*Warning: Photographs and information in this ongoing series might be upsetting to some readers. Discretion advised.*
This will be an ongoing series chronicling a couple years' worth of encounters with bizarre, horrific, and taunting interplay between one innocent citizen and a stalker that defies description (at least in our known world).
This was an exceptionally well-documented series of events that may at times be too graphic or horrifying for some readers, but it is our hope that by sharing this experience, someone out there might recognize a set of circumstances that are similar.
We have advice to be given to anyone encountering what I am at a lack of words to accurately describe, so henceforth refer to it as…the stalker between the worlds.
(Links to prior installments at the bottom of this post)
"Chaos Theory"
The Walker stopped on his route to take note of a deer that had been left aside the road with its antlers sawed off, mostly bones, semi-rotted, with some tendons. It was not an uncommon happening there. Sometimes people stopped and took antlers from road kill. He hadn't seen it the two days earlier right out in the open near the roadway, so it went nasty very quickly!
When he approached it, the Walker found that the windchime was not on its hook, but up on a neighboring hook where the hummingbird feeder hung. The two were hanging from the same hook.
He looked around for a chair or something someone could have used. Even on his tiptoes, the Walker could not reach the hook. He had to bring a stool out to get to it at over 7 feet high. This brought back another memory from over a year ago when something reached up and snapped all the plastic flowers off the feeder and dropped them on the ground. Someone didn't like the feeder? Someone very tall.
As he headed back, the Walker's eyes were on the porch ground when he stopped and realized there were 3 drops of blood that stained the concrete. They were well dried and looked fairly old. He backed up, looking around the feeder for some sign someone got cut, but there was nothing. Just random drops of blood. Like the blood on the dog food bowl and on the bag of dog food, other times.
Once again, the Walker felt a bead of sweat on his forehead. whatever it was, it was still creeping around his place and messing with things. He had tried hard to be nonchalant on his walks, as if he didn't notice the strange goings on, but whatever it was, it knew where he lived. In fact, the Walker at that moment had a sense of dread that something more would be coming to his home. It was premonition that was going to come to be in a couple months' time.
He continued his walk and enjoyed a rather uneventful day. But, each day he walked his circuit and saw the horses nibbling, he was curious. What were their encounters with this local psycho?
The Walker stopped and took a picture of one of the horse's manes that appeared as if someone had begun to braid it. He shrugged and walked away, telling himself that maybe the hair just does that on its own.
He had taken a picture some time ago of the horse's mane and pulled it up to compare later on.
It admittedly looked like it had been manipulated purposefully. None of that mattered when a few months later, the horses were removed.
The Walker picked up his pace on his daily trek, feeling his energy one late afternoon. He was near the ravine where he had heard a strange buzzing sound once, where he had found a deer carcass and a strange 3-toed track at the top of the ravine that he casted.
The Walker stopped along the road, studying something that looked like prints. And then, his eyes narrowed on something beside it that was really odd, a shrew of some kind that appeared to be completely squeezed tight and wet, as if it had been vomited up from an alimentary tract. It hadn't been there earlier in the day.
(mouse on the left near road)
An otherwise uneventful walk days later proved to be unsettling as the Walker was moving along at a good clip, feeling especially spry that morning, when screams from the woods stopped him in his tracks. Something was screaming and it was not human. It sounded irritated and frustrated, reminded him of himself if he stubbed a toe, if he had a barrel chest and a lot more volume. He would have brushed it off, but not too long after that, his wife came home from a late shift and stopped in the driveway, listening to something foreign screaming in the woods. She reported it to her husband the next morning and the Walker couldn't help wondering, what is it doing in the woods now?
The Walker's 2-year-old grandkid “Bobby” was put down for bed while family was over. The Walker went outside to get in the car and go get supplies for supper.
As he walked between the cars, he looked over to the right and Bobby was standing in the dark behind the SUV. He had an armload of twigs in one arm and was trying to put sticks on top of the spare tire, pushing up on his barefoot tiptoes to reach.
Bobby looked at his grandpa strangely as if to say, “what are you looking at?”
The Walker thought he was seeing things when he rounded the car and saw his grandson standing there, it was dim lighting. He went over and it was Bobby.
The Walker scooped him up to take him inside and the boy said, “I won’t never pick up sticks again,” as if he thought he was in trouble.
When the Walker went to check, the window was open in the bedroom. The latch was opened from inside, the window was old and hard to open up. The boy had no scrapes from the aluminum grooves in the sill and it was a drop to the ground barefoot. The curtain had been closed at bedtime. The room was on the side of the house the window had been tampered with before. Curtain was partially dragged out as if dragged on the hook of his foot as he was pulled out.
Days later, having calmed down and decided to try reason and not jump to the extraordinary, the Walker asked his grandson if he could go open the window. The boy tinkered for a while to figure out the odd lock mechanism, but he could not lift the window. The Walker frowned. The boy had never sleep walked and he never would have considered using the window instead of the door, as the window was not something he could manipulate, even wide awake.
Determined to get back into the routine, The Walker began his daily jaunt, but as he passed one neighbor's home, she stopped to talk to him.
"Have a look at this." She waved a photograph before him.
The Walker squinted at a photo of a cat with something pink on it.
"What's this?" He asked.
"My house cat. She's never been outdoors before. She went missing for a week."
"I haven't seen her." He let her know, but his stomach flip flopped about a stray animal.
"No, she came back home. This is a picture of her. Someone pulled the hair off her face, between her eyes and ears, under her chin and on her belly, leaving all pink skin. Totally raw. Like some kind of cartoon figure." She shook her head and tsked.
The Walker looked at the photo again and then lifted his head, looking over at the house where the neighbor had two dogs that are now one-eyed after going into the woods. Then, another neighbor next door had a dog that lost an eye after going into the woods too. All three dogs, no scars, no cuts, just an eye popped out. Popping a dog's eye out wasn't impossible if one either picked them up by the scruff of their neck or squeezed their neck. But how could that happen three times in a few months in the same area? And how the heck did someone pull the hair right out of a cat in so many places and not have it wiggle out of his arms or scratch him up and down?
The Walker offered his neighbor, "I hope she's okay. I'll keep an eye open for anything strange." That was an understatement.
Then, he saw a hummingbird zoom by and crash to the ground. He went over to see what was wrong and picked it up when it suddenly shocked him by flying away.
A neighbor came up and approached the Walker and he stopped to give his usual warm greetings.
"Heard the strangest thing last night." The neighbor shook his head.
"What?"
"It was midnight." The neighbor announced.
Midnight, that had the Walker's attention. Had his friend heard what his wife heard at midnight?
"I came outside because of the craziest loud calls of a mockingbird. You ever know a mockingbird to call at midnight?" The neighbor didn't wait for a reply, he pointed across the roadway to the neighbor's home, the one whose two dogs both had one eye each after their woodland encounters behind his home.
The neighbor pointed in two directions behind the man's home, towards the woods. "One mockingbird called, then another replied. Back and forth. They were maybe a quarter mile away and so loud! How is that possible?" He squinted at the Walker.
The Walker felt his scalp tingle in unease. Those woods where the dogs went in and came back with an eye popped out. In fact, they were the same woods that only days ago, he saw a 3-toed print come from that direction to the roadway. This print, he thought could be claws of some kind of coyote or something, the direction it came from and the size gave him the willies, especially comparing it to the three-toed track he casted months ago.
The neighbor sighed loudly. "Got something else kind of odd. Don't know what to make of it."
The Walker stiffened.
"You know I'm a water man. I do witching with rods. Never had any issues with divining, but then I recently tested them over a pipe in the ground and they didn't cross. They have always crossed. They just didn't work. Kind of weird. Like something is in the air." The man lifted his head and squinted at the woods in the distance. "You take care on your walk." He offered.
The Walker nodded in agreement and raced off silently, not sure if he even wanted to finish his route, but he was determined he would not let anything stop him from his routine.
Without warning, the dogs came galloping from the woods straight for the Walker. He wasn't sure what to do, but he remained very still, thinking he shouldn't threaten them to chase, they were worked into a frenzy. They yapped at him and encircled him. He recognized two of the dogs as strays that a neighbor had taken in, thankfully, given what happened to the other strays.
One dog had blood on his neck.
The Walker puzzled over this as the dogs at once turned and raced back to the ravine in the woods, still barking and carrying on. Just then, the neighbor who had taken in the strays, started up his quad and rode off into the woods after them.
The Walker moved on, but he was concerned about what the dogs had cornered and why they came for no reason to bug him and then leave.
He walked past the long black shoelace that he and the Stalker kept moving back and forth. Finally, the Walker got tired of wondering if an animal was dragging it and tied it with a double knot on the pole. It was on the pole, but untied. A critter could have dragged the shoelace away, but when the Walker found it and tied it up with a double knot, no critter was untying that!
(black shoestring on the right hand side showed up one day)
(string went missing soon after)
(string untied - center top of pole under limb)
The Walker shook his head, refusing to give it any attention and moved on, but as his eyes swept the roadway and surrounding woods instinctively on guard.
He was feeling a bit uncomfortable, as it was, because one neighbor had announced that his hunting dogs were missing.
This thing, whatever/whoever it was, it was total chaos. He could not predict its moves or its motives, which made it exceedingly threatening.
There was no getting around the fact; this was utter chaos.
Distracted by lots of things happening in his family and work life, the Walker forgot to think about it for a while. That only lasted a couple weeks, because his wife noted that one of the windchimes was moved from a peg to atop another windchime's peg so they hung together. What was the issue with the hanging items and how the heck did it manage to reach up?
Then, one night the Walker heard strange howling on the porch. He found a tom cat out there, a gray tabby. He shooed it off and then went back inside. The next day, however, he found the oddest fur all over the porch and into the yard. Someone had pulled it from a creature quite obviously. He recalled the neighbor's cat with the hair plucked out and shuttered at the notion. It wasn't cat fur, that was for sure and it certainly wasn't the tom cat's. In fact, it was varying lengths, mostly white, some dark worked in, and reminded him of a hare.
The Walker lifted his gaze to the distant thicket and considered the last time he ran across a hare on the solstice - the one with its head and arm torn off, having been brought up from the lower swamp area.
The Walker's fists tightened. He had enough of it coming up to his home and messing with him and possibly his family and pets. Ultimately, this was going to come down to a confrontation. He always knew it, but he dreaded it. If it would just be polite and move on, he'd let it go, but now it was getting personal.
He pivoted on his feet and stalked back indoors to have some hot coffee and contemplate his plan....
ADDENDUM: It was brought to my attention that a zoom in on the black shoestring untied showed this right beside it - looking like an alien grey with spindly fingers reaching out on the far right side of the photo. Of course, pareidolia is a likely explanation, seeing shapes in things, and with it pixelated, it loses much content. Yet, it certainly gives one a chill to look into those eyes, one of them glistening....
(just to the right of the vertical shoestring)
PREVIOUS INSTALLMENTS -
Installment #1 "Walking Dead"Installment #2 "Dem Bones"
Installment #3 "Too Close To Home"
Installment 4: "Encounter"
Installment #5: "Roadside Horror"
Installment #6: "Baffling Kills"
Installment #7: "Not By a Long Shot"
***Tomorrow night, listen in while I talk para subjects on Paranormal Talk 101 at 11 pm EST/10 pm Central/8 pm Pacific ***
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