Last year when I got my driver’s license, me and a group of friends decided to celebrate by going out to party at some farm that some family member of my friend Alex, owned. We decided it would be a good place to do that sort of thing since it was a rural area and therefore we wouldn’t be disturbing anyone if we got real loud. We eventually got there after a 4 hour drive and because I was the driver, my friends told me to just relax and do whatever while they unloaded everything we brought. So I explored the house, the barn, and the field. The field was full of corn, and of course that meant there was a scarecrow.
Now I don’t want to be one of those people who pretends like they’re not scared of anything, but I grew up with parents who loved horror movies, so I was used to seeing scary things and not really being affected by them all that much. So when I saw the Scarecrow, I sort of started joking around about it to myself, but then I touched its arm. It felt way too sturdy for it to be full of hay. Something about it rubbed me the wrong way, but then I reminded myself that the area was still in a small town. So it was possible that some little hooligans liked to come down and mess with the Scarecrow, and so they decided to fill it with something more sturdy so it would be harder to mess up or something like that. I still couldn’t help but feel a little freaked out, at the time I didn’t know why it worried me so much.
I was about to mess with the Scarecrow a little more out of curiosity to see why the arm felt so real, but then my friend Alex came from behind. “Hey, we’re almost done unpacking everything so I decided to come check on you, what are you up to?” She startled me but as soon as I was done being a scaredy cat I immediately felt a whole lot better. Alex seemed to just make the whole vibe feel nice, I remember there was this sewer that me and my friends liked to walk through and it was always way less scary with her around, just for an example. “Oh, I was just checking out the scarecrow, the arm feels a little heavy and stiff, here look!”
I got her to feel the arm and she agreed that it was off-putting. And then I saw a red spot on its wrist and I asked, “What is that spot?” She pointed out that her family members who own the farm have to work with tools that can be sharp and dangerous, so it’s possible that one of them cut themselves by accident and then took the Scarecrow to do some sort of maintenance or whatever with it and got some blood on it. I decided to just accept that answer but I still couldn’t stop thinking about it, it didn’t help with the feeling I already had before.
We wanted to get high so we just decided to go back to the house with the others to party. And eventually Alex started telling everyone else about the Scarecrow.
“He found this scarecrow out in the field, he said it gave him this weird feeling.”
She worded it like she wasn’t put off by the feeling it gave either but I couldn’t blame her for not wanting to sound like she’s scared of a simple scarecrow.
“I was messing around with it, it’s arm felt weirdly sturdy and heavy, it didn’t feel like it was full of hay at all, it felt like a person was in there,” I explained.
“My family probably just decided to fill the Scarecrow with something more sturdy to keep kids who come down to the farm from destroying it so easily,” and that sounded like a reasonable explanation, so we just decided to laugh it off and joke about it.
Eventually at like 5:00 am, after a night of getting stoned and drinking, we all went to bed. Well my friends did, I have a feeling that I was more sober than them and so I was thinking about things a lot more. I was sharing a room with Alex and my friend Lucas, and I had the sound of Lucas snoring to keep me up. But then eventually it started raining, and I fell asleep.
I had a dream that I was in some fancy apartment, above the clouds. And while that would personally be preferable for me, I was also getting skinned alive. And of course, it was by the scarecrow. I don’t think I described the scarecrow, but let me give you an idea, it’s important to know that whether or not the damn thing was stuffed with a human, it still looked creepy.
It was a weird design for a scarecrow, it looked like it was wearing some sort of gas mask, the eyes looked like the goggles of a gas mask and the mouth had that filter looking thing instead of a regular mouth. Imagine if a human wasn’t wearing gas mask, but had the eyes and the mouth of one. There’s no real better way to describe it. It wore a plaid button-up shirt, jeans, and a straw hat. Basically apart from the face and the weird sturdiness of it, it was a regular scarecrow.
I couldn’t see what was behind those goggle eyes, so I had to stare into the empty, unfeeling pit as my skin was peeled back and sliced off with a scythe.
I eventually woke up around 90 minutes later, at least that’s what I was guessing from the time, it was my friend Alex who woke me up. “I think we should go, this place has been giving me the creeps and I heard whistling from the field earlier,” She told me, in a worried tone.
I agreed with her, especially after my dream. But I was the only one in the group who had a driver’s license and we couldn’t just leave them behind. And I wasn’t sure they would be willing to cancel our big trip because of something so seemingly small. I mean what would we do? Leave them there? With that thing in the field?
I decided with Alex that I would tell the others that I had a family emergency or something and that I needed to go back home. Of course I felt bad about lying but me and Alex couldn’t handle being in the same area as that thing. So I told them, and we started packing.
After I had finished packing my things, I decided to visit the scarecrow one last time out of curiosity. As irrationally creeped out by the thing I was, I couldn’t help myself. I decided to try to see why it was so heavy and stiff.
I pulled back the burlap hand.
And behind it was what looked like a hand, a human hand that had been skinned. It looked as though the arm had been cut into four strands, and twisted together to form a new arm. At first I thought it was a human hand, but then I looked at it’s fingers. They were skinny and skeleton like, but seemingly covered in flesh. They looked claw-like. You could see grooves in between each bone. It was like Jack Skellington’s hand but covered with meat. This was not the hand of a human. This was the hand of something evil. I clumsily tried to put the covering back on and then I booked it over to the car.
Luckily I had been busy long enough for them to be nearly done packing. And in a panic I told them that we needed to get the hell out of there. As soon as we had everything secure in the truck I sped on to the road and drove away as fast as possible. And after explaining what I had seen to my friends, the only one who believed me was Alex, I assume because she had felt the scarecrow for herself.
But knowing that we were safe and wanting to lighten my mood, she started trying to be goofy and crack jokes. She had nearly succeeded in making me feel better and maybe even forgetting about it, but the idea that we not only spent time partying, getting high and drunk in the same vicinity as that creature. And not only that, we fell asleep in the same area as that creature, and Alex even heard it whistling. I don’t know what it was, why it was in that scarecrow, or if it was even alive.
But I will never forget what I saw underneath its burlap skin.