Written by : u/Physical-Speaker-457

Year written : 2022

I've been lurking around on the forums for a while now, and I was about to give up until I found this thread. I've read some similar experiences to my own so I figured you all would be able to bring more clarity to all of this. This all happened back during this past summer in the state of Kentucky. To protect his identity, and out of respect for his family, I will refer to my friend as James. I was spending time together with James, celebrating his completion of finals and my recent promotion drinking to our hearts content, and we had the thirst of a Norse Warrior at a Midsummer festival. Starting with a nice bottle of Japanese whiskey that lasted all but 30 minutes, we moved onto something a little classier, Jim beam. We sipped until day became night and everything got fuzzy around the edges. James took a long pull off the bottle before he turned to me and asked if I want to go for a night walk to our favorite star gazing spot.

I obliged by taking the final swig.

This was just one of the things James and I would do every weekend, and surprisingly our parents were okay with it. Ever since we had science class together as kids, we loved stars and outer space, and the clearing was like our own private research facility. We had a large amount of forested area near where we lived, and the clearing was just a mile and a half into the woods. I would pack my budget telescope and we would get nice views of the moon in its differing phases, as well as nearby planets and visible galaxies. After high school James had saved up a couple thousand dollars to spend on one of those fancy scopes that could be remote controlled and could take HD videos. We would often talk about Black Holes, the inevitable heat death of the universe, or if there were other Earth-like planets out there with life like ours. We could even recite all the differing spectral types of stars from memory. It was the foundation of our friendship, though James was much more serious and even talked about going to college for a degree in Astronomy once he had finished his general education courses at the local community college. He was the only kid from class that said he wanted to be an Astronaut and was serious about it. I was content looking at the stars through my telescope from my backyard, beer in hand, and not being in debt.

It was a bad idea, but we did not care, and off into the night we went. Along the way there was this drainage ditch we would pass by. Alluring today as it was back then, for no good reason other than it was creepy. Being as inebriated as we were, we took the bait and headed down. Being extra careful to scale down the steep incline of the ditch walls we made it inside. It was your standard drainage ditch, a large concrete canal stretching out about ten miles in both directions, dividing the forested land in two. There was an overpass that ran across a small portion of the ditch like a bridge, connecting the two pieces of land so that people could walk across. Along the graffiti riddled walls of the canals were drainage holes to help disperse the water should the levels rise high enough. One of these was a drainage tube about 2m wide and 50m long, what we dubbed The Butthole. The other end of the Butthole led into the forest on the other side. As kids we would crawl through it and act like it was a portal to another dimension or it would take us back in time. James could not resist.

"Dude, look, the Butthole! I'm going in man!" He exclaimed.

"I can't believe you actually said that out loud. Be careful you're going to scrape your knees or bonk your head." I warned.

Once he got further in, he stopped moving.

"Any Xenomorphs in there?" I asked.

"Nah... you hear this frog man?"

Indeed, I could hear the thing from where I was standing. As I approached, I noticed the croaks sounded guttural, throaty, and wet. If you've ever seen The Grudge, it sounded like the noise the girl makes, but not as drawn out. At that moment I just chalked it up to my imagination, alcohol intoxication, or a big frog, though my anxiety was already setting in. But what was strange was that there was a little water still running through the ditch from last week's rain, and typically where there was water, there were frogs. Though the croaks were coming from one source. Come to think of it, I do not recall any other noises, no bugs, no animals, no typical forest sounds. Dead silence except for the frog.

"What's wrong with Kermit?" he said.

"I don't know man, just come out, I'm starting to lose my buzz."

With that he scooted out backwards, still a bit tipsy he fell on his way out, then stood up to face me.

"I just got pooped out!"

We climbed out of the drainage ditch and continued along the dirt path. I could still hear the croaking, but it was faint. The sounds of insects and small critters rustling in the foliage eventually returned and filled the unnerving silence, the croaking becoming a distant memory and I settled down a bit. It was a clear night; the moon was clearly visible, and stars dotted the sky, like tinsel strewn about a black canvas. The trees reaching tall, towering above us, and a nice cool breeze blowing the refreshing smell of pine to our nostrils.

It was a few minutes before we arrived at the clearing that James broke the silence.

"Hey man..."

"What's up?"

"Look, I am not sure how to even say this, but there's something I've been meaning to tell you, for a while now. It's been weighing heavy on my heart, and I just need to get it off my chest."

"Of course, you know it's just you and I out here, I'm here for you man, you can tell me anything."

"Thanks" He sighed.

"It's just, lately I've been thinking I might---Whoa, dude, do you see that?!"

Wide eyed, he pointed his finger ahead, I followed, and saw what he was seeing. A young buck, ten pointer, still with velvet around the antlers.

"Wow, he's beautiful!" I said.

We had a staring contest for about five minutes, everything seemed normal about the deer, but most of its body was cloaked by the shadows casted by the trees overhead. What I could see was its head and a portion of its neck. It could have been the glare from the moon overhead, but the eyes looked glossed over, like thick cataracts, or like it had been dead for a while. It was also trembling, which could have been because of us. The tips of the antlers I can remember clearly too, the way the moonlight gleamed off them, like the surface was glossy. I tried to take a step closer, and then suddenly the buck sprinted off into the woods. It looked like right before the buck ran off, the antlers twitched, like fingers clenching to form a fist, but I brushed that off too, trying to stave my anxiety once more, and we started walking again.

I really should have turned back at this point.

After an additional three minutes, we had arrived at the clearing. James and I began walking to the middle, there we lie down on our backs, staring up at the sky. We were far enough from the city where light pollution wasn't visible. We could see a portion of the Milky Way Galaxy, and the Moon was in its Waning Gibbous phase. This almost would have been a perfect night for the telescope. In hindsight I am glad we didn't bring it because it was heavy and might have weighed me down.

"Okay" I said, "You didn't finish what you were going to say back there, what's going on with you?"

"Oh yeah, right, well, I'm thinking about moving to "

Before he could even finish, he was interrupted by a scream. It sounded like a young girl if I had to guess around the age of ten.

"HELP.........HELP ME!......WHO'S THERE?!.........AAAAAHH!"

I could not move my body, I couldn't even speak, I felt bad that I wasn't jumping into action, but for reasons I couldn't understand at the time, I was paralyzed. A primal fear had awoken in me, and I could only manage to turn my head slowly towards James, our gaze locked. It felt like hours had passed, I broke out in a cold sweat and had trouble swallowing. My words kept catching in my throat, but eventually I managed to form words and spoke to James in a low whisper.

"What should we do? Call the police?"

"They'd never get here in time, and how do we explain where we are? Yes officer, we are in some woods, there's dirt and rocks. She sounds hurt; we might need to help her ourselves" he reasoned.

James was the first to get up, once he did, he extended his hand out to me and hoisted me up. The direction of the scream had come from our right, a little way past the tree line. We waited a while longer to see if the girl would call out again.

"I think we should head over there, call out to her, she might be lost or hurt man" James said.

"I don't know, something doesn't feel right, don't you feel weird about this?" I questioned.

"It's probably the booze man, regardless of how this feels we need to go over there!"

We took a few careful steps towards the tree line, before we got within three feet of the first tree, we heard a noise that has scarred me indefinitely for the rest of my life.

For context, when I was younger, me and my friends would love to jump off the swing set at its peak because it gave us the sensation of flying. One time I managed to get some good height before I let go, but I botched the landing and all my weight landed on my right shoulder. It had become dislocated, and I had to go to the hospital to have in popped back into its place. I am not sure if you all ever had something like that happen to you, but the noise from the shoulder bone being reinserted back into the socket is disgusting, you'd never forget it.

This noise was similar, but incredibly loud, and wet. I could hear the bones shifting and adjusting even from this distance, muscles, tissues, and sinew being torn with the sound of wet fabric ripping. Then a rustling of leaves and brush, followed by silence. Once again frozen by fear, we could only wait for what would happen next, a voice called out to us, voices to be precise. The girl's voice, but two other voices spoke with it at the same time and with the same cadence. One being a significantly lower pitch, the other, sounded like my own.

"Stoooop......that......HURTS......Wow, he's beautiful!"

Hearing my own words and voice was enough, I pissed out the liquor all over myself in that moment. I don't know much about trauma and how the human brain reacts, but what happened next comes back to me only in fragments. Thinking about it too hard always results in a panic attack. I remember multiple gaunt limbs, a misshapen head with horns, matted and patchy blond hair, tall and lanky body with saggy leathery skin, pustules all over. I remember it running towards us on all fours, body turned sideways. Then came the gunshots, running through the woods. I remember hearing a deer bleat mixed with the sound of a death rattle of a dying old man. And the rest is a blur, but I remember waking up in my own bed.

I haven't seen James since that night, anytime I would reach out to him there's no reply and his phone goes straight to voicemail. I want to know if that was real or if we were just drunk and imagining things. I'm thankful he was carrying his firearm that night because I'm not sure if we would have made it back, but I don't understand why he won't talk to me. I just feel crazy, what was that thing, has anyone else encountered something similar in the area? I've heard of things called Skinwalkers from the forums on here, could that be what that was? It was capable of mimicry, albeit not particularly good.

I received a text message from James today, and it was one of the reasons I decided to share. It simply read:
"You left me"