I've gone back and forth on whether to share this. Been listening to your program for a while now, and I keep hearing stories that remind me of what I saw. So here I am. This happened in the summer of 1979. I was nine years old, living on my family's farm in Hardin County, Ohio. We had about eighty acres, mostly corn and soybeans, with a big pasture out back that ran up against a stretch of woods. Old woods. The kind that always felt darker than it should, if that makes sense. I spent most of that summer running around the property by myself. Only child. My folks worked the farm sunup to sundown, so I learned to keep myself busy. Caught frogs in the creek, built forts out of hay bales, that kind of thing. It was a good childhood. Lonely sometimes, but good.
The day it happened was a Sunday. I remember because my folks had gone to church that morning. I'd told them I had a stomachache. I didn't. I just wanted to stay home and read my comic books. So they drove off around nine, and I had the whole place to myself. It was hot that day. Humid. The kind of heat where the air feels thick and everything moves slow. I'd been lying on the porch reading for maybe an hour when I got restless. Decided to walk out to the back pasture. We had an old tractor out there that hadn't run in years, and I liked to climb up on it and pretend I was driving. I'd gotten about halfway across the field when I stopped. Something was moving at the tree line.
Now, the tree line was a good ways off. Quarter mile at least, maybe more. Far enough that when deer came out of the woods, they looked like brown smudges until they got closer. But what I was seeing wasn't deer. There were figures moving along the edge of the trees. Tall figures. Walking upright. At first I thought maybe it was people from the next farm over, the Hendersons, cutting through our property. But the way they moved was wrong. Too stiff. Too deliberate. Like they had to think about every step before they took it. I shaded my eyes with my hand and squinted. There were four of them. And they were coming out of the woods, heading into the open field.
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