I have two short stories to tell, but I’m going to start off with a little back story. I was the middle child of seven children. I had three sisters and three brothers and we lived with our parents and Nana (who only moved in once her mother passed when I was 3 years old, but she grew up in that house. Her, my parents and three younger siblings still live there currently). I wasn’t the only person who saw/experienced things, and as a child my Nana would tell me endless stories that my parents would roll their eyes at, but I could also see the look in my mother’s eyes when she thought no one was looking. She’s more reluctant to discuss any ‘strange’ things that happened there.
Anyway, the first story is about something we saw many times. The first time I saw it was when I was twelve years old and saw my brother Mikey staring blankly out of one of the windows facing the forest. If my sister Heidi hadn’t pulled us away from the window, I don’t know what would’ve happened. What we saw was an abnormally tall, pale, and thin humanoid-looking creature. To be more descriptive, its skin was an ashy grey sort of colour and its eyes were too far back in their sockets, but still visible. Its bones seemed as if they could rip through its tight, thin skin at any moment, they were so prominent and it’s lips appeared shredded and bloody. I felt a chill go down my spine at the sight of it and noticed Mikey and Heidi did too before she pulled us out of our trance. We didn’t speak of it until Mikey was older and brought it up, and later that very night we saw it again. It was always on the edge of the forest, sometimes hunched over or in a stance that looked like it had been running towards the house but came to a hault when we saw it.
The second story is from when we had chickens. My mother convinced my father we’d save money on eggs and teach us kids responsibility by having us take care of them, but really she just missed when she was younger and had a pet chicken. We got four of them, named Peachy, Pear, Pumpkin, and Pepper. She doted on them all, but one morning we all were startled by a blood curdling scream from the coop. Every single one of us ran outside to see my mother sobbing on her knees, surrounded by blood and all four chickens running around her. After getting her to calm down, she explained that when she saw the blood, she thought a fox had gotten to her hens, but luckily they were all unscathed. However, there was no explanation for the blood, and small footprints all over the place - like those of a baby. The next 30 mornings, the same thing happened, except after the 3rd morning my mother stopped screaming at it. Sometimes there’d be baby’s footprints, sometimes there’d be adult’s footprints, but mostly there were both. My sister Bonnie and I woke up in the middle of the night and snuck downstairs to get a snack. As we left our bedroom, we saw something out the window surrounding the chicken’s coop; about 15 babies running wild whilst a man held a knife, trying to kill as many as he could. Eventually, one of the babies saw us and let out a strange noise, then ran away followed by all the others. The man looked up at us, said some curse words, then left in the opposite direction. That was the last time my mother woke up to a bloody chicken coop.
I have plenty more stories but I think I’ll leave it there for now.