So occasionally you guys send me weird stuff. Usually it’s praise because I made you laugh. Sometimes it’s an email from a pissed off reader who thinks I’m not featuring enough spider jewelry or whatever. But occasionally some of you have been sending me weird and creepy stories for some reason. And they are freaky. Well, since you guys want to send me stories, Imma start puttin”em on the site so everyone can enjoy. The first is below. I’m calling them Creepy Encounters, cuz that’s what they are. Is it true? I have no idea, but certain details creeped me out.

If something strange happened to you, I want to know about it. Did you meet aliens? See a werewolf? Time travel? Encounter a spider with a human face? Send it to [email protected] and chances are good that I’ll share it here. It will be completely anonymous to protect you.

We moved into an old house, built in 1867. The place had an old barn that was full of antiques. One of which was an old and ornate wood frame that was carved with owls all around. A wood sign near its place leaning against the barn wall read “Always hang against wall. Never leave free-standing” I didn’t understand that at the time, but I do now. The frame measured about 4 feet X 3 feet. Just big enough for a kid to fit through. The odd thing about this frame was that no matter how you moved it or what you put it in front of it, whatever you viewed in the interior of the frame just seemed off. For instance the air was dusty in the barn, but within the frame it seemed slightly less. Clearer maybe. I thought I heard sounds coming from inside of it the first time I saw it. One day I was playing in the barn and pretending it was a portal to another world, so I stepped through, playing my kid game. Once I tired myself out, I left the barn and played and explored my new backyard. That’s when I saw my first odd thing. I noticed that something was different about the bird feeder by the back fence. It was filled with some kind of white seeds. As I got closer, I realized that those were not seeds. I felt a chill down my spine that I still feel today thinking back. It was filled with what must have been hundreds of teeth. Human teeth. I was about to freak out and run to the house, but that was when my kid mind finally kicked out of play mode and actually took in my surroundings.

The sky looked normal. Almost. The blue was just slightly off, but the clouds were fluffy and yellowed. Like dirty snow and a lot like those teeth in the bird feeder. The property didn’t look any different at first glance, but then finer details started to sink in. The trees back near the creek where the forest began seemed more twisted, not straight and reaching to the sky, but stunted and gnarled like old people cowering in a tight room, if that makes sense. I saw something that looked like an octopus climb a tree and hide inside the knot.

I was feeling sick to my stomach because of the strangeness of everything and it was so sudden. To the east of the property, where our small tool shed normally would be, I saw a solid black staircase leading upward to nowhere and on the top step sat the ornate owl frame as if it were a doorway. But it looked brand new with a golden tint to it. Again I was about to run when I felt the worst fear that I have ever felt in my life. A crunching sound like dried leaves made me notice. One of the trees had a growth on the side that looked like a sack. A cocoon that looked like it was made mushroom. Something inside was moving and liquid spilled out of the base. In the liquid, a human shaped something started to move. The arms moved the way a butterfly does when it emerges from a cocoon as if flexing and testing muscles. The goo was a like the rainbow prism color you see in a pool of oil on the road. It was all a mass of that shifting color so I didn’t see exactly what IT looked like. But I knew instinctively that it had awakened to get me.

That was all I needed to get running back into the barn, which seemed to look exactly the same as MY barn as I ran though. I got to the frame in record time and ran through, immediately putting the frame against the nearest wall, blocking the entrance in case anything wanted to follow from that other place.

I never told anyone. Not even my mom. And I made sure that the frame was ALWAYS against the wall. A few times over the years, I noticed that my dad or maybe someone else had moved the frame from the wall, leaving it askew and I would always put it back. I did not want anything coming through that doorway. The worst that ever happened before I put it back during one of those times, was that one day I found a strange dead bird by the frame. It had the head of a bat and the body of a bird and it was pitch black. I think it flew through and hit the wall nearby.

My folks are no longer around and I own the house. The frame just disappeared one day and that was that. I have no idea what it is or where it came from. Google has not been helpful. But maybe one of your readers has experienced something similar. It’s worth a try anyway. I have reached a point in my life where I am tired of hiding this and I want answers. I did NOT imagine this.