’t gonna down in the basement, we’re just gonna wait. So, I ask the babysitter, Where’s this girl you’re supposed to be watching, and she says, Down in the basement.

“Well, Frank is ready to haul the babysitter into the station, he’s so mad, but now we gotta go down there. The babysitter swears the little girl ain’t hurt or nothing but we don’t exactly trust her judgment on stuff anymore.

“So, Frank and me, we don’t know if we go down guns drawn or not. What if we shoot and hit that kid? Frank says it might be too late for the kid, but that dog has gotta be put down.

“We open the door and look down the steps, right? There’s a smell down there not like a dog exactly, but like a dead dog that’s on fire or something. Real rank stuff.

“We start going down those steps and I’m wishing I got the flashlight outta the trunk. I can hear a soft crying just like a little girl and it’s sad to hear but it means she’s still alive, right?

“Frank finally finds the light switch and we see her, this little girl in her jammies, sitting in the middle of the basement floor, all red-faced and crying. Frank goes to take a look at her while I’m covering his back and checking the shadows for this dog.

“Frank is talking to the girl – her name’s Val – and telling her it’s all right, asking if she’s hurt and tell us what the heck happened. Well, she doesn’t have a scratch on her and she finally calms down a bit and spills her guts.

“She says the babysitter tried to get rid of her dog or something and then it tried to bite the sitter. Now Frank and me, we’re thinking, this sitter is a nutjob for calling the police and letting this kid sit in the basement. Then I hear this scratching in the corner.

“I put my gun away and I’m all like, Here poochie, and laughing, and then I see these red eyes in the corner, right? And they’re not where a little dog’s eyes oughta be, they’re like five feet up the wall.

“Frank sees it, too, and he starts to draw his weapon, but he stops, I don’t know why. This thing starts to growl and it sounds like a bulldozer taking the house down above us.

“I do what I was trained to do and I point my freakin’ gun at it. Well, that was a dumb thing to do and what happened was this thing barked and right away my gun gets slapped out of my hand and it goes flying into the corner. Now, I didn’t see nothing even hit my hand, but something did just the same.

“Frank asks Val what she calls her pet, and she says, Spot. Cute kid, right? Anyway, Frank asks her where Spot came from. Did her mommy bring Spot home from the store?

“Val says, Oh no, mommy doesn’t know about Spot, mommy hates dogs and all this. And Frank asks again where did she find him and she says that he just followed her home from the park a few days ago.

“And Frank says, Which park? And she says the big one down the block with all the stones in it. Frank rolls his eyes and says, That ain’t a park, sweetie, that’s a cemetery!

“Well, poor little Val don’t know what that means but the Allegheny Cemetery is just a stone’s throw away and that sucker’s huge. Been there forever, too. Nice place for a walk.

“Frank explains to Val how Spot needs to go home, right? She gets it ‘cause she don’t want trouble from her mom and the cops at the same time.

“We all go up the steps and Val calls Spot out. The sitter is long gone and Frank and me, we’re just looking in from the next room, being all non-threatening like they say and everything.

“So, as this thing comes up from the basement, it looks like somebody turned the lights off. It was like a dog – dog-shaped – and it was big, right? But it seemed like it made the place darker just by being there, like it was sucking up all the light. It was so black you couldn’t look right at it, you could see it but you couldn’t at the same time.

“And lemme tell you, this thing’s head was huge but all you could really fix on was these giant red eyes – they were almost glowing like they were on fire.

“It came up to the kitchen with Val and it’s padding through the rooms as Val leads it to the back door and it’s not making a sound as it goes. It was like watching a shadow just slide away out the door.

“So, there we all go: two cops following a little girl in her pajamas and a giant dog down the street in the middle of the night. That’s my life, I guess.

“We get to the cemetery gates and Val goes through the motions of trying to get this thing to go, to leave, and it’s just as hard for a monster ghost dog as it is for a real one, I guess. Finally, this thing turns toward the cemetery and, of course, walks right through the gates like they wasn’t there and it disappears.

“Val’s kinda shook up but I think she’ll be fine. Now when we get back to the house, we find the dogcatcher, guy by the name of McNulty, drunk on the stoop. We tell him to go home but he’s riled up on account of being called out so late, so we tell him the story just to mess with him.

“This guy, McNulty, he cusses and spits, then he apologizes to Val, then spits again. He says, That damn dog don’t belong to you little girl, belongs to Satan himself. I seen him, too, on nights like this.

“Then Frank goes, I bet you see a lot of things when you’re looking up out of a bottle. Well, we sent that guy home but we had to wait for Val’s mom to show up. We told her how a dog got into the house and scared off the sitter and of course she bought the whole thing.

“That black dog, though, Frank puts it down in his files as a harbinger, and they say a harbinger means something else is coming, something bigger and badder.”

Don't go in the basement!

2012-02-10T08:59:00.000-08:00

Next week on Scary True: There's a monster on the loose and it's up to the Midnighters to put it down in "The Midnighters: Black Dog."
And check out this week's vampire story "The Boy in the Well."

The Boy in the Well

2012-02-06T06:43:00.000-08:00

Every generation of a family takes a little from the one that preceded it: hair and eye color, the shape of a nose, or the way a face can show surprise or sadness. Sometimes those pieces come together in surprising ways, and a distinctive gesture or the eyes of a long-dead relative suddenly return in the face of a newborn baby. In this way, each generation is a return of the dead, a haunting of the living family by the dead one, a reminder that a family’s roots can run very deep.

Chris writes to tell me about the summer of 1985, the summer he lost his best friend, Chris. Eric and Chris had been friends since the second grade, inseparable playmates when they were young and, as they grew older, teenagers looking for anything to relieve the boredom of suburban Maryland.

“That summer was our last summer before high school started,” Eric tells me. “We didn’t have any real plans, but we knew we were going to start some trouble.”

No mailbox was safe from Chris’s baseball bat and no robin or starling could out-fly Eric’s BB gun. The summer was quickly turned into a catalog of venial crimes and acts of petty vandalism.

Even this, however, was not enough to completely alleviate the boredom that seemed to haunt Eric and Chris. “It was around the middle of summer that we went up to the old Kocher place,” Eric tells me, “to find the ghost that was supposed to be up there.”

The boys had heard the stories all their lives. They were told in the margins of a teenager’s circumscribed life: heard in the bleachers after the game, passed around at sleepovers and bus rides, whispered in the shadows at the video game arcade.

“It went like this: there was this family that used to live there, the Kochers, and the son got sick and the dad thought it was something like a curse,” Eric tells me. “So, he kills his son but then the whole family gets sick and they all die because the son comes back and kills them all. And the son was supposed to be buried in the back yard, in the well.”

Legend had it that the son’s ghost walked the countryside at night and haunted the shell of the old Kocher homestead. He could be seen, it was said, on certain nights but no one could say exactly which nights. He was chalk-white and moaned in despair, or he was covered in dirt and blood and growled like a dog.

Whatever the description, one detail that all storytellers agreed upon was that the Kocher place wasn’t just creepy, it was haunted by the past, by an act so evil that it seemed the very land the house was built upon could not forgive it.

“Chris said we ought to go up some night and check it out,” Eric tells me. “Like a dumb-ass, I said, Why not tonight?” And Eric later said that Chris smiled wide at his friend’s invitation.

Eric had a permit, so they drove up in his family’s old station wagon, arriving just before midnight. They parked at the end of a dirt road and walked the rest of the way through trees and bushes guided by the light of the full moon and the boys’ cigarette lighters.

At the top of a small rise lay the old Kocher place, or what was left of it. Intentional neglect had collapsed the walls and roof, while generations of kids like Chris and Eric had gnawed away at what was left.

A weathered square was all that remained of the home’s foundation. Weeds and small trees had long ago claimed the interior, and only the imagination could describe the house that had stood in the spot a hundred years before.

Eric and Chris paused at the foundation’s edge. It lay like a giant tombstone, seeming to mark some boundary, but its power and its purpose were elusive, suggesting a house, a murder, a ghost, a story.

Chris produced two cans of beer from his coat pocket and gently rested his right foot on a foundation stone. Eric got out his pack of cigarettes and shared them with Chris. The boys drank and smoked, conversing quietly in the vacant face of night.

They waited. They waited for a sound like a snarl or a smell like a corpse or the sight of a see-through, floating sheet or something they didn’t know what.

“We were just hanging out for a while, teasing each other about how lame it was,” Eric recalls, “and then Chris says, Where’s the well?”

In the dark, it was hard to make out anything past the little clearing where the foundation stood, but as the boys searched the perimeter, they found a small hole. “We were looking for a big thing, like the kind of well you might see in a cartoon, I guess,” Eric tells me. “This thing was just a hole lined with bricks. It was pretty small, too.”

Having almost stumbled on top of the well, the boys stood uncomfortably close to its rim. Eric felt an out of place chill in the summer night air. Chris wondered aloud if the small hole at their feet was even big enough to fit a boy’s body. Eric didn’t answer.

Chris continued his speculations and Eric sensed a strange fascination with the Kocher place, with the old legend, and with the murder of the little boy. “I asked him flat out, I said, Why are you so concerned with it,” Eric recalls, “and I guess there was something about my tone, something set him off, like I was accusing him of something and then he told me why.”

Chris revealed to his friend that the Kocher place wasn’t just some old house, not to him. Chris’s grandfather had married a woman named Mary Koch, shortened from Kocher after the events that wiped out her Great Uncle’s doomed family. The boy buried in the well is my cousin, Eric told Chris, and blood will have blood.

“Then we heard something scratching,” Eric remembers, “and it sounds like it might be coming from inside the well.”

A sound like clawing began to rise from the old well, from the ground beneath the boys’ feet. Chris looked at Eric and Eric looked at Chris. Their fear was a kind of excitement, an anticipation that their world was about to change, maybe not for the better, but at least it would be a change.

“It was getting louder, this scratching sound,” Eric tells me, “because whatever it was was crawling up the well, it was coming up from below.”

The boys began to back up and Eric tripped and fell on the rough ground. The sound was getting louder. “I was hoping and praying it was just a raccoon,” Eric tells me.

Instead he saw a lean dark figure quietly emerge from the well. Rotted clothes covered its body and strings of black hair obscured the face. It crawled on the wet grass with stick-like hands, its head turning from side to side to taste the air.

It was the size of a boy, so young and small, and now Eric wondered how it had fit inside the hole.

Eric was still on the ground, clambering backward over rocks and fallen branches while Chris stood still, seemingly transfixed by the strange sight.

The figure – the boy – stopped and turned its head upwards to look at Chris. Eric got to feet and ran, screaming at Chris to do the same. But, before he ran blindly into the dark forest, Eric saw the bestial face, the blood red eyes, and the hideous fangs that marked the boy as something more terrifying, more deadly than the ghost of a murdered child he had expected was ahunting this place.

“It was a damn vampire,” Eric tells me. “We went to look for a ghost, but we found a freakin’ vampire!”

After an hour of being lost in the woods, Eric got back to the car and found that Chris was not there. “I thought he must be lost, too,” Eric remembers. “I figured I’d lock the doors and have to wait for him.”

Just before dawn, Eric saw a dark figure emerge from the trees. It was Chris. Eric stopped and stared at his friend for a moment before unlocking the door.

“The ride home was quiet,” Eric tells me. “When I asked what happened, Chris said it was just a raccoon.” But as Eric glanced at his friend sitting beside him in the dark car, it seemed to Eric that the strange mark on his neck could have been dirt or a scratch from a tree branch or something else.

“I didn’t see Chris much after that,” Eric tells me. “He seemed different. He started hanging out with a different crowd. And then his mom got sick and she died.”

Eric ended up in a vocational school and now operates his own heating and cooling business. Chris’s life took a darker path. He disappeared for a time after his mother’s death and people said he had gotten into drugs and moved away or was in jail or was dead. “No one seems to know for sure where he went or what happened to him,” Eric tells me. “I guess he’s kind of like those ghost stories now.”

Maybe all that remains of Chris is a legend, something people tell each other to give a scare, to teach a lesson, or just keep the boredom at bay for one more night.