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Hey, welcome to Scary Stories in Rain. Do you want to listen ad free? Just subscribe on Spotify for $2.99 a month. Now turn out the lights, enjoy the stories, and enjoy the rain. Before I start the story, I should probably give context so you can fully understand the layout of my friend's house and why I was staying there. At this time I was in the Navy and was about to leave for deployment. I had just moved out of my apartment and moved my things into my storage. My friends were kind enough to make arrangements for me to stay with them before we headed out to sea. Their house was on a corner at the entrance of the neighborhood. It was in a busy street with a gas station directly across the house. The driveway was right off the busy street, but the front door faced away from the road. You actually couldn't see it unless you took a path that would wind around a large tree and a few bushes. Basically, it was tucked away and sometimes delivery drivers would need help finding it. If we ordered pizza or something. This is important because at night it's especially hard to find. There was a camera on the garage and another at the front door. My friend Jay and I had started a routine where we would sit on the couch, drink wine, and watch True Crime. It was our way of winding down from the day. This particular night was one of those nights. Jay and I were sitting on the couch when we heard the ring doorbell go off. Jay and I looked at each other a little puzzled because it was very late. That's weird. Did you order food or something? I asked. J. No. Did you? She asked me as she opened up her phone to look at the app to see who was out front. I began to walk over to the door to see if it was our neighbors or someone who might need help. Don't open the door, Jay said. I I could hear fear in her voice. I turned, looking at her, concerned and a bit confused. I walked over to Jay and looked over her shoulder at her phone to see what was scaring her. My stomach dropped. A large man was standing at our front door, completely still. He was wearing a mask and holding what looked like a child's backpack that appeared to be dirty and stained. What are you doing? Jay asked through the screen. The man held up the backpack and opened it slightly. He tilted it, trying to show us what was in the bag, but we couldn't see. If you have a ring camera then you probably know that sometimes the quality can be crap, but a glare made it seem like something shot shiny was in the bag. Yet the man never pulled it out. He then got close to the camera and just stared right into was creepy. He stayed there just staring. His eyes were dead and looked sinister. Did I say creepy? No. It was terrifying. I'm calling the cops. I yelled. I grabbed my keys and also made my car alarm go off to scare the man away and bring attention to anyone nearby. It seemed to work because the man slowly walked away. I called 911 as Jay monitored the cameras for any sign of the man. Once I got off the phone with dispatch, J showed me something even more terrifying. The cameras caught footage of the man sneaking around the house prior to him ringing the doorbell. He was trying to understand the layout of our house. The footage also showed him pressing his back against the side of the house and looking around the corner a few times as if he was making sure no one was around to see what he was doing. It was then that I made the connection that he was probably planning to hurt us with whatever was in that bag. The cops came and we gave our statements and the footage from the doorbell camera. They let us know that they would keep an eye out for the man matching the description and let us know of any updates. But the story does not end here. A few weeks passed since the incident with the man. I had pretty much forgotten about the whole thing until I got a call. A police officer reached out to me and asked me to sit down because she had an update about the man. We saw approximately 12 minutes before the man came to our house. He had broken into an elderly woman's home. He stood in her bedroom and was watching her sleep until the woman woke up and saw him. She screamed and he stabbed her seven times before fleeing. The man had thought that he killed the woman, but she somehow survived. The only reason we know it was the same man was because the elderly woman also had a doorbell camera showing the same man with the same mask and the child's backpack. Remember the stains I said were on the bag? It was the woman's blood. The footage we gave the cops was used in a trial and the man was put in prison from what I heard. I am really thankful Jay stopped me from opening that door. Who knows what would have happened if I had. And thank God for doorbell cameras. It was quite a beautiful night when all this happened. I had been working at a hostel in Arkansas and I had met a German national named Amelia. We became a thing rather quickly and spent our nights searching and exploring the city streets and enjoying the lamp lights in their orange glow. Laughing and joking and kissing and Hugging, all that sort of stuff. It was in October, a few nights before Halloween, and we were on one of our typical nightly escapades. I remember that the moon was bright. Bright. I cannot quite recall if it was full or not, but I know that it was light enough to witness all of our surroundings. There was this spot called Foster Pond, and her and I frequented a specific bench that seemed to never be occupied. Almost as if it were only for us. Her and I sat there gazing up towards the stars, listening to the trickles of pond water, enjoying the strange scenery of the town around us. We felt untouched and unburdened. She and I made plans to visit Germany next year and celebrate Oktoberfest together. It was an innocent time, really. After a while, Emilia leaned her head back more and more and stared up towards the constellations, and I fixated my eyes out out towards the pond and the area that enveloped it. At first it was just movement, motion, a lone figure walking down the path. Not unusual at midnight in this particular part of town. However, something grabbed at me in my slim to nothing attention span about this particular wayward walker. The walk was diluted, deliberate, methodical, angry and fast. The first impression I had was that this guy really had something going on. Perhaps it was a Halloween party, or perhaps he had just been relieved from work and just wanted to get some. Something about the gate really got my attention and I could not stop fixating on this man just charging through the park in a mad, dashery sort of way. Within a few seconds, it sprung on me why I was so fixated on the guy. It was what was in his right hand. It was a hatchet. Definitely a hatchet. Now, my first thought was, ah, cool. A Halloween costume. Hatchet wielding skill. Psycho. Well done, sir, well done. But another few seconds passed by and I thought to myself, maybe not. Upon further inspection, it appeared as if he wasn't really in a costume and it did not seem to be a mere prop. To be clad in nothing but shorts and a hoodie whilst wielding a hatchet would not be inappropriate for Halloween. I had to remind myself that it was not quite Halloween yet. In fact, it was two days before Halloween. This was no costume, and that hatchet was no mere prop. It dawned on me in the dark that this was straight up a guy walking across the park with a hatchet and coming straight at Amelia and myself. At the moment, I wasn't quite sure as to what to do, but I figured it would be best to do something. Something like get out of there. I turned to Amelia and whispered, hey, don't worry about it and please don't ask any questions yet, but just get up and let's go right now. Let's go back to the hostel now, okay, she said. Fortunately for me, she didn't ask any questions or present any disagreements. She stood up off the bench and I put my arm around hers and we walked back towards the hostel. While I said, nothing's wrong. Keep it cool, I wanted her and I to walk as if we had not a care in the world, as if nothing was wrong. Okay, okay, okay, she repeated over and over as I felt myself nervously picking up the pace while trying to seem chill and nonplussed. We got to the door of the hostel and I opened the door and made sure she went in first and I followed and then locked the door behind me tight. I peered out of the darkness out by the pond. What is it? Amelia asked. She knew something was up by now. What's wrong? Feeling safer behind locked doors, I felt a responsibility to inform her of the situation, but I didn't want to freak her out. For all I knew, I was the only person who was freaked out. But still. There's some guy out there with an axe, I said. A what? Amelia asked. Just look, I said. Just wait. Sure enough, the man with the hatchet came right up to the bench where Amelia and I had been sitting. He looked left, he looked right up, down past him, behind, in front, all, all over. He even looked down on the ground and scoured the place. Then this figure emitted the most terrifying scream I had ever witnessed escape a human body before. It was filled with torment and anguish and frustration behind closed, locked doors. The scream was loud enough to give me goosebumps. The hell? Emilia asked. After shaking his arms at the stars in the sky as if the gods had wronged him, the figure with the hatchet sunk his hooded head down low and began to walk off back towards whence he came. We were safe, presumably after reading the newspapers and talking to a few neighbors the day after. No information, information came. Nobody had known anything about this strange, solitary figure who paraded Foster Pond with a hatchet. I pray it was an isolated incident. Emilia and I never went to that pond after dark ever again. In 1999, I was in my mid-40s, and I had just escaped from my stressful and joyless career as a management consultant. I needed a project. I loved small period buildings and decided to throw my energy into restoring one. I started combing through auction catalogs in search of a place. Having failed to win a number of London houses that didn't much inspire me anyway. I cast the net wider. My father would often give me advice over the phone. He persuaded me to focus on Derbyshire, a county my family has a strong connection to, and helped me identify what my ideal house would be be like. Stone built a south facing garden with at least two bedrooms and a workshop. One night we had just finished a long conversation about this elusive dream home when dad, a healthy 75 year old, had a heart attack. He died instantly. I didn't look at any more auction catalogs until after the funeral. When I did, I spotted Lowe's Cottage straight away. Located in the Derbyshire Dales village of Upper Mayfield, it was built late in the 18th century by a stonemason who needed a home with a workshop. It seemed exactly like the place my father had described. I drove out to view it the day before the auction. The cottage was approached over the ominously titled Hanging Bridge and Gallows Tree Lane. The house itself was named after a nearby Iron Age burial mound. Perhaps I should have felt a sense of foreboding, especially when the agent would not let me use my video camera inside the house. But the cottage had everything I had been looking for, with the added attraction of bewitching Peak District views. I was deep delighted by it. The following day I turned up at the auction to find a camera crew present and a tangible buzz in the room. The hammer came down after I had bid 6,000 over the guide price. I barely had time to process the fact that I had won before I was ushered into an anteroom full of reporters. A microphone was thrust towards me and someone asked, how does it feel to have bought England's most haunted cottage? I had no idea of the house's reputation. There was no hint of it in the description. But I was quickly brought up to speed. A couple, Andrew and Josie Smith, who had bought Lowes Cottage in 1994, had filed a lawsuit against the previous owners for not telling them the property was haunted. The Smiths claimed that they had been driven out by a number of manifestations, including something they described as a creeping presence like a mist that appeared and thickened into fog. They spoke of sudden pockets of cold, damp patches on the wall and objects inexplicably moving. Their claims were backed up by a vicar who investigated the cottage and and said that he found a pungent odor that moved around and a wall that seemed to weep when he placed his hand on was reported to be the first case relying on the existence of supernatural forces since the Middle Ages. But the judge gave the Smith's claims short shrift. During my first night in Lowe's Cottage, I started to have some sympathy for my predecessors. My colleague Sion was uneasy entering the house and found it hard to settle. Lights switched on and off, there were sudden changes in temperature, and my TV would turn itself on. There were further incidents. I was visited by reporters who experienced problems with tape recorders or cameras. I remembered the agent who had forbidden for filming when I first visited. And when mysterious patches of glistening moisture started forming on the walls, I recalled the vicar's description of a weeping wall. It felt almost as if Lowe's Cottage had a personality and was testing me in some way. The place seemed capable of changing moods, though I never had any sense of a malignant entity. I later got to meet the Smiths and found them to be solid and authentic people. After a while, Sion seemed to make peace with the house and the perplexing incidents stopped. I spent a happy four years at the cottage before renting it out. Only one of the tenants has reported anything unusual. In the months after the auction, some people told me the house would be a blessing to me, and they were right. In spite of its notoriety, I'm very grateful to Lowe's Cottage. Seemingly prophesied by my father, it acted as a pivot between an unhappy time in my life and my more fulfilling existence restoring period properties. The painting had been put up for auction at a local event, raising money for charity. It was an original, according to the auctioneer, by an obscure but talented artist from the early 1900s. It was almost the end of the day, and I had yet to see anything that caught my fancy. But the moment the painting was unveiled, I felt something stir in my chest and I knew I had to have it. Nobody else seemed quite as enthused as me about the portrait. And winning it had been a relatively simple affair. After countering a few other vaguely interested buyers, I managed to secure it for myself. I had it wrapped up in a piece of old, old moth eaten cloth that was found in the auction warehouse, and I stowed it in the back of my car, excited to find a place for it in my home. I was a collector of sorts, mostly of antiques and other knick knacks, so it would fit right in with the assortment of old ceramic pots and tarnished clocks and statues that I had sitting in my display cabinet. On the way home from the auction, I started to feel restless. I wasn't sure if it was because the auction had lasted longer than I expected or because I was tired or something else, but I struggled to focus on driving and almost pulled out right in front of another car as I turned at the junction leading left towards my house. When I finally pulled into the driveway of my semi detached, I cut the engine and sat for a moment moment behind the wheel, taking a couple of deep breaths to clear my mind. When I flicked a glance up towards the rear view, I thought for just a moment that I had glimpsed a shadow pressed against the backseat of the car. Between one blink and the next, however, the shadow had disappeared and I rubbed my eyes realizing I must have been more tired than I thought. I twisted around to double check the back seat just in case, but there really was nothing there. I stepped out of the car. I headed round to the trunk of the car and popped it open. The painting was where I had left it, nestled safely in its bandage of thick yellow cloth. Gripping the edges of the frame, I hoisted it out of the car, careful not to knock the corner corners against the trunk. Balancing it on one knee, I used my free hand to slam the trunk closed and locked the car behind me, heading up the drive towards the front door. Somewhere behind me, I felt the strange sensation of being watched. Assuming it was one of my neighbors, I turned around to wave, but there was nobody there. The street was empty, deserted. I was the only one out here. Shrugging it off, I headed inside. Laying the covered painting down on the mahogany dining table, I carefully stripped the cloth away to unearth the portrait. It was even more beautiful seeing it up close instead of across the auction hall. I wasn't a painting connoisseur by any means, but even I could appreciate the balance of colors and the masterful brushstrokes used to create the dichotomy between the subject's face and the backdrop. The signature in the corner, scrawled in black ink read Thomas Mallory. That was the name of the painter. I had never heard of him before the auction, but the painting itself was a masterful piece of portrait portraiture that held up against even more well known names. I wasn't entirely sure who the depicted subject was, but judging by the brush and palette he was holding and the easel in front of him, the subject must have been a painter too. Perhaps it was even a self portrait of Thomas Mallory himself. The frame was a deep brass with golden highlights, but there was a faint line layer of dust and grime on the edges of the frame, suggesting it had been stored somewhere damp prior to the auction. So I got some low chemical cleaning supplies and tried my best to clean it up by the time I was done, the frame was glistening in the swaths of the fading sun pouring in through the window. It wouldn't be long until dusk fell. I must have been sitting here for hours, pausing, polishing the frame, and my wrist had grown sore. Satisfied with my work, I took the painting over to the display cabinet in my sitting room. Despite the wide array of antiques, I did dust regularly, and the air was tinged with the scent of lemon and rose disinfectant. I hadn't quite decided where I would hang the painting yet, so instead I propped it up, up on the mantelpiece beside the cabinet above the bricked up fire that hadn't been used in years. Sometimes, when I hadn't dusted in a while, I could still smell the tinge of ash and smoke embedded within the bricks. Making sure the painting was secure between the wall and the mantel shelf, I stepped back and admired the portrait in the light of the fading sun. There was something almost melancholy. Melancholy about the painter's face. Those eyes that sparkled with an unusual, almost corporeal luster seemed to be filled with a longing of sorts, a yearning for something that was just out of reach. But maybe I was just seeing things that weren't really there, like the shadow in the car. The light outside was fading rapidly, but part of me couldn't draw my eyes away from the painting or the man's woeful expression. Why had the painter portrayed him this way? What was the story behind each stroke of the brush? I don't think I or anyone would ever truly understand what was going through the painter's mind as he created this piece of art. That, after all, was the beauty and pain of subjectivity, of art, of interpretation. Nobody shared the same idea of inference and understanding, especially when it came to something like this. But perhaps I was overthinking it. I shook myself out of my daze, realizing that the sun had already set, dusk painting the edges of the sky in shades of dark purple. I should get something to eat before I go to bed, I thought vaguely as I left the room, closing the door behind me. That night I awoke to darkness and the feeling that I wasn't alone. I lived on my own, as I had done since separating from my partner a few years ago and didn't have any pets. There was no probable reason why I would feel like there was someone else here with me. But it was something. I felt with a strange sort of certainty that there was someone here in the dark, lurking just out of sight. My heart began to flutter in my chest, panic Rising up through my stomach, but I swallowed it down. I was being silly, of course. There was nobody else here. I had locked all the doors and windows before I went to bed, I was sure of it. But I still couldn't quite shake that feeling of unease that tiptoed along the back of my neck, making sweat bead along my skin. Breathing softly through my nose, I fumbled through the dark until my fingers closed around the light switch, clicking it on. Bright yellow light flooded the room, and I threw up a hand to shield my eyes from the glare. Squinting between my fingers, I looked around the room. Empty. As I expected, there really was nobody here. But then I noticed something that made my throat clench up once more. The bedroom door was open. I always slept with it closed, the way I had done since I was a child. I very rarely went to bed with it open, even by accident. Had someone really been in my room? Or was this one of those very rare occurrences where I had forgotten to close it? No, I was certain I had shut it. I remembered the creak and the click of the old door against the frame. It had become an almost bedtime ritual, and I would have felt something was off earlier in the night if I had left it open. I gazed at the crack in the door frame, shadows pooling around the edges, fear tightening in my chest. Was there someone in the house? Should I call the police? No, not without investigating first. I didn't want to waste their time if it really was just my imagination conjuring threats from nothing. Slipping out of bed, I tiptoed over to the open door, my fingers trembling as they gripped the handle, pulling it open wider. Light from the bedroom spilt out into the landing, illuminating the rest of the corridor. I couldn't see anything immediately out of place. I held my breath for a few seconds and listened. Above the pounding of my own heart, I could hear nothing, just the faint moan of the wind and the rustle of the leaves. The house was deathly silent. Swallowing back the lump in my throat, I stepped out of the room room and tiptoed down the stairs. I wanted to make sure there really was nobody else in the house before I went back to bed. Downstairs was silent, too, except for the faint, intermittent drip of the kitchen tap. I had gotten a glass of water before bed, so perhaps I hadn't twisted the faucet all the way. I padded into the kitchen, switching on the lights as I went, and tightened the leaky tap until it stopped dripping. Feeling somewhat less terrified, I went through each room, checking behind doorways and in closets to make sure nobody was hiding. Every room proved empty. The last place to check was the living room, where the painting was. In a brief lapse of judgment, I considered the possibility that a thief had broken into the house to steal the painting. But who would steal a painting by a less known artist after I had only owned it for a day? Shaking away the thought, I approached the living room door and froze. It was one of those old fashioned doors with a frosted glass window. On the other side of the window stood a shadow. A shadow that wasn't supposed to be there. Fear stabbed my chest, my heart racing. Was there someone on the other side? The shadow wasn't moving. Maybe it was nothing after all, but I had never noticed it before, and I was sure there was nothing on the other side of the door that could be casting it. Heart thundering in my chest, I went back to the kitchen to grab a knife from the drawer and hurried back. The shadow was still there. With a short, sharp breath, I shoved the door open and swung the knife around the edge of the door. Nothing. There was nothing there. A bead of sweat cooled on my brow. All that panic for nothing. Maybe I really was just overthinking it all. I checked the painting just to be sure, but it hadn't moved an inch. In the dark, the eyes seemed to glisten like obsidian, eerily realistic. I took a moment to calm my racing heart and rationalize the situation, then left the room, closing the door behind me. This time when I glanced back, the shadow was gone. The next morning I decided to do some research and see what I could dig up about Thomas Mallory and his work. I thought it odd that last night's experience had come right after bringing the painting into my home. Perhaps I was being paranoid and making connections where there weren't any, but I was still curious to see what I could find out. Surely someone, somewhere must know something about him, even if he was a more obscure name in the art world. I searched for the name on the Internet, but all I could immediately find were articles about Thomas Mallory, the writer, not the painter of the portrait sitting in my living room. After scrolling through countless websites and forums, I finally managed to find a page dedicated to the right Mallory. There was an old black and white depiction of him, and I recognized him immediately as the same figure in the painting. It was a self portrait after all. I was sitting with my laptop on the couch in the living room and my gaze lifted to the painting. Mallory gazed somberly down at me, making my chest pinch. Returning my attention to the Webpage, I read through a brief history of his life. According to the text, Thomas Mallory had never managed to succeed as a painter during life and had died in poverty without selling more than one or two of his works. Towards the end of his life, Mallory had begun to rant about how he had been able to find his muse and that he would keep searching for her even after death. He blamed the Muses forsaking him as the reason he had been so unsuccessful and had apparently passed away in a state of bitter despair. When I scrolled down to the bottom, a soft gasp parted my lips. There was a section titled Mallory's Last Work, and the picture attached was the very same one that now sat on my mantel. Mallory's self portrait, the last ever painting he created before his death. Was that the reason for his despondent look? Had he been unhappy with his career? At a loss? Abandoned by the Muses? Was that the message the portrait portrayed? I studied it from across the room, raking my eyes over the paintbrush poised against the painted canvas, the palette of muted colors almost drooping in his hand. Was this when he was on the verge of abandoning his passion altogether? Or was that searching, longing look in his eyes I a plea to the Muses to hear his desperate call? I shook my head, closing my laptop with a sigh. Thomas Mallory, despite being a wonderful artist, had suffered the same fate as so many artists had. Unappreciated, unrewarded, dying, nameless and poor. It was only after death that they truly found fame. The following night, I woke up once more to the feeling that I was being watched from the dark. The room was pitch dark. Through the netted curtains, there was not even a glimpse of the moon, only the dark, starless sky, like the open maw of a beast. I sat up, rubbing my eyes. It was just after 3 o' clock in the morning, according to my watch. Using one hand to switch on the lamp, I squeezed my eyes closed against the light, waiting a few seconds for my eyes to stop watering and finally adjust. The air in the room was still undisturbed. The door was closed. Nothing felt out of place except for the strange prickle of unease tiptoeing down my spine. I gazed around the room for a few minutes, waiting in silence for something to happen. But nothing did. Once again, it was all in my head. I reached for the lamp again, my fingers brushing the switch. The moment the room plot plunged into darkness was the moment I heard it. Footsteps. Soft, muted footsteps coming from somewhere deeper in the house. I held my breath, my pulse racing. Beneath my ribcage, was I hearing things. There, against the quiet of the night, was the sound of retreating footfalls. Someone was inside the house. This time there was no mistake. Fighting the rising panic in my chest, I fumbled to switch on the light and slipped out of bed. The air was cold against my legs and I shivered. Tiptoeing towards the door, I wrapped my fingers around the handle and tugged it open. As quiet, quietly as I could, I peered out. Nothing. The footsteps grew fainter, moving further away, until eventually I could hear them no more. Had they already left? I didn't want to leave anything to chance. Keeping close to the wall, I padded down the hallway and stood at the foot of the stairs, peering down. I couldn't see anything. Nothing stirred amongst the shadows. Silence pressed against me like something tangible, broken only by my short, panicked pants. Taking the stairs slowly, I reached the bottom and peered around the edge of the banister. My vision swam in the darkness and I tried to ignore the feeling that there was something crouched in the shadows, waiting to catch me off guard. It's all in your head this time. I passed by the kitchen and the dining room and went straight to the living room, straight to the painting. The door was open. Inside, the darkness felt thick, suffocating. I reached blindly through the dark until I found the light switch, flipping it on. The room felt warmer than the rest of the house. The air felt disturbed, like someone had been here recently. There was nobody hiding behind the doorway, Nobody crouched behind the sofa. Everything was in its place. Closing the door behind me, I walked up to the painting and gasped. My legs walked, wobbled, feeling like they were about to give way. My head began to spin, not quite willing to believe what I was seeing. The painting had changed. The painter, Thomas Mallory, had disappeared, leaving an empty space, a dark, mottled void where he once stood. The paintbrush and palette had been discarded, and the canvas that had before been turned the other way was now facing me, containing a new painting, a new portrait. A portrait that looked exactly like me. There was a period of my life where I chose to be homeless. It may seem strange to you, but the town I lived in had extremely unaffordable renting prices, and I preferred to lay out under the stars and fall asleep to the sound of the water running in the nearby creek and waking up to the chirping of birds. I had a decent job, strictly for saving up money that would enable me to travel, so my paychecks were never cashed, but rather stayed at my good buddy's house, just piling and piling up into a thick stack of paper for future deposit. I figured I would cash them all shortly prior to taxes being due. Not having a bank because I don't like or trust them. I usually dealt with straight cash and if I had to use a card I would transfer it into my PayPal account. That's about as close to a bank as I wanted to get. Food was never an issue. Either my boss would provide meals at my work site or I would visit a few of the many food banks in the city. If I really needed, I could go on food stamps, but that is a government program that is better suited for individuals who truly need it and I did not want to take advantage since I could viably attain my own freedom. Food My free time was spent reading at the library while I charged my cell phone, or I would use the computers if I needed to use a keyboard for an extended amount of time. There were showers every other day right next door at no expense, so I took advantage of that. Many times I would take a shower at my buddy's house where I spent many evenings playing dice games or cribbage watching movies, etc. My homelessness was optional and I wanted for nothing. It was not without hardships or inconveniences though. There were nights spent just wandering around, stumbling onto somebody else's sight and being run off. There were mornings where I woke up to find out that I had been robbed while I slept. Once I jerked awake by some druggie who thought he was picking up his own sleeping bag and didn't notice me inside it. He yelled at me a bit and then took a piss next to my head and stumbled off. After a while I found a camping spot that was ideal for camping. It was on the outskirts of town, off into the rolling green hills that were covered with dense patches of trees and labyrinth creeks. My camping spot was on the top of a terrace with running water nearby, encircled by thick trees and completely flat and soft. It was difficult to find, which meant feeling anxious of others encroaching on my area was unnecessary. Among the hills where this location is, however, is imbued with rumors and legends. The story goes that on the cusp of the 19th and 20th century, it was a mine of sorts. Whether it was silver or gold or something else I have never been able to unravel through any research onward, the legend persists that the mine collapsed and was abandoned and basically forgotten. Townspeople and generations that came before them never could quite pinpoint the location of this supposed mine. There were many such landmarks supposedly in the hills that nobody could quite locate but insisted were up there. According to some, there was a cannon just abandoned and forsaken up on one of the numerous unnamed hills. And on another hill, rumor has it, there was a desolate bell tower with the bell still intact. Many have claimed to see parts of an airplane that crashed decades ago and simply were never removed due to the logistics of moving heavy parts in an inaccessible terrain. Many years after the mine supposedly collapsed and onward into the 1920s, some of the tunnels into the mine were cleared out and used as some sort of federally funded bunker that served as a laboratory, carrying on the legacy of secrecy and myth. This myth was most likely created due to the amount of biology and agricultural students that attended the town university. Locals as old as the hills of the town would tell stories about animals being genetically engineered. One old timer told me and my friends that there were scientists of some sort hidden in the hills, experimenting and creating cougars that walked on all four legs, but had the feathery face of a raptor, a bird of prey, hawk like and demonish. Some other locals spoke of giant rats with the head of a wolfhound. This, of course, is all bogus, and I don't believe any of it. It's ridiculous to think of such things. These are fair fairy tales, boogeyman accounts, fireside horror. I never gave any of these stories any credence, and I still am not quite sure that I do to this day. But there is a spookiness on top of those rolling hills. Some nights, sleeping up there, it got strange once I had been woken up by the sound of a vehicle. It sparked my curiosity because there weren't even any functioning fire roads anymore. Unmistakably, it was the sound of a truck when I roused myself out of my sleeping bag and followed the noises and peered out through the dense trees and downward towards the town. Sure enough, there was a pickup truck driving below me towards some spot in the hills that I was unfamiliar familiar with. To me, it seemed as if it were a government truck. It was all white with the city emblem on the door. The lights were bright, the speed was consistent. The pathway it drove on seemed rugged and difficult. But the vehicle was deliberate. It knew exactly where it was going. The evening after that, before sundown, I chose to explore the path that I had seen the truck driving, following the crushed down grass and weeds. But after a while, it just got too rocky and difficult to determine where the tracks were. And though I had combed the area as well as I could, I never found anything other than More hills, tiny creeks and patches of trees. A month or so after that, in the middle of the night, I was roused by something walking in the brush that enveloped me. Whatever it was, it was massive. We don't have any big animals in my area. Raccoons, possums, things like that are about all anybody would ever see. We did have a cougar every now and then, and packs of coyotes. I have lived in various wilderness wildernesses all my life. I know the sound of every footfall of just about every mammal in North America. Almost. The sound of the steps were heavy, big and rough. Slow, purposeful. It was no cougar most of the time. You aren't lucky enough to hear them until it's too late. It wasn't until a coyote either, unless it was the size of a Volkswagen Bug. The steps went in circles around me, round and around. It's as if it didn't want to get too close, or perhaps was considering closing in, just biding time or something. I lifted my head out to get a better look, but the darkness would not allow it. That's when the growling began. Low, deep, threatening growls. Not the growls of a raccoon, not the growls of a person or a dog. It was way too low of pitch for that, and the volume was unthinkable. The duration was impressive. The sound was seemingly long, almost a minute without stopping between. I could not move. I lay there, too scared to even shake, to breathe, to scream. I became a statue laying in a sleeping bag. My mind raced, going over every animal I could think of, could possibly imagine, all while whispering to myself, what is that? After I don't know how long, the footsteps faded away, returning back to wherever they came from, back off down into the hills below. I turned on my flashlight and scrambled out of my sleeping bag and walked toward the treeline without bothering to put on my boots. All around I searched and found no tracks or marks or any indication anything had ever been there. I went into the thick patch of trees and shined the light down into the hill and saw no movement, no life. All was still. I was barking up the wrong tree. Returning to my campsite, I sat down on one of the logs I used as my sitting spot and shivered nervously until the day broke. Foolishly, I remained at that spot for a a few more months, until three things happened in a short amount of time that made me decide I had had enough. One night, randomly, I woke up to the sound of walking and lifted my head from my sleeping bag and saw a woman just walking past my sight. She did not acknowledge me. She did not say a word. Clad in normal way aware, she walked onward out of my sight and away from me. She had no hiking boots or backpack. She appeared to be just a normal person. However, it was three in the morning and there would be no reason for some lady to be walking out in this part of the hills this early in the morning. I had a cell phone that had an alarm on it and it would wake me up every weekday at 5.30am it was very distinct and it had been the same tone for two of three years. One of the nights I woke up with an unyielding necessity to relinquish my bodily fluids. Scrambling out of my sleeping bag and placing my boots on my feet, I looked up at the clear sky, enjoying the chirrups of the crickets As I walked 50ft into the bushes to take a number one. As I stood there doing my business, I heard my cell phone alarm going off. 5:30, I asked myself. Suddenly it hit me. It was not my alarm. It was whistling. Somebody or something nearby was whistling the exact same melody as my phone alarm. Same duration, volume, pitch, all of it a perfect replica. Upon this realization, I whirled around without even zipping up. Hello? I shouted out into the void. Who's there? The whistling stopped and all was silent. All was still. A moment or two went by and the crickets were picked back up again. I rushed to my sleeping bag and hid myself inside of it as much as I possibly could. I was in a cocoon of fear, sobbing to myself in the darkness, mumbling. That was weird. That was so weird. Mentioning this to anybody else did not seem like the best concept to me at the time. Very few people knew how I lived, and I didn't want to invite any sort of harassment into it. I didn't wager that people would understand my decision to be homeless. Also, the collection of stories just seemed crazy and unbelievable. Of course there are many homeless people who are not on drugs and are not crazy, but there are definitely those that are horror. And I felt if I were to tell my accounts to anybody, I would certainly be taken for a madman or on drugs or both. When I got out of work that day, I had enough light to go exploring. I went off into the same hills I always had, but this time I took a different route. It had an obscure entrance, and unless you really knew the area, it was invisible to the untrained eye. The pathway was steep, arduous, daunting. Every now and again I would place my eyes on the hill where I knew my campsite lay, allowing me to get more and more lost in the unexplored jungle that so many locals never bothered to set foot in an hour, followed by me randomly walking until I came up a hill with a sudden drop to the sides. There was a decline, a small grade. Taking one of the grades on the side let me down to a flat bottom. And I realized why it looked like the hill suddenly dropped off. It was a tunnel. A tunnel that was packed to the brim with colossal stones. On either side of the tunnel were large wooden panels, beams, with a gigantic one resting on top of the other two. The mine. I whispered to myself. I was in disbelief I had actually found it. I don't remember what path I took to stumble onto it, and I wasn't sure if I would be able to stumble onto it ever again. But there it was. It was the abandoned mine, long lost. Lost to many memories. I chuckled proudly to myself, mostly out of discomfort, then noticed that it would be getting dim soon and thus decided to return to my camp. Two steps were taken. And then I noticed it. A large metal box. I'd Wager it was 10ft long by 8ft wide, made out of steel and beginning to rust red with holes lined up around. Looked like a storage container, but smaller. Like a cage. A cage where the door was unlatched and wide open. It made me feel overwhelmed with dread. It seemed like something was in that cage. Something alive. Something. Whatever that something was, it was out now. I rushed back to my camp and as I did, I did my best to ignore the eerie feeling of the sight. As I sat down on my log by my sleeping bag. Something inside me told me things were not quite right. That night I had trouble falling asleep. I lay there trying to decide if I needed to find another spot or cash one of my paychecks and get a hotel or crash on one of my friends couches. I just wasn't sure. I wasn't even sure if I knew if I was insane or not. I questioned myself many times. Thoughts invaded my brain, wondering if that government truck had a purpose for being up on the unnamed hills. Perhaps the truck arrived there to unleash a demon from a cage. Perhaps there was a lady up in the hills that served as a caged creature keeper. That's when I heard my own voice coming out of the bushes crying out. That was weird. That was so weird. I jumped out of my sleeping bag like a bullet leaves a barrel. I snatched my backpack and I ran like an Olympian down the hill as quickly as my legs had ever carried me. I left my sleeping bag and my blanket up on the top and never retrieved them. The next day I cashed my paychecks and made a deposit for a room to rent in a nice house downtown in the middle of civilization, away from the creeks and the hills and the trees. I often reflect on this duration of my life. I constantly question what happened. Some will say that there is no predator in nature that is more dangerous than mankind. I am not so sure about that. I am of the mind that the most terrifying thing to cross paths with are the things that make no sense, the things that are unbelievable, the things that are unknown. When I was a child I used to have a dream where I would be mauled by a black panther. There are no panthers here. I live in a small town in southern Ontario with nothing to do, filled with do nothings and semi rural town mice. But in my young mind, all the facts I could pick up about the world outside of our community, any facts about exotic worlds abroad, large and more interesting animals and things generally not seen around these parts could easily meld together in my dreams. It was a dream I had relatively often and I had nightmares regularly. This is one of those vivid dreams that just stuck with me in the back of my head even into adulthood as I sit here and recall it to you now. I grew up with an avid love of the outdoors and subsequently spent the the majority of my life, seasons permitting, hiking, camping and swimming in the tame and domestic landscape of my home county along the north shore of Lake Erie. Eventually I got older, left home, and often I would try to plan vacations all around the province. I camped under the stars in Bruce county and listened to the haunting calls of loons as they sang to each other in the cool late summer night. I slept in a one room cabin and fished for my meals on the still and pristine waters of Marshall Lake near Lake Nipissing. I planned my first portage at age 21 in Algonquin park where I saw moose, black bears and beavers. The outdoors are what I grew to consider, consider my own individual sacred space. I could go there and be human without all the modern humanity. And still to this day, it is something my life basically revolves around. I have never questioned this, save for one time. Now I have always seen myself as a rational person. I'm not a snob about religion or people who believe in whatever they do, but I tend to lean towards the side of science and logical thinking more than anything. There are many forces at work and nearly all of them have Rational, scientific explanations. Those that don't simply don't yet have solid explanations yet. But I have no idea what happened to me during the course of the story that I'm about to share, and I have never experienced any anything like it since then. All things considered, I really hope I never do. It was a night I'll never forget. A night when I ventured deep into the heart of the northern Ontario wilderness and came face to face with the unimaginable. I won't tell you exactly where it was, simply to ensure that nobody with inclinations to do so might go looking for a similar experience. The forests here are unlike any I had ever encountered before, dense and ancient, with towering pine and spruce trees that seemed to scrape the very heavens. The ground was blanketed in a lush carpet of moss and ferns, and the air was thick with the scent of pine needles and damp earth. I had set up camp, camped by the shores of a serene mirror like lake, its surface reflecting the canopy of stars. Overhead. The moon cast an ethereal glow on the landscape, but the silence was unsettling, as if the woods held their breath, concealing secrets as old as time itself. As the sun dipped below the horizon, casting long shaft shadows that danced among the trees, I built a small fire to ward off the encroaching darkness. My curiosity had brought me to this remote corner of northern Ontario. Having long sought to visit more isolated locations further north from Algonquin, the thought of following in the footsteps of my own forebears who came to this country as trappers was something I always wanted to pursue. Pursue. I imagined them traveling through parts similar to these as they portaged through the thick brush on the way to the nearby river, just out of sight in the now darkening treescape. I take pride in my heritage and the country I live in, and I have always been more than keen to get out there and see everything this beautiful wilderness has to offer. I have seen a lot and I'm well traveled, a seasoned woodsman at this point in my life, there's not much that can shock me out here, but any naturalist will tell you that nature always finds a way to humble those who think they have seen it all. And what happened to me next was something that I never would have anticipated in my life, and it shook me to my core. As I sat by the fire, my heart sank beneath a groan, growing unease, a feeling that I was not alone, that unseen eyes were fixed upon me. I dismissed it as mere paranoia, convincing myself that it was the wild imagination of an urban dweller in the wilderness. Yet the unease persisted, gnawing at the edges of my consciousness. Then it happened. A blood curdling howl that pierced the silence of the night. It echoed through the forest, a haunting lament that seemed to reverberate through the very trees themselves. I froze, my breath catching in my throat, and I knew that this was no ordinary sound. The howl came again, closer this time, carrying with it a malevolence that seemed to seep into my very bones. Panic surged within me and I fumbled to grab my flashlight, the feeble beam casting trembling shadows on the ancient trees. And then I saw it. A creature emerged from the shadows. A nightmare in the form of sleek night. Its fur was as dark as the depths of the abyss, and its eyes, two crimson orbs, burned with an otherworldly fire. It moved with a predatory grace, its sleek form almost melting into the enveloping darkness. My flashlight's beam danced over the creature, revealing gleaming razor sharp claws that seemed to shimmer in the night. In that moment, the very fabric of reality seemed to froze. And I could feel an invasive presence in my mind, like tendrils of darkness wrapping around my thoughts. My voice caught in my throat as I tried to scream, but sheer terror propelled me to my feet and I fled from the campsite, leaving behind my possessions and any semblance of reason. Behind me. I could hear haunting laughter, a sound that reverberated through the ancient trees and seemed to mock my feeble escape. I fled from the campsite, my heart pounding in my chest as I made my way through the tangled undergrowth of the northern Ontario wilderness. The creature, the nightmare with gleaming crimson eyes, pursued me relentlessly, its sinister laughter echoing through the trees. In my frantic rush to escape. Escape, I tripped over a gnarled tree root hidden beneath the mossy forest floor. I tumbled forward, hitting the ground hard, the wind knocked out of me. Gasping for breath, I tried to push myself up, but a searing pain shot through my ankle, bringing me back down, flat on my face again. As I looked up from the ground, I could not believe my eyes. The creature, the hulking cat like terror seemed to dematerialize right before me. It was as if it had dissolved into the very shadows it came from. Relief washed over me. I let my guard down, thinking I had escaped. I looked around and saw nothing. As I started to calm down, any sense of ease started to wane. Rain as I realized the woods around me were still, as if time had stopped. Not a whisper of the wind or a rustling branch made a sound, and the chatter of frogs and crickets Fell mute as if they had all simply vanished. I quickly got back up on my feet and keeping low and as quiet as possible, started to make my way back out towards the valley that held the nearby dirt road that I took to get into these woods. The way out was still a long ways away, but at least on the trail, I could put some serious distance between me and the deeper forest and get back into civilization. But then, out of nowhere, the creature seemed to just sort of spawn in its shape, coming into material form from the darkness. It was there, looming over me with those malevolent crimson eyes, as if mocking my brief respite. Panic surged through me once more, and I scrambled to get out of there. The chase continued, the creature stalking me with an unearthly determination, I pushed through the wilderness, down into the valley and back onto the path, my breath coming in sharp, ragged gasps like daggers in my lungs, My heart a relentless drumbeat in my chest, no longer a concern. As I sped through the wilderness, the trees seemed to close in around me, the night air growing colder and thicker with each passing moment. I couldn't shake the feeling that this creature, this thing, was toying with me, relishing in the fear fear it had instilled. The forest itself seemed to conspire against me as if it were a part of the creature's design. With every ounce of strength and determination, I pressed on, driven by the primal instinct to survive and the chilling realization that there was no escape from the unknown terror that lurked in the heart of the wilderness. The pathway seemed to stretch to double, maybe even triple its length. It seemed to wind and veer off in ways that I didn't remember it doing before. At this point, I was so stricken with fear, I couldn't even begin to question it. I just kept moving. There was no way this trail was the wrong one. This was the only access into these woods at the valley. It must have been me. If I didn't die in there, I would surely go mad if I did not escape. After what seemed like hours longer than I knew the journey down the trail to take, I finally came to the familiar landmarks telling me the end to the trail and to where I had parked my truck. I emerged from the wilderness shaken and disoriented, but with an overwhelming sense of relief that I had no narrowly escaped a fate worse than death. I can't shake the feeling that that thing still watches and waits just beyond the edge of the darkness in the heart of northern Ontario's ancient and untamed wilderness. Years later, I am still wrapping my head around what happened to me. I haven't really found anything outside the realm of urban legends or cougar encounters. Let me say right now that this creature in my mind could not have been a cougar. This thing was massive. I am aware that in parts it sounds like a cougar account, but this thing howled. I'm not sure what it is that chased me that night, but I am dead certain of two things. One, if that thing got ahold of me, I would have been ripped apart. And no more if I were anything less than the luckiest person on the planet. Two, I have way more of those nightmares of being mauled by a panther these days. It's. It's.