[Music] This happened when I was a little kid, maybe six or seven. My family has always been very religious, so Easter has always been a huge deal for us. Same with most of the other major religious holidays.
Now that I think of it, even Sunday kind of felt like its own holiday with the way my parents treated church. It's actually kind of funny. Some of my earliest memories are church related.
What I'm about to tell you was one of them. It was Easter Sunday, so all the services are much longer than usual. I don't mind though.
My parents instilled the love of Christ in me very early on. After the service was Sunday school, or CCD as our church called it. I know lots of churches don't offer Sunday school after really important masses, but ours did.
So, after the mass, my parents took me downstairs to all the classrooms like they had done a 100 times, and I said goodbye. I'm just going to describe the layout of the church now, so this story makes sense. Our church had kind of a split level layout.
The main sanctuary was upstairs where the altar and pews were, and then all the classrooms were in the basement. It was technically a basement, but the church was on a slope. You could still get in and out of the building from down there.
There was this long carpeted hallway down there with maybe seven or eight rooms branching off on each side, grouped by age. My classroom was one of the first ones on the left. At the very end of the hallway were the two bathrooms, one for boys and one for girls.
Right next to those was a heavy gray door that led outside. It was almost always locked from the inside, but I remember being told it could be used in case of an emergency. The adults always warned us to never leave from that door because it would automatically lock behind us and we'd have no way of getting back inside the church.
But anyway, back to the story. The whole downstairs had been decorated for Easter. Like really decorated.
The walls were covered in pastel streamers and little paper cutouts of lambs and crosses. And there were drawings of Jesus with kids taped up between the classroom doors. Some of the teachers had even worn these cheap bunny ears you get at CVS.
It actually felt more festive down there than it had upstairs during mass. All the kids were in a good mood, too. Probably because everyone knew there'd be egg hunts later in the day.
Normally, I'd wait until class was over to go to the bathroom. But because the Easter service had run way longer than usual masses, and I couldn't hold it, I raised my hand and asked to go, and the teacher excused me from the room. The bathrooms were maybe 15 ft down the hall, and it wasn't uncommon for kids to go by themselves.
They always said if we took too long they'd come check, but I don't remember that ever actually happening. So, I slipped out quietly while the rest of the class was coloring pictures of the empty tomb and Jesus rising from it. I went into the boy's bathroom and shut the stall door behind me.
It was quiet, but those bathrooms were old. All I could hear was the soft hum of the fluorescent lights and the faint sound of a teacher's voice echoing down the hallway. But as I was sitting there, I suddenly heard this weird scraping sound coming from the stall next to mine.
It didn't sound like anything normal. Not like someone shifting or unlocking a door. It was the slow uneven metal sound like something was being dragged or scraped against the inside of the door.
Not loud, but sharp. I don't remember being scared. I was mostly just confused.
At first, I thought it was another kid, so I kept quiet and finished up my business. As I was washing my hands though, I looked into the mirror and saw that stall door opening slowly. But instead of another kid stepping out, it was a grown man wearing an Easter Bunny costume.
I remember the way the ears flopped forward a little and how the suit looked off. It was kind of saggy and stained in places like it hadn't been washed ever. The fur was more of a grayish white than a bright white, and one of the eyes on the head looked like it had been sewn back on crooked.
But the thing is, I don't remember being scared when I saw him. Not then. Like I said, I was pretty young, and in my mind, this was just the Easter Bunny making a surprise visit.
I actually smiled when I turned around. I think I even said something like, "Hi. " He didn't say anything at first, just stood there halfway out of the stall, staring at me.
His head was tilted slightly, and he didn't move. I remember feeling a little awkward, like I wasn't sure if I was supposed to say something else. Then, after a long pause, he stepped all the way out and slowly raised one of his arms, pointing towards the door like he was guiding me out.
That's when he finally spoke. His voice was muffled behind the costume, but I still remember the exact words. He said, "You're the lucky chosen child.
I have a gift for you outside. " I didn't even hesitate. I was excited.
like genuinely thrilled at the idea that I'd been picked for some kind of special Easter surprise. I think the fact that this was happening in my church gave me a false sense of security or something. I pushed open the big gray door without thinking twice, not even remembering that it was supposed to stay locked.
The Easter Bunny followed right behind, not saying anything else. He started walking across the pavement toward the far corner of the church parking lot. There was a car parked back there, mostly hidden from view by the dumpster and a few scraggly bushes.
I remember thinking it was weird that he had parked so far away and that he didn't even have a basket of candy or anything. At one point, he started holding my hand. We were maybe halfway across the lot when I saw it.
A second Easter bunny stepping out from a car he was leading me to. At first, I just stopped walking. My little brain didn't know what to make of it.
I remember looking back and forth between the two of them, completely confused. I hadn't seen that car earlier, and now there were two Easter Bunnies. Something about it didn't feel magical anymore.
It just felt wrong. To this day, I've always thought of what happened next as an act of God. One of the teachers, I think her name was Miss Sabrina, just happened to be walking around the church, maybe heading out to prep for the egg hunt or check on something outside.
She looked over at the parking lot right as I was being led over to the car. I'll never forget the sound she made. I've never heard a more terrifying scream in my life.
The man in the costume immediately let go of my hand and bolted for the car. And without thinking, I took off running in the opposite direction toward Miss Sabrina. Once I was safe in her arms, I turned my head just in time to catch a glimpse of the car, which was now speeding out of the parking lot.
I'm not 100% positive, but I'm pretty sure I saw another kid in the backseat of that car. Miss Sabrina wasn't even looking, but I told her what I had seen, and she took me seriously. The next few hours are a little blurry.
Miss Sabrina alerted the other adults right away, and police eventually made me tell them what happened. They asked about the kid I said I saw in the back seat, and I did my best to describe him, even though I had only seen him for like a split second. and I wasn't even sure if my mind was playing tricks on me or not.
My parents were the most upset and for good reason. I think my mom cried for an hour straight after we went home. The police followed up with the church, but nothing ever came of it.
There were no missing children in the area, so the police didn't really have anything to work on. The running theory was that whoever had been in that costume somehow had a key to the back door and just sat in the bathroom waiting for a kid to use it. And by sheer misfortune, that kid had been me.
I still find the whole thing deeply unsettling. Whoever had done that must have been familiar with the church's layout. Otherwise, they wouldn't have known where to park or wait, or even how to get away with it all.
But what scares me the most is that I think there really was a kid in the backseat of that car. It's hard for an Easter to come and go without me thinking about this experience. [Music] I just graduated high school last year, which is when what I'm about to tell you took place.
Easter has always been a fun time of the year for my friends and I, but not for the reason you think. We've outgrown those childish Easter egg hunts that everyone does when they're little, and I honestly cringe when my parents make me participate in one with my younger cousins. A few years ago, I can't remember exactly when, my friends and I created a fun twist on the typical egg hunt format and devised our own game.
It's not really that special. It's basically just a mashup of manhunts and an Easter egg hunt. It's two teams like Manhunts, but the seekers are also responsible for hiding and protecting a few eggs.
If the hiders manage to capture all the eggs, they win. And if the seekers don't find all the hiders within a certain time frame, the hiders also win. There are some other dumb rules like how the seekers can't be camping where any of the eggs are hidden and stuff like that, but that's not super relevant to the story.
It was the Thursday before Easter and school was cancelled the next day for whatever reason. So, we decided to have a sleepover that night. It was me, Jake, Race, Chuck, Arthur, and Raz.
Raz wasn't actually his real name. His last name was Razzy, but everyone just called him Raz. His family had the biggest house by far, so he'd always chill there.
He lived in the middle of nowhere, and his backyard bordered a decentlyssized wooded area. Plus, his parents were out of town until Friday night, so we'd have the place to ourselves. We were just chilling, playing video games in his basement when Chuck suggested we play Manhunt.
We were all down, so we rounded up whatever flashlights Raz had in his garage. We used a random number generator on Jake's phone to pick random teams just to keep it fair and unpredictable. I was on a team with Chuck and Raz, and we were seeking.
Jake and Arthur were hiding. Raz's mom had a ton of plastic eggs upstairs, so we grabbed a couple of them, and all of us went outside. We'd played back there a bunch of times before, so we already knew the layout.
The far boundary was the fence line and the other edges were the creek and the back slope that ran down towards Raz's neighbors horse pasture. We set timers on our phones to give the hiders enough time to hide and us time to hide our eggs. Once 10 minutes passed, the game had officially begun.
I should also mention that the sun had already gone down, but it wasn't completely dark out yet. Once the timer went off, we all split up to cover more ground. I veered left into a thicker patch of trees while Raz and Chuck went the other way.
I kept my hand over my flashlight, just skimming the ground every few steps so that I wouldn't trip, but I mostly relied on the moonlight to see. The game was way more fun when you actually felt like you were sneaking around. And besides, if one of the hiders saw a flashlight beam coming toward them, they just book it.
A few minutes in, I thought I saw something move 20 or 30 ft in front of me. At first, I couldn't tell if I was imagining it, but then I saw it again. I instantly turned my flashlight off in frozen place.
Someone was crouching behind a tree up ahead. Whoever it was must not have seen me, otherwise they'd definitely have run off. They weren't moving like they were trying to stay perfectly still.
My first guess was that it was Race. He always picked spots close to the seekers, thinking no one would expect it. I decided to try to get the jump on him.
I crouched down a bit myself and started moving slowly, trying to circle around behind him. When I got close enough, I sprang forward and lunged at whoever was crouching there, tapping him hard on the shoulder and yelling, "Gotcha! " But the second he turned around, I felt a wave of fear wash over me.
It wasn't any of my friends. It was a grown man with sllicked back hair and these wide open eyes like he was on drugs. His clothes were all torn up and he smelled awful.
I was so taken back that I didn't even realize what was going on. Before I could react, he tackled me to the ground. I screamed as I hit the dirt, but before I could yell out again, his hands were around my throat.
He was pressing down with all his weight. And in that moment, I honestly thought my life was over. I couldn't breathe, and I didn't have the strength to overpower him from that position.
And then, out of nowhere, he stopped. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a flashlight beam bouncing off the trees somewhere behind us. One of my friends must have been running towards us.
The guy must have seen the light, too, because he jumped off without saying a word and straight up ran into the woods, disappearing almost immediately. I just laid there gasping for air, still too stunned to move. A few seconds later, Chuck reached me, helped me up, and said he saw the whole thing.
I wanted to chase after that guy, but Chuck told me that was an awful idea. So, the two of us instead ran back towards the house. Chuck called the rest of the crew and told everyone to go back to Raz's house immediately.
Once we all reconvened, I told everyone what happened. After Chuck filled in the rest of the gaps, everyone started talking over each other. But then, Arthur said something that shut all of us up.
He said that before the game even started, meaning before the initial 10 minutes were up, he saw two people walking through the trees near where he was hiding. He said they were moving slowly, like they were scouting or waiting for something. And he'd actually gotten pissed at the time because he thought it was two of the seekers teaming up and breaking the rules.
That's when me, Chuck, and Raz all looked at each other and immediately shook our heads. None of us had been walking together and there was no way we could have gotten all the way to their side in such a short time frame anyway. The realization hit us all at once.
If it wasn't any of us, then there were at least three other people out in those woods that night. One who attacked me and two more who were moving around before the game had even started. In that moment, I realized how smart I had been for listening to Chuck and not chasing after my attacker.
He might have saved me from walking head first into an ambush. I told everyone we needed to call the cops. I mean, I had literally been attacked.
But the second I said it, Raz cut me off. He got weirdly serious and said, "No, we're not calling anyone. " I asked him what in the world he was talking about, and he said he was technically grounded, and beyond that, he wasn't allowed to host anyone while his parents were out of town, so involving the cops would get him in serious hot water.
I told him this was a serious situation and worth involving the police, but he didn't budge. The rest of the guys were kind of stuck in the middle. No one wanted to put Raz in a bad spot with his parents, but I could tell that they were all having a hard time just pretending that the whole thing didn't happen.
Eventually, I caved and agreed to not call the police and try to just enjoy the rest of the night. But I was seriously shaken. I ended up going to bed early that night and left Raz's house the next morning before anyone else was awake.
This might surprise some of you, but I actually wasn't too affected by this experience. I'm very much of the mentality that things happen and people have to move on. So, that's what I did.
Anyway, about a week after everything went down, Raz told us all that he felt bad just leaving those Easter eggs out in the woods. So, he had gone to collect them, even though he was scared out of his mind. We all got a good laugh out of that, but his comment made me think back to that night and contemplate my life a little.
I have no idea what those men were doing in those woods that night, but I can confidently say that I won't be spending the night at Raz's place anytime soon. Anyway, I'm at college now and I'm far far away from Raz's backyard. But being as Easter is coming up next month, I got reminded of this [Music] story.
Every Easter, my entire extended family takes the trip out to my uncle John's house, who lives way out in the sticks. This past year was no different. Uncle John lives in a huge house that sits on a wide open stretch of land, which is surrounded by woods on all sides.
Even though I've been there before, many times actually, I've never actually wandered out in the woods behind his house before. I'm not much of a nature person, so I've never had much of an interest in the outdoors. I was dreading the trip, to tell you the truth.
I've never really related much to that side of my family. They're all super outdoorsy, into hunting and fishing and stuff like that. And most of them have lived in the same place their whole lives.
Anytime I'm around them, I feel kind of like the odd one out. On top of that, most of my cousins are way older than me, like already married with kids or working on some kind of farm. The only one even remotely close to my age is Kevin.
He's a couple years older than me and actually pretty chill. We always end up sticking together during these family trips just by default. He knows I don't really fit in with the rest of them.
So, he's usually good about keeping me company without making it weird. Anyway, we made the drive to Uncle John's late Friday night. I'm an only child, so it was just my parents and I in the car.
I was exhausted from the drive, so I went to bed almost immediately. The next morning, Kevin and I spent a couple hours in Uncle John's basement playing pool table. Neither of us was any good, but it was better than sitting around upstairs.
The house was already packed with relatives by then. You know what the usual holiday chaos is like. We mostly stayed downstairs, low-key avoiding it all.
There wasn't a TV down there, so Kevin played some music off his phone, and the two of us talked about some dumb family drama not even worth mentioning here. While we played, Kevin kept going on about the woods behind Uncle John's house. He said they stretched out for miles and that hardly anyone ever went far enough to see the cool stuff out there.
He talked about how magical it felt and how beautiful the isolation was. I mostly just nodded along. Nature talk wasn't really my thing, but he clearly loved it.
I'm not sure how, but later that day, Kevin convinced me to go on a nature walk with him. Like I said, I'm not a nature person by any means, but I was quite literally dying of boredom, which is probably why I agreed to tag along. We obviously told Uncle John where we were going.
He's a really nice guy and always lets us younger people do what we want, a mentality I wish my own parents shared. Kevin took the lead once we got outside, cutting across the backyard and into the treeine like he'd done it a hundred times before, which knowing him, he probably had. The woods were thick, but not totally wild.
There was a kind of natural path that Kevin was following. It wasn't late in the day, so I wasn't super worried about the sun setting. But the deeper we went, the more I started to wonder how we were going to find our way back.
After about 20 minutes of walking, I asked Kevin if he was sure he knew where we were, and he just laughed. He told me he knew these woods like the back of his hand, and that he'd been exploring them since he was a kid. We'd been walking for maybe another 20 minutes when we both stopped at the same time.
From somewhere up ahead, we heard this loud thunkk like something heavy slamming into wood. It didn't sound like an animal or someone stepping on a branch. It was reoccurring like a pause, then another hit, then another pause, and another hit.
It sounded like a hammer or mallet being driven against a tree. That's the best way I can describe it. Kevin looked at me and I could tell he was trying to figure it out, too.
That sound didn't sound too close, but it was loud enough to be clear. He told me it wasn't out of the realm of possibility that a hunter was wandering around in there, but even so, he definitely looked a little startled. Eventually, the sound stopped.
I asked if he wanted to turn back, but he shook his head. I could tell he was curious now, and I'll admit, I was kind of, too. So, we kept walking in the direction we thought the sound had come from, both on high alert.
We'd only been walking for a few more minutes when Kevin suddenly stopped and held his arm out in front of me. I froze, thinking maybe he'd seen someone in front of us, but then he pointed up into the trees. At first, I didn't understand what I was seeing, but then it hit me.
There were three upside down crosses nailed into three adjacent trees, way higher up than anyone could have reached without a ladder. easily 15, maybe 20 ft off the ground. Before we could even turn to leave, I saw movement out of the corner of my eye.
I whipped my head around, and to my horror, there was a person standing there. He was dressed like a lumberjack with a thick beard and a very dark stare. Kevin stepped in front of me, partially shielding me from the guy's view.
He stared at me specifically and said, "You shouldn't be here. " Kevin immediately apologized to the guy and told him we were just leaving, which is actually what we did. That guy didn't move as we left.
He just stared us down as we walked back the way we had come. I could feel my hands shaking. We walked back the whole way in silence, and I've never experienced a more tense moment in my life.
The two of us kept turning around trying to make sure we weren't being followed, but there was no way to tell for sure. When we finally made it back to the house, we told Uncle John first thing. Like I said, he's a friendly guy and he knows all his neighbors.
So, I got a sick feeling in my stomach when he said no one he knew matched our description of the guy in the woods. He asked us a bunch of times if we had been followed, and we told him no. There wasn't much else for any of us to do.
Someone floated the idea of arming up and sweeping the woods, but Uncle John wanted to avoid confrontation and didn't want to lead anyone to his house. So Kevin and I went back downstairs to chill, and the rest of our relatives went back to whatever they'd been doing, likely planning for the Easter festivities. That whole encounter messed with my head way more than I let on.
I ended up going to bed pretty early that night just to get my mind off of it. But because of that, I woke up way earlier than usual. like way earlier.
I rolled over, checked my phone, and saw that it was just after 5:00 a. m. The sun had just barely started poking over the horizon, but it was still mostly dark out.
I tried to go back to sleep, but I couldn't, so I just decided to get an early start to my day. Uncle John has a study on the third floor of his house, so I decided to go up there and see if there were any interesting books to read. Uncle John's study has this big old window that overlooks the entire backyard.
As I walked past it, something caught my eye. There was a very faint flickering glow coming from the edge of the woods. It looked like the pulsing light of a small fire, not a flashlight or anything that bright.
I stood there for a good 30 seconds just staring at it, trying to make sense of what I was seeing. Curiosity got the better of me, and I needed to know what I was looking at. So, I went downstairs and stepped out onto the back deck.
When I realized what I was looking at, I had to literally fight back a scream. There were at least three figures standing just past the edge of the woods, each holding a small torch. They weren't walking or moving around.
They were just standing there facing the house, facing me. I ran straight to Uncle John's room and woke him up, telling him what I saw. Without any questions, he grabbed his rifle, threw on a pair of pants, and told me to stay inside.
He marched out onto the back deck and scanned the yard while I watched from the doorway. By that time, though, those people had retreated back into the woods. Without hesitation, he aimed his rifle up into the air and fired it three [Music] times.
That woke up the whole house, and the next 20 minutes or so was complete chaos. I'll just tell you that I can't think of a worse way to spend an Easter morning. The whole holiday was kind of ruined after that and everyone was on edge for the entire day.
Eventually, it came time for my parents and I to leave and I can't say I was upset about it. This was like 9 months ago and Uncle John has since told us that he hasn't seen or experienced anything strange. Still though, I would hate to be living in that house knowing there are psychos lurking somewhere nearby.
I'll send an update should Uncle John tell us anything of note.
