I spent most of my childhood in a small farmhouse that was located in a wooded and remote area in the Inverness-Shire county of the Scottish highlands. The farmhouse was about 30 or so minutes away from the nearest village, so it was kind of isolated. It was just me and my mother and father (until they had another child, my younger sister, about 6 years after we left the farmhouse). Now we didn’t have much money, but we were happy enough. I loved living there because it was just so… open. It had so many places for young me to play and explore. The back garden was huge and beyond it was the forest, which was a place that was absolutely magical to me as a kid. I spent a lot of time there, sometimes with my parents or by myself. My parents were okay with me being in there by myself, just as long as I didn’t journey too far (my parents told me not to go beyond a brook that ran through the woodland).
But it was in those very woods that I first ran into trouble, and it was that trouble that led to my family’s abandonment of the farmhouse. What happened that night and the events that lead up to it have been seared into my memory. Even now, as a 25 year old man, I still find myself waking up in the middle of the night covered in sweat and hyperventilating. Neither my parents nor I will ever tell my little sister of what happened that night. My parents would rather pretend it never happened at all. But these past few days, the memories and the nightmares of what happened that night (and what could have happened) have just been eating away at me and I need to let it all out.
…
I had been awoken from my sleep by a light scratching at my bedroom window. It was pitch black in my bedroom and as many should know, one’s bedroom, no matter how cozy it was in the daytime, often took on a far more sinister atmosphere when the sun went down and the lights turned off. So of course I was freaked the hell out, but I needed to know just what was scratching at my window. Slowly and with a shaking arm, I reached up to the window curtain and took hold of it. All sorts of horrific images began to fly by in my mind as I wrestled with my nerves, I expected to see some horrific boogeyman leering at me as soon as I pulled the curtain away. I took a deep breath and pulled away the curtain… and I saw nothing. It was just the rose bush outside my window being rubbed against the glass in the breeze. There were no monsters outside my window. There was only the garden, the dark woods beyond and a huge waning moon. I noticed how the shadows of the trees loomed across the garden in the moonlight, much like claws grasping at the house. The forest always looked so menacing at night, like all kinds of beasts and goblins were hiding in the darkness between the tree trunks. But then again, it was only natural to fear the woods at night. It was one of the most atavistic instincts of mankind. Great Cats, Wolves and Bears would have surely stalked ancient man in the forests of prehistoric times.
Staring at those dark woods began to unnerve me. I began to worry that I’d eventually see something staring back, so I closed my curtain and sank beneath the covers. It took me a while to get back to sleep that night. But eventually sleep took me into its warm embrace and chased my anxiety away.
…
I awoke the next day to a cloudy Friday morning. My parents were both at work, so it was just me by myself. I made some breakfast, got dressed and stepped outside. We kept a few chickens, so I decided to go feed them and clean the coop a little bit and then I decided to go for a walk in the forest. It was early autumn, so the leaves on the trees were beginning to lose their green and take on more rusty colours. The forest looked beautiful in autumn, it was lush, feeling the leaves crunching beneath your feet and smelling that cold, earthy smell that permeated everywhere.
I wrapped myself up in a coat and a scarf and I headed off to the forest which had now, in the daylight, completely lost the menacing aura from the night before. Now once again it had taken on a much warmer and magical tone. I took a deep breath before I stepped beneath the multicoloured canopy so far above me, and then I closed my eyes as the ethereal scents and sounds entered my ears and nostrils. But there wasn’t much noise in the forest that day. The birds were extremely quiet, when normally they were chirping and singing up a storm and I’d hear the beating and flapping of wings big and small. But that day, there was only silence. I found it very odd at the time, but I just shrugged it off.
I decided to walk to the brook because I enjoyed watching the dead leaves floating along it. I walked down the overgrown path, my eyes darting around at the autumn caressed undergrowth and then I heard the trickling of the brook just a few metres in front of me. It looked beautiful that day and as I watched the dead leaves floating along, a feeling suddenly stirred within me, that sort of feeling one gets when they’re being watched. Now I’d had this feeling before, but it was always because of an animal watching me from the bushes like a fox or a squirrel. But this time it was different. I had a very bad feeling welling up within me. Like I was in danger.
I decided to head back home because the feeling was starting to get overwhelming and almost urgent. I got up and then I heard something moving a few metres up the brook. Thinking it must’ve been whatever was watching me, I grabbed a rock and threw it in the direction of the noise. I hoped to try and scare it off, but nothing happened. No big freakish monster came charging out of the woods at me. I was starting to think that I was probably just imagining things, and maybe it was the quietness that was getting to me. But I still felt a little unsettled, so I continued my journey back to the house.
As I walked along the path, I heard rustling in the bushes a few feet away from me. I thought it was just an animal at first, but then a rock came flying out of the underbrush and it landed on the path just in front of me. It was the same exact rock I had thrown by the brook earlier.
I ran, I ran as fast as my legs could take me. As I ran I could hear something following me, but I couldn’t see what it was because the brush was so thick and the tree trunks were so close together, and it was kind of dark too because the sky was so cloudy. But whatever was chasing me sounded big, like its footfalls sounded very heavy. I was terrified. Whatever the hell it was, it could’ve easily charged out onto the path and grabbed me, but it didn’t. It just pursued and stayed out of sight.
I practically leapt out of the forest and into my back garden and then I sprinted towards the house and locked every single door and window. I then ran into my room and stared out my window at the treeline, waiting to see if what was chasing me would come out. But it never did.
When my parents came home and enquired about the doors and windows being locked, I told them everything and my mother swiftly phoned the local police. About three officers turned up and they gave the area around the brook a good look over. But they didn’t find anything, no footprints, nothing. They concluded that whoever or whatever was chasing me was likely long gone. But they still told us to be careful and to make sure to call them straight away if something else happened.
My parents told me to stay away from the woods. They were very shaken up, and my mother suggested that I sleep in their room that night, but there wasn’t enough room. It was a very small house after all. So in the end, both they and I would leave our bedroom doors open. Our bedrooms were opposite each other’s, so they had a good view into my room and so could keep an eye on me or get to me quickly if something bad happened.
The night was tense and it took me forever to get to sleep. I didn’t dare look at the window. In my mind, all kinds of horrors were waiting for me behind that frost covered glass. I tried not to think about what happened in the forest, especially about what could’ve happened to me. It sure as hell wasn’t a fox or a badger that was stalking me. Like I said earlier, whatever was following me sounded large and a quadrupedal animal like a fox couldn’t have thrown that rock at me.
Somehow sleep finally managed to take hold of me and I drifted off for a little bit. But then I was awoken by a door slowly creaking open, I thought that it may have been one of my parents going to the bathroom or something so I just rolled over and was about to go back to sleep. Then a shadow fell over me, and a hand fell upon my shoulder and shook me a little.
“Mum?” I whispered as I turned. The woman I saw standing over me wasn’t my mother. She had dark red hair and these large, widely spaced eyes and this really flat, square shaped nose and her skin was very pale. Her mouth was partly open in a vicious scowl and her teeth were all jagged and peg-like. She was wearing a dress that looked like it had been made from the skin of some animal, like a red deer or something.
I would’ve screamed but she clasped her hand around my mouth and put a shank up to my throat. She hissed at me and made a shushing motion with her finger, and then she hoisted me from my bed. She carried me out of the room, keeping the shank close to my neck. I was shaking, tears streamed down my face and my eyes shot to my parents room. They were both fast asleep, I wanted to call out to them but I was too scared to. I thought the woman would slit my throat open the second I opened my mouth. She carried me down the hall, and I watched as my parents’ room disappeared from view.
She took me to the backdoor of the house, I thought that she must’ve picked the lock. She brought me into the garden and I saw a man standing there. He was big and like the woman, he was wearing the skins of an animal. He looked pretty similar to her, long dark reddish hair and similar facial features. Only he was missing a good chunk of his nose. He was holding a large pick-axe.
He scrutinised me with his cold green eyes and then he and the woman conversed in a language I didn’t understand at all. It definitely wasn’t gaelic. My grandmother spoke gaelic and my father could speak a little of it too. What these two were saying to each other didn’t sound like gaelic at all. They stopped speaking to each other and the man glared at me in a very “do as you’re told or I’ll cave your skull in” sort of way and then he turned away from me and the woman. He started heading towards the woods and the woman followed him. I looked back at the house as it began to shrink away, I started sobbing and the woman cuffed me and hissed something.
I looked over at the dark woods and saw about 5 or 6 people standing there. They were dressed like the man and the woman, and looked like them too. There were 2 girls who looked to be teenagers and they were grinning wildly. There was another man who looked a bit younger than the one with the pickaxe. There was a boy who looked a little bit older than me, he was missing his left eye and there was an oldish woman who looked like she’d lost all of her teeth.
I heard a gun go off and I swiftly turned around to see my father standing in the middle of the garden with his hunting rifle. The man and the woman quickly turned and their eyes widened as they saw the rifle.
“Put him down now!” My father yelled ferociously and he aimed the rifle at the woman.
She glared daggers at him and the man growled something at her and shoved her slightly. Her eyes darted at me and then to my father, and then she threw me to the floor. I swiftly got to my feet and sprinted towards my father and he grabbed hold of me and held me protectively.
“Get the hell off my property!” He roared at the weird people.
The ones by the treeline retreated into the darkness, but the man and the woman stood where they were. The woman gave this nasty grin and the man darkly chuckled, and then they charged towards the forest and disappeared into the dark thicket.
My mother appeared by the backdoor, my god I had never seen her more panicked in my entire life. My dad scooped me up and carried me to her, she grabbed me and nearly hugged the goddamn life out of me. She carried me into the living room and my dad slammed the backdoor and put the table in front of it for good measure.
“Did they hurt you?” My mother asked as he frantically searched me over for any injuries.
“N-no…” I briefly replied.
My dad then came into the living room.
“We need to leave now! I think those bastards might come back. There might be even more of them.” He said.
My parents packed up everything they could carry. Then we got into the car and drove towards the village. Everything just felt so surreal and fuzzy to me. My parents were both dead silent, my dad was just staring ahead at the road and my mother was sitting in the back with me with her arms clasped around me in an iron-like grip.
I don’t really remember much of what happened next. I think my dad drove me and my mum to an inn and then he went off to the local police station. When the police got to the farmhouse, it was completely ransacked. All the windows were smashed, all the rooms had been ripped apart and all of our chickens had been killed. The police scoured the forest for several hours, but they didn’t find a single trace of those weird people. I now believe that they had carefully covered their tracks and were very precise in doing so. Not to mention that they probably knew that forest like the back of their hands.
We never returned to that farmhouse. After the events of that night, my parents and I went to live with my grandparents. We stayed with them for about a year and then my parents bought a bungalow.
I’ve been in and out of therapy my whole life. I couldn’t sleep on my own for a longtime after the incident, I didn’t start sleeping regularly by myself until I was 15. My parents didn’t fare very well either. My mother started drinking a bit (she’s mostly sober now) and my father was a paranoid wreck for a longtime (even now he still has trouble sleeping at night). They’re both quite overprotective of my little sister, and of me too. My mother phones me practically everyday to make sure I’m alright. It can get kind of annoying, but to be honest, I really don’t blame them. What happened to me that night is any parent’s greatest nightmare.
I often have nightmares of that night. I see that woman looming over my bed with blood dripping from her face and that man snarling at me from the window and scraping that pickaxe against the glass. I see my parents in their bed, butchered and being eaten by those other people I saw by the treeline.
The worst thing about those dreams is they always end with the women ripping out my parents’ eyes and forcing me to eat them. I’ve unloaded my guts into the toilet bowl or over my blanket a bunch of times after I’ve woken up from those nightmares.
As far as I know, that farmhouse has been vacant since me and my folks abandoned it so many years ago. Honestly, I hope it stays that way. Those creeps could still be lurking about that forest to this day for all I know.
All of my happy memories of that little farmhouse have been tainted by that horrific night. What really haunts me though is just what those people were planning on doing to me. Merely imagining the possibilities is enough to make me go into a full blown anxiety attack.
At night I always make sure to lock every single door and window, and I make damn sure that my curtains are shut tight.