Beware the tap tap tap at night
Close your eyes, wrap covers tight
Pray she leaves you in your bed
And does not take you with her instead
Every kid in Sand Creek knows this rhyme by heart—it refers to an entity that has plagued our small town for the past hundred years.
She appears every so often to children at night. We cannot find a pattern to when she’ll return to us, nor do we understand how she chooses which children she’ll visit—though they’re always between the ages of seven and eleven. Too, we can’t really prove that she’s responsible for every missing child that we’ve attributed to her, but the similarities between the disappearances are hard to ignore.
An empty bed in the morning, a wide-open window, a faint smell of smoke in the room. At least six have gone missing in this fashion since 1924 and I fear she’ll take more in the future. There are many around here that say she’s a myth; that unfortunately child abductions are not entirely uncommon, and six of them having similar details over the course of a century doesn’t prove the existence of a monster targeting us.
But I know it was her—I know she’s real. I know because she tried to take me when I was ten-years-old.
I know it was The Tall Woman.
****
Her story begins in the 1920s.
An average woman, by all accounts, named Edith Pritchett served as the librarian for the community and lived in a two-story house on Carrolton Street. A widow of The Great War, she had been raising her young son, Henry, on her own since the passing of her husband. But, with some support from her and her late husband’s parents, it’s said that Edith and Henry had a quite comfortable, happy life.
Until an evening in March of 1922.
Edith put Henry to bed after they played with some of his favorite toys and she read a book to him. She then retired to her room to do some reading herself, and eventually drifted off to sleep.
And when she awoke later that night, she was coughing—smoke had filled the room.
From down the hall, she could hear Henry screaming for help, and she rushed to her door to rescue him. When she entered the hallway, though, she was met with blistering heat and denser smoke. Desperately, she tried to reach her son, but the closer she got to him, the less air there was, and she eventually collapsed.
Emergency services were too late to save the boy, but managed to pull a badly wounded, but still alive, Edith from the flames before the house was reduced to no more than cinders.
Burns took her right arm below the elbow and severely scarred half of her face, neck, and head. Her auburn hair now only grew on the lefthand side, and a milky eye that could no longer see sat in the right socket.
She spent the next year recovering, first in the hospital and then in a bed in her parents’ home—her injuries too extreme for her even to attend the small funeral where they buried what they were able to recover of Henry in the local cemetery.
While she was bedridden, Edith did not speak much. And, outside of asking for basic necessities such as food and water, she supposedly only ever uttered three words—which she repeated over, and over again.
“Bring him back.”
As the legend goes, when she finally regained her strength in the Spring of 1923, her parents first tried to get her to go to church as they thought that God was what she needed to begin emotional side of her healing.
But Edith no longer believed in God, nor in a Heaven where she’d one day be reunited with her son.
Edith instead turned to “black magic”—a study which, outside of her daily visit to Henry’s grave, she devoted all of her waking hours to.
Her mother and father found her pouring through texts in foreign languages—reciting what they later claimed were “spells.” They understood then what she’d meant by reciting “bring him back” during her period of invalidity. She wasn’t imploring some unseen deity to return Henry to her—she was intending to somehow reincarnate him.
Begging her to stop, they threatened to throw her out if she did not relent of her pagan ways, but Edith refused—she would not let anything impede her attempts to revive her son. They saw less and less of their daughter with each passing day—a dark madness possessed her, and they despaired the moment when she would be gone entirely.
The final straw came when they caught her leading a young boy from town into their home and, when asked what she was doing, she told them he was to be a surrogate in a ritual she was going to perform.
After stopping her, they returned the boy to his family, but news then quickly spread of what Edith was doing. She barely escaped a kidnapping arrest on the sympathy for what she’d been through, but now, her parents had no choice—it was either the asylum or exile for her. So, in the Autumn of 1923, she was forced to pack up all of her “tainted” books and writings, given a small amount of money to get her started, and sent abruptly out the door.
However, Edith apparently had no intentions of leaving the area where her son was buried, as rather than getting on a train to take her to away to a new life, it’s said she used all of her seed money to purchase as many provisions as she could carry, and hiked into the forest near the cemetery.
She had never spent a day in the wilderness that anyone was aware of, and it was believed she would die within weeks of heading into the woods either from dehydration, starvation, illness, or an encounter with wildlife—no one felt, at least, that she’d survive the first winter. Indeed, for the first month or so, there were several reports of someone seeing her visiting Henry’s grave after dark, but eventually she stopped coming. And, after several months without a single sighting of her, in the minds of most, Edith Pritchett was certainly dead.
But then, on the second anniversary of the fire, two children from two different families in town claimed to have been visited at night by a woman.
A very tall woman.
Both of them had second-story bedrooms and, impossibly, both of them said they’d been awoken by someone tapping on their window. Through the glass they saw a smiling face with one milky eye, and hair that only grew on one side blowing in the light Spring breeze. Then, she’d beckoned to them with a finger as long as their arms, and the smell of smoke had drifted into their rooms.
Each child had been paralyzed by fear—unable to move, unable to scream—they’d stared back into the horribly scarred face and prayed for her to leave. And, eventually, they said that she did—the smile became a frown of disappointment, and she turned and began to walk away. As she did, one of the children said he’d gone to the window to get a better look at what had just been outside his room and alleged it to be some sort of monster.
While the woman had had a human face, her body was terribly distorted. At least twenty feet tall, she was very thin, as if a giant machine had pulled a normal woman to that height by stretching her like a piece of taffy. Her left arm was nearly as long, and the sharply pointed tips of fingers two feet in length scraped the ground as she proceeded with jerky, stuttered motions—the right arm would have done the same, were it not for it ending just below the elbow.
Her legs and feet were bent at odd angles rather, as the child told it, like those of his pet dog. And, by the light of the full moon, he said he could tell that the woman was not wearing clothes, and that her skin was black and scaly, like it was made of charred wood.
Of course, when each of the children told their parents what they’d seen, their stories were brushed off as dreams or imaginative fabrications based on tall tales they’d likely heard at school. However, the morning after, word was rapidly spreading through town that something had happened to a third child that night.
Eight-year-old Ernie Timmons had gone missing.
Like the other two children, his bedroom was on the second-floor, and when his mother had gone to wake him in the morning, she’d found his bed empty, his window wide-open, and she thought she detected the faintest hint of smoke.
Ernie had not been a problem-child, nor had he ever spoken of running away, so his mother and father immediately went to the police to report their son had been taken, though they were not quite sure how. Ernie’s father had fallen asleep in an armchair that sat near the base of the stairs any intruder would have needed to use to access Ernie’s room through the house, and it seemed improbable to him that someone could have carried or escorted Ernie by without waking him.
As well, if someone had taken him through the window, they would have needed to use a ladder, and there were no marks in the soft ground beneath the orifice to indicate one had been placed there. For that matter, there were no shoe or footprints in the mud around the house anywhere to show anyone had stepped there the night before at all. But, as it was a small town and the officers knew the parents, they began a search for Ernie right away.
Going door-to-door and asking if anyone had seen or heard from the boy, or if they’d seen or heard anything strange that might aid in the search, the police eventually learned that two separate households that were near the Timmons’ home had children in them claiming to have been visited the night before by a woman bearing the distinct features of Edith Pritchett.
As it was the only lead they received, even though the stories they were told contained details they ignored as the creative imaginings of children, they felt it was worth investigating. The kids seemed genuine in their recollections of seeing the woman, and the details of her milky eye and burn scars were specific enough for them to consider that Edith might have come back to town for the anniversary of the fire. And that maybe, as she’d tried to do once already, she’d taken a child.
Their suspicions that she was somehow involved were bolstered, too, when something else was discovered later that day.
Henry’s grave had been dug up.
Edith became their prime suspect, and several search parties combed the woods she’d fled into the previous year. However, no trace of her or Ernie was found in the weeks that followed, and they began to wonder if maybe they’d placed too much faith in the stories of children. All the same, they asked every police department in the surrounding areas to keep an eye out for a woman fitting Edith’s or a boy fitting Ernie’s descriptions, yet no tips of anyone having seen either of them ever came in.
Ernie was never seen again.
But, since that night in 1924, The Tall Woman has visited Sand Creek on many occasions.
Over the years, a theory has developed that on that particular evening, Edith exhumed Henry and tried to perform a ritual on his remains to return him to life, and that it went horribly wrong—cursing her, and turning her into a monster. A monster that knows nothing more than it lost a child and that will never cease trying to fill that void.
And so, she returns every so often to visit the children of our town, having long since forgotten who Henry was—occasionally taking a boy or a girl that sparks a memory somewhere deep within her of her child that perished so many years ago. Maybe still trying to “bring him back” after all this time.
****
It was a cool, Spring night in 2002 that she visited me.
As I mentioned before, I was ten-years-old at the time, and I had heard the stories of The Tall Woman for as long as I could remember. She was a local legend, a myth, a fiend that terrorized children, and stole them from their beds at night.
But I found her story somewhat tragic. She was first a widow and then lost her son—having been terribly injured in the process of trying to save him. Yes, she’d turned to “evil practices” and yes, she’d tried to abduct a child even before she became the monster—but she had experienced so much suffering. I would not say she was blameless for what became of her, but a part of me did understand her actions, maybe even felt the slightest bit of sympathy.
However, that’s not to say I was not terrified of her showing up at my house, even if my parents told me nearly every day that she was not real.
My father had lived in Sand Creek his entire life, and as such, had heard many tales of friends and relatives having been visited by The Tall Woman—yet he didn’t believe any of it. She was, “something kids used to scare each other,” and nothing more in his opinion—having never seen her personally. And, as my mother only moved here after meeting my father in college, she felt The Tall Woman was nothing more than a regional boogeyman; just the same that her hometown had supposedly had a winged beast living in a cave near to it.
Though, their reassurances did little to assuage my fears, as there were several kids in school that claimed adamantly that The Tall Woman had appeared to them. One boy in the grade below me said she’d just stared at him through the window for what felt like an hour before simply turning and walking away. A girl in the grade above told of how a blackened hand had actually reached into her room and stroked her hair several times.
It did not seem to matter which floor of the house the child slept on, either. When I’d first heard her story, I thought that she only went after children on upper stories in homes, and I was maybe safe as my bedroom was on the first-floor. But I learned later that she could apparently contort her body in…unnatural…ways, and as long as the room had a window, she would always be able to center her face in it.
While a child hadn’t disappeared since the 1980s, the stories of those that she was suspected of taking were still shared often amongst the students as well. Ernie was the first, followed by a nine-year-old girl in 1929, then a seven-year-old boy in 1936, an eight-year-old boy in 1948, an eight-year-old girl in 1965, and an eleven-year-old boy in 1983. And, with it having been such a long stretch since she’d last abducted someone, there was growing concern that it was only a matter of time before one of us was carried off to God knows where.
So, I tried to listen closely to anyone that had an encounter with her to create a strategy for what I would do if she ever showed up outside my room. Some said they stared back at her, too afraid to break eye-contact, but it sounded like she’d remained longer at the houses of children that did that—or at least it felt that way. Others had thrown a blanket over their heads and tried to pretend that she wasn’t there, though they said they thought it had made her angry that they would not look at her.
It was difficult to tell what really was the best course of action if she ever were to visit me, and I mainly prayed that I would never need to worry about it. Maybe my parents were right, and she wasn’t real, or maybe, even if she was, she wouldn’t choose to come see me over the hundreds of other kids in town.
Unfortunately, I was not so lucky.
****
I remember that night vividly.
It was a Friday—I was allowed to stay up late watching cartoons, and at some point, I must have fallen asleep on the couch. I recall my father carrying me to my room and tucking me in, before closing the door and heading off to bed himself.
Exhausted as I already was, I quickly drifted off again, until…
thump thump thump thump
Sometime later, I awoke to the sound of slow, heavy footfalls—coming nearer with each step. Wondering if I might still be dreaming, I cracked my eyes open a little and perked up my ears to see if I could discern if the noise was real, and if it was, where it was coming from.
Thump Thump Thump Thump
It was no dream.
Whatever it was, I could tell that it was walking through the backyard straight towards my room, and that it must be massive—my heartrate increased.
“Please be a bear,” I implored the air around me—thinking back on one child’s story of having heard her approaching in similar fashion before she appeared to them. “Please be a bear, please be a bear.”
The few, final, thunderous stomps landed right outside the window straight in front of my bed, and I stared determinedly at my bedroom door in the wall beside me, too afraid to look over to check if the blinds were down.
Then, I heard the popping and cracking of joints, and the slightest trace of smoke wafted into my nose.
My hopes that it was a bear were dashed. I knew for sure then that she was outside my window, and that she was contorting herself to position her face right in the middle of it. Each crack made me jump, and I now drew shaking breaths, wanting simultaneously for the popping to stop, as each joint being snapped out of place made me more and more sick to my stomach, but also for it to never end as I knew what came after.
I couldn’t help myself—I stole a quick glance towards the foot of my bed, and saw with some measure of relief, that my blinds were in fact closed—realizing in that moment that I had never thought to ask if any of the children that had seen her before had their blinds drawn or their curtains pulled shut when she appeared.
‘It can’t be that simple,’ I thought, and as I did so, something about three inches wide, black, and paper thin slid its way through the crack in the side of the window, wrapped itself around the cord on the blinds, and began to raise them.
There was no time for me to think—I didn’t know if I should meet her gaze or try to hide under the covers until she went away, but I instinctively chose the latter and dove beneath my comforter before I saw her face.
Silence lay over the room for a moment, and then…
tap tap tap
Quietly, at first, she tapped on the glass three times trying to get my attention. But I refused to come out from hiding—I was not certain I wouldn’t scream the instant I saw her.
“Don’t look, she’ll just go away. Don’t look, she’ll just go away.” I whispered under my breath.
Tap Tap Tap
More forcefully, she rapped the pane—loud enough that a tiny, hopeful thought entered my mind. ‘Maybe one of my parents will hear it and come to investigate,’ I pondered—not daring to yell for them to come help me, unsure of how she would react if I did.
TAP TAP TAP
She hit the window with such force, that I couldn’t believe I didn’t hear it shatter.
‘My parents had to have heard that, they’ll come running soon.’ I thought. But as I listened for the sound of them shuffling next door, my ears were met with an overwhelming quiet.
BANG BANG BANG
She was hammering now on the wall, causing the entire room to shake. When my father didn’t come bursting through the door within seconds of this, I grasped that my parents were deaf to what was happening in my room. Something about her was blocking the sound and vibrations from reaching them.
I was on my own.
BANG BANG BANG
BANG BANG BANG
“Please stop—please just go away.” I continued my urgent mutterings—gathering quickly what children that had hid from her meant when they said they thought doing so had made her angry.
BANG BANG BANG
BANG BANG BANG
BANG BANG BANG
The noise was too great—it was hurting my ears, and each one of her hits sent an anxious pulse down my spine. Ripping the blanket off my head, I decided that I would give her my attention, praying that silently watching each other would be preferable to the panic inducing pounding that she was currently cascading through my entire body.
Yet, I initially regretted my decision.
The footsteps, the popping of joints, the smell of smoke, the blinds raising, the pounding on the wall—all were terrifying allusions that the stories I’d been told by other children were not pure fiction. But seeing her—looking upon the monster outside—was the moment she became real to me.
She had bent herself over backwards, and pulled the upper-half of her body through legs so long that they continued up and out of view—allowing her head to sit level with my window. And, in the strong beam of the floodlight for the backyard, I could see that every distorted feature of hers that I’d been told of, was accurate.
As described, her skin was blackened and cracked on everywhere but her face, which was pale white and deeply scarred on the right side. Part of her lips had been burned away, and she wore a crooked smile devoid of joy—baring teeth that were yellowed and rotting. On her head, matted hair grew only from the lefthand side, and fell down to her shoulder in thick, red clumps.
But the eyes.
I couldn’t look way from the eyes.
I knew one would be milky white, and it seemed most children had fixated on this one, but it was the other that intrigued me.
It was green.
A vivid green.
There was something of humanity left in it, and I latched onto that aspect. ‘She had once been a normal woman—she was not always…this…’
I began to consider her differently—the initial shock of her appearance was wearing off and I reflected that there was nothing inherently scary about her scars or her blinded eye—she had gotten them trying to save her son. True, the monstrous features of the rest of her body were stark reminders that she was no longer truly Edith, yet I felt if I could just focus on her face—focus on who she used to be before becoming The Tall Woman—I could survive until she left.
And it looked like this might work.
We stared at each other in utter silence for untold minutes, and her smile slowly slipped away; all the while, I dared not move or break eye-contact with her.
Then finally, after what felt like an hour, she broke my gaze—her head turned down, and a flutter of relief creeped through my chest.
I was going to be okay.
But as she was pulling back, she caught sight of something on the floor between my bed and the window, and she froze. I could not see it myself, but I knew what it was—I had been playing with it earlier that day.
My father had recently given me an antique toy firetruck from the 1920s that had once been his father’s. Strictly speaking, I was not supposed to play with it—it was just supposed to sit on my shelf by the door—but I had ignored this rule.
Something of recognition flickered in her eyes, and my feeling of relief evaporated as her face snapped back up to meet mine.
There was hungered excitement in her expression—she looked at me as if she was seeing something she hadn’t for a very long time, and a hand that had not moved since I’d come out from under the covers now touched its fingers to the glass. One of these began to extend itself, and flattened out to slip through the crack of my window—the same as I realized it must have done to raise the blinds. And, once it was through into my room again, it flicked the lock.
The smell of smoke intensified as she began to slide the window open—never taking her eyes from mine. I panicked. Forgetting trying to be still or trying to be quiet—I screamed and leapt from the bed—moving as quickly as I could for the door. But just before I could grab the handle, I felt her fingers close around my entire upper body, pinning my arms to my side.
Turning my head, I saw the blackened arm extended into my room and holding me back with an immense strength that I could not overcome. I screamed for help, but my parents still could not hear me, and I felt myself being dragged backwards towards the window.
She was going to take me—I was going to be “ten-year-old boy in 2002” that the children at school spoke of with the others.
And, just before I reached the edge of the room, one of her fingers slid up and over my mouth, preventing me from making further sound. Then she lifted me from my feet with ease, and pulled me out into the cool, night air.
I heard the popping of joints again as, with jerking motions, she pulled her body, and me, back through her legs and straightened herself out to her full height. When everything had snapped back into place, she yanked me up towards her head, and twenty feet off the ground, she held our faces inches apart—considering me closely.
Petrified, I could not fathom what to do, when a thought wormed its way into the back of my brain.
‘She’s still in there.’
With my eyes I tried to tell her what her finger was preventing me from saying—that I knew part of who she used to be remained—that I was not her son, nor could I help her bring him back. I was just a scared boy.
Miraculously, something changed—her expression softened and the finger slipped from my mouth. Aloud now, I said in quiet, shaking voice, “Edith, please let me go. I’m sorry for what happened to you. Please, Edith—Henry wouldn’t want this.”
Her mouth opened and she made a screeching, agonized sound, like she was fighting something inside her. I feared for a moment that she might crush me as the grip around my body tightened.
But then, she lowered me to the ground…
Her grasp loosened—she let me go. In disbelief, I watched as she turned and stalked away from my house, and headed in the direction of the nearby forest—continuing to shriek and lurch as if in terrible pain the entire way.
I climbed back through the window, stunned that I was still alive, that I was now getting back into my bed, that my parents would not awake to find it empty in the morning.
Though the faint smell of smoke still lingered in the room.
****
I did not bother to tell my parents what had happened as I was certain they wouldn’t believe me, but I did share my story with the other school children—thinking that it could be useful if she ever paid them a visit in the future.
Some of them took it as truth, but plenty of others didn’t—I was the only one that had ever claimed to have escaped once she’d decided to take them, and they felt I was making it up to “create a better story.” But even if many thought I was a liar, I hoped that telling them could help at least a few children, should they need it.
After the encounter, I wondered how long Edith would be able to keep the monster at bay. I thought back on her story a lot, and pondered if it hadn’t started to form all the way back when she was living with her parents—when she first started the “studies” she thought could return Henry to her. And, eventually, she went too far—the monster burst out, and took over.
I think she struggles against it as much as she can—maybe that’s why she only comes a few times a year—when her strength falters, and it gains control. And maybe it’s only when there’s an overpowering reminder of Henry, something in the child’s room, or something the child does, that it grows strong enough to take one.
These are, of course, just my theories. Whatever the case, she returned to Sand Creek six months after she appeared to me to visit another child, and children here continue to see her to this day—though thankfully still none have disappeared since 1983.
And, though she has been only our problem for the last century, I fear it may not always be that way. The forest she inhabits is shrinking—development is pushing in from all sides. Often, I check the reports of missing children from neighboring towns for the telltale signs of a visit from The Tall Woman.
So, if you, or your child, should ever happen to see her—just remember this rhyme, which I’ve modified slightly based on my experience.
Beware the tap tap tap at night
Don’t break her gaze, meet her sight
And if she takes you from your bed
Beg Edith let you go instead