Creetchling

"Creeetch, creeeeetch, the sound was defeaning."

I remember it like it was yesterday, a late night/early morning in 2014, and it has been the most terrifying experience of my life. See, I’m a pretty avid outdoorsy person; I go hiking, rock climbing, camping, the occasional cave diving, that sort of outdoorsy. While I have come across some pretty scary experiences like happening upon a mother bear and her cubs who weren’t too happy to see me, to crawling into a small cave to get out of the weather and finding a pack of feral dogs eating a fresh kill, all the way down to being lost and stranded for 48 hours in a national state park with temperatures plummeting and rain turning to ice. All of this, and it pales in comparison to what happened to me that day.

A buddy of mine, we’ll call him Michael for this story, and I had been planning to set out on a hiking/camping trip for months now in a remote area of Southern Illinois, not too far from the Shawnee National Forest. This particular day we decided I would be driving, and he would navigate us to where we needed to go, this is important as it is normally the other way around being that he is horrible with directions. The long and short of it is, we arrive at an area that is pretty remote, the paved highway became a gravel road which then turned to mostly dirt about 7 miles back. I should have known then that we were lost but he assured me that he knew where we were. Finally admitting that we were lost, and he had no idea where we were, we settled on going ahead and finding a place to set up camp and explore this area, seeing that we were actually looking for a location that was remote and likely not contaminated by tourists.

After setting up our campsite, we pulled out our GPS and began to check the area out. We had only walked a couple miles from our tent when I began to notice this forest was a little more different than I had anticipated. To put it in perspective a storm had recently rolled through the area and a lot of limbs and larger branches were down, making navigating a little tougher than we had wanted, but we made do. What I had noticed though was not branches all over the place, but that many of the trees were missing bark up higher along the trunks, and not like the bark had blown off, but like it had been peeled off cleanly. Now, I know there are a ton of reasons that something like this could happen, but it just struck me as odd as it seemed to be in clusters that this was present, and it was not like it was torn along the entire tree, just in spots about 10’ long. Again, nothing to set off alarm bells or anything, just a weird phenomenon of nature.

If you have ever been hiking in the woods, you know the sounds, birds chirping, wind blowing, leaves rustling, frogs, crickets, wildlife just living their best lives out there. And if you are in tune with nature, and you have spent some time out in it, you know when things change. I’m talking about when everything goes silent; no animal sounds, no insects singing, nothing. In most instances, because science, this means that a natural predator is in the area and the wildlife is trying to not become it’s next prey. It is a hell of an adrenal rush to say the least when this happens, because you don’t know if you are the predator, or if it’s something that considers you prey. Even then, some things are just different. Walking along no path in particular, we both must’ve noticed at the same time, but the birds had silenced themselves, frogs had hushed, and not a cricket could be heard, just the wind, the crunching below our feet, and the sounds of the trees rubbing together above our heads. Mike looked over at me with this furrowed look on his face and whispered about how quiet everything was, and I agreed and noted that the air around us smelled foul, putrid even, and tried not to gag. This is where things changed.

Like I said, if you have been in nature enough, you recognize the sounds. You know the sounds of cracking and grinding tree branches, you know what it sounds like when the wind blows a smaller branch into a larger one making thudding sounds, you know these things. What you may not know, is the sound of branches rubbing together making a “creetching” sound. That’s the best way that I can describe it. After about thirty minutes of us heading deeper into the woods, the creeetch, creeeeetch grew louder, and some quieter more off in the distance, same tone, but different pitches. See, branches rubbing together don’t just change pitch, they don’t go from a real dull sound to an almost high-pitched whining sound, they just don’t, they aren’t capable of that. At this point, I’ll be honest, I was getting a bit uncomfortable, and not that uncomfortable feeling like my feet hurt and I need to rest, but that feeling of unease like something was watching me or that I didn’t belong where I was. The hair on my arms and neck were standing at full attention, the goosebumps that covered my body, and not fear, not dread, but overall terror just filled me from my core. There is no other way to explain it, like I said earlier, I’ve mistakenly walked up on a mother bear and her cubs, and that was definitely fearful, but this was utter terror that filled me, and I had no idea why. Looking over at Michael, I noticed he could feel something too, so I suggested we head back to camp and just search around there a bit and get comfortable as nightfall was approaching soon.

We made our trek back, and the closer we got to camp the more the mood lightened and the more comfortable I became. I got to work on starting a small fire while Mike went to search for more logs and branches for it. About ten minutes later there was a rustle in the foliage behind me, branches snapping and the sound of something rushing toward me. I grabbed the large branch I was using to stir the fire up and prepared for the worst, that’s when Mike burst through the tree line looking white as a ghost and kept glancing behind him. It took a few minutes to calm him down enough to talk to me, but what he told me chilled me. He had gathered half a dozen small branches and came across a clearing we had missed earlier with a small pond in the center, he decided to head down toward it and see if there was anything of interest closer. As he got closer to the pond, he said that he could smell something that could only be described as rot or decay, and then he heard that now familiar “creetching” noise we heard earlier, quieter, and not too far off. Looking in the direction of the noise, he said he saw the tree moving, not like swaying, but shifting its bark down along base of it, until it reached the forest floor and disengaged from the tree.

What he saw was about 4’ tall, thin almost emaciated, bipedal creature with long legs and a short torso with long arms that ended in claws, the skin of the creature looked eerily identical to tree bark almost all over; he stood in disbelief staring at this thing as it turned toward the pond, showing a set of beady greenish eyes with a red tint and no sign of ears, almost lizard like. He watched as this thing sauntered toward the ponds edge, knelt down and cupped water into its hands and brought it up to its mouth, exposing a wide mouth full of small, pointed teeth, and drink the water…kind of like a person would do. Seeing this had startled Mike a bit, but as he began to step backward slowly, he gasped and dropped the branches, drawing attention to himself with the creature staring right at him, Mike turned and fled back to me where he told me this story.

Of course, I looked at Mike with disbelief and tried to calm him down, telling him after the trip and getting lost out here, and the eerie feeling we had earlier, his eyes must have been playing tricks on him. Once he had finally chilled out and everything seemed to calm down, we had a quick dinner, and retreated to our tent to get some sleep. We sat talking for a bit, I could tell he was fighting falling asleep as he was still terrified that whatever he saw was real and was after him, so I told him I would wait up for a few hours just to make sure we were safe and kind of keep watch. With this, Mike finally drifted off, leaving me to my book and the sounds of insects, owls, and other creatures of the night. A few hours had passed and by then I was growing tired myself, setting my book aside and residing to my sleeping bag, I was ready to drift off when I thought I heard some rustling outside out the tent nearby. Thinking nothing of it but a curious raccoon or various wildlife coming to see what the delicious smell of hotdogs was, I laid my head back down to try to fall asleep, but I noticed the scent of cooking and the fire itself had now been replaced with putrid death, it was soul foul I had to hold back from losing my dinner right then. That’s when I heard it and sat up bolt right, the trees above us were “rubbing together”.

**WRITERS NOTE: This is near the pond that we had found while out hiking**

"Creeetch, creeeeetch"

The sound was almost deafening, however, listening intently, I realized quickly that the wind was still, no leaves were rustling, and the night outside was silent, aside from the creeetch, creeeeetch that sounded as though it was all around us. That’s when I noticed it, the noise was not coming from just above us, it was coming from all around us, in different pitches, different tones, some with more bass; there were at least a dozen different “voices”. These things were all around us! Not trying to make any sudden moves, I slid my hand into the bag next to my sleeping bag and found the handle to my machete, slowing pulling it out and just holding it against me like it was the Holy Grenade or something. I began to frantically look around the tent to see if there was anything else I could use as a shield, or something, when I noticed Mike sitting up in his sleeping bag paralyzed with fear. I scooted closer to him and whispered that he needed to grab his knife and sit back-to-back against me, to cover all angles. So, we did. And we sat there like this until the sun began to rise. We stayed awake until the morning, both from absolute terror and adrenaline, staring all around us in what can only be described as fear-forced vigilance.

While nothing ever attacked us through the night, there were several times one of these things brushed against our tent, the embers from the near dead fire illuminating just enough to see outlines of whatever it was. The creetching noises were heard all night long, things being banged around in our campsite, items moved around and torn through, but nothing got inside our tent. It wasn’t until the sun was fully up and birds were chirping for a few hours before we decided to leave the confines of our nylon fabric fortress. I poked my head out first, half expecting to be met with giant claws to my face, but nothing. We both exited the tent, and our site was a complete disaster. I’ve had coyotes and bears and raccoons tear through my campsites before, but nothing like this. The cast iron skillet that was to the side of the fire looked like it had been put through some kind of metal shredder, pieces of it hung off jaggedly while it looked like something just chewed right through it. The rocks around our makeshift fireplace were all but scattered, the undergrowth surround our site was trampled and lain flat, the cords holding onto the tent stakes were torn and frayed, but the scariest part? All of the trees surrounding us, they were all now missing the bark from base to the top of tree. We gathered our belongings and trash as quick as we could, breaking camp and hightailing it back to my truck. Just as I was about to shut my door, something caught my eye. On the hood of my truck, there in the dust stirred from the roads, were small, clawed footprints about 5” long. I rustled for my phone in my pocket to take a photo when I heard it behind me, freezing me in place. A low, not too distant creetch creeeeetch from up above us. Quickly risking a glance as I shut my doors, I saw it for the first time, near the top of one of the nearby trees, one of these creatures, and I managed to snap a quick picture before speeding off as quickly as I could.

To this day, now nine years later, I have never seen one of these things again, but I have heard the distant sounds of them from time to time, always freezing me in place and remembering what I experienced that night. Michael and I no longer talk, a few years after this he had a sort of mental breakdown and has moved across the country, out to where there are no forests for hours. I posted this encounter on Redditt several years back and obviously had people questioning me thinking that we were just crazy, or that maybe it was something else completely, but I know what we experienced. There were also plenty that did believe me, and they had stories of their own not too different from my own, one user informed me that people in his town have seen them for years and call them "creetchlings", mostly based off of the sounds they make. I attached a screenshot of our conversation for reference of what we talked about. I limit my time out in the woods and forests anymore, in fear I may meet one of these “creetchlings” up close and personal by mistake, and I’m not quite sure how that would turn out...

**WRITERS NOTE: The Redditor I was speaking with sent this photo to me after our conversation ended, he mentioned that it may be photoshopped, but that it looks exactly like how they have always described them in his area. Since sending this photo, I have not heard back from them, even with reaching out to find more info. **

Submitted by Phreak