RED RIVER CREATURE

RED RIVER CREATURE

Colt Williams 5/13/20

. One of the guys in my friend group has a huge area of private land that his family owns that is up alongside the red river, bordering Oklahoma and Texas. They use it as their primary hunting spot, but outside of hunting season it’s usually abandoned. One weekend, he offered for me and a few other guys to go camping just to give us something to do. The trip ended up being four of us who drove out there around four in the afternoon, bringing a tent large enough to fit about six people in it. There was no phone service out there and we didn’t have any four wheelers or anything so the earlier portion of the evening was pretty much filled with us doing stupid college boys activities like shooting soda cans with BB guns, and chopping a tree down with an axe, then starting a fire with wood we cut off of it.

. This night led us to the most terrifying memory any of us there have, and one that continually gives me chills as it replays in my head while I’m trying to sleep, but in all honesty, we were asking for trouble. We started to pitch our tent later in the night using the light from our truck headlights as it was already dark outside. The location we had set our tent up in was located in between the feeder and pond, as we figured we would be able to see some beautiful wildlife in the morning that way. We tried to stay up and tell ghost stories but ended up falling asleep very quickly.

. We figured out the consequence of putting our tent near the feeder when we woke up around two in the morning to coyotes howling to the right of our tent. We had been hearing coyotes howl all night from a distance but never felt like we were in any danger, as we assumed that they probably are just as afraid of a group of loud humans than we are of them. They probably had caught a deer at the feeder or something, but it was still a little discomforting as none of us have ever heard a group of coyote’s this close before.

. We had been sleeping next to our “weapons of protection,” which consisted of three BB guns and the axe we used to cut down the tree, which probably wouldn’t amount to too much damage. All four of us woke up almost the instant the howling started, grabbed our weapons hoping it would make us look tough and slowly stepped out of the tent, making sure we would scare them off before letting them consider getting any closer for dessert. It was pitch black outside and it was hard to gauge exactly how close they were, we stood there silently and held our weapons into the void. All of us stood there dead silent until the howls of the coyotes changed drastically. The howls quickly went from the howls of a feast celebration to howls of pain followed by whimpering and then to a stop.

. “If they had trouble eating that deer, imagine how much trouble we could’ve given them,” one of my friends said jokingly, even though we all knew our BB guns probably would’ve been no match especially if we couldn’t see where they were coming from. Grateful that we were not getting eaten alive, we all went back to sleep.

. Forty-five minutes went by, and I was shaken awake by one of my friends. They were all awake already, and before I could say anything they held up the notion to stay quiet. I thought they were just trying to scare me but I could hear footsteps crunch in the leaves around the outside of our tent. I looked around the tent and all of us were inside so it wasn’t a prank. I would have written it off as a deer or something but the footsteps definitely sounded a lot louder and heavier than any animal I’ve ever seen. My paranoia eventually matched theirs as I was wide awake at that point and eventually the steps went away. It felt strangely silent for a while, not the kind of silence you would expect to hear while camping. Almost as if the wind even stopped in fear. One of my buddies finally broke the silence by saying one of us should go investigate. Obviously no one wanted to go, so we ended up deciding on the old reliable buddy system, that way we would go out in twos, that way no one would have to be first.

. We slowly took a step out and turned our iPhone flashlights on and shined into the trees. We didn’t see anything, but that didn’t make any of us feel any better. Causing all of us to jump suddenly we heard a strange noise coming from in front of us. It sounded almost as if someone was trying to talk while inhaling, but the words, if you would even call them that, didn’t seem like it would fit into any language or anything that would make sense. The second we heard the noise all of our bodies went into panic mode, as we simultaneously made the decision without exchanging a single word that we were going to end the trip early and get out of there.

. Leaving all of our stuff behind, we darted to the truck which was luckily only a few feet from us. Each second felt like hours struggling to get in and waiting for our friend in the driver’s seat to get the ignition going. The truck lit up and we hit the lights, only to see a being in front of the truck. The last bit of our cool broke, as we all yelled along the lines of, “what is that!?” It looked like an older man, but there were so many things about him, if I would even call it a him, that did not feel human at all. This thing was naked on all fours with skin so pale it seemed like it hadn’t seen sunlight in months, even though the property layout would definitely make it hard to avoid sunlight, while it’s body was completely void of hair. No eyebrows, nothing. Its eyes were looking straight at us, but at the same time they didn’t seem focused on the truck but instead seemed like he could see straight through it. As my friend was reaching for the reverse this thing let out this loud, loud scream which seemed beyond the vocal abilities that any human could hit. The closest thing I could compare it to would be clips of a mountain lion screech. Even though a mountain lion would be less terrifying than that thing.

. We backed the car up in such a panic that the back of it smashed into a tree, breaking the tail light off and giving the tailgate a massive dent. He put the car back in drive and drove past the creature onto the dirt road and eventually out of the land. We kept looking behind us but could see nothing but the pitch black, which probably made us even more paranoid.

. We went back the following day, this time with his dad and in the daylight to pick our stuff up. Our stuff had obviously been rummaged through but nothing was stolen or broken surprisingly. The land is now for sale, I don’t know if that creature moved on to somewhere else or if he’s still on the property. If that’s the case I wish whoever the property sells to well. I don’t think any of us are ever going to go camping ever again, and as much as I wish I could, I don’t think I will ever be able to forget the sound of that screech that was engraved into my head forever.