Well I've had plenty of weird feelings in allegedly haunted places, seen a lot of unnatural shadows jumping around and so forth...but not a whole lot of straight on spectacular experiences.
One, however, was back when I was at college. We were diligently skipping class to play Magic and D&D all day when the discussion turned to local haunted spots. There's a wooded area in my region called "Hexenkompf Rock" said to be all sorts of spooky. Depending on how much you believe in mystical things, it's a spot where the barriers between worlds is a bit thinner, and is said to have a gateway or two to other places scattered around. It also has a ton of stories about witches being burned there, various cults doing dark rituals there, suicides, and so on.
So we piled into a few cars and headed out. The place isn't so much one big rock as a large wooded area with a bunch of rock outcroppings jutting out of the ground here and there. None are terribly high, but are big and tall enough to climb up and get a wonderful view. All in all it's a great place. Anyway, we get there and tromp through the woods toward the 'main' rock where most creepy things are said to happen. It was winter and had snowed that day, so we could see a lack of any other footprints and knew we were alone(i.e. what ended up happening probably wasn't other folks pranking us).
We climb up the rock and stand around, checking things out. It's very peaceful and nice, with a definitive 'otherworldly' feeling. Being very active in magic, occult, etc, I was aware of a lot of energy and other presences - but even if you don't buy into that, there was an undeniably spooky feeling. We were up there for a very short while when we all started getting 'pushed'. It wasn't wind or us slipping on the rocks, but the feeling of being shoved from various angles. This was odd but I honestly chalked it up to mass-paranoia/hysteria and more or less ignored it. Not long after we heard horses running...not somewhere distant, but literally circling the bottom of the hill/rock we were up on. We could see for miles and there were sure as hell no horses. But still, this could have been from a farm or stable somewhere far away causing a weird sound echo. That's when we started seeing a lot of odd things - figures flitting behind trees, individual trees shaking viciously, sudden odd, deep shadows covering various areas when there was no direct sunlight to cast them, etc. This had everyone a little spooked, but we stuck around despite all the weird things intensifying. That's when a vulture appeared...not a hawk or turkey buzzard or something of the sort, but a goddamn vulture. It was circling over us, and not too high up either...low enough that if someone would have lifted me up on their shoulders I probably could have reached the thing.
At that point we decided it was time to be elsewhere, and we filed out. On the way, we saw our footprints from when we'd come. Now there were many huge bear-like tracks following them right up to the rock, though we had that area in sight all along and there were no animals around.
So we drove, fast, and piled out of the cars at the college - and that's when we saw almost every car(any of those that hadn't been washed recently and thus had a layer of salt/road chemicals) was covered in hand prints. All over - roof, trunk, hood, doors, windows.
24 Apr 2008, 7:01 pm
