by Jim Harold
We showed her the clock and tried to prove to her that no, it had been two hours. It was about 11:30, 11:40 more or less, when we saw the light. And when we woke up again it was about 1:40, 1:45. About two hours had passed.
She couldn't account for it. She said she was still reading the same article that she started out with and to her it was as if she had sat down five minutes earlier and just started reading—that's all she remembered. She doesn't know where those hours went, where she had been, or what happened.
We have talked with my mother a few times about it since, and a strange thing that adds to the story is that when she sat down and started to read the article, she had the feeling that someone was in the room, possibly behind her, but she turned around and there was no one. So she thought, That's strange, it's all in my head, and she looked at the clock and began to read again. And that's also how we know more or less the exact time. She looked at the clock before she vanished.
She doesn't have any memory of what happened.
This story got me into paranormal stuff. I became more interested in it, which doesn't mean that I believe everything I hear, but I do enjoy listening to or reading stories. Our feeling is, it must have been a UFO or flying saucer of some sort and that white light must have caused her to vanish, and...I don't know, to transport her? The light came, and after that she was gone, so we think it must have been the light.
One small thing to add is that when we woke up in the morning, in daylight, we realized there were bloodstains on our bedsheets, next to our knees. But our knees didn't have any kind of injuries whatsoever, and that's something we couldn't really explain. It's like somebody tried to take blood, yet there were no marks on our knees. It is all so strange.
-Marcel, Germany
29. Spirited Away
It was the summer of 1997, and I was at my cabin in Northern Minnesota in an old, out-of-the-way town that's about 45 minutes south of the Canadian border. It is very remote, and I had very few neighbors. The closest person was maybe 10 miles away.
One night, I had fallen asleep, probably around 11 or so, and a couple of hours later I woke up. There was a very bright orange light outside my front window. And my first thought was, My God, that's quite a bright firefly! It was kind of bobbing up under the eaves, and I thought, My God, and it was just extremely bright. So then I thought, This is not a firefly. I kept looking at it and then suddenly I thought, Maybe it's some kind of weird person? With a peculiar flashlight or something...I don't know.
Well, it was bobbing around. It really looked like a giant firefly. You know how they fly and hover and bob around? That was exactly what it looked like. It stayed there. I started to get kind of unnerved, and at one point I was staring at it, thinking, Well, maybe this is a person with some kind of strange lantern or something. Then I remember thinking, Oh, my God, this is not human. Then I got really, absolutely terrified. I've never been so scared in my life.
I was by myself at the cabin, which was unusual. I was typically up there with somebody, or at least I had a dog or something with me, but this time I was completely alone. I remember just that terror, and I turned my back to the light. I turned over on my side. And I remember feeling kind of paralyzed and speechless, and that's all I remember.
It was as though I was asleep. As though I were under anesthesia—that's kind of what it felt like. You know how an anesthesiologist says, "Count backward from 10?" I think I would have reached 6 and that would have been it.
I woke up the next day at high noon. That was weird too. Okay, so I woke up, and I was lying on my back in bed, with my arms at my sides, and my eyes just popped open. Which is unusual—I usually wake up really slowly, and stretch and roll over and whatnot. But not that morning. It was really weird. I was lying flat on my back, and my eyes just popped open. I felt very refreshed; I felt okay.
I don't have any memory except the falling asleep and the fear, and then waking up the next morning at noon. It was very unnerving. I know; it's really strange. I sometimes kid around about it now, and my coworkers think I'm a lunatic, because I will tongue-in-cheek say, "Oh, I think I've been abducted." You know, by aliens. I don't know.
-Emily, Southern California
30. A Walk in the Wilderness
I've been fortunate enough in my childhood to attend a lot of camps, and I always had a great time, but there was this one time it wasn't what I would call...fun. One of the years I went, about 20 years ago, we decided to take a night hike. We were all between the ages of 15 and 18, so, old enough to take care of ourselves, but we had a counselor with us.
We were going about a half of a mile from where our campsite was. We got to walk in the woods and go up on a ridge, and go to a cave. It was really a pretty neat cave. It wasn't very big, but it was one of those that are worth finding. We decided to take a hike up there. So as we were walking up through the woods, we kept hearing these voices. They're were kind of far away, and were—I guess you'd call it—mischievous. At least, that's the best way that I can describe it. I couldn't hear what they said, and I didn't know what their intentions were, but they just kind of sounded like they were up to no good. Nothing evil, but just up to no good.
I kept thinking, I'm hearing kids; they're being funny; they're following us through the woods. They're going to scare us because they know we're hiking. So I was convinced that it was just that: kids—which was fine, because it wasn't frightening at that point; not a big deal. So as we were walking through, I kept hearing them, and kept asking, "Hey guys, do you hear that?" They said, "No, we don't hear what you're talking about."
So we got to the top, to our cave, and we went inside the cave. We were sitting around and talking and it was kind of cool in there, but still a nice warm summer night. We were real comfortable, but I was still hearing the voices outside. I asked again, "Hey guys, do you hear them?" And still no, "We're not hearing them; you're crazy."
So we're sitting, and talking. I kept asking and they kept saying they heard nothing. Finally I said, "Darn it, I hear something. Turn the lights on. You guys are going to hear this, or I'm going home." We turned the lights on, looked around, and one of the guys was missing. It seemed bizarre; it was like something out of a movie—it doesn't happen for real.
So it turns out he was outside the cave. His friend said, "Let me go out and talk to him; I'll figure out what's going on." He went out and talked to him and then came back in, and he said, "You know, I think we need to go." At that very moment—it was bizarre—a cold wind rushed through the cave. We all just had this feeling of fear, dread, and doom.
As a 16-year-old, it was a feeling I'd certainly never had. Just this awful feeling. We all agreed that we needed to go. So we left and went to walk home but got lost—which is strange because we had just walked up the same way. We got lost, even though it's not that big a place, and when we finally got back, and were sitting down and talking to each other, we asked each other what happened.
I was hearing voices...no one else heard them...a guy went outside...his friend has to go get him...we felt this cold wind—what really happened? As we were decompressing, we figured out that what had happened was, while we were getting into the cave and laughing, this boy was hearing the voices, too. But, unlike me, they were drawing him outside, saying, "Hey, come out and talk to us. Come out. Hey, let's do something else...hey, let's...you know, we could go hurt something; we could go kill something." Just bizarre things that didn't make any sense.
He said, "I don't know why they were telling me to do that. I didn't want to do those things, but they really wanted me to." And we asked, "Where were they?" He said, "They were down in the bushes and they kept talking to me. They kept telling me to do bad things."
So, we never figured out what it was. It's been 20 years. I'm an adult now; I look back and think it was weird. Just very strange. But I still really wonder what it was. Was it evil spirits? Were they attached to him directly? Because nobody else was affected by it. I mean, I could hear them but they
didn't affect me. They didn't draw me to do anything or tempt me in any way, but I could hear them doing it to him.
As an adult, trying to deconstruct it—I guess this is me trying to be logical, but there's nothing logical about it! I get the willies thinking about it now. Right now, I have the goosebumps. And I don't tell that story very often, because it is a little bothersome to think, "I heard something I should not have heard. Something happened that should not have happened."
At the same time it makes me curious: What is it that causes something like that? Where does it come from? And the more that I look around and kind of study, the more I don't think that my experience is all that unique, necessarily. But there still really isn't any explanation.
-Julie, Ohio
31. Something's Out There!
It was 1989, I was 14, and a group of maybe 10 or 15 of us were going on a hike. It's really the only strange, paranormal-type incident I've ever had. If I could just set the stage for you here, I'll tell you about the area, so you can picture it in your mind's eye: There was this field that we were camping next to, and if you could pretend it's like a rectangle, it's about 400 yards long on the long axis and about 200 on the short. We were camping on one of the long-side axes, and it was like an old-growth type forest with a lot of evergreen-type trees. Real dark.
So that night, a group of us, about the same age, we went out to play. "Manhunt" was the name of the game. It's kind of like a group version of hide-and-seek, and we would split up into teams. My buddy B.J. and I—we remain friends to this day—decided to get on the same team. The moon was very bright; it was one of those moons that casts shadows in the middle of the night, and you don't even need a flashlight, really.
So we grouped up together as our own separate two-man team, and because of how bright the moon was, we decided to go to the long axis of the field. We thought we'd go to the other side of our campsite, on the other long side of that field, and go just inside of that tree line, where it was super dark. If you were in the field in the moonlight, you couldn't see into the wood line, but we could see out from that darkness just fine. So we were just creeping along the inside of that wood line there, and B.J., who was behind me, he heard something in the woods—leaves cracking or whatever. We stopped and listened. I didn't hear it, so we kept moving on. Then he stopped me again and swore there was something behind us, about 30, 40 yards, nothing real close...but close enough that we could make out some basic noises.
So we stopped again. We were real quiet and kept looking behind us. Then, sure enough, there was some type of movement coming toward us. It was just some kind of dark shape; I couldn't really make anything out and B.J. couldn't, either. Needless to say, we were freaked out, so we left the wood line and went about 20 feet into the field, looking back into the dark woods. So now we were in the moonlight and it was hard to see into this dark tree-lined edge to the boundary of the field. We were just kind of looking, and we heard something coming closer and closer. Then something stepped out briefly into the moonlight, and we only saw the head portion of it, and I estimate it was between 6 and 7 feet tall. We didn't really stay there long to get a great look, but it came out briefly, and it was only the front half of the face, if you will...it was something kind of like the face of...a cross between maybe a bear and a dog; I don't know. It was as though a bear stood up on its hind legs, but there were no noises. It didn't make any noise as far as grunting or anything like that—any animal-type noises. It briefly stepped out into the moonlight, and that's all we had to see. We turned off and sprinted as fast as we could towards our campsite, thinking there might be some older kids or adults playing a trick on us, but they were all there. There's no way anyone could have beaten us from where we saw it back to our campsite.
I hesitate to say it, but when we were in the woods, looking back at whatever was making this noise, the shape we saw did not appear as tall as whatever stepped out into the moonlight briefly.
And that's really the story. It still gives me chills just to think of it briefly coming out into the moonlight. And that's it. We didn't sleep that night; I just kept my ears open that night, listening for anything in the woods. Nothing.
It was incredible. After we got back and gathered the troops here, we walked back across the field and we didn't ever go back into those woods, but we stood out there looking with flashlights. There was never anything else that we saw or heard, and no one else did either, but I'm just glad we stepped out when we did and we heard something. I'm telling you, it was just something weird. And I still feel to this day that it was something paranormal—Bigfoot or Sasquatch or whatever—but it was unlike anything I've ever seen, from then to now. We're both 34, and B.J. and I still talk about it to this day.
-Josh, New York
32. Ol' Red Eyes
I was 11 or 12 years old, in fourth grade, and at summer camp in Florida with my Girl Scout troop. You know, with girls awake until 11 p.m. playing crazy pranks and stuff. Or so we figured. We were all getting ready for bed one night and we heard scratching that sounded like a hand on the cabin door, and we just figured it was girls being goofy. We weren't freaked out at all. Me being me, I wanted to get settled in and stop the nonsense, so I went outside and yelled, "Hey, cut it out!"
There's was no one there. So, we thought whoever it was must be hiding. We decided to just wait and see. So we turned off the lights, and about 15 minutes, later it started up again. It sounded like...not necessarily an animal, but a hand, like another girl was scratching the door. I got fed up—I felt it was ridiculous. I got up, stormed outside again, and there was nobody there. So I figured they must have dashed away, but I didn't hear any giggling or anything like that, so I went looking around the cabin.
There were a few bushes nearby, kind of in a wooded area, away from the cabins. So I went around and looked in these bushes, and there were two red, glowing dots, like eyes, looking straight at me.
I was freaked! I kind of jumped back, and hid behind the stairwell...well, not the stairwell, but there's these stairs that go up to the cabin door and are kind of elevated, so I went and hid behind there. I thought, Maybe it was a raccoon...some kind of animal, so I just waited. It seemed like an eternity. I was so scared, I was shaking, and being 11, everything freaks you out, so...I'd been watching for maybe five minutes when this creature, maybe 3, 3 1/2 feet tall walks out, standing on two legs like a person, and I was thinking, What is that? Maybe a monkey or something?
I couldn't really tell, but it looked right at me again with these red, glowing eyes, and then dashed away. I ran back into in the cabin and slammed the door, and everyone was asking, "What happened?" and I was like, "Oh my God, oh my God," you know? It was the creepiest thing. To this day, I have no idea what it was. I just can't forget those red eyes!
-Melissa, Florida
33. The Thing in the Woods
It was 1992 or '93, and I was only 16 or 17. One of my friends and I were walking home, and we decided to take a shortcut through this trail that we always go through. It was probably between 8:30 and 9 o'clock at night. We were walking through the trail and I was leading the way, and...well, it was really dark and I couldn't see, so I ended up getting us off the trail. We went off into the woods, probably about 20 yards or so before my friend noticed that we were off the path. He started leading us back and we finally got back onto it. As soon as we did, I felt a gust of wind go behind me, and there was no wind blowing at all. I thought it was kind of strange, but we didn't really think much about it. As soon as that happened, we started walking and we heard tiptoes in the bushes.
We'd take four or five steps and then the tiptoeing would catch up to us. So that's when we started thinking that something was going on, but we weren't really taking it seriously. It sounded like a little rabbit or a cat, so we thought maybe a little animal was following us. My friend was joked about how it might be a wolf or whatever, and he was playing like he was going to take off running, and as soon as he did that, that's when it started happe
ning: There was a little ball of light going along on the ground, probably about an inch off the ground. And first it was like a little ball—you know those fireworks, they call them jumping jacks, and they kind of bounce around? The difference was that it was going straight, going alongside us, not all crazy like the fireworks. All of a sudden, you could start to see the form of the thing inside of the ball; it looked sort of like a little rat that was standing up on its hind legs, walking. It was like that. Then, all of a sudden—I mean, this all happened in a few seconds—it started to get bigger, in an instant. And it got anywhere between 10 feet and 15 feet tall. And it was made out of...it didn't have skin like me and you. It was...the only thing I can describe it would be ether.
I have heard similar stories since. A guy I went to school with said it happened to him probably about two years after that. He said he tried to run from it, and when he tried to run from it it broke down into shadows of some type and attacked him. He ended up going to the hospital.
The thing was very strange. It looked a lot like the Predator, from the movie. It had dreadlocks on its head and spikes all the way down its back. And it was hot...it was like standing next to a stove with the door open, you know?
I don't have any further information on it. I've been trying to find something...thinking maybe somebody had drawn something that was similar to it, but I haven't found anything close to what it really looked like.
-Tim, Nevada