80 Acres

I know there are thousands of people who don’t believe in God, or the devil. I wish I was telling you a God fearing story of how an angelic being appeared and changed my whole fucked up life, but this is not one of those stories. I’m not sure if God is real and if he is, I don’t know how he allowed such an evil to walk his green earth. I do believe in the devil. I have met his gaze and I don’t think I can ever shake all the hopelessness I saw in those cold black eyes. They were endless pools of black. It seemed as if the light didn’t even reflect off of them. They were empty and now that empty feeling is eating at me from the inside and I don’t know how much longer I can deny him. I can hear his breathy voice on the breeze, and it’s calling my name.

I used to love small quaint little towns. Have you ever been to a small town? Well, in case you haven’t, I’ll elaborate a little bit. I don’t mean towns of 16,000 people. I’m talking about the towns that have a population of under 1,000. The kind of towns that you would miss if you drove by them and blinked. They are the kind of places that live in children’s books and country songs. Towns were everyone knows everyone and most of the population is stretched out over miles of rural gravel roads. Can you picture it yet? Towns where you have to have a truck, because the creek floods when it rains more than an inch. In the wintertime these roads remain blankets of white as there are not any plows to come to the rescue, unless the neighboring farmer has a tractor and is feeling generous.

I grew up on an 80 acre farm in a small quaint town called Silva. This town is not much of a town. I can only imagine that it is considered a town at all because of the local post office and the handful of police officers. I have fond memories the farm. Regardless of the events that have recently occurred I still can’t say I have I hate for that place. My grandparents purchased that land and worked hard to get everything that they had. They were God fearing people, but didn’t necessarily go to church every Sunday. I do recall my grandmother having Joyce Myers on TV when I would get up most Sunday mornings. My grandparents helped my father raise me, as mother was in and out of the picture. They were like my 2nd parents. They made me who I am today and I miss them dearly. I truly think they are what helped keep the darkness away.

Before I can get into the present I need to talk a little more about my past. My parents had their problems and I could write a whole book about things that should’ve and would’ve been. I do believe that negative actions can let negative things into your daily life, and this rule helped spark these events. My parents abused drugs, mostly pills, for most of my early childhood. They would get messed up at home and if things got too crazy my grandmother would come and pick me up, which was easy because she lived within a 5 minute walk from our trailer. My mother was very drawn to the paranormal and this has some bearing on why I share this same fascination. She would read tarot cards and dabble in witchcraft. Now, I’m not saying my mother was a full blown Salem witch, but she has told me she would participate in spells and séances with her friends. She also didn’t have a full bearing on what she messing with. This, along with unknown things, led to the event I’m going to try to describe to you.

I had to be around 4 years old when this happened. My parents were suckers and would let me sleep in their bed, even though I had my own bed. I remember waking up to my mother screaming. I can’t remember anything she was saying, but I remember the tone in voice wasn’t anything I had heard come from her mouth before. She had me wrapped up in the big duvet and I remember the room being so cold my nose hurt. She had me wrapped up so tightly that my legs and arms had fallen asleep. She was in the right hand corner of the room sitting on the floor and had me on her lap. The bathroom light was on and flooded a portion of the room with light. The light shown primarily on the bed. My eyes followed the light and what I saw still haunts me today. My father was levitating about a foot off the bed. He wasn’t calmly levitating either; he looked like he was being pulled. He was tightly gripping the posts of the head board and mumbling something I couldn’t understand. My mother sat me down on the floor and told me not to move and to close my eyes. Of course, I didn’t close my eyes. I was so scared but I couldn’t look away. My mom entered the room with a bible and began reading a scripture and praying. My father began to convulse and flail about, all while still a foot off the bed and hanging onto the head board. As quickly as it started, it stopped. My father fell to the bed after his body lurched forward. I don’t remember exactly what happened after this, but I quit sleeping in my parent’s room after that. As adult, my mother has told me that she saw “it” leave. She had called my grandmother when she went to get the bible. She said it was a very dark shadow. It shot of my father’s feet and slithered out of the cracked window in the bedroom the moment my grandmother walked into the house. This ties in to the story later.

The paranormal has always been a part of my life. The supernatural doesn’t scare me anymore. It will surprise me from time to time, but I won’t allow it to scare me. However, the thing that I have recently encountered scares me. I can feel it in my bones and it’s like nothing that I have ever felt. After my grandparents passed away, my father and I inherited the 80 acre farm along with everything else they owned. I came down from the city to help my father go over paperwork and get all the affairs in order the day I got the news that my grandmother was gone. It was a happy and sad evening. We stayed in the house that night. We laughed and cried and told stories about the “good ol days”. The house didn’t feel eerie at all. In fact the feeling of house didn’t change until my grandmother was laid to rest. I really think her spirit stayed with us over that week and left after she saw we were going to be okay and her remains where next to my grandfather.

After the funeral the family all came back to the farm and we ate and reminisced. With each person that left, the house got colder. I don’t mean cold as in temperature; it’s as if the atmosphere just began to change. My father was the last person to leave. He helped me clean up and as he was leaving offered for me to stay at his house. I had a bad feeling about staying at the farm, but I declined and said I would fine. He stood there and looked like he wanted to say something to persuade me to leave with him, but he didn’t. I walked him out to his truck and waved good bye to him. I stood in the opening of the garage door and lit a cigarette. I hadn’t smoked for years, but this week had earned me a few smokes. The flood lights were drawing, what seemed like, a million bugs to the area I was standing. I swatted a swarm of bugs out my face and went into the garage and flipped off the light. It was so dark. If you have never been in a rural area at night, you are missing out. You can see stars you didn’t even know existed. I feel like I can actually see entire galaxies out there. But when I turned the light off this time, I didn’t feel adventurous. I felt scared. I questioned myself, ‘why are you scared? You grew up here? You’ve been in this yard when it’s dark too many times to count.’ But there was an uneasy feeling in the air. I flipped my cigarette out onto the gravel driveway and right as I hit the button to close the garage door I heard a scrambling sound on the tin roof of the garage. I hurriedly opened the door that led into the living room and locked the door behind me. As the garage door was closing I saw a glimpse of what looked like something’s legs. I closed all the blinds and tripled checked that every door and window was locked. I went to the interior pantry and grabbed one of grandfather’s shotguns and grabbed a handful of shells from the shelf. I loaded the gun, sat down on the couch and listened. I was holding my breath to see if I could hear anything. I didn’t hear anything at first. Then I heard a thump on the roof and then footsteps. I felt my eyes welling up with tears of fear and anger. Then I heard a scratching sound and it sounded like sporadic claws being drug along the siding and roof of the house. I even heard a sharp squeal of what sounded like something metal and sharp being ran across the windows of the living room. I felt a tear slide down face. I wanted to call my father, but I didn’t want him to be in danger. I didn’t know who or what was out there. The cops wouldn’t get here for awhile and then they probably tell me I had been in the city too long and it was just the sounds of the “country”. I don’t really know what happened at this point, but I woke up on the couch around 6:30 AM. The sun was shining through a crack in the blinds, but the house still felt heavy. I unloaded the shotgun and put it back in the pantry. I grabbed my keys and my purse and hesitated a little when I went to hit the garage door opener. The door mechanically squealed open and I cautiously walked outside. I fumbled for my pack of cigarettes and lit one and walked out into the sun light. I walked to the side of the garage to get into my car when I noticed a strange set of prints on the ground. I still really don’t know how to describe them. They kind of looked like hooves, but that would impossible. I then decided it had to be a large cat and the dry ground had distorted the tracks and that had to be what was messing me with the prior evening.

I went to my father’s house and didn’t mention anything that happened. We still had a lot of things to take care of around the farm. The fields needed to be mowed and most of the items in the house were going to need to be packed up. So he rode back to the farm with me. When we got back to the house I saw something lying in the driveway. I stopped a few feet away from what was in the drive way and my father got out first. It was a lamb, a mutilated lamb. My father looked it over and then went to the garage and grabbed a large trash bag. “Looks like a stray dog chased this guy from someone else’s property,” he said while shaking his head. I knew no one kept sheep near us and our land didn’t border anyone else’s land. But I know my father was just trying to justify the clearly odd situation.

We worked around the house and were about half way through the packing and cleaning. We both flopped down at the kitchen table and started to chat. I glanced out the window and didn’t realize how dark it had gotten. I mentioned that we should head back to his house. He looked at me puzzled and asked why I wasn’t staying at the farm. I stumbled over my words and then he said, “It’s a little spooky out here by yourself, huh?” He chuckled. We started to my car and loaded a few small boxes in my car that had belongings my father was taking to his house. There was rustling in the overgrown hay in the fields and it was close. I told my dad to get in the car. He shrugged, and opened the passenger door. I looked out into the dark field and saw a figure standing in the tall hay. I’m 5ft 5 and the hay was a little over my waist. The hay hit the figure in the field at about the knees. Even though it was dark, I could tell their head was off to one side. It was like they were tilting their head like a dog does when they hear a high pitched sound. The figure was very thin and had something on its head. I just couldn’t figure out what it was. My father started to get out of car, but I locked the doors and slammed my foot on the accelerator. Gravel hit the still open garage and a cloud of dust trailed behind the car. My father was yelling at me asking me what I was doing. I looked out my car window and saw that they hay was swaying behind the car in the field next to me. That thing was chasing us! I could see that in the moonlight it had horns, but not like our local deer. I couldn’t place them. I turned my eyes away and my father was staring out of the passenger window. He tapped me and I turned my gaze to the right. Out in the woods that met the fields, there were sets of eyes. I don’t mean 2 or 3; I would say 60 or more. I can’t be sure, it looked like hundreds but I’m sure that would be an exaggerated amount. My father didn’t speak until we were in his house with the door locked. After speaking about what it could be we decided it had to be a deer that was running by us. The eyes must have just been a trick of the moonlight.

The next day my father and I reluctantly headed back to the farm. The tension in the air was almost tangible. After working on packing my father and I sat out on the back porch and looked across the golden fields. “Let’s take a walk,” he said. I unwillingly dragged myself from my seat on the porch. I told him to hold on and ran inside to grab my boots. I didn’t want to take a chance in flip flops in field that had old rusty farm equipment lying around. We started to head back to the entrance of the fields that all of the out buildings were on. As we were walking through the fields again, talking about my grandparents we caught a waft of something rancid. As you have gathered, I grew up on a farm, and have come across dead animals in the field. My grandfather was an avid hunter and fisherman so I had smelled some very terrible smells. This wasn’t like anything I’ve ever experienced. It smelled like rot, blood, trash and sewer. I started to gag and my father put his hand over his mouth but soon followed my reaction. We walked towards the smell. We were standing on an open, relatively flat, piece of land. My boots hit something metal under where we were standing and made a hollow “ping” sound. My father looked down and then looked at me with a perplexed look on his face. We kicked away the cut hay that had been laid all over the area. It revealed a large square metal plate. “Have you seen this before?” I questioned. My father didn’t say anything he just shook his head. We stupidly decided to move the metal plate, because that is a good idea right? When we did, there was incredibly deep, round hole, almost like a well. It was dark even in the still bright afternoon sun. The horrid smell was the first thing that hit us. It was like a forceful wind of putrid air. My father and I just peered down the hole. Then we heard a chuckle. It echoed from the hole. I started to back up when I saw something in the darkness. Then we heard a scrambling sound, like something was coming out of the hole! We started to run but we stopped, entranced by what was happening. All I can remember are the eyes; all black and sunken into a thin face. I see those eyes every time I close my eyes. I was now on my hands and knees and was leaning into the hole with my eyes glazed over according to my father. My father bellowed, “Move!” And his voice snapped me out my trance and I hurriedly crawled away from the hole. My father somehow lifted that metal plate and slammed it down on the hole and we heard a screech unlike anything I’ve ever encountered. It was like a barn owl and a panther, but it was so haunting and loud. I put my hands over my ears and my father grabbed my arm and basically drug me to my car and threw me in the passenger seat. We drove in silence other than my labored breathing. When we got to his house he put my bags in the car and told me I needed to go back to the city as soon as possible. He continued to tell me that he didn’t know how that hole got there or what the fuck was going to come out of it, but that he had seen those eyes before. He told me the night he “levitated” he saw a shadow at the end of the bed and it had a hold of his legs and had those same eyes.

I returned to the city that very evening after I had calmed down. It’s been a few months since this all happened. I think this thing that had possessed, or whatever it did, my father is coming after me. My grandparents are gone and there is no one here to protect me. I was looking in the mirror the other day and swear I saw my eyes change for a second. I saw those cold dead eyes staring back at me. I don’t know what is going to happen to me. But I know that if you see an 80 acre farm for sale in Silva, don’t buy it. Please, don’t, no matter how much it appeals to you. If you do, you might find yourself looking into those dead, black eyes and I might be the one looking back at you.

Credit: MmmBrainss!