The book 'The Demonic Connection' catalogues strange goings-on around Clapham Woods amongst other places. This is an account of what happened when I ventured there. This happened some time in the late 1990s.
It all started as a prank that we had been playing for a few weeks. I had some friends over to my parent’s house for a party while they were away. We got drunk, and then more people turned up, and they brought a road sign with them. It said “pedestrians” and had an arrow on it, pointing. For a joke, they put it in the doorway to my sister’s room. There it stayed until my parents got home. They saw the joke, but were annoyed at being stuck with a huge road sign, so they decided to ditch it. When they did the weekly shop, they ditched it at the back of Tesco’s car park. Then they gave me a riddle to find it. Late at night, me and some friends, most of us drunk, go and pick up the sign, and a new game evolves. We split into two groups, one group hides the sign, the other finds it, then we switch. My group hid it in a graveyard, the other group hid it by ‘the miller’s tomb’ and so forth…
It was my group’s turn, and I had a great paper chase going, following three sets of hidden clues, leading to Clapham Woods. We went there during the day, the woods were a little dark, but we put it down to it being an overcast day, and the thick foliage. We traipsed along a small path, and mapped out the route as we went. It was fairly simple, and we felt sure they’d find it. We stuck the sign behind a bush, and went home.
That evening, after the pub closed (11.30) I gave the other group the first clue and we followed them as they hunted for the other clues. We had 3 carfuls of half drunk loonies. They followed the clues with ease, and the cars pulled in to the car park by Clapham. We all piled out, and the other group lead the way, following the map with ease. We entered the woods, and right away, something felt…wrong. I thought maybe it was the dark, the alcohol…but most of us had torches, and I was driving, so I was stone cold sober. We followed the map, but things didn’t look right. I dismissed it, because it is bound to look different at night. The map was leading us to dead ends, and we started to get a little lost. I took the map from the leader of the group, as I’d drawn it, and lead the way. I back-tracked and found the right path, or so I thought. The trees were closing in on us, and I didn’t remember the undergrowth being so thick. Then I found something…weird. It was a footprint, of sorts, made out of very thin papery material, only it was soft, almost like…a layer of skin. Bizarre. We moved on, and more of these foot shaped things were stapled to trees, everywhere. Odd, I thought, but we kept going.
Then we all heard a noise. A growl of sorts, feral in nature, and coming from a very close-by thicket. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up, and everyone froze. Some of the girls started to freak out, but I said we should persevere. We moved on, and the noise came again, louder this time, and it had moved, to directly ahead of us. Then the sound of twigs snapping, seemingly from all around us. I thought FUCK THIS, and turned everyone around, and started urging them back the way we came. I could hear movement behind me, and I was now the last in the group, being single file. I could hear footfalls behind me, not footsteps, mind you, more like soft padding…GUYS, MOVE FASTER! I yell, and the two girls at the front start to run, then one of them screams, a branch hits her in the face. Everyone breaks into a run, and the footfalls behind me speed up too. By luck or fortune, we manage to find the track back to the car park, and we break out into the open. There is a loud crash behind me in the trees, and suddenly a shot is fired! Some fuck is shooting at us! Complete panic breaks out, and everyone is screaming and running full pelt to the cars. We pile in to our respective vehicles, shots going past our heads, and drive away, FAST.
Needless to say, we never went there again, and for all I know the sign is still there…
