By CULLEN MURRIN, Staff Writer
I remember it vividly. It was a few years ago on my birthday weekend. Maybe my sixteenth. My friends were spending the weekend at my house, which happened pretty much yearly on or around my birthday. Including myself and my brother, there were four or five of us, all fifteen to seventeen.
One night we decided to go for a midnight walk down the road. I live out in the country, just outside of a little Oklahoma town called Indianola. Other than my neighbors across the road (a one lane gravel road) the closest houses to mine are a fairly good distance away. Anyway, we decided to take the walk, I guess for the same reason a group our age would turn on a scary movie at midnight. To see who would wimp out, to give ourselves a thrill. Well, a thrill we most definitely got, and I haven’t yet forgotten the terrifying experience.
Leaving my driveway and turning south, we made our way down the road, which after a very short distance climbs up a mildly steep hill, then, after flattening out on the other side, crosses a small bridge over a creek before going way back into the sticks. My neighbor’s driveway runs east into the woods from the south side of this bridge. If I remember correctly, the stars were out that night, illuminating our fields of view.
After topping the hill and going only a short distance, someone noticed a strange light, and told everyone to stop. Everyone else immediately caught sight of it as well, and stopped to look. The light was just beyond the bridge, and after a second I announced that it was just my neighbor’s headlights coming from his driveway. Still, though, the light looked odd to be coming from a set of headlights. That’s because it wasn’t.
Immediately after my suggestion, the light began to move along the road toward us. And it wasn’t headlights.This ball of light was self contained, not coming from beams! It was a white light, shaped sort of like an oval, and once it crossed the bridge (at a rather alarming speed), it was clear to me that it was indeed intentionally coming at us. We all turned and bolted over the top of the hill and back down, filled with fear, not once looking back until we reached my driveway.
No sooner than we turned around to look, the light topped the hill, still coming quickly in our direction. We ran like our butts had been set ablaze into my house, where my dad was up waiting for us. After telling what happened to my dad and calming down in my room for a while, we were finally able to relax, and we felt safe.
I don’t know, none of us do, what the light was. In fact, one or two of my friends claim they didn’t actually see it, or weren’t sure, but that they freaked and ran because everyone else freaked and ran. Reasonable enough a thing to do.
Was it a ghost? A spirit? If so, why was it hurtling toward us? Were it’s intentions good or bad? Or was it just lonely? What if this was a completely natural occurrence?
These questions are asked by a great number of people in the world. These people may see cryptids, which are defined as animals whose existence is unsubstantiated. Or they may see something like what I saw. Not a cryptid, but strange all the same.
One well known cryptid is the Beast Of Bray Road, a creature that has been sighted dozens of times in and around Elkhorn, Wisconsin. Some people say it’s a werewolf, some say bigfoot. Everyone says it’s unnatural. And everyone is left unsettled or scared by the experience of seeing it. A frequent similarity in the reported sightings is how the creature stares back at it’s onlookers. It deeply unsettles whoever it locks eyes with, and their compiled stories attest to that. To quote
