I guess I should start my story with some context, and I apologize if it’s kinda nonsensical or out of order, but this took place over a couple months so I’m pretty much just writing as a I remember.
I will NOT be typing out the name, but I suppose we could call it a “fleshcrawler,” which you may or may not know the real name of, but legend has it that saying it’s name or thinking about it too much calls their attention or summons them (I’m probably stupid for writing about it too.) In Navajo beliefs (It might be other native american tribes as well) they are essentially witches that can take the form of animals, most commonly coyotes as far as I know, as well as people you know. If this is incorrect PLEASE correct me in the comments, I would do more research but this experience was a bit creepy and I don’t want to fuck around too much with things I don’t know about, I think I learned my lesson.
Anyway, the story starts in like, April of 2020, where I happened to be scrolling through tiktok and saw something about a place called “fleshcrawler” ranch in Utah. It seemed interesting at the time and I had mentioned it to a group chat of my online friends, to which one of them replied “no, please don’t think about going there, I’ve seen one and it was awful. I’m serious.” I pretty much rolled my eyes and ignored it. I kept looking up things about it, including a lot of people saying NOT TO SAY THE NAME. Again, I did not take them seriously.
Flash forward about 3 days, my little brother was at his friends house down the street, and randomly comes home banging on the door for me to let him in. I thought he was being dramatic af. He told me he heard an animal outside screaming on his way home. I didn’t hear anything as I opened the door, but I stood outside for a couple minutes and listened. Eventually I heard a really weird periodic animalistic screaming. It didn’t scare me much at the time because it could’ve been a neighborhood dog or a coyote in the woods.
Flash forward again about a week and I’m hanging out with my friend. She passively mentioned that one of our mutual friends friends believed that a “fleshcrawler” might have been after her. At that point I started thinking these things were a bit too weird to be a coincidence. We drove around that night to see if we would find anything. We didn’t see anything. I’m not sure if it’s super relevant but i should mention we lived close to a native burial ground, where they literally built a neighborhood on top, in Ohio. I know Ohio is far outside of Navajo territory, but I’m not sure if distance is an issue for these mfs (also there are similar creatures the great lakes area)
Over the next few weeks I would repeatedly wake up at 3 AM (commonly associated with paranormal events) and hear growling and other noises outside of my house. I still was chalking it up to coyotes but I’m ngl I was scared shitless. I would not look out my window, or even turn over in bed to get a better listen, which is probably the smartest thing I had done this entire story.
One night in June-ish I woke up because I heard a loud tapping noise at my downstairs glass sliding door. It wasn’t a very human tapping, but more like someone had positioned their hand into like a claw and kinda knocked/tapped/scraped with that. If you have a glass door or anything you’ll know the difference. The VERY strange thing about this is that the way our door was, it slid to the right. There was a screen cover on it, that my mother closed EVERY NIGHT, and to get out of the door, there was a set of stairs, with no outside access to the area of the door without a screen cover. Our house is on a foundation so only an adult sized human could reach up and touch the glass sliding door from the ground. The door was right below my window, so I literally just cried myself to sleep that night.
Okay, so final flashforward, I’m home alone, dogsitting, and scrolling through Instagram when I see a meme or something about “fleshcrawlers” obviously at this point I’m like oh god not again, but I check the comments anyway to see someone say something like “Oh yeah I’m navajo and our parents always tell us not to open or window or door if we hear tapping/knocking at night” at which point I had a panic attack because of the tapping on MY window.
Nothing happened while I was home alone, and I never actually saw anything, but I think that was warning enough for me to not fuck around with supernatural/cryptids and things I’m not familiar with. If you know the creature I’m talking about, please don’t be stupid lol. Thanks for reading, if they come for me again for writing this I will update LMFAO.