My grandmother on my dad's side lived in a holler in West Virginia. My
family and I live in Ohio, but we would go visit her from time
to time over the years. It was like an adventure. Every time we
visited. Grandma was fun of telling us a story of a time when she
saw a face in the window. She described it as a large, hairy
man she called Burper. Since my grandmother's house sat up on a hill,
in the window she was referring to easily sat eight feet off the ground,
we always laughed it off with a sure Grandma. She was always telling us
story, so we figured this was another one for our entertainment. That was
part of what was wonderful about my grandmother. She was always telling tales and
spinning yarns for us, even if they were oft in the kind my mother
would have preferred. My sister and I not here. That's why we assume
Burper was another one of Grandma's special stories. Years later, when I was
an older teen, I went to visit my grandmother by myself, and by
the time I struggled to get my bags up the hill to her house and
got settled in, it had gotten late. I noticed that my grandmother seemed
nervous, which was highly unusual for her. It got my attention, so
I asked her what was wrong. She was reluctant to talk at first,
but after some coaxing, she said that she'd been hearing noises in the woods
at night, and then she added that she would rather I didn't go out
there alone. Well, I did my best to assure her that it was
nothing to worry about. It's probably animals in the woods, Grandma, I
said. Ignoring my explanations, she said, if you wake up in the
night and you have to go outside to use the outhouse, and you wake
me up and I'll go with you. Then she pointed to the big,
heavy silver flashlight she kept by the door and added, and we'll take the
flashlight out with us. There was no doubt in my mind that I was
going to have to go out to the outhouse at some point. My only
other option was to use the bucket that she kept for nighttime emergencies, and
I didn't think I could bring myself to do that. But I could see
that she was serious, so I promised that I would wake her if I
needed to go out. A week passed, during which I spent my time
riding quads up and down the haller with the neighbors, waiting the creek,
and generally having a good time. I forgot all about my promise to my
grandmother. It was a typical hot and sticky summer night. I was tossing
and turning in the heat with no air conditioning when I realized I had to
go to the bathroom. The bucket was in Grandma's room, and I didn't
want to wake her. Besides, I didn't really like using that bucket anyway.
I slipt on my shoes and grabbed my flashlight, and I shut the
door as quietly as I could behind me, and walking down that dark wooded
path at two o'clock in the morning was creepy, but I had the flashlight,
so I shined it up and down the path to make sure nothing was
going to jump out at me. I wasn't actually scared until I heard a
twig snap behind me. I stopped and I turned around to shine the light
back down the path, but there was nothing there. Hearing noises in the
woods set me on edge. And until that night I had been using the
bucket, so I felt a bit like I was in unfamiliar territory. I
shined the light along the trees once more for reassurance, and then continued on
my way to the outhouse. And by the time I reached the door,
I had to go so bad I didn't even latch it. The unpleasant odors
had me holding back my breath, but all outhouses smell, and the relief
was worth it. Once I finished my business, I stood up to leave,
but as I reached for the door, something slapped the side of the
outhouse so hard that it shook. I froze in fear for a second before
reaching up and locking the door, and then I held onto the handle as
if my life depended on it, and at that moment I was pretty sure
it did depend on it. Another slap shook the little building again, as
I clutched the handle tighter, and I screamed at the top of my lungs.
I was more terrified than I had ever been in my life. I
was sobbing hysterically now as another slap, this time at the top of the
door where the screen was, and it rattled the door terribly. I looked
up in time to see a big hairy arm tear through it. I grabbed
the flashlight and began hitting the arm over and over with all my strength,
screaming as loud as I could the whole time. There was a howl of
pain and heavy breathing, and then the thing must have run back into the
woods. I slid down onto the floor, terrified and stunned, but too
afraid to leave. I sat there on the outhouse floor the whole night,
with my shirt sleeve through the handle and the flashlight cradled in my arm.
At some point I fell asleep. The next morning, I was awakened to
the feeling of someone trying to open the door and the sound of my name
being called. It was my grandmother, and when I opened the door,
she kneeled down and she hugged me while I cried. I'll never forget that
comforting hug as long as I live. Grandma is no longer with us,
but she was the kind of person you never forget, and now I know
that her stories about the burper were true. I had my first encounter when
I was fourteen. I've always been a prolific reader, and I love to
write stories too. I've started fifty stories or more over the years, but
I finished maybe two of them. I was reading in bed late one night
when I began to hear a noise coming from the lower end of the cattle
pasture. Now, I'm a kid who's raised in the country, who's been
hunting since I was six years old. I'm familiar with all the sounds of
all the animals in Alabama, but I couldn't place this sound into any category
that I've ever heard. It would start with a low howl or moan,
and then building volume and pitch until it ended in something that reminded me of
a guttural growl. It was so loud that it seemed to vibrate the windows
in the house as it passed through the pine thicket fifty yards away. Why
got out of bed and took out my leaver Action thirty thirty and started up
the hallway toward the front door. As I passed my parents' room, my
father said, let it go on by and stay in the house. Son.
I asked him what it was, but he said he'd never heard anything
like it before. Well, that scared me more than the noise that I
was hearing. My father fought in World War II, and he was afraid
of any man or animal, so when he didn't want to go outside to
investigate, and he didn't want me to go outside. Well, that struck
more terror in my heart than anything. The next morning, I searched the
thicket for any tracks or signs from the night before, but I didn't find
anything in the pine needle carpet. I found it hard to hunt the land
down past the cattle pasture for a while after that. The sheer determination not
to let whatever that thing was push me out of my favorite pastime that kept
me going. It didn't register that those loud knocks I would sometimes hear while
I was out hunting might have been anything other than someone hammering into a tree
stand. That was nineteen eighty two, and only now, after all these
years of reading encounter stories, has it finally dawned on me that I might
have been encountering boogers and they were keeping tabs on me. One night in
nineteen eighty four, my brother, his brother in law, and I decided
to go spotlighting some deer. Well. Spotlighting was legal back then, as
long as you didn't shoot. My brother lived way out in the county on
a one lane dirt road that led to nothing but large tracts of land that
we hunted, and that night we stopped on the road overlooking an open area
where the timber had been cut three years earlier. A lot of new green
underbrush attracted the deer there to feed. But to our right the land fell
into a holler and then rose up a hillside where we would always see deer.
To our left was a twenty foot embankment and standing timber that went on
for miles. We were checking out the deer and they were ignoring us.
Then all of a sudden, the deer snapped their heads up in our direction,
and the loudest, most awful, snarling roar came from the top of
the embankment, and it rattled in our chest. That was followed by the
sound of tree breaking. We barely had time to register this when tree limbs
and dirt started raining down on our car. My brother stomped on the gas
pedal and we sped out of there, never knowing what was making all that
racket. And I thought it sounded like a mix between an Alaskan brown bear
and an African lion, but we didn't have those animals, or any animals
big enough to make that noise. In Alabama, several years after I got
married, my wife's cousin and I were fishing in old watershed in Delta,
Alabama. We got there close to sunset and had access to water by way
of an old boat ramp. We walked the fifty yards down to the water
and threw our lines in. We'd been there about an hour when I heard
a loud thump and the broom straw thirty feet behind us. I ignored it,
but a couple of minutes later I heard something flying through the tree branches
and it landed with a big thud between us. Now I was curious,
so I picked up my flashlight and I turned it on. Lying in the
grass between us was a rock the size of a soft ball. I pulled
out my pistol and I fired around into the air while shouting that we were
armed and to get the hell out of there or they get shot. Well,
that got several more rocks pelted at us, so we decided to get
out of there in a hurry. Out of curiosity. I drove back up
there later to check it out in the daylight, and I found the boat
ramp and figured out the directions the rocks were coming from. It was from
across a slew that we were fishing on, which was one hundred yards away,
and I found one of the rocks and I picked it up. That
must have weighed twelve pounds. It sent tremors up my spine as I realized
it wasn't a man who was throwing rocks at us that night. In another
incident, it happened when I was ten. I was outside playing under a
huge cedar tree in our front yard with my dog, a Newfoundland Shepherd cross,
and for no, he's in Duke. My dog began looking out toward
the tree line seventy five yards away, and he started growling. He put
himself between me and those woods, as if to protect me. The honeysuckle
began to thrash around, and something inside the woodline started snarling and growling.
My mother, who was outside hanging up laundry that day, came running over
and herded me inside, and I watched Duke through the front window. Only
after he knew that we were inside did he run and hide under the house.
I'm fifty four years old now and i'm reaching retirement age. I'm looking
forward to finishing some of those stories I started. My wife and I purchased
eleven acres of undeveloped land for our retirement homestead. I'm gonna name it Boger Holler