Chapter 1

This whole thing started with a text message I received a few weeks ago from a friend of mine. We’ll call her Sarah because it’s the first name that popped into my head. I’m out late at a friend’s party, and I get a message from Sarah that says, “Dude, please tell me that you’re awake” followed immediately by “Can I call you?” The conversation proceeded as follows:

Me:

I’m at a thing. Why? Is it an emergency?

Sarah:

I don’t even know, I’m literally shaking so hard rn

Me:

What happened??

Are you okay??

Sarah:

I don’t even know

I think I saw a monster

Like, an actual call-the-Winchester-brothers creature that shouldn’t exist but there it was in an empty parking lot digging through the trash

Me:

…what?

Sarah:

I DON’T KNOW

I was driving home

I was stopped at a light

I saw movement out of the corner of my eye

And I looked over into the empty lot and this THING stepped out of the shadow of the dumpster

Me:

What kind of “thing”?

(Here Sarah paused for about five minutes during which I could see she was still typing but apparently having trouble coming up with a description)

Sarah:

It was like. So, so tall but hunched over like on all fours, but then it stood up and its arms were too long compared to its body, and its eyes were dark, and I think it had sharp teeth?

I didn’t get too good a look because it started coming toward me and I noped out of there real fast

Actually ran the red light

Me:

Did it have like, hair?

Clothes?

Sarah:

Yes

Maybe?

I know it sounds like I’m describing a person but I swear it wasn’t

It couldn’t have been

Me:

Are you sure it wasn’t just a really sick person? Like a very tall homeless man on drugs?

Sarah:

Not unless the drug was whatever they gave the people in the Russian Sleep Experiment !!!

Meth does not make you seven feet tall

Me:

To be fair, I don’t think the Russian Sleep Experiment drugs did that either

(Another long pause where Sarah began to type but stopped)

Me:

Sorry if I sound skeptical, it’s not that I don’t believe what you saw, just that I think it was probably something explainable

You said you didn’t get a very good look at it?

Sarah:

I didn’t get a good look at its face

I don’t know man, I guess it had to be a person

I mean, what else could it have been?

Me:

I dunno

Sarah:

But it seemed so wrong that it kicked in my fight or flight instincts

It wasn’t like I was anxious or anything before that

I was listening to Taylor Swift and then boom, scariest thing I’ve seen in my life

Me:

…do you want me to drive by where you were? See if I see anything?

Sarah:

NO

The unnecessary emphasis on the “no” was probably because Sarah doesn’t really trust my survival instincts due to previous incidents which I still maintain were not that big of a deal, but I digress. I did eventually get her to tell me where she was, and I did in fact go out of my way going home to drive by there, but I didn’t see anything. Who or whatever it was, it was gone.

There’s a reason I’m including this bit of prologue. The fact that someone else claimed to see a monster in the same part of town where I had my own experience and the fact that I knew this beforehand may affect your interpretation of what happened to me next.

It was less than a week ago.

I was driving home late, going about 45 on a road that passes some abandoned industrial buildings. Not on the same street where Sarah saw her creature, but not far from it. That road isn’t very busy in the daytime and it’s completely dead at night, so mine was the only car in sight.

My headlights are not very good, and my windshield was dirty, and I’ve seen people walking on that street at night in the past, so I was straining my eyes trying not to miss any movement in the dark, when I reached the top of a slight rise only to see a great big opossum that was hidden from view a moment before. It was in the middle of the road where I couldn’t confidently swerve around in either direction, so I hit the brakes. I remember thinking that I was not going to stop in time and preemptively feeling really bad. Then, suddenly, I was looking at something else.

It happened so fast. I don’t think I blinked at all in that moment, but that’s the best comparison I can make. There was an animal on the road. Blink. There was a person instead. Except not a person. Something person-sized and roughly person-shaped. Crouched on all fours. Scrawny, mostly naked with skin that almost looked translucent. It turned to look at me, and its eyes caught the headlights with a reddish-orange glow.

All of this I took in in a fraction of a second.

And then I hit it.

As soon as the car stopped, I jumped out, because of course I did, because that’s what you do if you hit a person with your car. If you are reading this as a horror story you might think getting out was stupid, but I was still interpreting things in the context of the natural, everyday world and I thought I’d just committed a natural, everyday vehicular homicide. Except, when I got out of the car, there was nothing there. Nothing except a distressed possum which waddled out from under the car, perfectly unharmed, and bounded into the brush as fast as its short legs would carry it.

I checked under the car. I checked around the car. I checked the ditches on the side of the road. I yelled “hello?” in a really half-hearted voice because the situation felt so ridiculous, and I was starting to get nervous.

I considered for a moment that the thing I’d seen was a hallucination, brought on by the stress of thinking I was about to hit an animal, that I had somehow imagined the feeling of collision. But when I walked around to the front of the car again, there was a dent in the bumper. I had definitely hit something. Even worse, when I examined the front end closely, there were flecks of what might have been blood, and strands of hair caught in the grill. Not animal fur. Long, human-looking hair. Only, coarser than any hair I had ever seen.

This made me feel ill, so I leaned up against the side of the car and took some deep, steadying breaths. Then I checked again. Under the car. Around the car in widening circles. Finally, because I couldn’t get the idea out of my head, I checked the back seat. It was empty, of course, but the action forced me to consciously acknowledge my subconscious suspicion: that I was dealing with something unexplainable.

And this is where I might have gone wrong. I didn’t call the police. Because what was I going to say? I hit someone with my car, dead on. Their head. My bumper. But, not only did this person survive and run away, they did it so quickly and noiselessly that they were on their feet and out of sight in less than five seconds without me ever seeing or hearing them on mostly flat ground, on a moonlit night, in an area that has no conceivable cover within fifty yards. No officer, I have not been doing any drugs, why do you ask?

Nope, I did not call the police. I got back in my car. I drove home, put on my pajamas, and doomscrolled for three hours, all the while trying to convince myself that I’d made the right call. Finally, I got back up, threw on a bathrobe, and went out to stare at the front end of my car again. The dent was still there, but even looking with a better flashlight, I could not find any trace of the blood or hair that I thought I had seen, and that made me feel a little better. I guess at that point the idea that I was experiencing psychosis felt like the least bad option.

All the next day, I kept checking the local news to see if any headlines were about a person being found dead with signs of blunt force trauma. I still couldn’t get past the thought of, “what if it was a person, and I just missed something?” But nothing turned up. Nothing ever did. And the more I think about it, the more sure I am that what I saw was not human.

I mean, it didn’t run out into the road, and it definitely didn’t run away. It just appeared, then disappeared. And there were the eyes, too. Human eyes don’t reflect light like that.

Multiple people have asked me how I got the new dent in my car, so it can’t have been a hallucination. I also have the fact that Sarah saw it too. One could argue that if I was going to imagine something, it makes sense that I would imagine the same creature that my friend said she’d seen in that same place, but still it’s something.

And then there was the possum. I know at this point some of you are thinking that the possum that waddled out from under my car and the humanoid creature that I hit were the same creature. It’s not that I haven’t thought of that. It’s just that I really don’t think this was a shapeshifter situation. There was no moment of transformation, absolutely no transition between possum and not-a-possum. So I really think it has to be one of two options.

One, the possum and the creature were two separate things. Maybe the creature was chasing the possum and ended up in the road because it wasn’t paying attention, maybe its appearance as I was slamming on my brakes to avoid hitting an animal was a coincidence

OR

Two, it was the possum that wasn’t real. I know, I know, but what if that creature, whatever I saw, normally can’t be seen? What if it creates an illusion of an ordinary animal to hide behind, and for a split second, maybe because I scared it, maybe by coincidence, I saw through to its true form.

I don’t know. Both of those theories sound ridiculous now that I’m writing them down. If anyone has any thoughts that could help me, like what this thing could be, please let me know. I’m seriously considering going back there to see if I can find it again. But then I remember what Sarah said: that when she locked eyes with it, it started to approach her. And I remember that weird urge I had to make sure it wasn’t in the backseat of my car. And I just don’t know what to do.

I just don’t know.