I recently came across the following account:
I think it is time to share my story. I'm 29 years old and this happened about 13-14 years ago.
Back in the day the soldiers who have been stationed here (Germany) would go out to train in the woods. We would go there almost everyday checking the shooting ranges for bullets, shells, etc. Whatever we could find. Since my father is an American and I can speak English, I would talk to many soldiers and often we would trade beer/chocolate for some MRE's.
In this forest there used to live a woman. We called her "Waldhexe." Guess you would translate it to "forest witch" in English. This woman lived in the woods for 25 years. The last thing I heard about this woman was that she got arrested by the police and is locked up in a mental asylum.
We often talked to this lady and she would talk about random stuff that made no sense at all. She often talked about "Wichtelmänner." I have no clue what the English translation would be. Maybe some kind of dwarf/imp. Not too sure about it. She even showed us the clothing she sewed/crafted for them and said it was some kind of tribute so that she can live peacefully in the forest. Judging by the size of the clothing they had to be like a foot tall.
Anyways, on this particular day my two buddies and I decided to ride our bikes deeper into the woods just to explore and maybe find a new shooting range. In the distance we saw a person sitting on a log beside the trail. My bud was like "That has to be the witch." Turned out he was right. As we got closer to her she stood up and blocked our path. She was really angry and asked us what we are doing here. We told her that we just wanted to explore the woods some more.
This is about the time I was a little creeped out. She started to talk weird stuff about "Krabbenmenschen," some kind of crab humanoids. At one point we've had enough of her crazy stories and we kind of laughed it off. I said to her "well maybe we meet one of your friends along the way." We hopped back on our bikes and just as I was going to pedal off she suddenly grabbed my arm. It was a really tight grip she had on me and with a kind of creepy smile she said "I warned you." I told her to f**k off and let me go.
We kept advancing deeper into the woods and joking about the things she said. We maybe did about, I'd say, two more kilometres until the trail was so bad it became impossible to ride a bike. We took a break and decided that we turn around.
All 3 of us were just sitting on an old log and suddenly I got goosebumps. Even my eyes had gotten a little bit watery. I look over to Daniel and notice he has goosebumps to. Marc, my other friend who was with us, said "You guys feel that? We are being watched." Daniel is the type of guy who always goofs around and I would've bet all my money in that moment that he would say something like "the crab people are stalking us" just to break the tension. But he didn't. Instead he said with this serious tone, "We should get the f**k out of here now."
We were riding out of the woods at a really fast pace and it felt like forever to get out of there. We have never really talked about it not even after all these years. I have goosebumps writing this part of it. I was really scared that day. The silence was what freaked me out. You didn't hear a bird, a branch falling off a tree nothing. Just this dead silence. Who knows what is out there.
Thank you for reading. Steve
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