Evening. I wanted to share something that happened to me a few years back. My brother keeps telling me I should call in about it, so here I am. This was September of 2019. I'd been fishing Teal Lake up near the Canadian border my whole life. Forty years, give or take. My father took me there when I was eight, and I've been going back every fall since. I know that lake better than I know my own backyard. Every cove, every drop-off, every sunken log. I'm telling you, there's not a square foot of that water I haven't fished. That's why what I saw doesn't make sense. Because I know what's in that lake. Pike. Walleye. Smallmouth. Leeches and crayfish and turtles. I know what lives in there. And what I saw that morning wasn't any of that. I'd driven up the night before, slept in my truck at the access point. There's this little dirt launch on the east side of the lake, barely marked, most people don't even know it's there. I like it because you've got the whole lake to yourself. No jet skis, no party boats. Just you and the water.
I launched right at first light. Maybe six fifteen, six twenty. The sun was just coming up over the tree line, everything had that orange glow to it. No wind at all. The lake was like glass. I mean perfect mirror, you could see the clouds reflected on the surface clear as a photograph. The water itself was dark though. That time of year, after all the summer algae, visibility was maybe a foot, foot and a half. Murky green, like pea soup. Couldn't see your hand if you stuck it in past the wrist. water visibility sounds frustrating for fishing - Alex' I motored out to my usual spot, this little shelf about two hundred yards offshore where the walleye like to feed in the morning. Cut the engine, dropped anchor, started rigging up my line. Everything normal. Everything the way it always was. I'd been there maybe twenty minutes when I noticed the fish had stopped biting. Not just slowed down, stopped completely. I'd had three hits in the first ten minutes, good ones, then nothing. I figured maybe a front was coming in, pressure change, something like that. I was about to move to a different spot when I looked down into the water. And I saw it.
At first I thought it was a reflection. Some trick of the light, the sun at that low angle doing something strange. But it wasn't on the surface. It was below. Way below. I'm telling you, it was at least fifteen, maybe twenty feet down. And I could see it clear as day. This shape. Massive. Had to be twelve feet tall, maybe more. Vaguely humanoid, like a person, but wrong. The proportions were all off. Arms too long. Head too small. No features I could make out, just this smooth, blank surface where a face should be. And it was translucent. That's the only word for it. Like it was made of dirty glass, or ice that hadn't quite frozen solid. I could see through it, sort of, see the murk of the water behind it. But it had mass. It had presence. It wasn't a shadow or a trick of the light. It was there. It was standing on the bottom. Just standing there. And it was looking up at me. I don't know how I knew that. It didn't have eyes, not that I could see. But I could feel it watching. The way you can feel someone staring at the back of your head.
[ Story continues in the full game... ]