Long title, I know. But lately I've been thinking about the area I grew up in, and I would like to share some of the things I've experienced over the years.
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When I was around five, there was a small forest a bit behind the apartment complex my grandma lived in. A friend and I went there a lot to play, and at some point we found money in the scrub. I am talking about coins, maybe 10 cents, at most 50, but back then that was enough to make a kid happy. The next time we came back, we found more. We spent about half an hour there each day venturing through the woods, picking up coin after coin until we had collected enough to buy ourselves some sweets from the nearby corner shop. The more frequently we went into the woods, the more stuff we would find. Full bottles of nail polish, more money, all sorts of knick knack. It was like a trip to wonderland for us. But when we mentioned it towards our families, they knew nothing about it. We got into a lot of trouble, and weren't allowed to go out there anymore. Not much later, my friend moved away without notice, and soon after that my grandma had to relocate as well as she was growing old and needed a more suitable place to live at. I never went back to those woods again. Thankfully so, because god knows how all of these things even ended up there. Someone had to have been watching us collect them. Thinking about that still makes my skin crawl.
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At the age of 8, I befriended the neighbors' son and became a bit more adventurous again. There used to be a small man-made stream not too far away (it dried out a year ago, I'm still kind of sad about that), and one of our favorite pastimes was to build tiny levees and then jump into the filled up pits of water that barely went up to our knees. One day, as we were collecting sticks for our newest work of art, we found a small animal skeleton. Nothing out of the ordinary, I know, but it kept us guessing for a while. The bones were clean, almost as if someone had washed them, and the way they were laid out didn't look right. The skull looked like it belonged to a bunny, but the torso and tail said cat. There were bits of fur scattered around, and as the dog-obsessed kid I was, I identified it as dachshund fur. We just joked about it, coming up with ideas for what it could've been and who might have placed it there. One day it just disappeared. All of it, including the bits of fur around it.
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Same friend, similar location, summertime. Before I developed a huge phobia of insects that lasted multiple years, nothing could stop me from being outside in pits, fields, woods or rivers. One of the most fun things to do was running through the wheat fields, playing catch with each other for hours. It's a huge field with nothing much around it; there are only a few houses nearby and all of those belonged to the respective farmer. He wasn't very fond of kids, and he was even less nice to kids ruining his crops. It's not like he ever managed to get a hold of us, though. As my friend and I were running around, we heard laughing in the distance. It sounded like some cliché kind of kid laughter production companies would record once and then use for all types of movies for the next 40 years or so. It wasn't threatening per se, of course. But we couldn't figure out the source of it. Standing in the middle of the field, we were tensely searching for a group of little kids in the distance, but to no avail. The spot we both agreed on as the source was just a regular patch of wheat. We were ready to play it off, but then it got louder. Closer. At an incredible fast pace, the volume increased to the point of the laughter being the only thing we could hear anymore. My friend and I looked at each other, and we just bolted. We went straight home and never mentioned it again. I walk past said field every now and then when I walk my dog, and I have to admit that it still makes me feel a bit uneasy.
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When said farmer wasn't growing wheat, he settled for corn. This is also what kickstarted my aforementioned phobia, mind you. Most of the stalks and cobs were totally fine. I could tell you about crop circles, but media has totally ruined their appeal for me. Thank you, next. Some single cobs baffled me though. They were growing in round shapes, almost like perfect little balls, and they were tinted blue. Yes, I know, "blue balls", nature is beautiful. When I say blue, I don't mean naturally dark corn, but "I let this thing sit in blue cool-aid for two days straight". I decided that this had to be the work of some weird parasite the pesticides couldn't kill, and imagining my own limbs and organs looking like that weird corn did something to me. I'm better now, but there used to be times when I started screaming as soon as I saw bugs. Chicken, huh.
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People tend to just load off their garbage in the woods. The usual junk includes empty beer cans, newspaper, plastic bags and fast food wrappers. The further you go into the woods, the bigger the trash gets. One time I found a little propane tank. Further away I spotted an old sink, and even deeper into the woods I discovered the matching bathtub. Nothing too weird, but I would really like to know who decided to basically move their entire bathroom into the woods without anyone noticing.
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Hares. Really, have you seen a hare in the flesh before? They're twice the size of a pet bunny, have ridiculously long bodies and, for some god forsaken reason, love to walk on two legs. First time I saw one, I nearly shat my pants. They also make some really weird growling noises.
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Not too long ago actually, I was walking my dog around 1am. Yes, bad idea in general, but time feels fake anyway and I'm usually just outside for around 15 minutes. My dog is rather on the "could accidentally trip over it" side of the size chart, and despite my best efforts, he grew up to be just a naturally anxious guy. But as soon as it gets dark, he barks at everyone who walks closer to me than 10m. He wouldn't be able to defend either of us, but I appreciate the concern still. So, as I was walking him late at night down the totally empty street, he froze. His entire body stiffened, and he looked towards the woods at the end of the road, around 15m away from where we were standing. I tried to spot what he was looking at, but I couldn't see anything besides the trees. My dog suddenly went batshit with the barking, and I could hear branches breaking. Branches, not twigs. Footsteps were coming towards us, louder than deer or hogs could be, and if it really was a person, they probably had to be 6ft tall and 440lbs heavy, as there was no other way those steps could've had so much impact. Now, I have watched a lot of horror movies in my lifetime. All of those countless slasher, monster and ghost flicks taught me to not be that white person who walks straight into the arms of the unknown, so I just picked up my dog and sprinted right home. I didn't turn around once until I was sure the front door was locked behind me. Since then I make sure to just walk my dog around 9.
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Last but not least- there are a lot of polish people living in my neighborhood. Of course there's nothing strange about that. But a while ago, someone was throwing a party in their backyard after dark, and there definitely is something eerily funny about hearing loud polish chants in an otherwise empty street. This was around the end of summer, during a period I like to call "toad season", because it's the time of the year when you can find tiny toads jumping all around the area in the evening. Seriously, they are everywhere. And on that specific night, as those people where singing, the toads started croaking. I thought my mind was playing tricks on me, but the toads were in absolute harmony with the voices. It felt as if they wanted to join in, and in retrospect I honestly think that's even kind of cute.
Does anyone have stories similar to these? I would like to hear about them, just because I think it's sort of interesting.
Submitted December 11, 2018 at 10:27PM by chees__y https://ift.tt/2QoJk8D
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