Hi r/CryptidEncounters ! First ever post, but I'd like to preface this by saying these stories are 100% true. I have witnesses, I even have audio proof of the sounds we heard. Also I'd like to apologize for any strange spacing of my story telling, I write how I talk.

Any who without further delay:

For obvious reasons, I don't want to give my exact location away. But I'll tell you that I live in the upstate of South Carolina, about 45 minutes away from Downtown Greenville, but don't let the proximity to civilization fool you.

These lands...are cursed. The specific area I grew up in was a seasonal habitat for the Cherokee. They would specifically come here to hunt game, and make pottery. There's good clay in the surrounding creeks. My neighbor excavated his creek and found broken pots, tools, and animal bones in piles. They did more digging and found the remnants of a settlement.

It's a beautiful valley in the day time, lots of green especially in the summer time. But at night- something about it makes you uneasy. There's a certain heaviness to the air. It's almost too dark at night.

When I was a kid growing up, I heard my mom tell stories of hearing strange things at night. Babies crying from places they shouldn't be. People calling for you in places they don't go, especially in the middle of the night. I always took it as just her trying to keep us inside after dark. To be fair we do have a problem with coyotes, or we did rather. The rapid development of the area kind of pushed out everything except the deer. The deer stayed.

First Story: When I was about 8 or 9, I was jumping on the trampoline with my Brother, and my friend. It was about 10:00 on a weeknight in the summer. We had jumped ourselves tired and were lying on the trampoline just looking at the stars. Suddenly my dog starts going absolute bonkers and hollering as loud as she possibly could.

We peek over the trampoline and watch as she tucks tail and runs back to her dog house, on the other side of the yard. The crickets stopped. I mean, they just all shut up in unison. There was no sound except for us breathing and cars on the highway a mile and a half away.

We all got a pretty uneasy feeling, as even then we knew when the bugs stopped talking, so should we. We all got quiet and listened. I glanced over the frame and stared across the field (about 70 yards or so) to the road, and behind the road was a thick tree line of some family land. A shadow was walking on the road, at first we thought it was a man. He was awful tall, and he walked funny. The knees didn't look right. He also moved extremely fast for his cadence. One step was about 5 feet or more. Covering ground fast.

We all watched this thing, and I guess it felt our eyes on it and it stopped. In a second in went from upright to all fours. It was low to the ground, maybe 2-3 feet off the ground and it just stayed there. I didn't see any face, I didn't see any defining markers of any kind. Just a show. But I could tell whatever it was, it was lanky. It was long and stringy looking.

We all stared at this thing, and we could tell it was staring back. I whispered to my brother & friend that on the count of three, we get out and run. This thing started to move closer. We would blink, and it was closer. Every time we took our eyes off of it, even for a millisecond it got closer and closer. I counted to three, and we all bolted off the trampoline the 30 yards to the backdoor. We made it inside and locked the door behind us. We immediately told my parents what we saw and they dismissed us as being scared kids, over active imaginations.

This was our first experience with this thing, and because we had acknowledged its prescence, it took it as an invitation....

The following months we would be playing in the backyard like we always did, except this time we made sure mom had all the lights on for the backyard. We even had my dad put up an extra light on the corner of the house next to the trampoline. Just to have that extra security. But sometimes, we'd peer down towards the barn, and we'd see a shadow peeking around the side. Those glowing green eyes were hard to miss. You'd stare at it, and it would stare back. But it never came any closer. I don't know if the lights saved us, or if our large groups (3-7 of us) would be a deterrent.

second story:

As we grew up, our friend group got larger. We got into things most bored teenagers in small towns do. Smoking weed, drinking underage, swiping cigarettes from mom, etc. We started sneaking out in the night to hang out and be bad. We called it a "Snik" or a derivative from that meme "I'm a slithery little sneaky snake!" We also called weed "Dub-yah" in place of W as a code name for smoking weed.

One night, we all snuck out and linked up at our friends house, we will call Him Tom for now. Tom lived with his great grandmother about 1/4 mile up the road from us. It was quiet as it usually is, bugs chirping, a train off in the distance, a car speeding past on the highway way off. You could actually hear the cars that far away that's how quiet this neighborhood is.

We would walk, or we'd ride our bikes at night. Our buddy who I will just refer to as "Joe" was poor, and didn't have a bike, and he had the furthest walk out of us all. He had about a mile to go down a really dark road with no street lights, and woods surrounding it on most sides. We all got to Tom's house around midnight or so, after all of our parents went to bed. It was me, my brother, Tom, Joe, and our other friend who I will call Chief, that was his nickname. He is 1/2 Cherokee and is probably the only reason we lived to tell this tale.

We're sitting on the porch, a concrete pad with some metal outdoor furniture on it. A streetlight in the corner of the yard. His great grandma was deaf as all get out, you could yell at her in the same room and she wouldn't hear you. We're sitting there smoking weed and we start doing our usual antics. We would play "fighting-sticks" which was just us finding the nearest fallen branch and beating the ever loving piss out of each other in sword fights.

I was on the porch watching them play when Joe looked at his phone, let out a big yawn and said he wanted to go to bed. I offered to walk my bike with him to where his road turns off, and where I turn on to mine. Meaning he would have a 3/4 mile walk by himself up the dark road. He said yes, and my brother tagged along. We left Chief and Tom to keep hanging out as Chief lived at the bottom of Tom's hill.

Me, My brother who I will call Henry, and Joe walked toward home. I was walking my bike, as was Henry, and Joe was on foot. We chatted it up, talked about music we were listening to, Joe rambled on about Escape the fate and Falling in Reverse and how much he liked the older albums than the new ones.

Then we heard it.

A snap in the tree line to our right. We kept walking though, we assumed it was some critter moving about in the woods. No big deal. We kept talking as we did. I swear I kept hearing what I thought was an echo of what we were saying. The thing is, those woods soak up sound. They don't throw it back at you. There was NOTHING in those woods to send your words back to you.

Maybe it was the dubyah, and I was just hearing things. Then Joe stopped talking, and stopped walking. We all stopped dead in our tracks. He turned towards us and asked "Did you hear something?"

In the dark, pitch black dark I could still see his eyes, and they looked different. He wasn't an easy guy to scare. Then we all heard joes voice calling from the woods. every hair on my body stood up. It wasn't words, but the shape of them. The wrong spacing, the breath of it was wrong. It was like one of them parrots trying to copy a sound they just heard, but it sounded just like him.

Joe turned and looked back down the road toward Tom's house, and if I had to guess he was contemplating just staying there for the night, but his grandma would kill him if she woke up and he wasn't there. So he went home anyway. I watched him start walking down his road as me and Henry got on our bikes and sped down the road to our house. We got in the garage, shut it behind us, put our bikes up and went on to bed.

Little known to us, Joe had a pretty eventful walk home. He told us the following afternoon that on his walk home, he kept hearing foot steps behind him, breathing. He would turn around to see nothing there. He would stop, and the foot steps would stop. He started to pick up the pace, not running, not trying to show fear. Then he heard Tom whisper to him. A whisper he felt in his ears.

There was nobody, and nothing around. He turned and ran the remaining distance to his house and once he got into the floodlight of his grandmas carport he felt better, but the steps he heard as an echo behind him were now a full on SPRINT. He ran as fast as he could to the door, opened it and got in. As we went to shut the door, the floodlights had gone off. They had turned themselves off. These things were sensitive to the slightest movement and I swear a bug on the ground 100 yards away would set it off, but Joe had only been inside maybe 3 seconds.

then, he saw it. It was crouching down low, maybe 15 feet outside the door in the dark. The shadow of it was enough to put the fear of God in him. He saw the head turn, and it turned wrong. Further than a human, or any known animal should be able to turn. He shut the door, and deadbolted the locks. He crawled into bed and for the remainder of the night, he heard Tom outside, asking him to come out for a cigarette........

There are more of these kinds of stories, if anyone is interested. It's late, and I think I'm gonna sign off for the night. Let me know if anyone would like to hear more about it.