Virtual Campfire

I have a face for radio and a voice for mime, but that doesn't stop me from telling the weirdest paranormal stories that I find online. Turn out all the lights and get some s'mores ready, because it's time to sit round the virtual campfire.

[campfirecreeps]

The Wolf at the Door

It was 2014 when a Michigan woman (kept anonymous in the source book for this article) wrote to cryptozoological investigator Linda Godfrey to report a bizarre encounter her great-grandfather had had with an exceptionally unusual sort of wolf-like entity in the 1920s according to his son (her grandfather). The woman was the descendant of one of the founding families of Detroit.

He had been driving in the Rockwood area of the absolute southernmost tip of Detroit, somewhere along the Huron River not more than a few miles away from Gross Isle and Lake Erie when one of his tyres went flat - marooning him on a country lane in the days before service stations infested the corners of each and every street. Instead, he decided that his only reasonable course of action would be to walk to the nearest house and hope that the people living there would be kind enough to help him.

Taking this risk, however, would not go his way at all. He knocked on the door and something happened which he never forgot for the rest of his days. Something large and hairy opened the door - it resembled a ‘dog’ stood on its hind legs. As if the situation couldn’t get any stranger, the dogman proceeded to speak in clear English. Go, or I’ll kill you. Horrified, the man bolted from the doorway and ran back to his car, driving it all the way home on the flat tyre in sheer panic.

Source: Monsters Among Us by Linda Godfrey

[campfirecreeps]

The Legion of the Damned Comes to Iceland

If the deathbed requests of the dearly departed are ignored then it stands to reason in a folklore-based world that their disgruntled spirit might return to pester the living. However, for one woman who died 'far back in the history of time' in Iceland, the posthumous disrespect she received would not only bring about the manifestation of her wrathful ghost, but would also rain all sorts of supernatural hell down upon those living in the house in which her body had been temporarily stored before she could be buried. You may have heard of paranormal hotspots such as Skinwalker Ranch in Utah or Hoia Baciu in Transylvania, but I for one had never heard of a human cadaver becoming a hotspot for such a wide-reaching variety of paranormal phenomena. I'm talking hordes of apparitions, poltergeists, lethal sleep paralysis, UFOs and even bizarre subterranean pinniped cryptids. Are you sitting comfortably?

After she died, the unnamed Icelandic lady's body was to be interred in a far-off sepulchre (perhaps out of fear of her wrath) but unfortunately this could not take place for the first day after her funeral for unspecified reasons. The bearers stopped in a nearby house overnight, depositing her body in the house as well. Predictably, her ghost made itself known at midnight, gliding around the kitchen. It seems as if her body was then interred the next morning, and the funeral participants returned home. However, they had evidently unleashed something they couldn't easily lock back up. The house had become undeniably damned. On the night that the bearers returned home, a bizarre object appeared in the sky above the house in which the body had been stored. It was described as a glowing 'spectral form' resembling a half-moon, and it moved about in an arc shape through the night sky, revolving in the opposite direction to the manner in which the sun would normally proceed across the heavens. It continued to repeat this action endlessly until the occupants of the house went to sleep. It did this without fail every evening for a week - and 'certain wise sages' declared it to be a portent of pestilence and death. One of these unfortunately-correct prophets would later meet his demise as well at supernatural hands.

The first death to be caused by this phenomenon was that of an unnamed herdsman. Shortly after the death of the lady who had started the whole unholy thing, he found himself apparently persecuted by demonic entities. One morning, his lifeless body was found in his bed. The phenomenon which had now evidently taken complete possession of the house seemed to not want to let the hapless herdsman's soul move on, however, and his ghost appeared to one of the men who had prophesied the coming of death and destruction to the house. This man's name was Thorer, and one night the shepherd's ghost set upon him with such ferocity that he was effectively beaten to death by incorporeal hands. Thorer joined the growing horde of wrathful spirits shortly thereafter, seemingly aligning himself with his killer to further persecute the occupants of the house. Several more individuals would be assaulted by these murderous spirits.

Poltergeist activity commenced within the house soon afterwards, with tables and chairs being upturned by invisible hands and kitchen utensils being hurled about in wild and unpredictable directions. Next, something which takes the cake for weirdness happened - a 'demon in the shape of a seal' emerged from the ground. This creature apparently rose from the earth on several occasions, causing the occupants of the house great distress. The next notable figure to die was Thorodd, the master of the house. He was crossing a river in a boat along with two of his servants when the boat suddenly faltered in an unspecified manner, causing all three men to drown - and their spirits to walk the halls of the accursed house soon after.

However, the occupants of the house were now devout Christians. The source for this story is an 1880 book of folklore which seems to be highly biased against those that it refers to as 'heathens' - and so of course the Christians are described as being completely unbothered by the murderous ghosts which are now described as demons. The Christians are said to have simply accepted that those who were favourably received by a goddess named Rana (presumably Rana Niejta of the Sámi Shamans) were bound to show themselves after death. Despite this weird little aside in the narrative as told by the book, it is evident that the ghostly onslaught was not quite done yet. In fact, the next few sentences of the story in the book heavily imply that it didn't even slow down. There were now thirty ghosts haunting the house, and this was apparently the exact number of people who had somehow been in contact with demons (if my understanding of the passage is correct). The nocturnal storage of the woman's body had evidently started something which had now completely outgrown her initial wrath. People in the surrounding village started to flee their homes out of fear that they would soon be killed by the entities and that their spirits would join the demonic hordes.

Their fears might indeed have been realised were it not for the timely intervention of a pious priest. He came to the house and plentifully applied holy water to the site, exorcising the foul spirits through means of holding a solemn mass. Hereafter, the entities all disappeared and were never heard from again - and so ended the parade of the damned which had briefly taken over a small Icelandic village...

Source: 'The Mysteries of All Nations' by James Grant

[campfirecreeps]

The Bray Road Rituals

Kettle Moraine State Forest is a very weird place. There is a 270ft tall glacial formation that allegedly holds an extraterrestrial base, and there are prevalent rumours of occult ritual activity in the dark woods of the forest. Vague but disturbing urban legends about the legendary Goatman swirl around in the shadowy trees of the region. It also happens to be quite close to Elkhorn, Wisconsin - which was plagued by sightings of a terrifying werewolf-like creature that came to be known as the Bray Road Beast in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The period in which the monster was allegedly seen is also famous for the so-called Satanic Panic, and so it was probably only a matter of time before Old Nick himself got involved in the werewolf panic...

As far as I can tell, the first mention of occultic activity in the woods of Kettle Moraine comes from a news report remembered from the late 70s or early 80s by the mother of a Cult of Weird writer by the name of Charlie Hintz. The most memorable feature of this report, apparently, was a photograph of a large oak tree which had been carved out and had been adorned with occult symbols on the inside of the trunk where three branches converged. While this is quite a weak little anecdote, the stories only get stranger from here, folks.

Looking deep into the bizarre events that constituted the Bray Road Beast panic, we can find mention of strange characters prowling Wisconsin's Elkhorn neighbourhood. These unidentified people would allegedly pose as humane officers, and were known to pilfer stray dogs for purposes unknown. An unnamed child spoke of an incident that took place when he was left home alone. A stranger appeared and tried to talk him into giving up his black Labrador. It was clear that something sinister was afoot. This underlying current of Satanic Panic took a much more extreme turn in 1990, however, when more than a dozen animal corpses were found in a ditch beside an Elkhorn road. The humane officer of the nearby town of Delevan stated that he believed that the carcasses had been used in occult rituals. Some of these unfortunate animals had ropes tied around their legs. Their throats had been slit and some of them were missing their heads or other body parts. One dog's chest had been cut open and its heart removed. Even more upsettingly, some of the animals were identified as local missing pets - making me wonder if the aforementioned black Lab would've ended up on this ghastly heap if the unnamed child hadn't been so strong-willed.

It was the late winter of 1992 when Tammy Bray (coincidentally named) encountered the Bray Road Beast while driving home from work at 10:30pm. She said that a canine humanoid crossed the road in front of her, and she described it as being having a strong-looking upper body but as having 'slouchy, sloppy-like' movement in the rear. Just a few months after this odd encounter, several horses nearby were found in their pasture with their throats slashed.

Seth Breedlove arrived in Elkhorn in early 2018, travelling with his Smalltown Monsters film crew in hope of getting some footage and interviews for his Beast of Bray Road documentary. One specific interview really captured the spirit of the Satanic Panic during which the werewolf flap took place, and it provided the interesting implication that at least some of the residents of the area already suspected that perhaps the canine monster had a occult origins. The interviewee was a man named John Frederickson, and he was a former animal control officer for Walworth County. He had apparently been investigating occult ritual sites found in the woods near Elkhorn - and although he acknowledged that some of the sites were likely the work of prankish teenagers, he also stated his belief that there were genuine Satanic rituals happening in the area at the time - and that these were being performed by people from all walks of life, be they teachers or law enforcement officials. This is, of course, classic Satanic Panic paranoia - but perhaps there is more to it, seeing as Elkhorn was listed as one of the top three counties in which Satanic activity was supposed to be taking place, real animal mutilations can be verified to have happened around the area, and John apparently spoke to an FBI agent who acknowledged the presence of occult ritual practices in the area. Part of John's interview can be viewed here.

Charlie Hintz also recounted another story about a woman who was on a horse ride through Kettle Moraine in the mid 90s when she came across cleanly mutilated animal remains. The same woman would later go for another ride through these woods with her daughter, and would this time be confronted by a naked man walking out of the brush in front of them. This bizarre character quickly vanished, presumably after realising he had been caught in whatever heinous act he was undertaking at the time. Fearing for the safety of her young daughter, the perturbed witness filed a police report. The police apparently confirmed that they were aware of rituals being conducted in the forests - but also stated that they had not yet been able to catch the culprits.

It is my opinion that the Satanic Panic was an example of a literal modern day witch hunt. There are still people in prison to this very day after having been wrongly convicted of Satanic ritual abuse during the 1990s. However, stories like the many tales I have recounted above make me question what - if indeed anything - was really going on during those hysteria-fuelled few years, and what these nebulous events might've had to do with the manifestations of monsters...

Sources:

'The Weiser Field Guide to Cryptozoology' by Deena West Budd

'Occult Rituals in the Backwoods of Wisconsin' for Cult of Weird

[campfirecreeps]

Megarachnids in Venezuela

Rick C. West is a Canadian arachnologist, specialising in studying tarantulas. He's a scientific man, and has written a scientific paper on the subject with an extraordinarily long title. He's not the sort to believe anything he hears, especially not about his chosen subject of interest - and so when he buys into legends about child-eating mega spiders in Venezuela, it's probably wise to take him seriously.

He was recruited in 2008 by the American television show MonsterQuest to trek into the Venezuelan jungle and talk to villagers living near the Orinoco River and the Colombian border. This was to be a three day long expedition, and West was accompanied by some unnamed local helpers and an experienced Amazon guide by the name of Juan Carlos Ramirez. Ramirez had worked in the jungle for over 20 years, and so West was certainly in capable hands.

West would begin his quest for a bona fide Shelob in the small village of San Rafael de Manuare. One villager living here told a truly terrifying story from his childhood about the occasion on which he had supposedly witnessed a giant tarantula-like spider capture a small dog from the village before dragging it off into the boundless jungle. Despite the absurd nature of this proposition, Ramirez was convinced of the veracity of the witness. This villager described it as having an abdomen as large as a basketball, and as being the same height as a human when it reared up. According to Karl Shuker - the fangs of this nightmarish creature (if they were in proportion to the rest of the body) would measure in at a whopping 6-9 inches. Imagine being bitten by those...

Seemingly next on the itinerary was another village by the name of Pandari. Pandari is deeper within the Venezuelan mountains - and it certainly seems like our plucky protagonists were venturing further and further into mega-spider territory. Here, the crew met up with two villagers - Antonio and his son Simoni. This father-son duo told a dreadful tale about a small child who had vanished, and clarified that this disappearance had been attributed to the activities of giant spiders. Although these stories might seem like urban legends, the fear of giant spiders is very real for the villagers of Pandari - seeing as they resort to engineering their huts specifically to protect themselves against invasion by Acromantula. These huts have thatched roofs which extend all the way down to the ground, creating dense and tightly woven barricades against arachnid intrusion.

As you can probably guess from the fact that this expedition took place in 2008 and that we currently don't have colossal tarantulas in our zoos, the monstrous arthropods were able to elude West and his team - but they did succeed in finding some tarantula specimens roughly the size of the largest on record, and West was apparently convinced that even larger arachnids could exist further in the jungle. So we have at least a professional arachnologist at least partially supporting the notion of child-eating spiders. Also, a cinematographer by the name of Richard Terry sought enormous spiders allegedly capable of killing horses in the Colombian rainforest for a television series in 2011. He was also unsuccessful, but he did hear stories that seemed to suggest that the spiders exist in networks of subterranean tunnels which enter out onto the forest floor from large holes.

One more quick note - I am wondering if perhaps MonsterQuest changed the names of the villages from which the spider witnesses came - on the grounds that the only results for any locations by the name of Pandari are in India, and searching for San Rafael de Manuare only returns results for a village simply called San Rafael. We definitely see all of these villages in the documentary itself - and so I don't think they were fictional, but I think that perhaps their names were changed for confidentiality.

Sources:

'Mirabilis' by Karl Shuker

MonsterQuest Season 2 Episode 17

Image Source:

'Giant Spider' by Markus Neidel on ArtStation

[campfirecreeps]

The Drowner in Lake Winnipeg

You might think you know what a Wendigo is, and I would wager that you would be right in most cases. However, folklore is rarely that simple - and so the definition of a Wendigo is somewhat liable to change based on the individual group of Algonquian people discussing it. There is one particularly intriguing story that comes out of the Lake Winnipeg area, which suggests that perhaps these malevolent cannibal spirits could even be aquatic on some occasions.

Wilma Raynor began her career as a nurse on a reserve in Alberta in 1944. She would help to set up nursing stations throughout the Canadian north, and would eventually become the nursing director for the Manitoba branch of the Canadian Red Cross Society after eighteen years of hard work. Throughout her many years, she heard countless tales of the terrifying Wendigo spirit, but she dismissed them all as 'ridiculous' until she witnessed something she couldn't quite explain...

She was working with a Cree community near the northern end of Lake Winnipeg, and one morning she caught sight of a girl quietly walking along the shore of the lake holding a pail. This girl was 19 years old, and her name was Christina. She briefly stood there, just staring out into the lake - before suddenly screaming in terror at something unseen and running for the nearest cabin. Christina found her mother in this cabin, grabbed her by the arm and dragged her down the shore of the lake. She desperately tried to point something out to her mother, but she strangely refused to look at whatever it was - and then pulled her daughter away from the lake to safety.

Presumably alarmed by this bizarre happening, Wilma made her way back the cabin. By the time she got there, it was already packed with concerned Cree neighbours, listening intently as Christina described her frightening vision. She had apparently seen a female figure stood in the water, which went up to her waist. There was long, dark hair hanging around her 'evil' face and she used a spindly arm to beckon for Christina to approach. Her mother claimed to have seen nothing, and noted that it was a 'hard struggle' to drag her daughter away from the potentially lethal water. Wilma was driven by this story to believe the assertion that Christina was nearly drawn into the water by a malevolent spirit of some kind. She gave Christina a sedative and kept her company while she calmed down.

However, the nightmarish influence of this watery Wendigo on the Cree community of Lake Winnipeg hadn't ceased yet. You see, it was apparent that the spirit wanted to claim a human life, and it wasn't going to rest until it had one. It laid in wait for months until a young Cree man came to visit Christina. He was a potential marriage partner for her, and after seeing his possible future wife, he decided to go skating on the frozen lake. You can guess how this ends.

The young man fell through a hole in the ice, and nearby people immediately rushed to the scene to try and save him from the freezing embrace of the water. However, they were ultimately unsuccessful - and the unfortunate suitor drowned in Lake Winnipeg. Intrigued by this harrowing incident, Wilma spoke to an older man in the Cree community about it - and what he had to say was shocking to say the least. He slowly shook his head and started, saying that he had never seen anything like it before. He had seen many people drown before, but never 'like that'.

The community members had apparently managed to find the hole in the ground into which the young man had fallen, and had shone a light down into it. They were able to see the man's head just underneath the ice. He was just floating there - 'like he just stand there'. Wilma visited the lake the next day, and likely felt a chill scuttle up her spine when she realised that the man had drowned in the same area from which the Wendigo had attempted to lure Christina.

Wilma told this terrifying story in 1957 in a short article called 'Windigo Woman' in issue 228 of a local newspaper for the Hudson Bay Company called The Beaver. It was originally meant for employees of the aforementioned company when it was first launched in the 1920s, but it had since expanded readership to all those with an interest in the Subarctic. Wilma apparently would've been writing both to inform and entertain. The newspaper in question is now simply called Canada's History.

Source: 'Dangerous Spirits' by Shawn Smallman

[campfirecreeps]

Creeping Fingers of the Men in Black

Harold T. Wilson is quite widely known for his books on ufology, archaeology and world mysteries. He was busy investigating the wide world of high strangeness in the same era as people like Gray Barker and Al Bender, and so of course it was only a matter of time before he ran into the dreaded Men in Black - who were apparently very much in full operation in those days. There is one specific story in his files which deals with this particular terrifying aspect of the UFO phenomenon, and it involves some decidedly inhuman men in black suits.

Wilson received a letter from an anonymous informant in 1953, containing a bizarre story about two black-clad creepers that turned up at the door of a Los Angeles-based attorney's office in late January of that year. This attorney's office was particularly focused on tracing missing persons, and the two MIB were almost instantly given high-ranking positions within the company - despite nobody except the director (who chose to remain silent about the whole situation) having any real idea as to who they were. They spent most of their time holed up in their office, and hardly ever spoke to anyone.

These men were odd-looking in the extreme. They were described as emaciated, and were roughly 1.98 meters in height. The bones in their hands were exceedingly aberrant, with their wrists and fingers seemingly being entirely devoid of joints. At least one of these spindly spooks evidently possessed superhuman strength, seeing as he was able to leave a half-inch dent on top of a filing cabinet when he put his hand on it while leaning over it. Another incident that clearly demonstrated the inhumanity of these entities was allegedly witnessed by an unnamed female member of staff at the company. She described seeing the fingers of one of the men (said fingers have also been described by Nick Redfern as being rubbery and boneless) stretch to lengths of roughly 8 or 9 inches - meaning that they briefly appeared like grotesque tentacles.

Unsurprisingly, yet another anonymous employee of this unfortunate company concluded that the best course of action would be to call the FBI to the scene. Two government agents were swiftly dispatched to investigate the bizarre happening. Soon after having the Feds sicked on them, the two mysterious men vanished - never to be seen again.

However, this case was now government business - and all good UFO investigators should know that government business is never simple. The FBI proceeded to 'sequester' (read 'confiscate') the filing cabinet with the dent in it, and promptly turned it over to a chemist specialising in metallurgy. This helpful character determined that a force of 2,000 pounds (907 kilograms) or above would be needed to deal that sort of damage to the long-suffering cabinet. According to Wilkins' anonymous informant, the FBI were rather alarmed by this news and quickly forwarded a classified report to the trusty Bureau's Washington DC headquarters. This report swiftly vanished, as was likely pretty inevitable in this sort of story.

Now, this story is admittedly pretty outlandish, and would serve to confirm that the FBI was aware of the presence of the MIB if it could be confirmed to be true. However, that's where the trouble starts. Wilkins was apparently certain of the veracity of his source, as evidently were other researchers, seeing as the story appeared in the August 1954 edition of Mystic Magazine. This article was then summarily read by a certain resident of Lanesville, Ohio - who felt the need to send a letter to J. Edgar Hoover himself, demanding to know the truth of the matter. I admire his courage.

As one might expect, Hoover replied 'I would like to advise you that the article you mentioned is entirely incorrect with reference to the FBI, and there is no information on the matter which I can give you'. Also, there was later an FBI document written on August 12th of that same year which stated that the FBI's field office had now advised the editor of Mystic magazine that the story was untrue 'as far as the Bureau's part was concerned' - and that said editor had agreed to publish a retraction of the story in the next issue. Whether or not this retraction ever came is not knowledge I possess.

And so we are left with an interesting question - was this bizarre event naught more than an uncanny hoax, or has the truth of the matter been obscured by an insidious coverup?

Sources:

'True Stories of the Real Men in Black' by Nick Redfern

'The Slenderman Mysteries' by Nick Redfern

[campfirecreeps]

an entertaining and fast-paced ride through the folklore of Chicago’s spookiest street

Submitted by addovoltproductions! 

[campfirecreeps]

First reported on back in July of 2018, a truly chilling piece of footage appears to show a Ukrainian television co-host briefly revealing that she has distinctly reptilian eyes. This anomalous incident occurred during a television broadcast produced by a New Age spirituality group called AllatRa. The broadcast lasted for a whopping six hours, and featured a man and a woman (of whom I cannot easily find the names) discussing Atlantis, spirituality and all manner of other fringe topics, presumably through the lens of AllatRa’s belief system.

The woman in question briefly looks up at the ceiling before her eyes seem to blink sideways, revealing yellowish reptilian orbs before they promptly return to normal and she resumes talking.

Obviously, footage of ‘real’ reptilian shapeshifters is almost always obviously hoaxed or simply the product of misunderstandings by people who don’t understand how camera clitches work. However, the puzzling moment does actually appear in the original broadcast released by AllatRa - and so that rules out it being added later as a prank or hoax. If it wasn’t added by pranksters, then maybe it was added by the esoteric group themselves? Some have suggested that they might’ve done this deliberately to generate buzz around their organisation, but I would contend that the anomaly only shows up for a split-second and so I think they might’ve made it more obvious if they were going to do this. Another skeptical perspective is that this footage falls in line with almost all other Reptoid footage that I’ve seen - and that it is simply the product of either a camera glitch or the woman’s eyes reflecting light in a strange way.

I’m honestly not sure what to make of this one. Watch the video and see for yourself!

Source: https://www.coasttocoastam.com/article/watch_tv_presenter_reveals_reptilian_eyes

[campfirecreeps]

The Gardiner Haskins Haunting

A household appliances and interior design store in Bristol may not be the first place you would expect to be haunted, but that is just what appears to be the case in the local Gardiner Haskins Interiors shop. The store was originally an old soap factory built in 1865, and the company is - as of late 2018 - in the process of moving out of the building and reestablishing their business elsewhere. Later in the article it is said that they were intending to be off the premises by December. Although not explicitly stated in the source for this story, I would personally be inclined to think that this may be because of unwanted incorporeal customers.

A paranormal investigator called Richard Case talked to BristolLive news, and he said that the investigation into the building began when a 999 call was received from within it, but when the police arrived there was no-one in the area from which the call came. Further inquiries revealed that witnesses had previously seen various inexplicable happenings at the store - such as pots of paint moving across rooms of their own accord. When staff have locked the store up at night, they have said that they sometimes hear ‘traditional fairground organ music drifting from somewhere in the building’.

Richard went on to talk about an EVP recording that he garnered from his time investigating the case. ‘People have also heard voices. I have got a recording and it does sound like a human voice. It could be saying 'George'. The voice is male’. This case was documented in mid-October of the year in question, and so Richard and his team were of course planning to stay in the location for Halloween. The results of this endeavour are currently unclear, but Richard said that he would be attempting to capture evidence of the moving paint-pots. 

The basement area of the store, which is presumably a hold-over from the building’s past as a soap factory, still bears boarded-up doorways and an old kiln, as well as a large, fire-damaged wooden door (pictured above). Shaun Butcher, a director at the store, said that this ominous door hasn’t been opened in years. Although he has not yet had a paranormal experience in the 15 years that he has been working for the shop, he is aware that another member of staff saw a feminine apparition wearing a white high-neck Victorian dress. The ghost ‘walked through the basement and vanished’.

Shaun concluded by saying ‘It is certainly a very eerie location. The building does have its own noises, creeks and bangs and I wouldn't discount anything’.

Source: https://www.bristolpost.co.uk/news/bristol-news/gardiner-haskins-believed-haunted-staff-2155973

[campfirecreeps]

The Armadillo Man

Speaking to the ‘Expanded Perspectives’ podcast, a witness going by the initials of SB told of a unique and bizarre tale that one of their patients had related to them in their job as a hospice chaplain. The witness was obviously near the end of her life, seeing as she was under the care of SB - but her illness had nothing to do with mental issues. She had apparently relayed her story multiple times ‘without wavering’. 

The witness used to live in Grassy, Alabama when she was a young mother. One day she was gathering laundry from the line when she ‘got a peculiar feeling’ before being confronted with an anomalous creature as it ‘lumbered from behind a wood pile’. It was described as a 3ft-tall white entity with stringy hair which was long enough to drag on the ground as it walked around on all fours. Its face was long, and reminded her of an armadillo’s - being hairless and ‘smooth like bone’. Its eyes were kind and human-like, and it never broke eye-contact with her. After getting within hand’s reach of the witness, it suddenly went ‘flat like a bottom sheet’ and continued to look up at her. I am slightly confused as to what this description is supposed to mean - did the creature literally flatten its body and become two-dimensional? 

As any sensible person would at this point, the witness quickly moved away from the entity and backwards to her house’s door. As if the story couldn’t get any stranger, she was woken that same night to find that her baby was crying, and so when she got out of bed to tend to her she suddenly ‘noticed the front yard was like daytime with sun shine and blue sky while the backyard was normal night time’. Apparently the witness was a ‘good honest Christian woman’ who has since passed away.

Source: https://www.phantomsandmonsters.com/2019/01/pale-armadillo-faced-humanoid.html

[campfirecreeps]

Demonic Hysteria in Quezon City

Panic and hysteria ensued in the Quezon City barangay (the smallest administrative district in the Philippines) on the 22nd of January, 1993 after a group of children witnessed a giant black humanoid figure while burning some wood next to a tamarind tree in a local forest. They described the entity as having a tail and a pair of horns, and this sight apparently prompted some of the students to go into a trance-like state and speak in tongues, after which the figure vanished. The chaos wouldn’t stop there, though.

Although this first event may have been vague, the next report hones into the anomaly with chilling specificity. The first person to suffer from what can only be described as demonic possession in this bizarre outbreak was a 12-year-old schoolgirl called Joy Bolante - who was attending classes when she suddenly caught sight of a ‘tall kapre* standing under an old sampaloc tree near the school’s herbal garden’. She told her classmates about it before promptly fainting. While she was unconscious, her classmates said that they heard her talking in a man’s voice. Joy was taken home later that day.

On Sunday that week (24th of January), Joy was taken to Camp Crame Hospital - and then when they presumably couldn’t help her she was instead taken to the local chapel so that the clergymen could ‘drive out the evil spirit in her’. The older and conventionally wiser folk in the neighborhood were quoted as saying that the evil spirit lived in the trunk of the tamarind tree, and had been angered after schoolchildren had burnt wood near its tree. Plot twist - it turns out that Joy Bolante was one of these unwise youths. 

Everything seemed to calm down for a few days, and perhaps people thought that the supernatural terror had come to an end. Alas, they would be incorrect - as another girl suddenly fainted at 9am on the 27th, and started talking while she was unconscious. The neighborhood was instantly once again gripped with panic, and the fainting girl’s neighbours said that the voice emanating from the unconscious child ‘identified herself as Jane’. 

Suddenly, the ostensibly demonic spirit started jumping ‘from one child to another’ in a hysteria-fuelled contagion. Among the many victims of this anomaly were 13-year-old Jean delos Santos, 12-year-old Geraldine Factora, 12-year-old Malet Juarez, 13-year-old Wilma Canuto, 13-year-old Gladys Cabata, 12-year-old Mayette Gonzales, 13-year-old Sandy Sevilla - as well as other girls named Joy (presumably the same Joy as earlier), Liwayway and Loreta - and seemingly even eventually all the pupils of Camp Crame elementary school.

The students had simply been attending classes when they suddenly started ‘howling and screaming’ and violently hurling objects around their classrooms. Priests and doctors quickly arrived on the scene, and a priest and a cult-leader (presumably a term that means something different than it does here in England) began performing an exorcism as two of the children fainted in front of the ‘shocked’ neighbours.

Sources: 

https://philparanormalsite.webs.com/spiritpossession.htm

http://thecid.com/ufo/uf14/uf0/140076.htm

*A big, black, arboreal giant known from Filipino mythology. Not necessarily a demon though.  

[campfirecreeps]

The Wazooey Man

It was 1973, and two boys were playing in an arroyo (gulch or dry creek) in the Pueblo area of Colorado when they had an experience that they would never forget. They came across a creature that they would later nickname the ‘Wazooey Man’.

They were playing with their air pistols when they noticed that they were being watched by ‘two huge red eyes’. Presumably shocked by the bizarre sight, one of the boys started firing BB pellets into the eyes - seemingly prompting them both to be picked up by an invisible force and thrown down into a ravine. A large wooden post came out of the ground and hit one of the boys on the head. Utterly terrified at this point, the boys took off towards their truck only to realise that they had somehow lost the ignition key.

With this new hindrance, the panicked youngsters ran to the road and started trying to hitchhike - but they noticed that ‘some form’ resembling ‘a mobile haystack with two huge red eyes’ would manifest every time they tried to go west, and force them to retreat back the other way. There is little information on how they escaped the situation, which they presumably did because they must’ve lived to tell the tale. 

Source: ‘The Hard-To-Believe-But-True!: Book of Colorado History, Mystery, Trivia, Legend, Lore & More’ by Carole Marsh

[campfirecreeps]

Mangled Footprints in the Basement

A Redditor who has named themselves something less-than-appropriate for this new censored version of Tumblr recounted a bizarre incident that occurred in their house, which was built on an area that was once an open prairie in which Native American artifacts have been found ‘laying around’. He had moved into it as a young teenager with his mother after his parents had divorced. At first, this ‘seemed great’ seeing as the house was spacious and cozy, but strange happenings became more and more common - seemingly becoming more frequent the more he noticed them. 

He would frequently hear footsteps coming from downstairs when he was brushing his teeth in the evening, and although he would assume it was his mother, there would never be anyone down there when he checked. These sorts of anomalous footsteps became very common sounds in his house, ‘especially at night’. Eventually he realised that his house was haunted.

One day, he and one of his good friends had just come out from sunbathing and decided to retreat to his mother’s house seeing as she was away on a business trip and so they thought that they would have the house to themselves. They would be wrong, in the most paranormal way possible. 

They walked inside and went straight for the basement, where it was cooler than the rest of the house. The witness noticed that the ‘Yellow Submarine’ poster that was hanging at the bottom of the stairwell had been tilted slightly to the left. He ignored it at the time, fixing it and walking into the main room of the basement. There were pictures and posters hanging everywhere in the basement, and so the witness and his friend were ‘instantly’ spooked when they saw that they had all been tilted to the left. The uncanny nature of the situation didn’t cease, however - seeing as the storage room (which was basically a dirt-floored room that was roughly 4ft off the ground) had its door cracked open. The witness walked over and saw ‘a golden glow emanating out’.

Located about 10ft away from the storage room’s door was a pull chord light, and it was turned on. So, wanting to get rid of the eerie glow, the witness crawled into the storage room on his hands and knees to turn off the light. After doing this, they called their mother in the hope that ‘all of this had a natural explanation’ - but it turned out that she hadn’t been down in the basement ‘for weeks before she left on her trip’. A shiver scuttled down his spine as he looked back into the storage room, only to be confronted by a footprint in the dirt.

This footprint was ‘the most distorted and mangled footprint’ he had ever seen, and the witness froze in fear. His friend had much the same reaction, and they wordlessly looked at each other with ‘a sickening, gut wrenching feeling’ before he slammed the storage space door shut and they both ran out of the house as fast as they possibly could. 

The witness will never forget that footprint, and the thought that they had crawled into that storage space to turn off the light gives him shivers to this day.

Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/60qr2n/reddit_regardless_of_your_opinion_of_the_occult/df8j7dq

[campfirecreeps]

The Sky Chariot

Shamim M. was about 14 when she saw it. It was a clear, bright Summer’s day and her parents were gardening, which was apparently their ‘pride and joy’. Shamim was looking up at the airplanes overhead, which was her hobby at the time since she had never flown before, and so was presumably curious as to what it would be like. Her feelings of wonder towards the flying vehicle were quickly dwarfed by the sudden appearance of another, far less expected, flying object. Flying from the west in an easterly direction was ‘what can only be described as a magnificent, brown, wooden-looking’ chariot.

There was ‘something’ driving the chariot but it was described as being almost featureless. She was able to see that the chariot had high sides with ‘almost wheel-like round definition’ - and was clearly very large, being taller than the size of a jumbo jet now that she looks back on it. The anomalous object (a UFO in the literal sense of the word) was ‘gliding ever so smoothly’ about 2,000 meters above the houses. Although she could not see the contents of the chariot, she was still struck by how awesome this sight was.

She shouted to her parents in the instant that she saw it - refusing to take her eyes off it all the time. All three of them watched it glide about for ‘about half a minute’ before her mother grabbed hold of her and rushed her into the house while her father remained outside to watch it a little longer. Her mother then went back outside to watch, but the anomaly was over within minutes. When Shamim rushed to the front side of the house, she could no logner see it - and the only information that she got about it after ‘persistent pestering’ of her parents was that it had vanished into thin air after a few minutes.

Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20150924054858/http://paranormal.about.com/library/blstory_january04_08.htm

[campfirecreeps]

An Ostrich-Horse?

On January the 8th of 2000, the witness went to a gun show wearing a bigfoot-themed t-shirt with the intention of talking about said cryptid with the various outdoorsmen and hunters who would attend the event. He met one vendor who owned an outdoor goods booth, and who told him a strange story about what appears to be a hitherto-unknown creature - both to science and cryptozoology.

The vendor apparently travels a lot, and he decided to pull over to the side of the road on one of his long trips in order to sleep ‘as he often does’. He parked up near the cemetery of Ripley, Oklahoma - but made a point to tell the person who later recounted his story that he has done this multiple times before and ‘it has nothing to do with the story except to tell the exact location’.

He had only just laid down to sleep when he heard a strange noise and immediately sat up in his seat to look out of the window. Just as he did this, something ‘ran in front of the car making a loud noise’. It had the shape and size of an ostrich, and the he thought that was what it might be ‘until he looked at the head’. The head resembled that of a horse - not exactly, but ‘that was the general shape’. When he was asked to describe the noises that it made, he struggled to put it into words but managed to say that it was ‘very loud and aggressive sounding’. Presumably alarmed, the witness stuck his revolver in his waistband and sat still for a couple of minutes, before wisely deciding to find another place to sleep.  

The creature described in this account sounds a lot like the Jersey Devil of New Jersey folklore, but lacks the bat-like wings often associated with the creature. It makes me wonder if perhaps the Jersey Devil reports were based on confused sightings of multiple creatures - perhaps one of these ostrich-like entities and a pterosaur or dragon-style being in the same area? 

Source: http://www.gcbro.com/WS0001.htm

[campfirecreeps]

Modern-Day Bilquis

It was the early hours of the morning on a fateful day in the early 2000s when a middle-aged woman was found unconscious on the road in a Diwanya suburb. When she was taken to the hospital, she had a horrific story to tell the authorities. Apparently, she was a musician, and she had been hired to provide entertainment for a gathering in a large villa in the neighbourhood she was found in. As the night went on, however, she came to realise that a number of her clients weren’t entirely human. She tried to escape and evidently failed.

This happened in Diwanya, Kuwait (Western Asia). In the early 2000s (source doesn’t give an exact date), stories appeared in the Kuwaiti media detailing the run-in that a hapless victim had with beings that would normally be confined to the dark reaches of mythology and folklore.

The musician was a middle-aged woman who plays a traditional Kuwaiti instrument. She received a call from a prospective client who wanted to hire her for her services during the month of Ramadan. Since it is inappropriate to perform music during Ramadan, the witness initially refused - but the caller insisted, and tripled her usual fee - persuading her to go. The callers sent their own driver to pick her up, and what began as a usual musical event suddenly took a sharp turn for the supernatural. The party started early in the evening, but continued on till 12am, at which point some of the attendees began to act bizarrely. A group of young girls at the centre of the room, for example, started to dance very aggressively. They moved in such a vigorous manner that their legs began showing under their long dresses, revealing that their legs were not in fact those of humans - but rather bore a closer resemblance to ’horses’ legs’.

Terrified, as anyone would be in this anomalous situation, the woman ran out of the party where she found the driver who had picked her up waiting for her. Panicked, she quickly got into the car and refused to comment when the driver asked her what was wrong due to being too distraught to speak coherently. After a couple of minutes, however, she had calmed down enough to be asked again by the driver. She told him that some of the partygoers did not have human legs, prompting the driver to reply ’you mean just like mine?’ before revealing his legs under his clothes. Like the young girls at the gathering, they were those of an animal. The woman was hysterical with fear at this point, and so threw herself from the car and landed on the street, rendering herself unconscious.

The next day, after reporting the bizarre incident, she decided to return to the villa accompanied by the local authorities. However, the villa was gone. It had completely vanished, leaving nothing behind but an empty yard.

Ethiopia is sometimes said to be home to satyrs and fauns, which resemble humanoids with goat-like feet and legs. The source from which I garnered this story also makes a link to the Hebrew figure of the Queen of Sheba - or Bilquis - who was said in various folktales and apocryphal accounts from all three Abrahamic faiths to have animal hooves. This links her to the ghoul or ghul, which is sometimes classified as a type of Djinn in Islamic tradition. The words said by the driver just before revealing his non-human identity are also very closely mimicked in Japanese folklore, with the this time coming from the terrifying faceless shapeshifters known as Noppera-bō just before they make their human faces melt away with the intention of scaring the bejesus out of an unfortunate victim.

Source: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Jh9IC7Ld-3U

[wulfhowl-deactivated20191005]

Wish I was invited…

[campfirecreeps]

😂😂😂

[campfirecreeps]

Modern-Day Bilquis

It was the early hours of the morning on a fateful day in the early 2000s when a middle-aged woman was found unconscious on the road in a Diwanya suburb. When she was taken to the hospital, she had a horrific story to tell the authorities. Apparently, she was a musician, and she had been hired to provide entertainment for a gathering in a large villa in the neighbourhood she was found in. As the night went on, however, she came to realise that a number of her clients weren't entirely human. She tried to escape and evidently failed.

This happened in Diwanya, Kuwait (Western Asia). In the early 2000s (source doesn't give an exact date), stories appeared in the Kuwaiti media detailing the run-in that a hapless victim had with beings that would normally be confined to the dark reaches of mythology and folklore.

The musician was a middle-aged woman who plays a traditional Kuwaiti instrument. She received a call from a prospective client who wanted to hire her for her services during the month of Ramadan. Since it is inappropriate to perform music during Ramadan, the witness initially refused - but the caller insisted, and tripled her usual fee - persuading her to go. The callers sent their own driver to pick her up, and what began as a usual musical event suddenly took a sharp turn for the supernatural. The party started early in the evening, but continued on till 12am, at which point some of the attendees began to act bizarrely. A group of young girls at the centre of the room, for example, started to dance very aggressively. They moved in such a vigorous manner that their legs began showing under their long dresses, revealing that their legs were not in fact those of humans - but rather bore a closer resemblance to 'horses' legs'.

Terrified, as anyone would be in this anomalous situation, the woman ran out of the party where she found the driver who had picked her up waiting for her. Panicked, she quickly got into the car and refused to comment when the driver asked her what was wrong due to being too distraught to speak coherently. After a couple of minutes, however, she had calmed down enough to be asked again by the driver. She told him that some of the partygoers did not have human legs, prompting the driver to reply 'you mean just like mine?' before revealing his legs under his clothes. Like the young girls at the gathering, they were those of an animal. The woman was hysterical with fear at this point, and so threw herself from the car and landed on the street, rendering herself unconscious.

The next day, after reporting the bizarre incident, she decided to return to the villa accompanied by the local authorities. However, the villa was gone. It had completely vanished, leaving nothing behind but an empty yard.

Ethiopia is sometimes said to be home to satyrs and fauns, which resemble humanoids with goat-like feet and legs. The source from which I garnered this story also makes a link to the Hebrew figure of the Queen of Sheba - or Bilquis - who was said in various folktales and apocryphal accounts from all three Abrahamic faiths to have animal hooves. This links her to the ghoul or ghul, which is sometimes classified as a type of Djinn in Islamic tradition. The words said by the driver just before revealing his non-human identity are also very closely mimicked in Japanese folklore, with the this time coming from the terrifying faceless shapeshifters known as Noppera-bō just before they make their human faces melt away with the intention of scaring the bejesus out of an unfortunate victim.

Source: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Jh9IC7Ld-3U