The vast North American wilderness
is home to evil forces
thought only to exist in nightmares.
But the terrible creatures that roam here
are all too real.
Young people looking for a place to play
find the woods irresistible...
almost as irresistible
as the beings within find them.
Let us in! Please!
Run! Aah! Run!
Something had followed us, something from a horror movie.
- Aah! - He's going to kill us.
Go! Go on! Get out of here!
Jon Patrick and his friend Lucas
are in the woods behind Lucas' house,
competing to win.
We were playing a game.
We would play Capture the Flag. We'd play Manhunt.
Manhunt pits two teams of teenagers against each other,
but at night, it's not as much fun as you'd think.
It could be pretty intimidating at night.
Definitely, if you weren't prepared for it
or you heard something, you didn't know what it was
and it caught you off guard,
the fight-or-flight response, for me,
was pretty heavily weighted towards flight.
We were basically running from three to four people.
If you were caught, then you were captured.
You were taken to the jail.
Shh!
Lucas and I were probably two of the fastest people out there,
which is why we were the only ones left on our team.
- We have to rescue them. - Yeah.
- You see 'em? - No.
If we catch them first...
We win.
Now their game suddenly takes
an unsettling turn.
The first time we kind of got the hint
that something might be wrong
was when the other team yelled at us.
Suddenly, there was another person
who we couldn't account for...
seemingly out of nowhere,
and neither myself nor Lucas had, uh,
had... had noticed this person.
As the game continues,
someone or something strange appears.
I couldn't tell if I'd really seen that or if I imagined it,
or maybe it was just another shadow.
Like I said, there were lots of shadows out there
that looked like people, that could be people,
that could be someone hiding.
I thought I saw one of the other members of the other team,
so I had to sort of come behind Lucas
to try to tag this person.
I'll cut him off!
He was running really fast,
which really kind of put me off because like I said,
I thought I was one of the fastest people out there.
The longer the chase continues,
the more Jon wonders exactly who he is pursuing,
or if it's even a person at all.
Entities tend to be attracted to the energy of a young person,
um, especially to the happy energy if they're playing.
Spirits, they don't eat food,
but they do need to consume energy to keep going.
They can pull that energy from the earth.
They can pull that energy from appliances.
They can pull that energy from people.
It basically looked like a shadow
that was running full speed.
It was incredibly silent.
I don't recall hearing it at all up to this point.
As I was running, I could feel my heart pounding.
I could hear every stick that I stepped on.
I could hear every misstep that I took where I had to trip,
where I had to kind of reset.
I expected it to be farther ahead of me,
and once I looked, there was nothing there.
That person never materialized.
When that person never showed up,
it sort of caught me off guard.
What?
Did you see him?
Lucas was silent.
He looked at me, and we both kinda
had a quick mental exchange that we both thought we saw someone.
Okay, let's go. Let's go.
It's increasingly unclear
what they were running after
or how their target could seemingly vanish into thin air,
but it scares them enough to call off the fun.
We kind of agreed to just end the game.
None of their friends report
seeing anything out of the ordinary,
and soon Jon and Lucas are on their own in the woods.
A couple of people decided to go back down the hill
to the houses.
When people started leaving,
the first thing that came to my mind
was basically every sort of horror movie that I'd ever seen.
I was thinking, "Oh, good. The group is getting smaller.
This is not helpful."
Man, you're sure no one saw anything?
Maybe it was an ax murderer.
Shut up.
Now it's just the two of them,
and they hope it stays that way.
Yet they're still determined to camp out.
We still wanted to stay out there,
just didn't want to be called chicken,
so we didn't want to leave.
We were pretty steadfast in that.
The general tone was just quiet.
No one really wanted to say much.
The fire actually sort of made the situation
outside of the immediate circle a little bit more tense.
It did cast moving shadows
that we couldn't write off as easily.
It made the unknown a whole lot more unknown.
It definitely left more room for us to want to stay closer to it.
At one point in time,
I noticed something at the edge of the clearing.
Look! Look!
What?
It looked like a person.
It was very shrouded in shadow, but the only reason I saw it
was because it became briefly illuminated by fire,
and I couldn't really make any features out
except that it looked like a person.
It may look like a person,
but it's most definitely not.
Teenagers Jon and Lucas
were playing a game with their friends
when they were interrupted by an eerie creature.
They're now alone in the woods,
and it looks like the creature has come for them.
Negative spirits in particular
may fixate on a younger person because physically,
they are going through changes in their lives.
Their bodies are changing. Their minds are changing.
They thrive on that kind of pain and confusion.
They do that to control.
They do that to draw energy.
They do that to feed.
Pass me the flashlight.
Pass me the flashlight! Come on!
- Okay, okay. - Hurry up! Come on!
Before they can get a good look at it,
it seems to disappear into thin air.
I bet it's my Uncle Jimmy.
- What? - He's just messing with us.
Come here.
Lucas is convinced this is all just a joke.
Lucas had an uncle. His name was Uncle Jimmy.
And he was, uh,
he was just about 10 years older than Lucas.
I mean, he would come out and he would, from time to time,
terrorize the kids that were hanging out there,
scare us out of our minds.
When we approached, as soon as we got anywhere near the woods,
it essentially vanished.
It looked like I could see it one second,
then it was gone the next.
It didn't move behind a tree. The fire didn't suddenly go out.
I didn't light it up with my flashlight
and then suddenly lose it. It just wasn't there.
I knew that something was wrong, that it wasn't Uncle Jimmy,
so we decided to, in our infinite wisdom,
try to find out what it was.
Generally speaking, it's never a good idea
for young people to...
go out looking for ghosts or spirits or entities.
They haven't reached adulthood yet,
even human experience-wise.
They're just not ready to...
handle the kinds of consequences that could be meted out.
We were too stupid to admit that we were scared,
and we wanted to act like the big guy,
act like the big, strong guy,
and so we definitely pursued it
farther than I really think we should have.
We got real silent. The woods got real silent,
and every now and again you would hear something.
And it was always a little bit deeper into the woods.
And then we heard this, um...
it was a stick breaking and then just a little bit of movement,
but it was much closer than anything else had been.
It was probably 10 feet from us, but we couldn't see it.
When they turn around,
they come face-to-face with the creature
that's been stalking them all night.
It made this growling noise that, uh...
um, it didn't sound human.
It didn't remind me of any wild animal that I'd ever heard.
It was something from a horror movie.
I couldn't understand what I was hearing.
It was a very low growling, scratching noise.
And I started walking backwards, but I didn't want to turn away.
I was afraid if I turned away, it would jump at me.
And there were just two of us. We didn't know what to do.
We needed to get out of there.
We knew that we needed to go home.
Come on! Come on! Come on!
All the tough guy-ness was gone. We were done.
No matter how fast they run,
it's not fast enough.
The woods felt like they were alive
and felt like they were following us down the hill.
We were originally playing a game.
We were chasing each other,
and it's ironic that at that point, something was chasing us.
The teens raced to Lucas' house...
- Come on. Let us in! - But they aren't out of danger.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, please!
- Please, please! - We're out back! We out back!
- Please, please let us in! - Oh, come on!
- The door was locked. We couldn't get in. - Please, please!
We felt safe at first, and then suddenly here we are,
trapped, stranded, out on the front porch.
- He's coming! He's coming! - Please! Please!
- He's coming! Please! Please! - Please, let us in! Please!
Their game of Manhunt in the woods with their friends
has gone wrong in blood-chilling ways.
Now terrified teenagers Jon and Lucas
are the ones being hunted by an evil and unnatural creature.
- Mom, let us in! - Please! Please! Please!
- They had been targeted, basically. - Please! Please!
A negative...
entity would probably target
a child's energy to sap it,
to drain some of that energy for their own well-being.
Help!
Something had followed us.
Whatever had been up had come down after us.
Please! We're out back! Please let us in!
They make it to Lucas' house, but no one is home,
and the door is locked.
Please!
The lock wasn't really that good of a lock.
If you sort of jimmied it and lifted the door,
you could get it off the track and you could slide in,
so that's what we ended up doing to get inside.
Please! Please! Let us in, please!
Please, no.
We felt relieved. It definitely was a relief to get inside.
We got that door shut behind us, and that felt like a barrier.
I mean, it wasn't a perfect barrier.
You kind of start thinking about it.
We stayed away from the windows. We stayed away from the door.
We were definitely still on edge.
But being inside doesn't mean they're safe.
With no one else home, Jon and Lucas are on their own
against the mysterious creature prowling outside.
We heard a loud thud up on the roof.
I was tired and I was terrified.
I wanted to go to sleep.
I wanted to reset. I wanted to start over.
Lucas and I made a quick judgement call.
If we could scare it away, if we could shoot it.
We didn't have access to a gun.
All we had was an air rifle, a little pellet gun,
and thinking that would be sufficient,
we quickly grabbed it,
and myself and Lucas went outside.
We look up on the roof, and there it was.
It was sort of hunched over, almost on all fours.
And then we heard that low, raspy rumble again
and it was almost like the way a firework hits your chest.
It sort of shook us.
Go, go!
We tried to throw things at it.
We had rocks, pinecones, whatever was on the ground,
and it seemed to almost go through it.
It didn't faze it.
It was the loudest growl I think I've ever heard.
And, um...
when Lucas fired a couple of shots
from the air rifle at it,
and it backed up, and we thought maybe we'd won.
We'd thought maybe we'd got it.
But it appears they've only made things worse.
And it just jumped off the house at that point.
And now it's on the ground,
inches away from them.
It turned to face us.
The best we could see it, it stood...
at the time, it looked like it stood 8 or 10 feet tall.
It was incredibly aggressive.
It seemed to be challenging us.
The creature appears ready to strike a fatal blow...
and then it vanishes into the night.
It jumped 20 foot across the creek,
and then that was the last we saw of it.
Jon and Lucas wait in terrified silence
until Jon's parents arrive home.
Yeah, we told them everything.
We... we told them what we saw.
They didn't really believe us.
A few days later, they realize how lucky they were
to have escaped the monster in the woods.
As we were telling Lucas' parents what had happened,
they informed us that a cow had been killed
and had been pretty much gutted, and it was all over the place.
Of course, when we heard that,
we thought it could as easily have been any of us.
It could have been any one of us at any time that night.
Jon and Lucas escaped the terrifying creature,
and now Dan and Ken
are heading out to the woods with their friends,
- a night that also begins as innocent fun. - Go, go!
I'm telling you, guys,
it's the creepiest place I've ever seen!
- Ooh! - There it is.
Try not to be too scared.
It was just a game of hide-and-seek.
After you, ladies.
You know, I haven't really told too many people about it.
Oh, we've got a lively bunch around here.
Oh.
This abandoned graveyard...
- Hey, Ken, I've found your mom! - There she is. -...tucked in the forest
is definitely not a place for the young and the living.
A lively bunch here, folks.
Some cemeteries do house spirits of people
who are actually looking after the graves
that their bodies are buried in,
to keep them from being desecrated.
All right. All right. Here's what I'm thinking...
I'm thinking hide-and-go-seek in the dark.
Ken and I against you guys?
What drew us into playing in that area, the graveyard,
is to kind of laugh in the face of danger,
thinking we were tougher than we probably were.
We were playing, like, a two-on-two game
of hide-and-seek, or Ghost in the Graveyard,
I think we were calling it at the time,
so we already were kind of enjoying,
or at least pretending to enjoy, the scariness about the evening.
At least, to provide some sort of entertainment,
considering, you know, the feel of death, uncertainty,
just knowing that it's possible that,
I guess, the... the veil is thin there.
Oh, 20 seconds should be enough, yeah?
Starting now.
- Go! - Run, boys!
Ready or not, here we come.
Dan and his friends sense they're not the only ones
lurking around the graveyard tonight.
Something has been woken.
We first thought we saw our two friends
hiding in some trees.
Turn the light right there.
Oh, they're so dumb.
And so we're both kind of saying,
"Hey, guys, get out. We know you're there.
"We see you. We know something's over there.
You're not being very good at hiding."
Gotcha!
I thought you changed the batteries.
Crap. I did. Oh, man. My mom buys the worst batteries.
Come on.
The sounds of the woods definitely made the game
more fun and more creepy.
Ken and I looked to the left
and we see this...
To this day, it's still kind of hard for me to explain.
Definitely made a lasting impact on my life.
Hard to explain and impossible to forget.
Go! Go, go, go, go, go!
Come on.
Teenagers Dan and Ken are playing
hide-and-seek with their friends by the old cemetery,
but now something has come looking for them.
The message is, "You came onto my territory.
"I didn't like it,
and I'm gonna show you my abilities and what I can do."
It kind of looked like an overflowing leaf bag
that was a little more dense,
on top of a young boy's legs.
Nice one, guys. That's real scary, okay?
At first, we thought it was our friends,
like, kind of doing, like, a piggyback.
Like, one on top of the other.
Come on. Come on, guys.
We started walking towards it, because Ken and I thought
it was our friends just...
trying a new way to mess with us.
Come on. Look at them.
- It's both of them. - Doesn't even look real.
No, doesn't even look real.
We started hearing it whistling...
and I can't...
It's really hard for me to describe the...
the odd whistle that it was doing.
This... uh, thing...
it seemed to just enjoy the fact
that it was able to scare us.
Go! Go!
And I turn around and just start running back towards my house.
Go! Go! Get up there!
I just felt pure fear.
It was just kind of like,
"I really hope I don't feel anything tug on me,
grab me, rip at me, whatever."
Definitely felt my heart rapidly hitting on my chest.
My blood was pumping so much
that my ears were kind of throbbing.
Go!
Go! Go! Go!
What the hell was that?
When Ken and I reconvened with our other friends,
"Did you see that? Did you hear that?"
Like, "Why didn't you guys come out when we saw you?"
They were just kind of laughing and like,
"I don't know what you're talking about."
Ken and I were pretty shook up.
Let's get out of here.
We didn't want to play anymore
'cause we had no idea where this creature had gone.
Deeply rattled by their terrifying experience,
the boys decide to call it a night,
but Dan can't forget what happened.
Sleep didn't come quickly, knowing that
whatever this creature or thing was out there,
just possibly in my backyard.
Um...
it...
Yeah, I didn't... I didn't sleep well.
I'll just put it that way.
He hopes the ordeal is behind him.
But two nights later, he's still on edge
when he has to go outside.
My dad told me I had to take the garbage out.
So as I was walking outside,
getting the cans ready,
and that's when it kind of hits me.
Hearing the whistling strike up again,
I was pretty frozen in fear
and not really sure what... Where to go or what to do.
I stood there for quite some time, contemplating.
I felt stalked or hunted.
There were so many different thoughts and feelings
I was experiencing.
Here it is again.
It chased me.
It's now messing with me.
Where is it?
Here we are, hide-and-seek in the dark.
Dan and his friends are terrified...
Me and Ken against you guys?
When the game they're playing in the woods
is interrupted by a malevolent creature.
Go, go, go!
He thinks he's escaped it.
What the hell was that?
But two nights later,
he discovers it's followed him home.
When a particularly malicious entity
targets somebody and follows them home,
they tend to invade their life.
Basically, I had 30 yards of driveway
and almost complete uncertainty
on where this thing was
because there were so many trees in the way.
What was most troubling
is I didn't see any movement.
I didn't see any shadow.
I hadn't told my dad or any of my family members
what had happened the night before
because I was so uncertain about it.
Now that it was happening all over again,
I was still kind of like,
"I don't want them to think I'm crazy."
I was just thinking, "Okay, I'm going to get this done,
"and then I'm just going to hide in the house
and I'll hopefully never have to hear or see this thing again."
Not only was this thing
watching me
and whistling at me,
I couldn't always pinpoint where it was.
It was very long and drawn out notes,
so it seemed very...
deliberate and almost like...
it was waiting for me to stop moving
so I could hear it.
The reason why an entity might follow a young person...
They thrive on that pain.
They thrive on the teasing, the torturing,
the taunting aspect, so they need that energy
and will draw on that to serve themselves.
I felt very alone, and still, all I could really hear
was this very eerie whistle.
I just booked it into my front door
and shut it.
It was just a very creepy,
life-altering event, experiencing that.
Dan doesn't understand why the creature appeared...
but he's terrified that it may still be lurking
in the woods surrounding his house.
Being a kid in my neighborhood
wasn't really the same after that.
I didn't really go out and play much, at least at night.
Go, go!
The dark forest hides
all sorts of terrors that can stalk you,
but games played in broad daylight
can go just as badly,
as Brett and his friends are about to find out.
Whenever I tell this story as an adult,
I-I get the general impression that it's hard to believe.
It's a thing that's straight out of a horror movie.
Most of my childhood was spent living in an apartment complex.
Just to the north of the apartment complex,
there was this clearing that we sort of
took it upon ourselves to make that ours.
When I was a kid, there were places that were sacred to me.
It was a place where me and my friends
could go talk about the things that we wanted to talk about,
about the things that we thought were cool,
and there were no adults.
It was just us.
It was a very secluded place that,
unless you spent a lot of time in the woods,
you wouldn't know that it existed.
All right, guys, what have we got?
Oh, nice.
So we would go to the different dumpsters,
'cause in an apartment complex,
there's lots of dumpsters with lots of cool stuff
to get into and grab and scavenge.
And we would take broken furniture,
things that we thought were cool
that were probably not very cool,
just pieces of other people's trash,
and use it to build a fort.
Did you guys check out that match yesterday?
Yeah.
I was pretty carefree.
I was well taken care of, so there weren't many hardships,
so it was just a life of going to school,
coming home, playing with your friends,
and repeating that throughout the week.
And then one day,
their childhood is changed forever.
As far as we knew, it was a typical day.
I remember it was sunny.
I remember that the wind was blowing
a little bit harder than normal.
Did you guys see that new "Archie" comic?
The day that we went out to the woods...
Got home from school, you drop your book bag off.
You say "Hi" to your parents,
and then you're back out the door.
And I went and rounded up my friends,
and we headed off into the woods to go to our fort.
We didn't know that it was gonna be the kind of day
that it turned out to be.
So I get the idea...
We were walking through the woods
and we were heading towards our fort like normal.
There was never anybody in the woods.
We'd always be there by ourselves.
It's like, you can't base an entire genre off it.
Wait, do... do you see that?
It was me who noticed that off in the distance to our left,
I would guess maybe 70 yards, 80 yards in the distance...
there was a man
walking in the opposite direction as us.
He had a very...
purposeful walk to him.
He was going somewhere or searching for something.
To see a person out there was startling,
so we froze whenever we saw him.
We didn't know where he was going.
We just stopped, stayed still,
and we hoped that he passed us by.
But to their horror, he sees them.
So we knew at that point in time,
he knows that we're here.
He's looked directly in our direction,
and that's the first time that we saw his face.
It wasn't just a man walking in the woods.
It was a man walking in the woods with a mask on.
And then we noticed that in his hand...
he was carrying an ax.
- Run. Run! - Let's go! Let's go!
The woods are full of entities that prey on the young,
but you don't have to be a creature to be a monster.
They're out in places that are isolated.
They're far from help,
and consequences
could be disastrous.
Brett and his friends are heading
to their secret shack in the woods
to hang out and play games...
only to discover their hideout isn't so secret anymore.
We were hoping that maybe he didn't really see us.
Maybe he is just looking in the direction
because he heard some footsteps or he heard some sticks break.
Unfortunately, that's not the case.
We were just frozen with fear.
We didn't know where to go.
What does he want?
That's when we knew we need to get out here.
Run. Run! - Let's go! Let's go!
Let's go!
It was just a... Sort of a boom boom decision.
He started running. We start running.
Let's go! Come on! Run, run, run, run!
Our immediate reaction was to run.
"We gotta go to our fort. We have to get to our fort..."
-Uhh! -...because that was the safe space.
Go! Let's go! Come on!
I can only assume that he is...
What are you doing?! He is out to kill me.
He's going to kill us. - Let's go!
We knew that if anything happened,
if there was something in the way and we tripped,
that he was on us.
Let's split! Go!
They decide to split up,
hoping that will save them.
We knew that he was gaining on us as we ran.
It's the woods, and there's nobody else out there,
so every sound is amplified.
You could hear his footsteps
getting closer and closer behind us as we ran.
Let's go! Let's go! Let's go!
- Come on! - Brett! Come on!
My friends made it,
and it was too late by the time it was my turn.
- Come on! - Come here!
Aah!
He was right there,
and I could not get away from him.
The only thing that I could think of was,
"If I can't get away from him,
I have to fight him."
It's either I hurt him or he hurts me...
so I grabbed what I thought was a good stick.
I assumed that I get one chance to make a connection...
and held it like a baseball bat...
-Aah! -...and took a nice, big fat swing at his face
and I hit him right in the head.
As he was stunned,
we saw that as our opportunity to get out of there
because the fort was no longer safe and we needed to get home.
We ran away as fast as we could.
As we were running out, we kept looking behind us
to make sure that he wasn't following us again.
Whenever we told my parents what had happened,
I think their initial reaction was to assume
that the story that they heard
were the embellishments of a kid's imagination.
"Surely that didn't happen to them..."
but it did.
After all of this happened, the woods themself sort of lost
their luster as our place of safety and solitude.
I think that it was the manager of the apartment complex.
I remember him being very strange.
I remember avoiding him.
Let's go! Let's go! Let's go! Sucker!
He did not like us playing out at the apartment complex.
I don't really know why.
It was just kids playing outside.
I don't remember seeing him after that.
We moved shortly after all of this happened.
Looking back, I am sort of proud of myself
in a way that
whenever it seemingly came under attack,
that we knew that we had to defend
the place that we loved being.
Perhaps the woods are not the best place
to venture into and play games.
Definitely made a lasting impact on my life.
After that incident, it definitely left us thinking,
"What if it came back?"
It was one of the last experiences
I had in Pennsylvania before we moved to Florida,
and it really puts a cap on the life up there,
and I was terrified.