From Harvey:

Back in 1977 in the small West Virginia town of Mason, a friend of mine and his younger brother and I had walked out into the hills down a dirt road that lead out into pretty much deep woods.

There were some houses that we passed on the way, but we wanted to venture out into the deep woods, as we were going out to shoot our .22 rifles and camp out for the night. My friend and I were 15 years old, his brother was 13.

Further down the road we passed an old abandoned single room school house which shared property with an old rundown abandoned church, which also had an old cemetery behind it. It looked pretty creepy, and we were more interested in getting out by the land we wanted to shoot on, so we kept on going. We were pretty good shots with our rifles, as was our intended targets were going to be bullfrogs. And we did get quite a few.

Well since we had intended to spend the night, when it started to get dark, we set up camp built a fire, and ate frog legs for dinner, and drank water.

As the night wore on, it got a lot colder than we expected, which it was usually hot and balmy in that part of the country during the summer months. First we built up the fire to a pretty large flame, but we couldn't get warm. We had our sleeping bags, but even with those and getting close to the flames, the cold was seeming to swallow us.

After a couple of hours of not being able to warm up, we decided to pack up and hike back into town, which was about 5 miles. We figured by walking, we would build up our internal furnaces, and keep warm, and just go home.

We were walking and talking thinking about the comforts of home, when we started to pass the fenced off gate that kept the school and church behind it. The property had high weeds, almost as tall as the fence, and several large trees on it.

As we were walking, as soon as we came into the fence line that was adjacent to the property line, we heard steps moving along with us! But they were coming from in the weeds behind the fence. We heard it, then we stopped - and so did the the "other" steps.

As we started to move again, we heard a groaning sound and a deep coughing sound coming from back behind that fence. Then from the back area of the buildings, towards the unkept cemetery, we saw a large figure. But all we could make out were legs and arms, moving as it walked our way, we could see shoulders, but none of us could make out a head on the figure.

Since it was moving towards us, we grabbed our rifles and started yelling at the figure to stop, that we were armed and that we would shoot. This thing didn't even pause, but instead seemed to pick up the pace a little!

We pointed our rifles and started shooting at it. We could see fairly good, and could tell we had hit it, because of the full moon light. But our shots didn't have any effect, as it kept coming at us, at what seemed to be a run!

At that point I guess we all decided that it was getting too close, bullets didn't make a difference, so we started to run, dropping our camping gear, but clutching our guns. We could hear the "thing" getting closer, then about that time, we had reached the other end of the property line which too ended with a fence. And the chasing stopped.

We couldn't hear it anymore, we would glance back to see if it was closer, but it was gone. Nothing there, nothing at all. Regardless of not seeing anything we kept running for probably a mile or so. Well by now we were sweating, no problem with being cold, except maybe in our hearts as to what we had just experienced. When we finally did get home we swore that never again would we be out there again.

The next day, I told my dad about that incident and where it happened, and he wanted to drive me out there just to look around. Well, feeling safe with my dad, we went back. We climbed the fence and started looking around. The only thing that we could find were places that appeared to have been stomped down, as if they were foot steps in the tall weeds. We went out, gathered up the stuff we had abandoned on the road, and left. To this day, I have never, and will never go back.