Steve Stockton - Strange Things In The Woods: A Collection of Terrifying Tales

All my life, Ive been fascinated with the woods. While its marvelous to be surrounded by nature, there is also at times a certain creep factor involved. As anyone who has spent a considerable amount of time in the great outdoors will tell you, there are some places in the woods that just dont feel right, for lack of a better word. Also, by the same turn, there are weird things to be found in the woods, many of which truly defy any rational explanation.

As a youth, I grew up on a small farm in East Tennessee, not far from Knoxville and Oak Ridge. While not considered deep woods by any stretch of the imagination, we had several acres that were heavily wooded with old-growth timber. Factor in that our property also bordered vast, undeveloped land claimed by the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), and you have the perfect recipe for youthful adventure and exploration.

Blessed with an active imagination and a love for adventure, these woods were full of countless hours of time spent looking for anything weird or out of the ordinary. As I grew older, my forays into the woods expanded, and Ive had the opportunity to explore many national parks and forests. I sometimes saw strange things that defy explanation (my own personal experiences are currently being compiled for publication in a separate volume).

Due to my own experiences in the great outdoors, I also began talking to family and friends, mostly older folks, and collecting stories of strange things they had encountered in the woodsthis book is a culmination of those conversations.

Many of the tellers of these tales have passed on, but their stories continue to live in my imagination and now in the printed word. Where possible, Ive left the language and mountain slang intact just as it was related to me, to give the true feel of the storywhether you call a place a hollow or a holler makes no difference, as long as we understand each other.

I hope you enjoy reading these stories as much as I enjoyed collecting them over the years. If you yourself have ever encountered anything weird in the woods, Id love to hear from you; my email address can be found at the end of the book.

Steve, September 2013.

THE FLYING ORGAN

I grew up on a several-hundred-acre farm in Jamestown, Tennessee, near what is now the Big South Fork National Park. My older brother, Leonard, and I were just kids, so this would have placed the event sometime in the early 1930s.

We were down by one of the creeks on our property, about a half mile or so from our familys farmhouse. We lived in a very remote and rugged area of the Cumberland Plateau, and our nearest neighbor was several miles away. It was summertime, getting close to twilight, and we were cooling our feet in the creek. The days chores were done, and it would be time for supper soon.

Suddenly, off in the distance, we heard the strains of what sounded like and old-time church organ, the kind that required the organist to pump the pedals with their feet to produce sound.

We immediately found this to be odd, because the nearest church was several miles away as the crow flies, and it would have been unusual for sound to travel such a great distance even in the quiet of the country.

Much to our amazement, the sound continued to grow louder and seemed to be moving up the holler we were in, heading toward us. Eventually, the sound was close enough that we could indeed tell it was an organ and was playing a song, although neither of us recognized the tune. The sound became louder and louder and eventually seemed to pass right over the top of us, apparently coming from an invisible source just above the treetops.

The musical notes continued playing as the still unseen object continued up the creek and then turned and went up across the ridge. The sound eventually faded into the distance until we could no longer hear it.

There were no roads nearby, and the sky was clear and cloudless, yet we both distinctly heard the song as the organ approached, flew directly over us (again, Im guessing it was just above treetop level) and faded into the distance. There was nothing to see; it was only sound.

Needless to say, we were spooked by the entire incident and beat a hasty path back to the house, arriving just before supper. Leonard and I never told our parents, and only talked about it occasionally between ourselves. It was quite some time before we were brave enough to venture back to the area of the creek where we had been, but we never heard the invisible flying organ again.

To this day, I am at a loss for a logical explanation as to what we heard. I guess well never know what it was, but it sure frightened two young farm boys.

THE CRYING KITTENS

When I was a child, we had an old cat that hung around in the barn on our property. One spring, she had a litter of kittens up in the hayloft, seven kittens in all. The old cat wasnt a very good mother and had abandoned the kittens, and unfortunately, they were already dead by the time my brother and sister and I found them. We felt sorry for the kittens and decided to have a funeral for them down by the creek bank.

We purloined one of mothers old hatboxes from the attic, filled it with straw, and placed all the tiny lifeless bodies inside. After arriving at the creek with our makeshift coffin, we said a few words, and my older brother dug a hole with a shovel in the soft ground.

Sometime later, perhaps a week or more, my sister had gone to place some fresh-picked wildflowers on the tiny grave.

Imagine her surprise when she heard the sound of kittens meowing!

Thinking we had made a mistake and had buried the poor kittens alive, she ran back to the house and got my brother and me. My brother grabbed the shovel out of the barn, and we flew down to the creek bank as fast as our feet would carry us. When we arrived, we could hear the faint sound of kittens, too.

My brother soon uncovered the box, and we quickly pulled it out of the ground and ripped the lid off the hatbox. Much to our shock, we were greeted with the sightand smellof seven very much deceased kittens. My sister took a stick and, holding her nose with one hand, gently prodded each tiny kitten. It was obvious they were all very dead.

Mystified, we replaced the box into the grave and covered it back up. From then on, for many years, we all continued to hear the muffled sounds of tiny kittens near the grave. We could only assume that what we were hearing was the ghosts of these poor tiny creatures.

THE GIANT SNAKE

This happened when I was a much younger man, Id say fifty or more years ago.

It was in the early spring, and I was out squirrel hunting in the woods with my .22 rifle.

I hadnt gotten many squirrels that day and observed that there wasnt hardly anything stirring in the woods, not even birds. I thought that maybe something had all the woodland creatures spooked, maybe a bobcat, as they were common in that part of the country at that time.

I shouldered my rifle and decided to make my way back to the house, figuring Id just have to be content with the two or three squirrels I had bagged earlier.

At one point, I arrived at the creek and started following it back toward the house, figuring I still had a mile or more to go until I reached a place where it was shallow enough to ford.