Now I’m not usually one to run to the internet to solve my problems, I’ve always thought of myself as an old fashioned DIY kind of gal but we are really at a loss as to how we should move forward. My family is terrified and we are in all likelihood beyond help at this point. This post will serve as my last ditch effort to save everything I love.
It all started when we moved. My husband, David, and I have lived in big cities our entire lives and we’ve always hated it. The noise, the people, the expense, nothing about that life was palatable. Not to mention that most cities are horrible places to rear children. Since we got married after highschool we’ve been planning our break for the wild. Though it was a curse to some, COVID came as a blessing to us. My husband started working from home when it first hit, and that allowed us to pursue our dream of starting up a homestead in the countryside. He used to spend 40 hours a week in an office where he frankly wasn’t needed and now I get to see him whenever I please.
David and I recently moved into a beautiful town in Northern Idaho (I won’t say exactly where, there are some real weirdos online), and at first we couldn’t have been happier. I’ve never really been a socialite and neither has he, we’ve always preferred the company of each other and the songbirds to your typical city crowd. We got exactly that when we moved here, our own private Eden. After we bought the land, it took the developers like six months just to clear enough of the trees to start laying down the foundation. It didn’t help that construction kept getting held up by the locals. The town kept trying to stall the construction, they fed us some bullshit about permitting, but we were absolutely certain it was just an attempt to keep outsiders out. Eventually we were able to proceed but those greedy sons of bitches put up one hell of a fight in court. All this natural beauty and they want it all for themselves?
Eventually it got built, and the house is absolutely gorgeous. Our contractor Eddie is the best of the best, an artist of the highest order. We wanted something somewhere between frontier living and modern luxury and he gave us just that. Our home is a beautiful two floor log cabin construction with floor to ceiling windows on the western face. The sunsets in this place are unlike anything you’ve ever seen. We could not have been happier. Those first few weeks slipped away blissfully, I started the garden of my dreams and my husband got to set up the smoker he had always talked about getting. I could tell that my son missed his friends from home, but between phone calls, zoom, and videogames, it was as though he had never really left them behind.
My sweet boy, Mitchel, was in love with the place too at first. He was thirteen when we first moved in and you know how adventurous they are at that age. He spent hours in the woods around our house stalking deer and building forts. He was in heaven for the most part. That is until one day he just stopped. The boy refused to leave the house for anything other than school or to go to someone else’s house. When questioned about his newfound aversion he responded with some typical teenage garbage about being too tired to explore or his allergies acting up. I suspected initially the cause was him staying up too late on that damn computer, but that proved not to be the case. He would help with farm chores and was usually up earlier than me or David, he just wouldn’t go near the woods. We’ve never been particularly good at communicating, which doesn’t entirely bother me as I was the same way with my parents until much later in life. I wasn’t worried until I found his journal.
I’ve always encouraged my son to write down his thoughts and observations, he’s such a bright kid I would hate to see all of his mental energy wasted on gaming and watching TV. He will sometimes read me little stories that he writes and they’re often quite good. Ever since we sat down and watched The Thing he’s been obsessed with horror and he’s written quite a few horror shorts. Some of them he posts on here I think but much to my chagrin he will not tell me his username. One day sometime last spring I was cleaning his room and I saw his journal sitting on his night stand. Wanting insight into his newfound behavior I took a peek at the last entry.
Now before you eat me alive in the comments I KNOW it was wrong of me to invade his privacy, but I’m glad I did because it was what clued me in to this whole situation in the first place. I flipped to the last entry and read it.
“I saw him again. This time he was closer to the house. I’m too scared to tell mom and dad. I’m worried that if I tell them about the wooly man they’re going to send me away like they did mom’s sister. I know I’m not crazy but without any proof I can’t tell them. I know how to get some, but it will be scary and hard. If it comes any closer to the house I know what I’m going to do. I have to keep them safe, even if they don’t know they might be in trouble.”
Initially I thought it was a piece of one of his stories, but the mention of my sister sent a chill down my spine. There was an incident when my son was younger where my sister, who is severely schizophrenic, locked my son in a closet for several hours in an effort to protect him from unseen forces that were supposedly trying to harm him. He never talked about it much, but I think the whole situation was extremely traumatic for him, especially since he was close with his aunt before her breakdown. We ended up having her sent to a psych ward for her safety and the safety of our son. Now I take no pride in pawning my sister off on those people, I know how awful they can be, but following that incident things kept getting worse so we had to have her committed. I know that this particular disorder runs in families, so my son’s mention of a “wooly man” was deeply concerning. To me it sounded like our son was talking about one of two things, both of which were equally concerning. Either our son was seeing some kind of lurker outside of our home at night, or he was imagining such a thing. I thought he was too young to have schizophrenia so the first thought sounded more likely to me.
I took this information to my husband and he had a similar reaction. We ended up cornering him and pressing him for details. We got nothing out of that argument other than some new and very serious trust issues. He seemed extremely coherent and wasn’t acting paranoid at all, and vehemently denied any allegations that the entry was based on reality. He said that it was just part of a story that he was writing and that he was doing so from a personal perspective. so that dissuaded our fears that he had a mental issue. In hindsight, this confrontation only made things worse as we were doing exactly what he was expecting we would do. I so deeply regret confronting him like that because if we hadn’t we might have been able to stop him.
It was the night we confronted him that everything went to hell. We figured he needed some space to cool off so we let him stay in for the night while we went out to dinner in town. I will regret that decision for the rest of my life.
We got home around ten at night. Our son was waiting for us out on the porch with a huge smile on his face. We were confused, thinking he would still be furious at us. Before we could even say anything he shushed us and made his way into the house. We followed him confused, he was leading us to the backyard. Before we could open the back door we were struck by a smell, a kind of musky odor reminiscent of rotten leaves and mildew. The other thing that we noticed was a faint groaning bark emanating from beyond the door. Mitchel opened the door like he was a game show host to reveal the single most unsettling thing I have ever seen in my life.
“Mom, Dad, I got it! It was eating our chickens and I shot it like dad does with the coyotes!”
The thing in front of us was no coyote. Lying on the back porch was a woman, or what appeared to be a woman lying on her back breathing shallow breaths. She was covered head to toe in a matted fur the color of rust. Our son looked at us beaming over his prey. The creature had sustained a gut shot and was apparently in agony, fading quickly. It wasn’t long before the creature took its last breaths.
Obviously David and I panicked. We rushed our son into the house and away from the creature, unsure of what to do. We told him to go to his room and he stormed off, apparently expecting us to be proud of what he had done. Now there is not a parenting book in existence that prepares you for a situation like this, so I would challenge you to do better than we did. For all we knew at the time our son had just shot an exceptionally hairy homeless woman. That’s what we told ourselves anyway, the supernatural alternative was much more unsettling. While David and I were discussing how to proceed we decided that the first step would be to get rid of the body. Burning that thing was probably the wrong way to go. The smell was rancid, the thing was so goddamn hairy our entire property reeked of sulfur and burnt hair for a week after.
And that brings us to now. I wasn’t planning on sharing this story ever frankly, I was content to let this memory fade into the annals of my mind, but something happened last night that changed that. I was up late watching a movie with David and trying to drink off some of the stress of this whole situation. I got up to get more ice cubes for my wine when I saw it. Pressed against the window was the silhouette of a man. A giant man at that, he couldn’t have been shorter than 7 feet tall. His eyes reflected in the darkness, which originally caught my attention. It was so dark outside that I didn’t initially notice him. I watched as plumes of breath fogged the window where it was hyperventilating onto the glass. The thing bolted as soon as I screamed for David to come look.
Now I’m terrified to leave the house. David runs all the errands and he always carries a gun on him. No one is to leave the house before nightfall, a rule our son happily obliges since we told him about the thing I saw. Tensions are high and we do not know how to proceed, so any advice? Should we try to kill it? We certainly seem to have angered something in the woods because there is a howl that can be heard almost constantly through the night that none of us have ever heard before. It’s certainly not the coyotes, we haven’t found anything but dead ones since the incident.