To begin with, I used to live in a small semi-rural town in the Midwest with lots of forest and lots of corn fields. As a kid, I was always terrified of the dark, to an irrational degree. So much so that it wasn’t until I was 13 that I started sleeping with the lights off. To deal with that, I forced myself to go on walks at night. As time passed and my fear of the dark subsided, it became something I enjoyed. I walked all over the place, everywhere I could so that I would have a better idea of my surroundings. Once neighborhoods got boring, I wanted to try my hand at exploring the farmer’s fields and the woods.
I remember it was one winter night that I finally decided to give it a go. I was probably like 16 or 17. It had to be night, I felt like it wouldn’t count if it were daytime. It was cold, probably in the upper thirties and there was a light breeze along with a full moon. Before I left my house that night I made sure I had a pocket knife, pepper spray, and my phone. I entered by walking along the outskirts of a cornfield, depending on the moonlight to not trip and get covered in mud. As it turns out the terrain of a farming field isn’t exactly even. Multiple times I nearly tripped and my foot was constantly moving at a weird angle. I kept moving and soon enough I got to the treeline and stepped in. The forest floor wasn’t exactly clean or even, but it was better than the field. I made my way in, and after about 20 minutes of walking it turned out that the patch of the forest I went through had another field on the other side. This particular field was quite expansive, and was kinda what I wanted to see, nobody and nothing around. I had to wonder, how many people had ever actually seen this location? People drive past this place every day, but how many of them had been in here?
I felt like I had to walk into this field and see what was even further out. The wind seemed to guide me, pushing me in the right direction and I continued onward. I walked on a slight diagonal straight through the field so I could stand in the middle. When I was almost there, I stopped and for a second I didn’t know why I did. Then, another feeling welled up inside me with no warning. It was a feeling of dread so intense that I felt like I could drop dead any second. It was the kind of feeling that reminds someone of their mortality. At the same time, the wind shifted and it blew hard against me. I took a deep breath, and as I did I could smell a disgusting and pungent odor. It smelled like a dead animal of some kind. Realistically, I knew that there was probably just a dead deer somewhere in front of me. But even then, I felt I couldn’t continue in that direction. I just stood there staring into the dark treeline, with the wind on my face. I don’t think I even blinked.
Eventually, I turned to my left, and the feeling of dread subsided in turn as if it weren’t even there before. I decided this would be as far out as I’d go, and I’d loop around to my left so that I didn’t feel like a complete pansy. Once I was a couple of hundred feet away from the tree line, I saw the outline of a person stepping towards the field from the tree line. Immediately I stopped and ducked down into the dirt. I was pretty confident that they shouldn’t be able to see me so long as I was flat on the ground. From the distance, they were still very much shadowy figure. The person must have been looking in my direction, but they gave no indication that they saw me. If I wasn’t scared from the smell and feeling earlier I might not have been able to react so quickly. The person just stood there for a minute, and then they walked back into the trees. But it didn’t even look like they turned around. Was this fucking guy walking backward? At this point, I was thinking, “What the fuck? Why would there even be anyone else out here?” Even if this was the landowner, it seemed unlikely they’d be walking around this random bit of woods and fields at night in winter on a random day. This left me thinking this person was either homeless, a weirdo, or perhaps both. Considering the way he was walking, I was leaning toward the weirdo part. I waited a minute and as I did the wind seemed to dissipate and a feeling of stillness and almost complete silence came over the world. All I could hear was my pounding heart.
Looking back, I don’t know why I followed this person into those trees. There was no thought behind it, at that moment it felt as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. Once I was a few feet in I started hearing what sounded like very indistinct voices in the distance. I wanted to hear them, so I kept going. That was all I was thinking. I don’t know how long I was walking but the voices gradually became more distinct. I couldn’t actually understand the words being said and it almost seemed as if they were coming from every direction. It sounded like some kind of chant in a dead language. I didn’t even think there was anything odd about this. It just felt like the type of thing that would naturally happen. It was almost comforting. The last thing I remember from this time was walking into a clearing and seeing what must have been a person sitting on a log. The moon was shining down on him, but strangely he seemed darker than he should be. Like the moonlight didn’t have an effect on him or something.
The next thing I know I’m standing with my hands at my sides, staring up at the moon and whistling. I was just confused. I was struggling to even form thoughts like my mind was foggy and I couldn’t think properly. The only thing I was able to realize was that some animal was limping toward me like it was injured. Just looking at this thing seemed to trigger my fight or flight response but I couldn’t move. As it got closer, I realized it looked like a wolf or a really big coyote. It was covered in some type of black liquid, and our eyes locked as it drew closer. My brain was working overtime trying to comprehend this situation, there was something so unnatural about its eyes. Once it was almost three feet away from me, I suddenly regained control of my body. My mind was still sluggish but I knew I had to get away from that animal, and this place. I must have run faster than I ever had in my entire life. I stumbled and fell multiple times, but I always got up and I never looked back. If I looked back, I felt like I would see that coyote or whatever it was right behind me. I made it back out onto the road in what was probably like 8 minutes but it felt like I was running for hours. The woods and fields just seemed like they would never end. I felt a lot safer once I was out of there but I still ran all the way back to my house as quickly as I could.
Before I did anything else, I made sure every door was locked and that all the blinds were closed. Then I went into my room and locked myself inside and checked my phone to see what time it was. It was about 3:45 am. This was shocking to me since I had left around midnight and I probably hadn’t even spent that much more than half an hour before I got to that second field with the smell. This meant I had over three hours of unaccounted time. I just kinda sat there for a minute. What was I even doing during that time? I checked my pants pockets for my knife and pepper spray, but I couldn’t find them. They were gone, I must have lost them or they were taken from me at some point. I kept my phone in a pocket on the inside of my coat, so that was probably the only reason I still had it. Disturbingly, there was a very small and thin bone where my knife should have been. It kind of looked like it was a finger bone or something, but I don’t think it was from a human. The tip of one side looked like it had been bleached by the sun, it was almost pure white. The majority of the rest was yellow, brown, and even black in some places like it was decades old. When I started changing into some clean clothes I noticed I had three small circular bruises evenly spaced on my lower chest. I touched them, and the most intense pain I’d ever experienced ran through me at that moment. In fact, I think I must have passed out from it because the next morning I woke up on my floor half-dressed. The bruises lasted a week, and I noticed that the bone seems to match the circles. It was like someone had pressed the bone into my chest in order to mark me. Out of fear of the pain I never had the courage to actually press the bone into one of the bruises.
I never told anybody what happened since it seemed too unbelievable. After about three months I finally worked up the courage to return to those fields. I came back during the day, and with a friend that I managed to convince with the argument, “Just trust me, man, it’s going to be cool.” I looked around but I didn’t find anything. I couldn’t even find that little clearing where that person was sitting. I threw that bone into some random bushes though, I felt like it was bad luck to keep it. I hope some animal trampled it into dust.
I’m 26 now and I’m still no closer to understanding what happened that night. But ever since then, my luck seems to have taken a turn for the worse. I’m prone to sickness and other health issues seem to crop up all the time. I struggle to maintain relationships and I can’t even really hold a job. I ended up dropping out of college too. I feel like this has something to do with what happened to me that night. Sometimes I’ll wake up in the middle of the night, and feel like I was just whistling. This is especially common on full moons. Before that night I didn’t even know how to whistle. I don’t like to go out at night anymore. I did a little research and it turns out that whistling at night is said to attract spirits and bad luck. Whoever that person or thing was, I think they marked me for misfortune. Even all these years later, I still find my chest aching. I often wonder if that person is still out there, and I still dream about that coyote.