The Mystery in the Arkansas Woods
The woods can be an intimidating place full of weird things. Just ask Reddit user I_Am_Eli, who recalls seeing a strange glowing ball near his grandparents’ house deep in the forest. But what really spooked him wasn’t the glowing light but rather the hairy humanoid creature crawling towards him.
“Back in the early 1990’s I was a kid, around 13 at the time of this incident, and I used to stay at my grandparents house a lot out in a very rural area in SE Arkansas. When I say very rural, I mean it was a series of networked dirt roads to get out to their house.
The closest neighbors besides my aunt and uncle who lived about a quarter of a mile up the road was over a mile and a half away. This was very backwoods and isolated from most civilization. The closest town was a 10 mile trip. It’s in the middle of farmland and mostly woods. They had lived in this house since my mother was a child. And had both grown up just a ways down the road.
Anyways, there was a general store roughly 3-4 miles down the network of dirt roads. This was your typical country general store ran by an old lady and her husband and it’s only customers really only consisted of the people who lived out there in BFE.
One day my grandmother asked me if I wanted to walk to the general store and get her some milk, eggs a few other miscellaneous items and I told her I would. She gave me some money and I headed on my way.
It was fairly early in the day and I had plenty of time to get back before dark, which I always made sure to do when I was out roaming about. Things can get mighty creepy out in the backwoods of Arkansas after nightfall. It’s a darkness unlike most people who have lived primarily in cities or towns have ever experienced.
Me being a 13 year old, had poor time management skills. I stopped at the bottom of a hill next to this small wooden bridge you have to cross and messed around at the creek catching crawdads and such and I kinda just messed around the whole way to the store. By the time I left the store I realized it was quickly approaching dark. This was fall and darkness set upon the land pretty early in the day.
I didn’t want to be walking those lonely, secluded roads through the woods alone in the dark so I hurried as fast as I could. Running and sprinting as much as possible. But it wasn’t enough. By the time I had made it back to the bottom of the hill near the bridge, it was almost completely dark, and there was an eerie sort of glow brought about by a very bright nearly full moon that was rising.
At the top of the hill the road was perfectly straight and flat, with woods on the left side and a large field on the right. About a half a mile up from the top of the hill is my grandparents house and you can see it from there. As I top the hill I can see the faint glow of the lights at their house, and I feel a sense of relief because I was kinda freaking out a little bit, but knowing I was so close and could see the house offered a little bit of comfort.
The field on the right was somewhat illuminated by the glow of the moon and my eyes had adjusted to the darkness rather well at this point. As I walked up the road, I hear something from the left, behind me on the wooded side of the road. It sounded like leaves being rustled. I turned to look and see nothing at first, but then as my eyes begin to focus I see something in the ditch, a black shadowy shape slowly moving towards me.
At first I thought it was a dog, but then realized it was much to large to be a dog, and then I realized it wasn’t actually walking on 4 legs, it was crawling, like a person would. I stared for a moment, out of sheer confusement trying to figure out what I was seeing and then a jolt of fear shot through me as it dawned on me, that whatever this thing was, it had been trying to sneak up on me.
At that exact moment this thing stood upright out of the ditch on two legs, like a person. It had the shape of a human, long arms, legs and was proportioned as such. It stood roughly 7-8 feet in height and was completely covered in black or maybe dark brown hair. It’s face was dark in color, and I can’t recall seeing much in the way of features do to it being night. It was no bear for certain, or any other kind of animal I have ever seen for that matter. I immediately dropped the bag of stuff I had been carrying and bolted as fast as my legs could take me towards my grandparents house.
I heard a heavy breathing/guttural growling kind of sound behind me and heard this things foot steps running behind me on the gravel as it gave chase. I did not turn around and was certain that it would grab me at any moment. I then heard it crash off into the woods, and let out an earth shattering and ungodly scream unlike anything I had ever heard before or since.
I’m positive this thing could have easily caught me, had it wanted to, but for some reason it let me go. By the time I reached my grandparents my heart felt as if it would explode from the combination of the adrenaline rush I had from being scared beyond any type of fear I had ever felt before or since, and full on sprinting as hard and fast as possible for about a half straight mile.
I flew into the house and in an incoherent mess of hyperactive gibberish tried to explain to my grandparents what had just happened. My grandmother didn’t really seem to believe me, but did believe SOMETHING had scared me and acted rather weird about the whole thing. She tried to convince me it was just a dog or some other animal. The next morning I woke up and found my grandpa sitting outside whittling wood underneath the shade tree in the front yard, as he often liked to do.
I went and sat down beside him in one of the old metal lawn chairs. He was a very rational man, down to earth, and had grown up in and hunted that area his entire life. He knew every square inch of it, mapped into his mind. He knew every type of critter and creature that lived in those woods, what noise they made, where to find them, how to catch them, etc. I had only been hunting with him for a couple of years, but had been going out into those woods with him since a pretty young age on walks and such. He had passed a lot of his knowledge down to me during those adventures.
I spoke to him about what had happened to me the night before, and told him that I knew what I saw. It wasn’t my overactive imagination, I wasn’t making it up, and it definitely wasn’t a dog. He knew that I wasn’t just some dumb 13 year old kid, and he knew that I knew the things he’d taught me. He stopped whittling, looked me right in the eyes and said, “I know what you saw. I’ve seen it before too. There’s things out in them woods that people don’t understand, and that a person ought not go foolin with.” I remember those words clearly to this day, because it gave me affirmation, but at the same time made me realize that whatever I’d seen was very real in existence, and beyond my understanding.
My grandpa then went on to tell me that far back in the woods, there are some cliffs and at the bottom of those cliffs is a cave. He told me that the cave is where the creature lived. He had once stumbled upon it a long time ago when he was hunting. He said he was standing on the top of the cliff looking at it when a creature fitting the same description emerged and began screaming wildly at him and throwing rocks.
He said he took a shot at it, missed and then this thing gave chase to him. But my grandpa was on top of the cliff, so in order to get to him this thing had to go around a pretty good distance and then up, which he said it quickly began to do, so he hightailed it out of there in a hurry. He said the whole way back home he felt as if he were being watched and kept hearing twigs snap behind him and he was certain that it was following him. Stalking him. He made it home and as he reached his front porch he turned and looked back at the woods from where he’d came and saw it peeking out at him from behind a tree. Later that night he said that he and my grandmother awoke in the early morning hours to large rocks being thrown at the house and ungodly howling noises from outside and this thing trying to get into the house.
He said he could hear it walking around on the front porch, rattling the doorknobs, banging on windows and it sounded like it was muttering to itself, in a low deep garbled voice, but it didn’t sound like a language, just a bunch of gibberish. After a while the thing went back to throwing some more rocks and howling, so my grandpa grabbed his shotgun and fired it out the front door a few times into the darkness and the direction of the howling and said he heard it run back into the woods. He didn’t know if he’d hit it or not.
He said that was the last he’d ever seen or heard from it, but over the years an occasional farmers cow would be mutilated, or someone’s hunting dog would go unexplainably missing, or someone would have a story about some strange creature they’d seen. He also said it scared my grandmother beyond words and she absolutely has refused to ever talk about it or even acknowledge that it happened. Which explains her acting weird about it when I told her what happened to me. I know it’s a pretty far fetched story, and you can believe it or not. It makes no difference to me. I know what I saw and my grandpa knew what he saw, and neither of us had ever felt the need to convince anyone else of it. In fact, until today I have never actually spoken of it to anyone other than my grandpa and he passed away roughly 10 years ago.”