Just Creepy: Scary Stories - He Saw It Running Beside His Truck at 85 MPH | 4 True Skinwalker Horror Stories

Episode Date: March 10, 2026

*BONUS EPISODE*Tonight’s stories come from the deserts of the American Southwest — places where Navajo legend warns of something that should not exist. People who encountered these things describe glowing eyes, voices that mimic loved ones, and creatures that run beside moving vehicles in the dead of night. These are four disturbing accounts of alleged Skinwalker encounters that witnesses say changed them forever.Linktree: https://linktr.ee/its_just_creepyStory Credits:►Sent in to https://www.justcreepy.net/Music by:►'Decoherence' by Scott Buckley - released under CC-BY 4.0. www.scottbuckley.com.auBusiness inquiries: ►[e-mail]#scarystories #horrorstories #skinwalker 💀As always, thanks for watching! 💀

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Shop Ultima on Amazon or in store at Target and Whole Foods Market. Today's stories all involve people who came face to, to face with something that, according to Navajo legend, should not exist, something that walks on two legs when it shouldn't, something that wears a skin that doesn't belong to it, something that, if you're smart, you never speak about by name. But before we get into today's stories, I need to give a disclaimer. The Navajo people take the subject of these entities extremely seriously. This is not folklore to them. This is real, and it is dangerous. Many Navajo elders believe that even speaking about these things can attract their attention.

So with the deepest respect to Navajo culture and tradition, these are accounts shared by the people who lived through them. Let's get into it. Story 1. The Thing on Black Rock Road. In the fall of 2014, a man named Marcus, who had asked us not to use his real name, was living on a small piece of land just outside the Navajo Reservation in northeastern Arizona. Marcus was not Navajo himself, but he had married into a Navajo family, and he and his wife

Elena had built a modest home on a stretch of flat, dusty ground, about eight miles from the nearest town. Now Marcus had always considered himself a rational man. He was an electrician by trade. He fixed things that were broken. He understood circuits and wiring in the physical world. He did not believe in ghosts. He did not believe in monsters. And when Elena's grandmother would sometimes whispers warnings about things that walked in the desert at night, warnings about something called a Yinald Lushi. Marcus would smile politely, nod, and privately chalk it up to old superstition. That changed on the night of October 17th. Marcus had been working a job about 45 minutes away and didn't leave the site until well after dark. By the time he got on the road back home,

it was almost 11 o'clock at night. The road he took, a long two-lane blacktop that the local just called Black Rock Road, cut straight through open desert. No streetlights, no houses, no nothing. Just flat land and scrub brush as far as the headlights could reach. Marcus had driven this road hundreds of times. He could practically do it with his eyes closed. So when he saw something standing on the shoulder of the road up ahead, his first thought was that it was a hitchhiker. Out here, people sometimes walk the road at night if their car broke down. It wasn't unusual. But as Marcus got closed, something about the figure didn't look right. It was tall, unusually tall, and it was standing completely still,

not waving him down, not walking, just standing there, facing the road. Marcus slowed down instinctively, and as his headlights swept over the figure, his stomach dropped. The thing on the side of the road was not a person. It had the shape of a person, two arms, two legs, an upright posture, But its proportions were all wrong. The limbs were too long. The torso was too narrow.

And the head... The head sat at an angle on the neck that no human spine could produce. It looked like someone had taken a person and stretched them, the way you'd stretch Taffy, pulling them taller and thinner until everything was just slightly off. And it was watching him. Marcus could see its eyes in the headlights. They didn't reflect the way a deer's eyes would, or a coyotes.

They glowed with a dull amber light that seemed to come from inside the skull, not from the reflection of his headlights. For a long moment, maybe two seconds, maybe ten, Marcus couldn't tell. He and this thing just stared at each other, and then it smiled. Marcus would later describe that smile as the single most terrifying thing he had ever seen in his life. He said it was a human smile on a face that was not human. Like something had studied what a smile looked like and was trying to replicate it, but didn't understand the emotion behind it.

The lips pulled back too far. The teeth were too numerous, and the expression behind those amber eyes was not joy or amusement. It was hunger. Marcus floored the gas pedal. His truck lurched forward, and he blew past the figure at close to 70 miles per hour.

He was gripping the steering wheel so hard his knuckles were white. His heart was slamming in his chest. He told himself it was a trick of the light, a weird shadow. maybe a drunk person in a costume. There had to be a rational explanation. And then he looked in his rearview mirror. The thing was running after his truck,

not running the way a person runs, with that rhythmic, upright gait that humans have. This thing was running on all fours, low to the ground like a dog, but it was covering ground at an impossible speed. Marcus was doing 70, and this thing was keeping pace. He could see it in the red glow of his tail lights.

That elongated body, those two long limbs pumping in a blur, that awful face still twisted in that terrible smile, and it was getting closer. Marcus pushed the truck to 80. 85. The old pickup was shaking and rattling on the rough blacktop. He didn't care. He was watching the rearview mirror more than the road, and what he saw made him moan out loud in fear.

The thing was now right behind his truck, close enough that he could see individual details, He could see that its skin was a grayish-brown color, modeled and rough, like leather that had been left out in the sun. He could see that it wasn't entirely naked. There were patches of animal fur clinging to its body in random places, like a pelt that had been draped over its shoulders and was slowly sliding off. And he could see its hands, if you could call them hands, elongated fingers, with thick, dark nails that scraped against the asphalt as it ran. Then something happened that nearly made Marcus crash. The thing pulled alongside his truck. At 85 miles per hour, this creature overtook his vehicle and was now running beside his driver's side window,

and it turned its head to look at him. That face, that stretched, wrong, smiling face, was inches from his window staring in at him with those amber eyes. And then it spoke. Marcus said the voice didn't come from outside the truck. It came from inside his head, like a thought that wasn't his own, and what it said was a single word, his wife's name, Elena. Marcus screamed. He doesn't remember making a conscious decision to do so, but he yanked the steering wheel to the left, swerving directly toward the creature.

The thing leapt, leapt, clear over his truck in a single bound, and when Marcus looked in the mirror again, it was gone. The road behind him was empty. Marcus didn't slow down. He drove the remaining 12 minutes to his house at over 90 miles an hour and pulled into his driveway with his tires throwing gravel. He ran inside, locked every door and window, and found Elena sitting on the couch watching television, completely unaware that anything was wrong.

He didn't tell her what happened, not that night. He couldn't bring himself to say the words. But the next morning, when he went outside to get in his truck, He found something that made his blood run cold. This episode is brought to you by Netflix's remarkably bright creatures. What if a Pacific octopus held the key to a mystery that could heal your heart? Well, that's Tova's reality. An elderly widow working at an aquarium.

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He told her everything. The old woman listened without expression, and when he was done, she closed her eyes and nodded slowly. She told Marcus that he had been followed, that the thing had learned his wife's name, which meant it had been watching them for some time. She told him that what he saw was a Ye-Nald Lushi, a skin walker, a person who had given up their humanity in exchange for power, a witch who could take the shape of any animal or twist their own body into something that was neither human nor beast.

She told him there were things he needed to do, certain protections, certain prayers. She told him never to speak of what he saw, especially not by name, because speaking about it was like sending up a signal flare. It would know, it would come back. Marcus followed every instruction the grandmother gave him. He buried certain objects around the perimeter of his property. He hung certain items above his doors. And for three nights, Elena's grandmother came to the house and performed a ceremony that Marcus

did not understand but sat through with absolute reverence, and the thing never came back. Marcus told me that even now, over a decade later, he cannot drive Black Rock Road after dark. He takes the long way home, an extra 30 minutes of driving, because even though the scratches on his truck have long since been painted over, the memory of that face in his window has not faded, not even a little. Story 2. The Ranch Hand The second story takes place in 1997 on a cattle ranch in south central Utah, not for far from a place that would later become infamous, a property called Skinwalker Ranch.

But this account doesn't come from that property. It comes from a working cattle ranch about 20 miles south, owned by a family we'll call the Tauruses. The Toresses had been ranching that land for three generations. Their property covered about 2,000 acres of high desert scrubland, and they ran a modest herd of around 300 head of cattle. It was hard work, but it was honest work, and the family took pride in it. In the summer of 1997, the Torres' hired a seasonal ranch hand named Dale.

Dale was in his early 20s, ex-military, and built like a fireplace. He was quiet, reliable, and utterly unflappable. The kind of guy you wanted on a ranch because nothing rattled him. Coyotes in the hen house? Dale handled it. Fenced down in a thunderstorm? Dale fixed it. Bull got loose and was charged, charging anything that moved? Dale walked right up to it and led it back to the pen like it was a golden retriever. Nothing scared Dale. Until the night of August 14th, the Torres's had been losing cattle, not in the normal way, not to coyotes or illness or wandering off. These cattle were being mutilated. Over the course of about three weeks, four cows had been found dead in the eastern pasture, and each one had been killed in exactly the same disturbing way.

The animal was drained of blood. Its eyes were removed, and a section of hide had been cut away with what appeared to be surgical precision. No tracks around the bodies. No sign of a predator. No blood on the ground despite the animals being completely ex-sanguinated. The local sheriff had come out after the second cow was found and had basically shrugged his shoulders. He suggested it was probably a mountain lion, even though no mountain lion had ever been seen on the property, and even though no mountain lion on earth

performed surgery on its prey. Mr. Torres was furious. He was losing valuable livestock, and nobody seemed to care. So he asked Dale if he'd be willing to spend a few nights out in the eastern pasture, watching the herd, to see if he could spot whatever was killing his cattle. Dale said yes without hesitation. Like I said, nothing scared him. On the night of August 14th,

Dale drove one of the ranch trucks out to the eastern pasture and parked on a small rise that gave him a good view of the surrounding area. He had a thermos of coffee, a 30-ought-6 rifle, a spotlight, and a pair of binoculars. The plan was simple. Sit in the truck, watch the herd, and if anything came near them, deal with it. For the first few hours, nothing happened. The cattle were calm. The desert was quiet. Dale drank his coffee and watched the stars and started to think this was going to be a very boring night. Then at around 1.30 in the morning, the cattle started acting strange. It began with the animals on the eastern edge of the herd, the ones closest to a dry wash that cut through the property.

One by one, they stopped grazing and lifted their heads. Then they started moving, not running, just walking. Slowly, deliberately, all in the same direction, away from the wash. Every single cow in the herd was now moving westward, away from whatever was in that wash. and they were doing it in total silence. No lowing, no bellowing. Just the soft thud of hundreds of hooves moving across dry ground. Dale picked up his binoculars and scanned the wash.

At first he didn't see anything. The wash was about four feet deep and lined with scrub brush, so visibility was limited. But then his binoculars caught something, a shape, low to the ground, moving along the bottom of the wash. It was hard to make out in the darkness, but it looked like a large animal, a dog maybe, or a coyote,

except it was too big to be a coyote, and it was moving in a way that no dog moves. A slow, deliberate crawl, belly to the ground, like a soldier low crawling under barbed wire. Dale set down the binoculars and picked up the spotlight. He flicked it on and pointed the beam down into the wash. What the light revealed was not a dog. Crouched in the bottom of the wash was what,

what Dale initially described as a person in a wolf suit. It was humanoid, two arms, two legs, a torso, but it was covered in thick, dark fur, not wearing fur, covered in it as if the fur was growing directly from the skin. Its hands were flat on the ground, and they were human hands, pale, five-fingered, with visible knuckles and fingernails, emerging from the ends of fur-covered arms. The contrast was nauseating. It was like seeing a special effect in a horror movie, except this was real, and it was 30 yards away, and it was looking directly at him.

The thing's face was partially obscured by what looked like the upper half of a coyote's skull, worn like a mask. But beneath the skull, Dale could see a jaw, a human jaw, hanging open in a way that reminded him of a snake unhinging its mouth to swallow prey. The lower half of the face was smeared with something dark and wet. Dale was a combat veteran. He had served overseas. He had been in situations where people were actively trying to kill him. And he told me that nothing, nothing had ever frightened him the way that thing in the wash frightened him. He said it wasn't just fear. It was something deeper,

something primal. Like every cell in his body was screaming at him that he was in the presence of something that should not exist. But Dale was also a man of action. and his training kicked in. He dropped the spotlight, picked up the rifle, and chambered around. He told himself it was just a person, some psycho in a costume who had been killing the cattle. That's all it was, and he was going to put a stop to it. He shouldered the rifle, put the crosshairs on the thing's chest, and fired. The 30-0.6 is a powerful round.

It can drop a bull elk at 300 yards. At 30 yards, it would go through a person like a fist through wet paper. Dale's aim was true. He saw the impact through his scope. The thing jerked backward as the round hit it square in the chest. And then, it stood up, not slowly, like a wounded animal struggling to its feet. It stood up instantly, like a marionette yanked upward by its strings. One moment it was crouched on all fours, and the next it was standing at its full height, and it was tall. Dale estimated later that it was at least seven feet, maybe closer to eight. Those long arms hung at its sides, and those pale human hands flexed and curled. The coyote skull mask, or whatever it was,

tilted to one side and from behind it Dale heard a sound. A laugh, not a human laugh, not an animal sound, something in between, a low, rattling, clicking sound that rose and fell like laughter but had no warmth in it, no joy. It was the sound of sound of something in the sound. It was the sound of something mocking him. Dale chambered another round and fired again, and again, he put four rounds into that thing, and each time it jerked from the impact but did not fall, did not bleed, did not react in any way other than to keep making that horrible laughing sound. After the fourth shot, the thing dropped back down to all fours and ran. It ran up the side of the wash and across the open desert, with the speed that Dale said was, like watching a video on fast forward.

It covered a hundred yards in what seemed like two or three seconds, and then it was gone, swallowed by the darkness. Dale sat in that truck for the rest of the night. He did not sleep. He did not get out of the truck. He kept the rifle in his lap with his finger on the trigger and watched the desert until the sun came up. In the morning, he drove back to the ranch house and told Mr. Torres what had happened. Mr. Torres, a man who had lived on that land his entire life, listened without interruption.

When Dale was finished, Mr. Torres was quiet for a long time. Then he walked over to a cabinet, opened it, and pulled out a box of rifle cartridges. But these weren't normal cartridges. Each bullet had been dipped in white ash. Mr. Torres told Dale that his own father had made these bullets decades ago. He said that what Dale had encountered was something his family had. had known about for generations, something that lived in the desert, something that the Navajo and Ute peoples had warned about for centuries, and he said that the only thing that could hurt it

was a bullet dipped in white ash, blessed in the proper way. Dale took the bullets. He loaded his rifle with them, but he never had to use them. Because after that night, the cattle mutilation stopped, and the thing in the wash was never seen on the Torres property again. Dale quit the ranch at the end of the season and moved back east. He never returned to Utah, and he told me that for years afterward, he would sometimes wake up in the middle of the night drenched in sweat, because in his dreams he could still hear that laugh. Story 3. The Voice Outside the Window. This third story is the one that honestly disturbed me the most, because it doesn't involve a remote desert road or an isolated ranch. It involves a family, in a house, with children.

In 2019, a woman named Kara, again, not her real name, was living with her husband James and their two young daughters, on a small property on the outskirts of Farmington, New Mexico. Farmington sits at the intersection of three rivers and is surrounded by the wide open landscape of the Four Corners region. It's also very close to the Navajo Nation. Kara and James were both teachers at a local school, and they'd moved to the area a few years earlier from Colorado. They loved the landscape, the community, and the slower pace of life. Their property backed up to open land, miles of sage and juniper stretching out towards sandstone mesas on the horizon. In September of 2019, their older daughter Lily, who was seven years old, started talking about a dog man. At first, Kara didn't think much of it.

Kids have imaginary friends. Kids see shapes in the dark and give them names. Lily said the dogman stood in the backyard at night and watched the house. Kara checked the backyard, saw nothing, and told Lily it was probably a coyote. But Lily was insistent. She said it wasn't a coyote. She said it walked on two legs, and she said it knew her name. Over the next two weeks, things escalated. Lily began refusing to go near the windows after dark. She would become hysterical if anyone tried to open the curtains at night. She started to start to. She started having nightmares, terrible nightmares that would wake the whole house.

And she started saying things that made the hair on Kara's arm stand up. She said the dogman wanted to come inside. She said it asked her to open the door. She said it sounded like Daddy. That last detail is what broke Kara's composure. Because one of the most common elements in Skinwalker encounters, something that Kara did not know at the time, is that these things can mimic voices. They can replicate the voice of someone you know, someone you trust, and use it to lure you outside, to get you to open a door, to get you alone.

Kara started paying closer attention at night. She would sit in the darkened living room after the girls were in bed and just, listen. For the first few nights she heard nothing unusual, the hum of the refrigerator, the occasional bark of a neighbor's dog, the wind. Then, on the fourth night, she heard it. A knocking. At the back door. Not loud, not urgent. Just three slow, deliberate knocks. Tap, tap, tap. Kara's heart began to pound. James was in bed. The girls were in bed. Nobody should be at their back door at 11.30 at night. She sat frozen on the couch, staring at the back door, which was about

20 feet away across the kitchen. And then she heard James's voice. Kara, hey, can you let me in? I locked myself out. It was James's voice. Exactly James's voice. The cadence, the tone, the little laugh he does when he's embarrassed. It was all perfect. For a split second, Kara almost stood up, almost walked to the door, because it sounded exactly like her husband.

But James was in bed. She had watched him fall asleep 20 minutes ago. Kara did not move. She sat on that couch with her hand over her mouth, trembling, and she did not make a sound. The voice came again. Babe? Come on, it's cold out here. Same voice, same inflection.

But now Kara was listening more carefully, and she noticed something wrong. The voice was coming from too low. James was six feet tall. If he were standing at the back door, his voice would come from about the height of the top of the doorframe. This voice was coming from about three feet off the ground. Like whatever was speaking was crouched on the other side of the door. Kara slowly, silently, pulled her phone from her pocket and texted James. She wrote, Do not get out of bed. Do not come to the kitchen. Stay in the bedroom with the door locked.

James, groggy and confused, texted back. Why? What's wrong? Kara wrote, something is at the back door pretending to be you. There was a long pause. Then James wrote, I'm calling the police. Kara sat perfectly still. The knocking came again. three slow taps. And the voice spoke again, but this time it was different. It was no longer James's voice. It was Lily's. Mommy, Mommy, I'm scared. Can you open the door? It was her daughter's voice. Her seven-year-old daughter's voice coming from the other side of the back door, high and small and trembling with fear. And Kara knew her daughter was in bed. She had tucked her in herself, but the sound of that voice nearly broke her. Every maternal

instinct she had was screaming at her to get up, to open that door, to protect her child. She didn't move. Kara sat on that couch with tears streaming down her face, and her hand clamped over her mouth, and she did not move. The voice tried three more times. Each time, it was a different family member, James, Lily, her younger daughter, Sophie, who was only four and could barely form complete sentences, and yet the voice replicated her perfectly. Then abruptly the knocking stopped. The voices stopped. And from outside the back door,

Kara heard something that she said she will never forget as long as she lives. Breathing. Not human breathing. Something deeper and wetter and bigger. A long, slow inhale through what sounded like a massive set of nostrils, pressed right up against the crack at the bottom of the door. Like something was smelling her, taking in her scent, cataloging her. Then silent. Kara sat on that couch until the police arrived 20 minutes later. Two officers checked the perimeter of the house with flashlights. They found no one, no footprints, no sign of forced entry, nothing. But they did find one thing. On the back door, a solid wood door that Kara and James had just repainted that summer, there were scratch marks. Deep, gouging scratch marks

arranged in clusters of four, running from about three feet off the ground all the way down to the threshold. Like something with four clawed fingers had been dragging its hand down the door while it crouched there, speaking in voices that didn't belong to it. The police wrote it off as an animal, maybe a bear, they said, though bears are almost unheard of in that area. But Kara knew it wasn't a bear, and when she told a Navajo colleague at work what had happened, the woman's face went pale. She didn't say the word. She didn't have to. She just grabbed Kara's hand and said, You need to talk to my uncle. Tonight, don't wait. Kara and James met with the colleague's uncle that evening. He was a medicine man, a Hattalia, and he listened to their story with a gravity that told

them he believed every word. He came to their house and performed a ceremony. He placed certain items around the property. He told them that under no circumstances were they to ever respond to any voice outside their home at night unless they could see the person with their own eyes. He told them the thing had been testing their family, learning their voices, studying their habits, and he told them that by refusing to open the door, Kara may have saved her family's lives. The family moved out of that house three months later. They now live in a suburb of Denver and have no plans to return to New Mexico. Kara told me she still checks the locks three times every night. She still keeps the curtains drawn after dark, and she told me that sometimes,

not often, but sometimes, she will be lying in bed, and she will hear a faint knocking. Three slow taps, coming from nowhere, coming from everywhere, and she never, ever answers it. How many discounts does USAA auto insurance offer? Too many to say here. Multi-vehicle discount, safe driver discount, new vehicle discount, storage discount, legacy How many discounts will you stack up? Tap the banner or visit usaa.com slash auto discounts. Restrictions apply.

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Ask your doctor about Ebglis and visit ebbglis.com or call 1800 LilyRX or 1800 545-5979. Story 4. The Deputy. Our fourth and final story comes from a man who spent 30 years in law enforcement. A man whose job was to deal in facts, evidence, and rational explanations. A man who, by the time he told me this story, had long since retired and had nothing to gain and nothing to lose by telling the truth. His name is Robert. He was a deputy sheriff in San Juan County, Utah, from 1986 to 2016. During his career, he responded to thousands of calls, domestics, car accidents, bar fights, trespassing, and the occasional dead body. He had seen the worst of what people could do to each other, and very little surprised him anymore. But there was one call that he never wrote up,

one incident that he never put in an official report, because he knew, he absolutely knew, that if he had, he would have been removed from duty and sent for a psychological evaluation. It happened in the winter of 2002. Robert was on the night shift, a solo patrol covering a vast stretch of rural highway and reservation-adjacent land. It was February, and it was brutally cold, the kind of cold that makes the desert feel like the surface of the moon. No wind, no clouds, just a blanket of stars overhead and a temperature that hovered around five degrees. At approximately two in the morning, Robert got a call on his radio.

A woman on the reservation was reporting a disturbance near her home. She was frightened but vague on details. She said something was outside her house. Something was scaring her dogs. Robert drove out to the address, a small, single-story home about 15 miles off the main highway. When he pulled up, the first thing he noticed was the dogs. The woman had three dogs, big, tough res dogs that lived outside and could hold their own against coyotes and even the occasional stray.

But when Robert arrived, all three dogs were under the front porch, not just hiding, wedged under there, crammed into the tightest space they could find, whimpering. These were dogs that would charge a moving car without a second thought, and they were shaking. Robert walked up to the front door and knocked. The woman opened it just a crack, saw his uniform, and pulled him inside so fast he nearly tripped. She slammed the door behind him and locked it. She was Navajo in her 60s, and she was terrified. Robert could see it in her eyes, a deep fundamental terror that went beyond a simple disturbance call.

She told him that something had been circling her house for the past hour. She told him her dogs had started howling. around midnight and then had gone silent, which she said was worse. She told him that she had heard something on her roof. Robert asked her what she thought it was. She just shook her head and said, You know what it is. Robert did not in fact know what it was. He was a practical man, so he told her he'd take a look around the property, and he went back outside. The desert was dead silent, not the normal kind of quiet. Robert had spent decades in the desert and was used to the ambient of the night, insects, distant coyotes, the whisper of wind through sage. But this was different.

This was a complete absence of sound, as if someone had pressed the mute button on the world. Robert unclipped his flashlight and began walking the perimeter of the house. The beam cut through the darkness, illuminating the side of the house, a metal storage shed, an old truck up on blocks, a clothes line, nothing out of the ordinary. Then he turned the corner to the back of the house, and his flashlight beam landed on something in the yard. Footprints. In the thin layer of frost that covered the ground, there were footprints, but they weren't normal footprints. They started at the edge of the property, at the fence line, and they led directly toward the house. The prints were wrong. They were roughly the shape of a human foot, but much too too.

large. Robert estimated later they were at least 18 inches long, and the toes were elongated, almost like fingers. Each print was pressed deep into the frozen ground, which told Robert that whatever made them was extremely heavy. But the strangest thing was the stride. The distance between each print was enormous, eight to ten feet apart. Whatever made these tracks had been taking strides that no human could possibly make. Robert followed the footprints. They led to the back wall of the house, and there they stopped. He looked up.

On the roof, about eight feet above him, he could see marks in the frost on the edge of the roof. Handprints. Huge handprints, where something had grabbed the edge of the roof and pulled itself up. Robert pulled his sidearm. He was a good shot in a steady hand, but he will freely admit that his weapon was trembling slightly as he stepped back from the house to try to get a view of the roof. He pointed his flashlight upward. The roof was empty. He swept the beam from one end to the other. Nothing. Just the flat, frost-covered surface of the metal roof. But in the frost, he could see marks, long, scraping

marks, like something heavy had crawled across the roof on its belly. Robert was standing there. Flashlight pointed at the roof, trying to process what he was seeing, when he heard it. behind him. A low, rumbling growl. Not from a dog, not from a coyote, from something much larger and much closer than anything had a right to be. It was coming from the darkness just beyond the reach of his flashlight, 20 feet away, maybe less. Robert spun around and pointed both his flashlight and his weapon into the dark, and he saw it, two eyes, amber, reflecting his flashlight beam from a height of about six feet off the ground. Whatever this thing was, it was standing upright, and it was big. Robert couldn't make out details, just the eyes, two burning points of amber light in the darkness,

and below them, the vague outline of a shape that was broader and taller than any man he'd ever seen. Robert was a law enforcement officer with 30 years of training. His training told him to identify the threat, issue commands, and respond with appropriate force, so he did. He did. He did, He shouted, San Juan County Sheriff's Office, don't move. The eyes blinked, once, slowly, and then the growl turned into something else. It turned into words. In a voice that sounded like gravel being dragged across stone, the thing in the darkness spoke, and what it said was Robert's name, not deputy, not officer, his name, his first name, in a voice that didn't sound like any human vocal cord could produce. Robert fired. He put three rounds from his service

weapon in the direction of those amber eyes. The muzzle flash lit up the desert in staccato bursts, and in those flashes, Robert saw the thing clearly for the first time. He would describe it later as something that looked like it was halfway between a man and something else. It had the general shape of a man, two arms, two legs, standing upright, but it was covered in matted dark hair. Its face was elongated, almost like a snout, but the eyes were forward-facing. like a predator's, and its hands, those enormous long-fingered hands, were raised in front of its chest, palms outward, as if in a gesture of mock surrender. It was grinning. Roberts' rounds hit it. He was sure of it. He was an excellent marksman and the thing was less than 20 feet away.

But it did not fall. It did not flinch. It just stood there, grining that horrible grin with its palms out, and then, in a movement so fast that Robert barely registered it, it dropped to all fours and was gone, into the darkness, in the space of a heartbeat. Robert stood in that yard for a long time. His weapon extended, his flashlight cutting back and forth across the desert. Nothing. Total silence. The thing had vanished as if it had never been there. He went back inside the house. The woman was sitting at her kitchen table with her hands folded, and she looked at him with an expression that said she already knew everything that had happened. Robert sat down across from her. His hands were still shaking. He asked her, very quietly, what that thing was. She told him. She told him in words that he had heard whispered his entire career, but had never taken seriously.

She told him about the witches, about the people who choose the dark path. about the ones who sacrificed something precious, something human, to gain the ability to shed their skin and become something else. Robert listened, and for the first time in his career, he believed. He stayed at the woman's house until sunrise. He helped her make coffee. He checked on her dogs, who eventually crawled out from under the porch, but were skittish and wouldn't leave the front step.

And when the sun was fully up and the desert was bright and warm and normal, he got in his troll car and drove back to the station. He never filed a report about that call. He told the dispatcher it was a false alarm. A stray dog had spooked the woman's animals. Case closed, but Robert kept a journal. And in that journal, he wrote down every detail of that night. He wrote down the footprints and the handprints on the roof and the sound of that voice saying his name. He wrote it down because he knew that if he didn't, he would eventually convince himself it didn't happen, and he never wanted to forget. Because forgetting, he said, would be dangerous. Robert is retired now. He lives in a small town in Colorado, far from the desert,

far from the reservation, far from the open spaces where things can hide in the dark. He sleeps with a light on. He has done so every night since February of 2002, and he keeps a box of bullets in his bedside drawer, each one tipped in white ash, just in case. That's going to do it for today's stories. If you enjoyed them, please consider following the podcast and subscribing so you don't miss any future content. And if you're ever driving through the desert at night, through that vast, empty darkness where the only light is your headlights, and the only sound is your engine, and you see something standing on the side of the road, keep driving, don't slow down, don't look in the rearview mirror and whatever you do, don't open the window because some things are

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