An au-pair in Sweden recounts a bizarre night in the forest. She encounters a nude woman sitting on a rock and a dark shadow with illuminated eyes.
The following account was recently referred to me:
"I am an au-pair in Sweden and spent most summer weekends in my family's summer house, which is out in the archipelago outside of Stockholm. Breathtakingly beautiful place but boonies doesn't even begin to cover it. The nearest neighbor is about a 30 minute brisk walk away. And after that there's nothing except ocean and thick, terrifying forest.
This particular night was date night for the parents so I was left with the two children alone out in the terrifying house. There are two houses on the property, one main house and the other is a guest house, where of course I got to sleep all alone. It's literally two meters from the ocean.
The game plan was to go exploring in the forest, which I had never done alone with the children, only with the parents, and then walk to pick up my boyfriend from the bus stop. He would stay with us until the parents got home from their date and then my boyfriend and I would go sleep in the guest house.
So, while in the forest, I kept getting the jitters. Things were definitely stranger and it wasn't just because I was alone with two children, I grew up in the forest. But several times we heard the birds calling out these weird distress call noises and big flocks would appear, a long time before we were even close enough to scare them. And there were big thudding footsteps nearby. I was terrified of there being an moose or something.
We came to a little hidden lake, and then things got even weirder. Though the place is unpopulated for miles, there was a woman sitting on a rock opposite us, about sixty feet away. She was naked and wet as though she'd been swimming even though the water was MUCH too cold for that. When she saw us, she stood up and did this weird pacing thing, like she would get close to the water and then back away, then move close again. Like she wanted to cross and come toward us but there was the obvious lake barrier in the way. The kids were mildly worried and it wasn't long before I ushered them back the way we'd come and we made our way out of the forest.
On the road to pick up my boyfriend I had the oddest sensation of being watched. I was really terrified actually. But we met him with no incident and returned to the cabin just as the sun was setting. We gave the kids dinner and just as they were curling up with a Swedish comic book, the main door slammed open.
I really remember thinking it was a real person. There was a heavy footfall and then BAM! like someone had stomped and flung open the door. But there was no one there. My boyfriend went out and had a look around. Nothing. Must have been the wind of course, right? It's always the wind.
While we were in bed reading the story we could hear skittering around and clawing from underneath where we were. I knew for a fact that rats and other rodents camped out at the other end of the house, because that's where the kitchen was. I had a really awful feeling in the pit of my stomach but my rational boyfriend promised me it was a fox or weasel and not to get worked up.
Fast forward to 3 am. I had to pee, my boyfriend and I were in the guest house. My bosses had come home long ago. Right after I had finished, I straightened and adjusted my shirt, that I got that awful feeling of dread. I had it in the forest, I had it on the way to see my boyfriend, I had it while we were camped out inside the house. I had felt just fine in the guest house with my boyfriend, but now the feeling was back.
Behind the guest house is a steep hill, about a 45 degree angle, and on that hill sits what we call the 'ghost house.' It was the house of an old soldier in the 1600's and now it just sits there vacant. There's a trail going from the ghost house to the main summer home, and my boss had lit the trail with dim solar lamps. You can't see how to read by the light of the lamps, but the idea was to light your way up the hill and not trip and die over a tree root.
I could sense something moving up the trail. That means, something moving FROM the main house TO the ghost house. I squinted in the dark and saw a shape of a person, but that wasn't right because by the solar light you can see color - jeans or shirts or jackets, and ours all had reflectors on them - but this was just a black shadow. I thought 'animal' but then ruled that out because it was two legs, walking REALLY fast and smoothly, but then it slowed and seemed to notice me.
I was actually terrified, but my intuition told me to commence staredown, so I did. I was fighting to see in the dark and just when I couldn't focus, I realized there were two very softly illuminated eyes on its face. And they were on me. It slowed down to a stroll and I could see the eyes change tint from a blueish to a yellowish glow based on where they were in relation to the solar lamps. They were catching light.
So I stared. It was going so slow now this felt surreal, and I could hear twigs snapping and other noises that a real-life non-imagined creature makes. I remember actually thinking "this isn't a hallucination, it's f*cking WALKING on the ground..." And then the weirdest part.m Instead of moving at a normal, relative height the way human eyes (or animal eyes) would do, the eyes started kind of hovering. They were six feet off the ground, suddenly would dip down to four feet, then back up to five. And they never left me. But the direction this thing was moving in never changed, it kept going up the hill.
The eyes and the figure faded out into the darkness once the solar lamps ended, and I went back into the guest house and locked the door. I heard nothing else that night. My boyfriend slept through everything, but early in the morning he woke up whimpering from a nightmare. And that's the only time anything has ever happened at that summer house and I was there collectively a month." RA
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