Scary True

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 hat there’s need to imagine what sorts of things might be 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

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.

“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, Eric. Chris and Eric 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,” Chris 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,” Chris 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.”

Like his lost cousin, 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.

It won't stay buried!

2012-02-03T11:51:00.000-08:00

Next week on Scary True: A little legend tripping leads to secrets unearthed and bodies unburied! Blood will have blood! Come and play with "The Boy in the Well."

Christmas with the Krampus

2011-12-15T16:04:00.000-08:00

The following story can be found in The Lehane Book of Children’s Stories.

This story takes place somewhere beyond the swift river but before the lonely hills, past the darkling valleys but not the fearsome woods, after the time when one learns to fear the dark but not before one learns why.

There in that high strange country, Little Suzie and her Granny lived together in a tiny cottage. Suzie was young and her Granny was old. Suzie was curious and her Granny was wise, and while the two had always loved one another, they did not always see eye to eye.

It was Christmas Eve and Granny was cooking what passed for a feast in those hills in those days. Suzie lingered by the old stove and watched as Granny chopped and peeled, boiled and baked.

But little Suzie grew bored of cooking and the thought that Santa Claus would visit her house that night was becoming too much to bear. It had been an especially hard year for the two, but according to Granny, little Suzie was an angel except for the times when she was a devil.

Granny saw the little girl fidget and squirm by the fireplace. “Remember, Suzie,” she said, “Santa still has his eye on you. Even as he loads up his sleigh, he’s still watching.”

Suzie sighed and straightened her back. Being a good girl was hard work, and Suzie wasn’t sure yet whether it was all worth it. She knew that she had sometimes given Granny a hard time, but Granny could give as much as she could get.

Whenever little Suzie got on the wrong path, Granny would sit her down and tell her one of her many, many stories. Some of the stories were about fire-breathing dragons and talking animals, but some were about Granny when she was a little girl.

Suzie loved Granny’s stories, although she sometimes resented the lessons that always came at the end. What always enchanted little Suzie was that Granny could weave something as rich and delightful as a story right out of thin air.

“You know, Suzie,” Granny continued, “Santa comes to visit good boys and girls and bring them toys, but the bad ones get a visit from the Krampus.” Granny went back to her cooking knowing that behind her, Suzie’s eyes were growing wide with fear and her head was slowly turning away from the fireplace.

“Granny,” Suzie’s little voice called, “what’s a Krampus?”

Granny chuckled quietly. In her granddaughter’s voice she heard the fear that haunted childhood, but she also heard the headstrong curiosity that reminded Granny of her daughter and herself.

“Well, Suzie,” Granny said, “we need another log for the fire. Why don’t you fetch one from the woodpile and then I’ll tell you the story when you get back.”

Suzie’s eyes narrowed and a flash of frustration flared across her face. She grudgingly took her coat from its hook near the door, slid her little feet into her old boots, and slammed the door as she left.

The air outside was cold and crisp and the sky was lit from end to end by the glimmer of countless stars. Suzie sometimes wished she lived somewhere where it snowed, and then she could ride a sled or build a snowman like the children did in her books.

Suzie trudged across the cold, hard dirt past Granny’s vervains, yarrow, and mugwort to the woodpile. Suzie reached into its dark recesses and pulled out a dusty log.

It was almost too heavy to carry, so Suzie pulled it behind her. She was admiring the furrow the log gouged in the ground when a noise drew her attention.

In the woods not far from the cottage, Suzie heard a sound like a tiny bell. She stared at the darkness, at the trees standing close by.

There was a crack – this time much closer – that sounded like a tree branch snapping.

Suzie pulled the log a little faster. Another crack from the woods. She pulled the log to her chest and began to run. As Suzie neared the cottage, a figure – a shadow – suddenly swept in front of her and blocked the path.

It stood taller than tall. Shaggy black with red devil eyes. A mouth of razors and two scrawny goat horns turned and pointed menacingly to the stars.

Suzie dropped her log.

Suzie stood in its shadow and the monster stared hard at her and she saw the infinity that was like a fire inside its eyes. Before she was completely lost on that fiery path, she swallowed and said, “Merry Christmas?”

The monster huffed in response. It seemed to stand even taller for a moment and Suzie heard a bell’s jingle and then it stood on the cottage roof and then it was a only a distant mark on the night sky, a dark star in the heavens.

Suzie breathed. She picked up the log and went inside.

Granny sat by the fire with her knitting while dinner bubbled and cooked on the stove. “Now that you’re finally back,” she said without turning to Suzie, “I can tell you that story.”

Suzie set the log next to the rosy fire and leaned against her grandmother’s chair. “No, Granny,” she said and Granny looked up in time to catch the arcing flash in her granddaughter’s eyes. “I can tell you a story.”

An Account of the Traveller

2011-11-22T21:37:00.000-08:00

Some houses are haunted by the spirits of the dead while others are haunted by the wickedness of the living. There are some houses, however, that play host to forces unaccountable to the human mind, forces that exist outside of space and time, reaching from somewhere beyond reality’s veil to slowly close around your throat.

When Marsha left the house that day in 1999, she didn’t expect to return so quickly. But, because she had forgotten her car keys, she found herself opening the front door and climbing the steps to her bedroom. Something else, something terrifyingly inexplicable, was also not expecting her to return.

“I never had any trouble in that place,” Marsha tells me. “I was happy there.”

Marsha’s house in Oakland, California was, in her opinion, happily unexceptional. She had lived there with her son and daughter for three years without incident.

On the day everything changed, Marsha was on her way to work after having packed the kids off on the bus. In the morning’s never-changing mayhem, Marsha had forgotten to grab her car keys, something she had done numerous times without consequence.

“When I put the house key in the lock and turned the knob,” Marsha recalls, “it just felt different – I don’t know – like a current was running though the door or something.”

The car keys were upstairs in Marsha’s bedroom and, as she turned to the staircase, Marsha heard a faint crackle, like a bad radio connection, from somewhere upstairs.

“I didn’t think much of it at the time,” Marsha tells me. “I thought it must be coming from outside or something.”

The noise grew stronger as Marsha climbed the steps. Turning to her bedroom, she saw a dim blue light frame the half-closed door. It was difficult to see in the morning light, but then Marsha realized that the sound was coming from her bedroom, too.

“I didn’t know what to do. Should I leave and call the cops?” Marsha tells me. “I should’ve left, I never should have gone in there.”

Marsha slowly pushed the door open and stared into her bedroom. The room was bathed in a strange blue light, as if the whole room were underwater, but Marsha couldn’t see where it was coming from.

But what she did see, what immediately arrested her attention and never let it go, was a hand, an arm outstretched, reaching from a point in the empty space above her bed.

“This thing – an arm – it was just hanging in the air,” Marsha remembers, “like it was reaching through a hole in the air.”

The arm was covered in a white plastic-like material, and Marsha could see a blue pulsing light deep within it. It twisted and turned, the fingers splayed and clenched as if seeking something blindly.

The upper arm terminated at a hazy, blurred point that was anchored in the air and seemed to define a plane, a boundary that marked a division between reality and something else.

“It looked like that part of the arm was fuzzy, the part where it just stopped,” Marsha recalls. “It reminded me of the heat coming off asphalt on a hot day.”

The arm’s movement was uncanny; it made strangely fluid-like movements but at the same time it was almost too rapid, too precise to be human. The arm pitched about, grasping the empty air. It swung around and hit the lamp on the bedside table, knocking it to the ground.

The arm seemed intrigued by this contact and it carefully searched the air where the lamp had been. It found the clock radio and the fingers gently explored its surface and Marsha thought she could see the hand express a kind of exotic wonder at the small upraised buttons.

Suddenly the fingers closed around the radio and the hand jerked up, retreating into the hole. Most of the arm disappeared into the invisible hole above the bed.

“There was an awful racket when that happened,” Marsha tells me. “It was a noise like a big pressure – an earthquake or a sonic boom.”

The clock radio, however, was still plugged in. Marsha could still see the radio as the hand tried to pull it through the hole but the angle of the cord kept it securely in the socket.

As the hand struggled to take the radio through the hole, Marsha could hear another sound behind the pressure wave – voices. Was it the voice of the owner of the strange arm? Or one of its controllers?

“I couldn’t make out any of what they were saying,” Marsha recalls. “But it sounded like a roomful of people shouting from very far away.”

There was a moment when the hand stopped pulling and a silence fell over the room and Marsha realized she was standing in her bedroom staring at half a clock radio stuck in the air and she almost laughed.

Then the arm moved again and the full length returned to the room. It twisted toward Marsha, reversing the angle that had caught the radio’s cord. The cord popped free and at first the arm disappeared into the hole and then the hand with Marsha’s clock radio and then the intransigent cord spiralled and vanished.

There was a flash of white and blue and a sound like a steel beam cracking and echoing in a space vast and empty and then it was all gone.

Although the incident left Marsha with a deep fear that the strange traveller will return, we are left with important questions we cannot answer.

Did the traveller breach the inky gulfs of space to reach Marsha’s home? Or did it somehow overcome the arrow of time and reach across years, centuries, millenia to recover an artifact? Or, more bizarrely, did it penetrate the barriers between dimensions, between realities? Was the arm that Marsha witnessed attached to a living thing? Or was it designed to look as human as possible so it might not unduly upset those from whom it took its souvenir?

Marsha’s question, however, is much more pressing. “I don’t care about my damn radio,” Marsha tells me, “but what if one of my kids had been there, what if it had grabbed them?”

Back from beyond!

2011-11-15T12:49:00.001-08:00

Next Week on Scary True: Where did it come from? What did it want? When will it return? All the answers can be found in "An Account of the Traveller."
And check out last week's scary story "The God of Winter Returns."

The God of Winter Returns

2011-11-07T11:56:00.000-08:00

In Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, winter has a way of coming that brings to mind ancient myths of primal powers and unstoppable forces. Many people who live in Michigan, however, welcome winter’s arrival as a time to celebrate the changing seasons and the economic opportunities it brings.

For twenty years, Anne and her family have sold and rented snowmobiles to the thousands of visitors who come to Houghton, Michigan to enjoy the winter-time fun. The start of winter was an important event for Anne, and she had spent the summer preparing for it.

Now, however, it was November and Anne was not yet ready. “There were a few trails that weren’t cleared,” Anne tells me. “And the weatherman said a big storm was coming.”

Anne took the ATV out along the northernmost trail. Small trees – downed in late summer windstorms – had to be cleared from the trail before they were buried in snow.

“It was always easier to get them off the trail now,” Anne says, “than wait for a few feet of snow to hide them.”

All afternoon, Anne worked to inspect the trail and clear debris. It was hard work, but Anne loved it. “To me, there was nothing better than being out there in the woods, in the stillness,” Anne recalls. “But after what happened, it’s different now.”

In the late afternoon as the sky was just beginning to darken, Anne was busy with what she hoped would be the last work of the day. “I was dragging a log and huffing and puffing so I didn’t hear it at first,” Anne recalls. “Barking dogs. A lot of barking dogs.”

Anne set the log down and listened. It seemed that the weatherman was a little off in his forecast because Anne could feel the wind begin to pick up. And just below the sound of the wind howling in the distance, the baying of a pack of dogs.

“I thought it was peculiar,” Anne tells me. “There really never is anybody up there at that time of the year.”

Through the nearly-leafless trees, Anne could see the horizon’s darkling line. She knew she had to hurry if she wanted to leave the forest before the light was gone.

“It was time to go,” Anne recalls. “But, of course, my four-wheeler didn’t get the message.”

Anne’s ATV sputtered and smoked as she tried to start it. She cursed and slumped in the seat. The barking was getting louder.

“Whatever it was – a dog pack or some hunters,” Anne remembers, “they were definitely coming my way.”

Anne thought about what she could use to defend herself against a pack of wild dogs and decided that although a tree branch would not do the job, she felt safer with a solid length of pine in her hands.

Anne selected a stick from the trail-side and crouched beside her four-wheeler. She waited quietly, watching the treeline and the thick shadows gathering. She could hear the braying of the dogs and the crunch of small branches as if the darkness creeping toward the sun’s setting was a wave of force washing over the world.

Anne noticed that the air had a sudden sharp chill and she could see her breath in wispy puffs. The wind picked up again, sweeping up fallen leaves and raining them back down to the earth. It started to snow.

“It was getting dark real quick and I could still hear those dogs,” Anne recalls. “I had to get my ATV up and running.”

Anne began to inspect the machine. She didn’t know much about fixing it, but she could look for obvious problems and decide whether they the thing was salvageable or not.

“I was busy looking all over the damn thing and it was dark,” Anne remembers. “So, I didn’t notice that the barking had stopped.”

Anne looked up from the ATV to see an enormous black dog standing in the road.

It looked to be almost as tall as Anne herself. Its pointed ears swiveled forward and its massive shoulders rose and fell with each sharp breath. Its great snout sniffed the air and beady red eyes shone like a fast approaching train.

“I swear those eyes were glowing,” Anne says. “I thought I was dead.”

The massive dog stood very still and Anne thought maybe it was just a hallucination until the dog was joined by five more just like it from the shadow of the trees.

The six black hounds began to growl and snort, their breath a fog that hung in the air, and Anne could smell them and it was the stench of wet cinders.

Anne was held in the hounds’ unearthly gaze and the only thoughts in her head were images of her body torn apart and covered by the slowly falling snow. How long would it take her family to find her?

From the woods there came a terrifying wail and Anne could not tell whether it came from some kind of horn or from the throat of a living thing. The dogs went quiet at the sound and turned toward the treeline, lowering their heads.

As if in reply, a horse and rider appeared between the trees and stepped out upon the trail. At the sight of them, Anne thought she was already dead, or that if she wasn’t, her final moments would be a lot more interesting than the previous forty-odd years.

The horse was black and grey and over-sized, like the dogs. The rider was massive and he sat upon his horse like a king upon a savage throne. He wore a cloak of mismatched hides and furs from animals that Anne couldn’t recognize. On his head was a helmet that looked like the skull of a great elk and curving away from the helmet were two black antlers and around his neck was a cracked yellow hunting horn.

The rider turned toward Anne and the horse trotted slowly up the trail. The rider’s face was hidden deep in shadow but Anne could see two orange lights like dying flames shining from under the bony helmet.

The dogs, tamed in the rider’s presence, began to follow. It seemed to Anne that the rider was watching her but she really did not know whether he had even seen her. As the rider approached, the black spreading antlers were framed by the twilit sky and the snow seemed to follow him in a swirling white aura.

Anne knew that what she was seeing was no earthly sight but a vision torn from the wild fabric of the universe, a manifestation of a still-unconquered power, a divinity of this or some other world.

The horse turned and took the rider into the trees. The dogs followed and the dark and the woods swallowed them all. In her final glimpse of the strange rider, it occurred to Anne that she could not now say whether the cloak and helmet he wore were clothing or the features of some inhuman body.

Anne’s ATV started up when she tried it, just as she suspected it would. She rode home as quickly as she could from fear of the vision she witnessed and the fast-falling snow. “When I think about it now, it kinda warms my heart to know that things like that are out there,” Anne tells me. “But then I have to ask, What else is out there?”

Winter is coming!

2011-11-04T08:10:00.000-07:00

Next Week on Scary True: A winter storm is fast approaching and its herald walks among us! When Halloween is over, "The God of Winter Returns."
And check out this week's ghost story "The Ghost of Halloween."

Every so often, Scary True would like to spotlight websites, books, films, and other fun stuff that promote scares, creeps, and the heebie-jeebies. With Halloween over, Scary True would like to acknowledge the people who keep the spirit of the best holiday going. Some of my favorite Halloween creators and haunters can be found at Pumpkinrot, Something WicKED This Way Comes, Magikal Seasons, and Frog on a Pumpkin. These people work tirelessly to create the seasonal and the scary, the fantastic and the frightening, the things that remind us that Halloween is a holiday made by hand. So, if you find yourself wishing it were October again, check out these blogs. And if you're feeling ambitious and think you might want to try your hand at some Halloween creations, you've got about 360 days, so get to it!

The Ghost of Halloween

2011-10-31T09:31:00.000-07:00

Halloween can be a magical time for any kid: candy, costumes, and the chance to scare and be scared. It’s a time when convention is upended and the symbolic power to punish and reward – to trick or to treat – is granted to the least powerful among us, to children. The only thing required is the wearing of masks, but sometimes, putting on a mask is all a part of growing up.

When Dylan was six years old, he carved his first Halloween jack-o’-lantern. Dylan’s dad had spent the afternoon with him at his mother’s house. “My parents had been split up for about a year,” Dylan tells me. “So, I think that was the first Halloween after.”

By the time his father left that evening, Dylan had a large handsome pumpkin with a gaping, toothed mouth, arched triangle eyes, and a matching nose.

“I guess it was a real old school pumpkin,” Dylan recalls. “I think that was all my dad knew how to make.”

After dinner with his mother, Dylan wanted to take his jack-o’-lantern to the front porch, but his mother had other ideas. “My mom wasn’t really into the whole giving-out-candy thing,” Dylan tells me. “We just turned off the lights so no one came to the door.”

After the last of the trick-or-treaters went home, Dylan took his jack-o’-lantern to the porch.

As a consolation for sitting in the dark for two hours, Dylan’s mother had even let him light the candle himself.

Dylan carefully placed his jack-o’-lantern on the porch table facing the street with an orange grin. Dylan took a few steps down to the sidewalk to see what it looked like from the street.

In the dark the pumpkin looked suitably terrifying to Dylan. “Then I looked down the street and I saw this orange mess on the road,” Dylan remembers.

A neighbor’s jack-o’-lantern had been snatched from its porch and viciously smashed on the street, no doubt the work of local teenagers. “I was so freaked out,” Dylan tells me. Dylan rushed back up to his porch and turned the jack-o’-lantern around so it faced the family room’s large window. And Dylan came up with a plan.

That night, Dylan tried his best to secretly stay awake. He lay in his bed on his Batman sheets and thought about his defenseless pumpkin waiting outside for him. When Dylan thought his mother was asleep, it was time to put his plan into action.

Little Dylan slowly got out of bed and crept into the hallway. He could hear his mother’s snore coming from the far bedroom. Down the steps he went, avoiding all the secret spots on the staircase that creaked, a knowledge gained through trial and error and spankings.

At the bottom of the steps, Dylan almost changed his mind. The downstairs was a different planet after bedtime. A deep, impenetrable darkness suffused what was usually so familiar, so warm to Dylan. It seemed a black sheet had been thrown over what made up most of Dylan’s world.

“I closed my eyes and ran for it,” Dylan recalls, “until I hit the couch.” And there Dylan had planned to wait until morning, watching over his vulnerable jack-o’-lantern.

The couch was deep and warm, and Dylan wrapped himself in the blanket that his mother kept there. Determined to spend the night staring at the flickering face of his jack-o’-lantern, Dylan quickly fell asleep.

“I don’t know how long I was out for,” Dylan says. “It was the wind that woke me up.” A fierce storm was on the way – the first of October – and the wind was howling ‘round the house.

Dylan looked out the window, past the pumpkin’s still-glowing smile, but the leaf-littered street seemed darker now as if the storm were blowing an inky blackness over Dylan’s neighborhood. He shuddered a little to think of the cold and the dark just beyond the thin pane of glass.

As Dylan studied the night half-asleep, he thought he caught sight of something else blowing in the wind. A piece of black cloth seemed to be caught somewhere on the sidewalk, maybe on a bush or a lamppost.

“I was concentrating on looking at this thing in the wind,” Dylan tells me, “that I didn’t notice when it started moving closer to the house.”

Dylan could see now that the dark cloth was not moving with the wind; it seemed to form a whirlwind of tattered black fabric that was heading for his house. “Then all of a sudden,” Dylan remembers, “it was standing there in the front yard.”

What looked to Dylan like a mass of cloth one moment was suddenly in the shape of a human figure the next. And it was walking swiftly toward Dylan’s house, toward the window where Dylan sat.

It walked up the porch steps and stopped, the wind seemingly blowing right through it. It wore a great black cloak, shredded and trailing stray strips of cloth. The face was hidden in a deep hood but Dylan sensed a menacing presence there, one he thought he recognized.

“I don’t know if I knew the name at the time,” Dylan says, “but it was pretty much the Grim Reaper on the porch.”

The figure moved closer to the window where Dylan sat frozen in fear, his jack-o’-lantern still stupidly grinning. The figure paused again and it seemed to contemplate the mutilated gourd before it.

Now the figure stood directly in front of Dylan, just behind the pumpkin. It bent over and two bony, clawed hands reached out for the jack-o’-lantern.

Dylan’s pumpkin rose in the air as the figure lifted it high, then it placed the lit pumpkin in the hood, in the spot where its own head should be. The pumpkin sat there awkwardly for a moment as something inscrutable adjusted itself.

In that moment Dylan’s jack-o’-lantern no longer belonged to him. The pumpkin face contorted and stretched, the mouth opened and closed as the eyes squinted in terrorizing displays of dexterity unknown to winter squash.

A great peal of sinister laughter erupted from the pumpkin-headed shadow and joined the wind’s screeching. Dylan could do nothing but watch as the shadowy figure turned to leave. As it did the jack-o’-lantern seemed to look in his direction and Dylan thought it he saw it wink.

Dylan’s mother found him the next morning asleep on the couch. “She searched the whole house before she heard me snoring,” Dylan remembers.

In the years that followed, Dylan made many more pumpkins, but he never forgot his first and the strange fate that befell it. “At first I thought maybe the Grim Reaper took my pumpkin for a Halloween mask,” Dylan tells me. “But now I think it was Samhain, the spirit of Halloween, and he picked my jack-o’-lantern for his head that year.”

A very special episode of Scary True

2011-10-28T09:37:00.000-07:00

Next Week on Scary True: A little boy learns the true meaning of Halloween in "The Ghost of Halloween."
And check out this week's monster story, "The Impostor."

This month marks the one-year anniversary of Scary True and we'd like to take a moment and thank every one of our readers. If only a few of the people who stumble upon this blog get a shudder, feel creeped out, or can't sleep at night, then it's all been worth it. Happy Halloween!

The Impostor

2011-10-24T09:28:00.000-07:00

If there’s one thing that epitomizes the celebration of Halloween, it’s dressing up in a scary costume. The practice of trick-or-treating has a long history as a means of imitating evil spirits and placating the restless dead. Sometimes, however, traditions become unmoored from their origins and people forget their own customs; sometimes, even the evil spirits forget.

Don writes to tell me the bizarre story of one Halloween night in 1993 when something strange – stranger than usual for Halloween – came to the door. Don and his wife, Kathy, were home with their son, Brian, handing out candy to the children who came to the door.

“Brian was just thirteen then,” Don tells me, “but he thought he was too old to go trick-or-treating.” Don and Kathy took turns answering the doorbell. It was getting late and Don was about to turn out the porch light and call it a night.

“There hadn’t been a trick-or-treater for a good half hour,” Don recalls, “but near nine-thirty, there goes the bell again.”

It was Kathy’s turn to answer the door and she rose from the family room sofa. Don heard his wife grab the bowl of candy from the chair in the hallway and open the door. It was quiet for a moment and then Don heard his wife’s low fearful gasp.

“I thought it must be a doozie of a costume to give her a scare,” Don tells me.

Don set down the magazine he was reading and leaned back on the sofa to listen better. He could hear his wife nervously clearing her throat and the night sounds coming through the open door – crickets and far away traffic – but the trick-or-treater remained quiet.

Kathy broke the silence and said, “That’s quite a costume you’ve got there, young man...or young woman?” She nervously tapped the candy bowl with her fingers for a moment, seemingly waiting for a reply.

Suddenly Don heard a strangely amplified voice scream “Trick-or-treat!” It sounded like a recording played on poor quality speakers, and Don jumped up off the sofa when he heard the crash of the candy bowl as it hit the floor and shattered.

Don called to his wife and she reassured him that everything was fine, she had just dropped the bowl. Don walked to the door and he could see his wife’s back but not the trick-or-treater standing outside. As Kathy bent down to pick up the shards of porcelain, Don got his first glimpse of the costumed figure.

“Well, it was real odd,” Don remembers. “It was a mixed-up sort of costume, I guess.”

A small figure, not five feet tall, stood in a ragged brown robe, a dirty plastic bag held out in one mittened hand and a small orange box with a jack-o’-lantern face in the other. On its head, it wore a yellow-stained pillowcase with two frayed holes for eyes.

When it saw Don approach, it held up the orange box and punched a button. “Trick-or treat!” the box screeched.

Don stopped and stared for a moment, not sure if what he was seeing was a threat to his family or just a harmless kid. “I mean, not every kid gets a new costume and you make due with what you got sometimes,” Don tells me. “But this kid gave off a really weird feeling.”

Don continued to the door and got down on his knees to help his wife gather up the candy. He glanced up at the trick-or-treater. The porch light was behind and above the figure, so when Don was standing, he couldn’t see much of the face. But now, as he knelt on the floor, he could see into the ragged eye holes.

“There were the eyes and they were black, like completely black, no irises or pupils,” Don recalls. “And the skin around the eyes, I’m pretty sure it was covered in black fur, real fur.”

Don recoiled in surprise and put his hand on Kathy’s arm. She looked at Don and then slowly rose with a fistful of candy in her hand. “Trick-or-treat!” the plastic toy screamed again.

The costumed figure cocked it’s head slightly and Don could hear a low gurgle. Kathy held the candy in an out-stretched arm. The figure held out the plastic bag in a mirror image of Kathy.

The two stood frozen facing each other, Kathy waiting for figure to close the gap between them and the figure apparently mimicking her posture. At last Kathy stepped forward and quickly dropped the candy into the bag.

As she stepped back, the figure stepped forward, and Don, still on his knees, could see that the feet under the cloak were shoeless, but covered with the same black fur. “And they had claws, big claws,” Don tells me.

Kathy nodded at the plastic bag but the figure continued to stare at her. Suddenly Brian walked up behind his parents and said, “What’s going on? Somebody break the ...”

Brian stopped when he saw the trick-or-treater at the door. The figure looked at Brian, studying him, and then grunted sharply. Rising to his feet, Don could see the black eyes widen in reaction to his son and Don began to feel very afraid.

“Well, I guess my wife has things more together than I do most of the time,” Don says. “She knew just what to do.”

Kathy took another step backwards and slowly closed the door on the strange little figure. The trick-or-treater simply stood there with the plastic bag still extended, still staring at Brian.

“Damn it if he didn’t stay there for another fifteen minutes,” Don remembers. “Every so often we’d hear that gizmo go off.”

Finally, it walked away and Don and Brian peeked through the curtains as it did. “It walked funny, kinda exaggerated,” Don recalls, “like it didn’t know how to do it right, but it was trying to imitate a person walking.”

Sharing their thoughts afterwards, Don and his family agreed that the last trick-or-treater to visit their house that Halloween night was not human. “Maybe it was a really, really good costume,” Don tells me, “but you can’t fake the feeling we all got that whatever was under that pillowcase was a monster.”

Halloween costumes represent a kind of meeting of the dead and the living, the human and the monstrous, a halfway point where recognition is exchanged. Could it be that the other side – the monstrous side – has changed the terms of the agreement and more visitors like the one that came to Don’s house are already on their way?

Or have the ghosts and goblins that come out to play on Halloween night forgotten their role in the show and are they now merely imitating what they see around them? Maybe the ancient practice of imitating evil in order to conquer it has now been obscured, becoming merely the performance of a performance.

“I think my wife said it best after I kept pestering her,” Don tells me. “She said, when a monster comes to the door, you give him some damn candy and then send him home.”

Trick or treat?

2011-10-21T13:42:00.000-07:00

Next Week on Scary True: It's hard to pick out a costume for Halloween but it's even harder when you're already a monster! Take a look under the mask in "The Impostor."
And check out this week's Midnighters story, "The Midnighters: All Hallows."

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 does horror movie reviews. We'll do it by category and pick it up with monster movies!

It wasn’t the first, but it was the best. James Whale’s Bride Of Frankenstein was a sensation in 1935 and hasn’t lost any of it charms or scares. What old school horror movies did was make an atmosphere that was scary because the monster would always suffer from bad make-up or bad acting or any number of technical faults. The monster you thought was chasing you, not the one you could see, was the scariest. Bride Of Frankenstein had the creepiest atmosphere of any horror movie. Ever. There, I said it.

Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) is the modern contender for the best horror atmosphere. This is pretty much dark, foggy London streets in space (of course the fog comes from all the steam vents that spaceships in the '70s had). Would I be remiss to mention the scene where the chest-burster does what it does? I thought not. I also credit this movie with beginning the trend of cats jumping out of shadows at people (or being thrown at the actors by their off-camera wranglers).

Honorable mention goes to a much more recent film, The Descent (2005). Spelunkers and monsters trapped underground? You can’t make that movie without coming up with a really creepy atmosphere.

The Midnighters: All Hallows

2011-10-17T08:40:00.000-07:00

“This must’ve been about 1970 or thereabouts, right around Halloween, when Frank and me – that’s my partner, Frank – we were investigating this homicide, well, it was more like a missing persons case at that point, but we had a hunch – Frank had a hunch – that there was more to it.

“The story behind it all was that in October this girl disappeared and she used to be real friendly with Mayor Flaherty which is a big problem, right? Well, that ain’t the half of it, ‘cause the real problem was she also used to go with Johnny LaRocca who ran the gambling and girls and the whole mob there in Pittsburgh.

“So, the girl goes missing and it’s kind of a mess for all the muckety-mucks, but of course this poor girl’s family are wondering are they ever going to see her again. Well, the girl – her name was Rosie – she was last seen downtown near the Liberty Bridge with a couple of shady guys, then she just up and disappeared.

“Frank and me, we were helping out on the case on account of all the heat from the mayor’s office. I was thinking the girl skipped town or was hiding out but Frank, he was pretty sure she came to a bad end. The problem was, nobody knew where she was and the blame was going around and people were getting antsy.

“Now it’s the night before Halloween, right, and we’re all working overtime and Frank, he pulls me aside and says let’s go for a drive. I’m like, sure, I could use a coffee or something but Frank takes me up the Boulevard of the Allies there and at Grant he pulls over and he shuts off the engine.

“Now, I’m like, this is all fine, Frank, but we got work, right? But Frank, he’s just staring off and I can tell he’s got something on his mind. Frank points up at the street signs and he says, where are we, Jerry? And I say, on the Boulevard at Grant, so what? And Frank says, right, Jerry, we’re at a crossroads.

“I’m like, big whoop, so it’s an intersection, who cares? But Frank, he says, no it’s a crossroads and he tells me how a crossroads is a place where ghosts and stuff hang out or something ‘cause it’s a place between two places...I’m not really saying it right, but intersections are spooky places is all I mean.

“Then Frank says, what day is it? And I say it’s the 30th and Frank says, no, it’s after midnight, it’s Halloween. And then he tells me how on Halloween, the wall between us and them ghosts is thin, as thin as it gets all year, and sometimes you can see the ghosts.

“So, Frank had a double whammy here with it being Halloween and us being at that crossroads and I’m wondering what Frank has up his sleeve but he just tells me to wait and I say, wait for what? And Frank says, for Rosie.

“It must’ve been two hours we were on spook stakeout there and I was falling asleep and Frank gives me a nudge and points down the Boulevard and I look and there’s this mist come rolling down the street, right?

“Now, I’ve seen some heavy fog before but this was something else and it just came like a flood down the Boulevard and up over the car. Frank and me, we’re just quiet, watching and waiting, and then after a minute or so, the mist starts to thin out and then I see that, yeah, there’s people in there.

“They was moving down the street, the Boulevard, in a big group – a parade, I guess – and I say they was moving, not walking, ‘cause I didn’t really see any walking going on. They were whitish like they were covered in chalk dust or something and they were kind of see-through. I mean, they were ghosts, right?

“There must’ve been hundreds of ‘em and every kind of person, right? There were guys and ladies, adults and kids, some looked like they died yesterday and there was some looked like cavemen and must’ve died a thousand years ago.

“I saw a guy, he looked like he might be a Revolutionary War soldier, and there were lots and lots of Indians all marching together. There were men in suits and top hats and others in rags and all bloody. They just stared right ahead and kept moving down the street.”

“But there were these other ones, right? I don’t know what to call them exactly, but some were big, bigger than people ought to be, and they were black and shadowy – hard to make out – with what looked like big bat wings, and there were some were smaller, but they had these big claws and teeth and they looked more like animals than people.

“I said to Frank, what are those things? And Frank says, I got no idea, Jerry, but let’s hope they don’t notice us sitting here. And none of them did, in fact, I don’t think any of them moving down the street even looked our way once.

“I said to Frank, what are we doing here Frank? And Frank says, we’re waiting for Rosie, and I’m thinking if she ain’t dead, she ain’t here, but I know Frank thinks she is.

“Well, we watched all this go on for a good twenty minutes – longer than anybody ought to – and then Frank says, look, and he points and there in the crowd is a little figure, and I can see it’s Rosie, I recognize her from her picture, and, I mean, you know, jeez, she’s just a girl, and she’s as white as the rest of them and soaking wet from head to toe.

“Well, we watch her pass on by up the Boulevard and the whole crowd starts to thin out and then that’s it, they’re all gone with the fog. Frank and me, we’re both a little shell shocked here. I don’t think Frank even expected all that to happen, but now we know, right, now we know that Rosie’s dead and she’s in the drink somewhere, in the river.

“We can’t exactly go back to headquarters and tell ‘em what happened, but Frank fudges a bit about a tip we got and he gets them to search the Mon River there around the bridge and after a couple of days, they find her down there with a chunk of concrete tied to her legs.

“Things cooled down between the mayor and the mobster after they buried the poor girl and that makes me think they were all in on it and that girl must have known some bad stuff about everybody’s business.

“Frank and me, we never been back to that intersection – the crossroads, right – but I guess if someone wanted to, they could go down there on Halloween, wait for Rosie to walk by, and ask her what happened. Couldn’t hurt, I guess.”

Read more stories of the Midnighters here.

Halloween parade of the dead!

2011-10-14T09:31:00.000-07:00

Next Week on Scary True: At a crossroads on Halloween, anything can happen! The Midnighters go searching for a missing girl on Halloween night in "The Midnighters: All Hallows."
And check out this week's witch story, "The Corn Witch."

George Romero’s 1968 classic, Night Of The Living Dead, started it all and remains the best all around zombie movie. What does that mean? Well, Night Of The Living Dead has real dead zombies (yeah, they’re pretty messed-up), it’s shot in creepy black and white, and it features the first honest-to-goodness zombie apocalypse, a theme we can’t seem to stop filming.

28 Days Later kicked off the latest love affair with the walking dead and probably ranks as the most well-made and thoughtful zombie movie. And if you want to argue that the film features no actual zombies, your point is well-taken but misguided. Dead or not, 28 Days Later certainly functions as a zombie movie and also manages to give great zombie apocalypse in the middle of London.

Honorable mention goes to Dawn of the Dead. Which one? Take your pick. Romero’s 1978 sequel to Night Of The Living Dead is an undead tour de force, while Zack Snyder’s excellent 2004 version introduced the terrifying and always-controversial running zombie.

Next week: Monsters!

The Corn Witch

2011-10-10T09:02:00.000-07:00

The following story is found in The Hamlyn Book of Ghosts, Part II by J. Allen Randolph, published in London in 1973:

As the crisp scent of autumn permeated the chill evening air, I sat down with Mr. Martin Fleetwood on the porch of his North Carolina home. Mr. Fleetwood had been a resident of the region his entire life, over ninety years as he figured it. Here he had farmed his small plot and provided a satisfactory, if arduous, life for his family.

Mr. Fleetwood, having been privy to secrets and tall tales of the area for much of long life, was a living archive of Americana, especially the kind that liked to lurk in dark corners and deserted country lanes. I traveled to Mr. Fleetwood’s modest home in order to hear a master storyteller “weave a yarn,” as the Americans like to say. I was not disappointed.

Of the many stories related to me, that of the Corn Witch was easily the most compelling, being a tale steeped in history and dripping with both tragedy and horror. The story of the Corn Witch begins in the early years of the century in the same part of North Carolina where Mr. Fleetwood’s family lived. I submit this story to you in Mr. Fleetwood’s own words:

“The Matthews family lived just up over the hill. Now, they were poor – we all were poor – but they were poorer than most. Mr. Matthews had been born into slavery and he took for his wife a Catawba Indian woman and some people didn’t think that was a proper way of doing things. What that meant was they didn’t get help when they needed some, so when Mr. Matthews died, why they were hard-pressed to keep the bank from taking what little land they had left.

“Now, two of the Matthews children, Zora and John, were twins and were always going about together, always getting into trouble of one kind or another. At the time they must’ve been about twelve or so; young enough to know everything.

“Their mother was worked up about the money trouble and some said she had turned to drink, and so, the twins were desperate to find any way to hold onto their daddy’s land.

“It was coming up on Hallowmas – Halloween – and Zora and John remembered there was an old story about a witch what used to live hereabouts. Folks called her the Corn Witch and it was said she could make the corn in the fields wither and die with nary but a sideways look.

“Some folks said she was up and hanged before the start of the War for the Union, and some others said she was an English woman married to a pirate what come across the sea before the Independence War, and some said she was an Indian maid cursed by the Devil, and still some others said she was older than all that, that she had been here before there was people here.

“Well, the part of the tale told ‘round these parts has it that the Corn Witch walked the fields by night, and she could bless ‘em or she could curse ‘em, depending on if she was feeling charity or spite. People back then liked to leave her little things like hard candy or rock salt or little dolls made with corn feathers and folks said the Corn Witch would take them and make your corn grow.

“The other part of the legend said that if you caught the Corn Witch in the field, if you looked down her long nose and didn’t turn from her old warty face, why you could get her to give you a wish, just like a genie in old Araby. The thing was that you could only catch her in a field she had cursed and you could only do it on Hallowmas night, when all the ghosts and the goblins and Hell’s own went to trooping about.

“John and Zora, being kids, got it into their heads they were going to catch that there witch. Hallowmas night came and John led Zora up to the high fields, the ones that get left to themselves more oftener than not. There was a field there owned by a Mr. Freemer that did bad that year and that was where they were going to go to wait for the Corn Witch.

“It was an awful cold night and them twins had a long wait ahead of them. Now the corn field was picked clean except for a few ears here and there – food for the crows – but the dead stalks were still standing row by row.

“John and Zora walked hand in hand down those rows and stepped across the dried-up husks, watching the moon get bigger and hearing the sounds of the night birds. It was sometime in the dead of the night, when it’s so cold it can’t get colder and it seems like the sun ain’t never coming back, that the Corn Witch came upon them.

“Now, this is the part of the story that folks want to hear and it’s the part of the story that can’t ever get told because no one except John and Zora can tell it and they for sure ain’t talking. This story’s got a big hole right in the spot where the heart ought to be, but it really ain’t like that at all.

“People like to get to talking about things they know, but they love to talk about the things they don’t know. For every corn stalk in Freemer’s field, there’s a dozen stories about what happened to John and Zora Matthews that night.

“Some folks think it was the Devil himself come up and others that it was a crazed-up mountain man, but I imagine that a black shape rose up out of the corn and crossed the face of the moon on an old corn broom, trailing a dirty, tattered shawl behind it.

“It might’ve struck John and Zora as looking like one of Freemer’s old scarecrows before it lightly came to rest among the dead stalks. On her head she wore a tall, crooked hat like she was pointing one angry finger up at God, and she glared at the children with hellfire eyes from beneath the broad brim.

“So, I’d imagine it might’ve been. All I know is that, in the morning, John came down from the high fields alone. Zora was nowhere to be found from that day to this. Folks said she run off with a peddler and others in their whispering said that John had killed her and buried her up in the field.

“Now, I don’t believe hardly none of it, but I don’t know exactly what to believe if you take my meaning. December was coming up when the bank agent come to town and went up to visit the Matthews farm. John met him at the door and paid off the family debts with a fistful of Spanish doubloons.

“The bank agent almost fainted dead away but he took it for the debt ‘cause he knew that John was overpaying. John didn’t care about that; he worked hard to help his mama and get that farm working again.

“No one in these parts had seen crops grow so fast and so well as they did on the Matthews farm the next season. Why, in a few years, John was able to buy out some of his neighbors, and by the time his mama was put in the ground, John Matthews was one of the richest men in the county.

“That sure gave people something to talk about, no doubt. They were jealous and they were petty and mean and most of all they wondered what really happened to Zora Matthews on that Hallowmas night so many years before.

‘Well, if, like me, you like to take evening constitutions and wander the backroads, and if, like me, you don’t mind walking after the sun is down and everything is dark, and if, like me, you sometimes stop to watch the moon and listen to the music them night birds make, then you might, on nights when the air is getting chilly and the leaves are starting to fall, spy a figure behind the corn stalks, a small figure, ‘bout the size of a girl, wearing a big old pointed hat and tattered black cloak, sweeping the rows with an old corn broom.

“They say the corn grows well in this part of the country, but I say we just know how to treat our friends. What happened to little Zora Matthews? Well, the corn needs to be planted again every year, and I’d imagine that maybe something like a Corn Witch needs to be planted again from time to time.”

In the fields, behind the rows!

2011-10-07T09:42:00.000-07:00

Next Week on Scary True: Terror stalks the corn field as a Halloween legend comes to life in "The Corn Witch."
And check out this week's monster story, "Night of the Melon Heads."

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 gets into the Halloween season with Retroween, where you can get your hands on some old school Halloween decorations. I can remember some of these decorating my elementary school, although it's hard to say whether they were retro then or had just been around for a long time.

Night of the Melon Heads

2011-10-03T09:11:00.000-07:00

There was a time we called them fairy tales, but now they’re known as urban legends: stories that frighten and bewilder, stories that enforce norms with the often gruesome results of what happens to transgressors. But sometimes, when one looks closely at an urban legend, a true story emerges, and sometimes, the legend turns to look back at you.

Diego and his friends had heard the legend of the Melon Heads many times while growing up around Cleveland, Ohio. The stories said that a mysterious Dr. Crow or Kroh had conducted hideous experiments on children, turning them into huge-headed monsters. Or they said that he operated a home for children suffering from hydrocephalus and, after mistreating them, the children killed their tormentor and went feral in the woods.

“So, yeah, the stories were silly,” Diego tells me. “We didn’t believe any of it, but it was fun to try to scare each other.”

One night in 2004, Diego and his friends were, like generations of teenagers before and since, bored. It was October 30th, the night before Halloween, and scary stories like the Melon Heads were making the rounds again.

“One of my friends, Josh, had just gotten his license,” Diego says. “So, I said, screw this, let’s go up there and find some Melon Heads.”

Diego’s friends exchanged nervous glances, but no one was willing to call the bluff. The four boys piled into Josh’s mom’s Camry and headed out to Wisner Road, where the Melon Heads were said to lurk.

The rural road cut a winding path through dark, deserted woods. The leaves were dying and falling, and many trees were already bare and skeletonized against the car’s lonely headlights.

“There was a spot where they said a trail led off to where the Melon Heads used to live,” Diego tells me.

After driving slowly through the woods, Josh brought the Camry to a stop just before a small bridge. On the side of the road, there was the faint trace of a trail marked by old tire tracks overgrown with weeds.

The boys sat in the car, the engine’s soft whine the only sound. The trail in front of them, distorted by the shadows thrown by the headlights, looked like a huge hole torn in the woods.

“We were all pretty charged up until that point,” Diego recalls, “but something about the look of the trail shut everybody up.”

The boys drew courage from their shared fear and, after many teases and threats, managed to get out of the car. Josh left the headlights on because the boys had forgotten to bring a flashlight.

“We went looking for mutants or ghosts or something and we didn’t even have a flashlight,” Diego tells me. “Yeah, it was pretty dumb.”

The quiet woods awoke to the sound of nervous laughter as the four boys warily picked their way along the trail. The crunching leaves punctuated each tentative step, taking them farther and farther away from the halo of the headlights.

That was when one of the boys, Ken, remembered the two glowsticks in his coat, part of a Halloween stockpile. The glowsticks were cracked and the faint green light that illuminated the few feet around the group only served to heighten the sinister atmosphere.

“Two of my friends, Ken and Dave, they wanted to go back and wait in the car,” Diego tells me, “but Josh wouldn’t give them the keys.”

The quartet were well beyond the light from the car and the path they had been following was becoming difficult to make out in the green glow.

“I was just about to call it off and make fun of those guys for going out there,” Diego tells me, “when we saw the first one.”

Off to the side of the trail, Diego and Josh both noticed a strange bulbous object reflecting the weak glowstick light. “It looked like a white balloon or something,” Diego tells me.

The two boys stopped and stared, whispering their discovery to Ken and Dave. As the boys tried to make out what they looking at, the balloon-shaped object began to sway and bob.

“That really freaked us out because there wasn’t any wind,” Diego remembers. “And then Ken and Dave just took off.”

Before Josh and Diego could react, their friends were already back at the Camry. “I said to Josh, let’s check it out,” Diego tells me, “and he said, let’s do it, so we did.”

Josh and Diego tried to walk quietly through the underbrush but the dried leaf crust made it impossible. Whatever it was they were approaching, it was going to have plenty of warning.

“We got right up to it,” Diego recalls, “and I still didn’t know what it was.” The boys stood within two yards of the strange object and held their glowsticks above them. The object was whitish with an irregular surface, reminding Diego of a mushroom, and its shape was like an oval or a balloon or a melon.

“I remembered why we were there, and I thought, shit, that’s a head,” Diego tells me. “Then I think the Melon Head finally realized we were there.”

As it dawned on Josh and Diego that they were looking at the back of a bizarre head, the Melon Head turned around. Two empty holes that seemed to only mimic eyes faced the boys and a wide slit opened to reveal a mouth full of brown fibrous gills. A thin root-like body held the head above the ground and two long white stems that ended in crude hands jutted out from the sides.

“I dropped my glowstick and ran,” Diego tells me. Behind them, the boys could hear a strange shrill cry, barely audible, that seemed to sound more like a rallying call than one of fear.

Diego and Josh ran straight for the Camry. In the woods around them, they could see more of the Melon Heads rising above the forest floor, watching them go.

Diego and Josh rejoined their friends and the four boys scrambled into the Camry. As the car sped off down Wisner Road, the headlights arced across the face of the woods, but from the road all seemed quiet and ordinary.

Dave and Ken barely believed their friends’ strange story, but all four boys had heard the eerie wail of the mushroom Melon Head. “I tried not to talk about what happened,” Diego tells me, “but of course it got around the high school.” A few months of teasing were all the boys had to show for their terrifying encounter.

In the spring of 2008, Diego was away at college in Pennsylvania when he received an email from Josh. Josh had sent along an article detailing an extraordinary find in the woods of Ohio.

An enormous fungus, covering an area approximately two square miles, had been discovered living under the woods along Wisner Road. The amazing fungus was a huge collective organism and thought to be over two-thousand years old. Like any underground fungus, it was capable of producing fruiting bodies, what we know as mushrooms.

“I thought maybe we solved the Melon Head mystery,” Diego tells me, “but now the story is even weirder and gross.”

Could fungal life evolve to include animal-like locomotion? Fungi can grow at prodigious speeds and, after thousands of years, who’s to say what a fungus couldn’t accomplish. The Melon Heads are still out there somewhere haunting the woods of Wisner Road, but it may be that the real mystery lurks below the ground more than it does above.

Melons among us!

2011-09-30T12:51:00.000-07:00

Next Week on Scary True: The Halloween season begins with the story of four high school boys who discover that the truth of an urban legend is stranger than fiction! Evil grows in "Night of the Melon Heads!"
And check out this week's werewolf story, "Descent of the Wolf."

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 gives it up for the comic book series "The Walking Dead." Now the AMC show based on the series is very good, but one of the comic's strengths is in the long form narrative and the TV show just isn't there yet. Curl up with the collected editions and experience the greatest zombie epic ever conceived!

Descent of the Wolf

2011-09-26T08:54:00.000-07:00

“The origin of a thing is a damned puzzle. Once it happens, it can never be recovered, but it sets in motion all that comes after. It is the one thing which can explain everything, but because it is an insubstantial thing, its true nature remains not just unknown, but completely unknowable.”

Mark Twain, 1875

When the little town of Waggner was founded in the Dakota Territories, the residents newly-arrived from the east thought they had finally claimed their little slice of heaven. The year was 1878 and the United States government had won the Great Sioux War, laying open vast swathes of formerly Indian land to white settlement. Twenty-one families had made the long trek from New York state to start a new life in the shadow of the Black Hills. They came for many reasons: economic conditions in the east, the chance to wipe the past away and start anew, the gold buried in the hills. But the new residents of Waggner would soon uncover a horror that would come to consume all their dreams and everything they had hoped to build.

The following is an excerpt from the journal of Captain William Clark, who, along with Meriwether Lewis, led the Corps of Discovery across the territory now known as South Dakota in 1804:

“The wind hard from the N. W. today. The Chiefs of the Lower Village Came and informed us they wished us to call at their village & take Some Corn, that they would make peace. Capt. Lewis questioned the Chiefs about the Prairie wolf and sundry other animals, and the Chiefs said a Great Black Wolf was known to hunt the western Plain, coming as far as the Great River in Hard seasons, a Savage Beast as large and as cunning as Man.”

The following version of a Black Hills Sioux legend comes from The Stars Above the Prairie: Tall Tales from the Great Plains published in 1996.

“When the world was new, the Great Apportioner set aside the lands of the high trees as a home for the animals and the birds. The People of the Prairie could hunt the Buffalo and Deer and follow them across the Great Plain but only Those Who Walk in Many Skins were allowed to hunt the Hills.”

From the journal of Captain John Potter of the 7th Minnesota Infantry Regiment, stationed in the Dakota Territories and tasked with defending white settlers from Sioux raids:

“May 23, 1879: The settlers of Waggner Town endured a hard winter and their provisions and stock were the prey of rapacious animals. It comes to us from a Trader by the name of McCormick the story of a boy of the town who was taken from his home by a huge wolf at night. The Men of the Town gathered themselves and went in search of the creature’s lair. The Indians tell a story about peculiar wolves who live and hunt in the Black Hills and it was said that the men of Waggner Town went up into the Hills and found the cave of the beast and its ilk. There in a dark and hellish pit, the beasts were destroyed, one and all.”

The following is a partial transcript of a 1936 interview of a Lakota shaman named Lone Horn by a field reporter for the Works Progress Administration:

“When I was a boy, many white men went up to the Black Hills with their guns and long knives and there they met the Bear Dog Clan in the Caves of the Moon. Many white men went into the Black Hills, but not one ever returned to their families.”

From Black Hills of Home, an anthology of writing by South Dakota settlers, the following comes from a journal written by Sarah Kelly, a resident of Hot Springs, Dakota Territory, in 1885:

“It was said that when the Waggner menfolk returned from the Hills, they were changed men. Their wives and children were hard-pressed to recognise them, although they looked the same as they did when they left. The men came back, but people say that the husbands and the fathers and the brothers they knew never came back.”

From Here We Go! a popular post-Depression travel guide series:

“South Dakota’s Black Hills offer some of the best scenic views in America at very little cost. Look for the Hillview Motel outside of Hot Springs for a clean, economical room for your stay or the Bighorn Inn near Custer. The little towns in-between – places like Drumme, Talbot, and Pine City – also offer friendly and safe accommodations. The canny traveller will avoid the town of Waggner, which fails to offer lodgings or hospitality to visitors.”

Lauren Gasman, author of numerous books on the subject of cryptozoology, cites the case of the Waggner incident in “The Great Wolves: From the Amarok to the Waheela,” an article published in 1990’s True Stories: Monsters, Legends and History:

“Remnant populations are continuously cited as a possible, rational explanation for numerous cryptid encounters that could otherwise be considered anomalous animals. Could a species like Canis dirus, the Dire Wolf, survive in small groups in North America? Anecdotal evidence, like the strange creatures killed in South Dakota near the town of Waggner in 1879, suggests that such an explanation is at least likely, albeit almost too neat. The Waggner wolves were said to be large and powerful, like the Dire Wolf, but they were also inextricably linked to the Lakota Skinwalker legends, a fact that many researchers would like to ignore. Maybe not every sighting is of an unknown animal; maybe some are simply unknown monsters.”

From a South Dakota state police report dated June 8th, 1967:

“Officer Rains and Officer William responded to a report of an intruder at a home along Chaney Road in unincorporated Waggner. The resident described an attempted break-in and damage done to the property. The suspect was described as being 7 feet tall, weighing 400 lbs, and covered in coarse black hair with fangs and claws. The resident was advised to stay indoors and the officers declined to investigate further.”

From the introduction to a 1988 report compiled by the South Dakota Department of Health concerning the state’s history of infant mortality:

“Before the 20th century, citizens enjoyed little state support; most care was provided by communities and reinforced by popular tradition. The harsh environment claimed many lives but, like they always do, people adapted and learned how to survive. The case of the town of Waggner is an exemplar of loss and recovery, marking one of the last data spikes in mortality rates during the winter and spring of 1879 when all newborns of the town perished. The next year, however, numerous babies were born and not one was lost. Folklore of the region tries to explain away the situation by attributing the dramatic change to a thick coat of hair that the 1880 babies were said to be born with.”

From Supernatural Nature, an exegesis of paranormal environmentalism published in 1979, by Ivan T. Gevaudan:

“The figure of the werewolf is significant in that it allows for a return of the long-repressed natural order from a space that is within the human body and not externally divided. What is the interior? It is never known. But it engages with the exterior force in a kind of evolutionary process. The werewolf must be seen not as a ravenous creature that preys upon man – a monster from a movie – but as man’s logical replacement in the universe. To become a monster is to adapt to one’s environment. Similarly, if man can become lost in the mask of the animal, to what extremes would the animal go in order to claim the place of man? Does man seek the savagery of the wolf or does the wolf seek the culture of the man?”

From the September 21, 2003 edition of the Black Hills Herald, a newspaper covering the southwest corner of South Dakota:

“When archaeologists from the University of South Dakota started their dig at Site 41, better known to locals as the Cave of the Moon, they expected to find the remains of a large number of coyotes, grey wolves, or even some kind of exotic hybrid canine. After all, Black Hills tales suggested that dozens of such animals were killed there in the winter of 1878 after preying on the livestock of the newly-settled town of Waggner.

“‘You can’t go into a dig with too many assumptions,’ says Dr. Michael J. Lloyd, who oversaw the expedition over the summer. ‘We thought we would find animal bones, but we never expected that the cave system would be full of human remains. It’s quite extraordinary.’

“Preliminary analysis suggests that the bones, dating from the late 19th century, show extensive signs of animal bite marks and appear to be exclusively made up of Caucasian males.”

From a January 2005 post on the blog Strange Dakota written by DeadwoodDave:

“The Cave of the Moon has been always been an obscure SD legend, but lately it’s been on everyone’s radar. After the archaeologists from USD opened up the cave and found all those old settler bones, there was talk of doing some DNA testing and comparing it to the old-time families of Waggner. Well, before they got the program off the ground, Waggner turned into a ghost town. No one lives there anymore. In the space of a year, families that had been there for generations moved away. They said it was because of the bottle plant closing and all the lost jobs, but I don’t know. Where did the people of Waggner go? And what really scared them off? Sometimes when people go digging for things that were buried for so long, it can cause everything to change.”

The people of Waggner may have taken the secret of their origins with them when they disappeared en masse sometime in 2004. Few documents remain to support the fact that the small town even existed at all. If the men of Waggner were slaughtered to a man in the Black Hills in 1879 as the discovery in the Cave of the Moon suggests, who or what came out of the hills to take their place? How long can a secret live and reproduce, creating generation after generation of monsters? We are left to speculate on the true story and live in fear of the answer.

In the cave of the moon!

2011-09-23T08:07:00.000-07:00

Next Week on Scary True: Cornered, surrounded, faced with extinction! What would a monster do to survive? Trace the history of a gruesome bloodline in "Descent of the Wolf."
And check out this week's Midnighters story, "The Midnighters: Four Rivers."

Every so often, Scary True would like to spotlight websites, books, films, and other fun stuff that promote scares, creeps, and the heebie-jeebies. This time, Scary True would like to testify to the quality of Paranormal Witness, the scary new show from SyFy. Although only a few episodes have aired so far, I can tell this show is going to be a favorite. If Scary True had been born a TV show, it would be Paranormal Witness, and it would be beautiful!

The Midnighters: Four Rivers

2011-09-19T07:59:00.000-07:00

“So, this happened back in 1967 when Frank and me, we were still working the beat in the Strip District. This one night, it was just after midnight, and we were cruising down 18th Street there and Frank sees something outside of Primanti Bros., you know that place where they do those sandwiches, right?

“I stop the cruiser and we get out and there’s some weird writing on the wall next door, graffiti they call it. Anyways, it wasn’t in American and Frank says it’s Latin and it said ‘The door is open’ and I says, ‘I didn’t know you talk Latin.’ Frank gives me a funny look and says, ‘Let’s grab a bite’ so we head into Primanti’s.

“Frank gets talking to Dick Primanti, one of the brothers what owns it, and they get to talking about the neighborhood and it turns out some of the late-night delivery guys was seeing things, ‘suspicious persons’ they would say today, but we just called ‘em monsters back then.

“I ask Dick about the new place next door that the Latin said was open, but he says the building is empty and ain’t opening anything. So, Frank is asking Dick if there’s anything else he can tell us, and Dick, he says he’s got a door that’s open, if we’re interested.

“Down in the basement, it turns out there’s this old door. Dick don’t know where it goes, but it’s always been there and it’s always been closed and locked. Dick don’t even have a key for it or nothing. Now, just in the past week, when Dick comes in and brings up supplies from the basement, he finds that door open just a little bit.

“Dick thought it was funny the first time, but now he don’t know what to think. Each time he closed it after taking a peek inside, but all he can see is an old hallway or tunnel that don’t smell too good. Frank and me, we volunteer to check it out.

“So, we go down with Dick and he shows us this old door and I’m telling you, this thing looks like it came out of some old-timey castle. This is one old door. Frank tries the latch and it opens like butter. There’s this long tunnel, all made outta stone, all dark and dirty and creepy. What’d you expect?

“We say bye-bye to Dick and get our flashlights ready and we go down in there. The tunnel is old, right, like real old, like maybe something they built before we kicked the Brits back to England. There’s a trickle of water running down the center and Frank says we follow the water and we see where it goes.

“So, down we go, right? The tunnel goes straight for a long time and, from the water, you can tell that it slopes down, and we’re going deeper. There are some other tunnels that open off to the side, but we take a look down them and then we follow the water.

“It’s so dark, we can only see what the flashlight sees and, let me tell you, it started to get damn cold down there, too. I was starting to think that there’s nothing down there for us to worry about when we hear something up ahead, something walking.

“Frank and me, we hurry up down the tunnel and we can see another light up ahead there. We draw our guns and we shout, ‘Freeze, police’ and all that. The light stops moving and we get up there and there’s this girl – this lady – with a headlamp and a pack and all this gear like she’s climbing a mountain or something. Not what we were expecting, right?

“We ask her what the heck she’s doing down there and she looks us over and I think she knows that if we’re all the way down there, then we’re not your ordinary cops walking some underground tunnel beat. So, her name is Daniels and she says she’s looking for her lost dog, and I start laughing and she gets mad at me, but not for the laughing, for making too much noise she says.

“Frank gets serious and I can tell he thinks something weird is going on, but before he can get to the bottom of it, there’s this noise like something scratching, right, down the tunnel. Everybody just freezes, right, and we’re all not moving, just listening. I’m thinking, it’s just some rats, but it sounds awful big for a rat.

“Then there’s this god-awful scream, kinda like a roar almost, but it’s real loud in the tunnel and I about drop my flashlight, I’m so scared. Frank and the girl – lady, I mean – look at each other, and then they start off down the tunnel, toward the scream, and I’m thinking, that’s nuts, we ought to be going the other way.

“I follow, of course, and we get down the tunnel to an intersection, I guess, where three tunnels meet. I can hear something moving down one of the other tunnels, but I can’t tell which one. Frank shoves his gun and flashlight into one of the tunnels: nothing. I move to the other one and do the same. All of a sudden, this thing lunges out of the tunnel right at me. It’s got these big, bulging eyes almost on the side of its head and a mouth full of sharp little teeth and skin that’s all slimy and wet.

“I scream my head off and this thing roars at me and Frank and Daniels are there with me and the thing backs off and it’s gone, just like that. It took off down the tunnel faster than a rat. I think we must’ve scared it. You could still see its eyes glowing in the dark for awhile as it backed away.

“Frank and the girl start to go down the tunnel after it and now I know they’re nuts. They don’t get far, though. There’s this loud bang and a big metal gate comes come over the tunnel and the thing is one side and we’re on the other. I could just see it the dark, watching us and backing off.

“We wait a moment or so at the gate and we can hear a lot of rushing water down that way. I ask, ‘Is that down to the sewer?’ Daniels says, ‘No, that’s the river’ and, Frank and me, we’re like ‘Which one?’ Pittsburgh’s got three rivers, you know, the Al, the Mon, and the Ohio. She says, not those rivers, the fourth river, the secret one.

“Frank and me, we’re not sure if she’s knows something or if she’s a kook. So, what we do is we back the hell up and Daniels comes with us and we all go to Primanti Bros. and we all get a bite.

“Frank and Daniels start to exchange notes. Turns out she works with a guy, name of Shaver, and Frank knows him, too. Seems that Shaver runs this outfit called the Subterranean Society

and him and Daniels have been exploring these tunnels and all the stuff even further down.

“She says that thing we saw – she called it a CHAD or a CHUD or something – it came out of the river, the fourth river. So, it t urns out there’s a river underground – a fourth river – that goes under the others and under the city. Now, it was confusing to me, because sometimes when people talk about it, it’s like it ain’t really a river like the other three, but some kind of path. To what, I don’t know.

“Frank, he asks about the Latin graffiti and Daniels swears it wasn’t her, but something is definitely going on with the fourth river and things underground is all worked up about it. Turns out there are lots of these doors under buildings like Primanti’s all over the city that lead down to the tunnels and below them. ‘The door is open’ but nobody knows which door they mean and what’s on the other side.

“Eventually, it all worked out in the end. We worked with Shaver and Daniels and their Subterranean Society – we used to tease and call them the Sinkers – and that damn door finally got closed and none of them Old Ones got one foot through.”

Read more stories of the Midnighters here.