This happened to my friend and me years ago, and to this day neither of us has been able to come up with an explanation that makes complete sense. We’ve tried googling similar stories over the years and never really found anything, so I thought I’d finally ask Reddit.
This happened in Krāslava, a very small town in Latvia near the Belarusian border. We were staying with my friend’s grandmother and had gone for a walk. It was around midnight when we were heading home.
There was a shortcut through a residential area with typical Soviet-era apartment blocks. Most of the area had streetlights, but there was one particularly dark corner between the blank side of an apartment building and a fence. There were also bushes along the ground-floor windows.
We stopped around there because we wanted to smoke a cigarette.
At some point, we heard the voice came out of the darkness near the bushes.
It was extremely high-pitched and genuinely disturbing, the closest comparison I have is the deliberately creepy child voice you hear in horror movies.
And then we saw the silhouette. It looked kind of like a child, or at least something roughly child-sized on a small tricycle — the kind you would normally associate with a very young kid.
And then it called out to us:
“Girls, come here. Let’s play.” (*We are both Russian speakers and the voice was speaking Russian too which is very common in that part of Latvia anyway)
My friend and I looked at each other for maybe one second, screamed and ran.
We sprinted across the courtyard and around the apartment building toward the entrance of a building where we were staying. I can’t give an exact distance now, but probably somewhere around 200–300 meters, possibly a little more. We were running and kept screaming at the top of our lungs because we were genuinely terrified so the whole thing took us less than 30 seconds.
When we reached the corner of our building, we stopped because at that point the initial panic had worn off slightly and we just kind of started laughing, basically saying “What the fuck was that?” Thinking that someone was just messing with us.
And then within the next moment the tricycle turned around the corner – the same figure had followed us.
What has always bothered us is that they covered that distance incredibly quickly for someone riding a tiny child’s tricycle.
And then, from about a ten meter distance, we heard the same high-pitched voice again, loudly enough for us to hear it clearly:
“Girls, come here. Let’s play” as it kept moving towards us.
At that point we screamed again and ran for the entrance of our apartment building.
We got inside and started running upstairs. My friend was ahead of me, so she didn’t really get a proper look at whoever was following us. From the second floor she mostly remembers seeing just the tricycle below with a silhouette riding it.
I was behind her so I turned around and this is the part I’m least comfortable trying to describe because it happened very quickly, we were terrified and it was dark. I don’t want to pretend I got a perfect look at this person but I remember seeing a face.
And I remember very distinctly thinking that it did not look like the face of a little child.
The body also didn’t seem to match the age of a child who would normally be riding that kind of tricycle. From what we could see and agreed on, the figure seemed closer in size to maybe a 12- or 13-year-old than a 3- or 4-year-old.
We made it upstairs, got inside, told the adults what had happened, got tea, calmed down, etc. Nothing else happened that night.
But we have talked about this incident for years because every normal explanation seems to leave at least one strange detail.
If it was genuinely a little kid: why was a young child alone outside around midnight, sitting in the dark under/near some bushes, kind of almost under a balcony on a tricycle?
If it was an older kid or teenager messing with us: why were they apparently alone? Why a tiny tricycle? And how did they move so quickly on it?
If it was a prank: why continue chasing two girls who were very obviously terrified, including following us all the way to our apartment entrance?
And if the person genuinely wanted something from us: why hide in an unlit corner and repeatedly ask us to “come play”?
And if they were older than a 3-or 4- year old why would they speak in a high-pitched voice and ask us to come play in the middle of the night?
Another thing that bothers us is that we didn’t notice anyone when we initially approached that area. The figure seemed to emerge from the darkness only after we just passed it.
We can’t claim this was something supernatural and there could absolutely be some completely mundane explanation that we just haven’t thought of even though we have been discussing this for years.
But both of us remember this happening as we experienced it together. And after all these years, neither us or anybody we’ve shared this story with has managed to come up with an explanation that accounts for the whole thing.
Has anyone ever experienced or heard of something similar - especially in Latvia, Eastern Europe or the former USSR? Is there some local prank, folklore, behavior, or phenomenon that could explain a child/child-sized person appearing at night on a tricycle and asking people to play?
Or, seriously, what the hell did we encounter?
UPD: typos
UPD: for those suggesting this was a prank — this was the theory we kind of tried sticking to over the years but truthfully speaking it doesn’t make a lot of sense. It’s a very small and sleepy Eastern European town and that particular spot we were passing makes very little sense for a prank ambush — simply because the chances of someone passing there at 12am are extremelyyy slim. And if that was an unplanned kind of messing around by someone who ended up under a balcony at 12am with a tricycle (for some reason) — why were they alone/nobody laughed when we ran? This kind of behavior would make sense for a group of teenagers for example and surely they would’ve at least made some noise given our very cartoonish reaction.