The Window.

This story is my revision of the infamous Goatman Story featured on CreepyPasta. Another version also exists on Reddit in this thread. I chose to revise this story in the same oral tradition that is known of the folklore/ghost story/legend genre. This is the scariest thing I’ve ever read and I wanted to share it with you. It should be noted that while my telling of this story is fiction, it is one of hundreds from around the world that have similar details and accounts from all different cultures, landscapes, and backgrounds that have been passed down and carried on generation after generation. When something is perpetuated across the globe, I can’t help but think there must be some truth at the core of the tale.

The story below happened when I was 16 down in southern West Virginia. My uncle had a 300-acre piece of property where they had placed a bunch of beat-up campers out in the woods for hunting season. The rest of the year they lived in a large, white farmhouse on the other end of the property. Even though a lot of time has passed since this happened, it is still one of the creepiest things I’ve gone through.  

When we get to my uncle’s house my cousin Rooster asks if I want to go out to the campers for a few days to get away from the grownups. I love the idea and we pack stuff into backpacks and take off into the woods. When we get to the camper the air has a strange electric smell, it is almost like right before a storm or like ozone. We brush it off thinking that the campers need aired out, so we unpack before we go down to a nearby creek to swim for a few hours.

We are swimming around when this older guy and a teenager come out of the bushes next to the creek. The older guy has a shotgun in the crook of his arm. He asks, “What are yall doing so far back in the woods?” Rooster introduces himself and we find out that the older man knows my uncle. We tell the man and the teenager we are camping out for a few days. The man says, “Yall need to be careful out here and stick together, I’ve been hearing a big animal tromping around in the woods.” The teenager says his name is Tanner and asks if he can come hang with us. We are cool with it and his dad says he’s fine with that.

We’ve got a pretty big group of kids at this point; there’s me, the neighbor kid, Tanner, five of my cousins, and four of their friends. Five girls and six boys, all around the ages of 15-17. We end up screwing around all day and go back to camp to get set up for a bonfire. Tanner says he wants to run home to see if he is allowed to camp with us. It’s about 7 now and the woods are getting dark. Tanner, my cousin Rooster, and one of the girls, Sarah, take flashlights and head down the trail towards Tan’s property. The rest of us chill, drink, and hit on the girls.

About 30 or 40 minutes later the smell of ozone comes back so strong we can smell it over the fire we have burning. It’s a nasty, coppery smell like after a nosebleed. It isn't exactly like dried blood but it’s a strong, metallic, back-of-your-throat smell. We think it's some kind of electrical malfunction in one of the campers or that someone left a hotplate on. We search the campers and find nothing but everyone smells it. Before we can sit back down around the fire, we hear people booking down the path toward us. Rooster, Tan, and Sarah all come running into the clearing out of breath. They don't break stride, they all run straight into the camper next to the fire.

We follow them into the camper. All three of them are crying. They’re trying to calm down and catch their breath. We are all wigged out but trying to be patient to hear what happened. The fire is getting lower and lower and my other cousins are talking about going outside to start up the generator. Tanner says "Fuck no!" and locks the front door. "Ain’t nobody else goin’ outside." He stops crying enough to keep talking. “We went up to my dad’s and got the go ahead for me to come out camping with yall. He said just make sure we are careful on our way back and offered for me to take one of the hunting rifles just in case cause we had a half-eaten pig turn up in our yard a few days earlier, that king of things happens on a farm and we assumed it was a coyote. So I pack my things and tell did that I don’t need the rifle since there are three of us. So we head back out into the woods towards the campers.”

Rooster and Sarah have calmed down but Sarah is staring vacantly out the window into the dark. Rooster takes over the story and says, “We got halfway into the woods toward the camp when we start to hear brush crashing. It’s dark as hell so we couldn’t see what it is. Sarah says she hears something in the bushes right off the trail and we all beam our flashlights that way. We see something standing back in the woods in a little low place. We shout at it with our lights on it and from what we can see it looks like a man facing away from us. We freak the fuck out and turn to keep walking. That’s when we start to smell the nasty, copper smell again. We look into the woods on the opposite side of the trail and see the man standing out there facing away from us but this time he's slightly closer. We start powerwalking and Tan keeps repeating under his breath that we should have brought the rifle.”

As they’re telling the story the ozone smell is strong, even inside the trailer.

Rooster continues, “After we start walking faster a kind of low gibbering starts coming out of both sides of the woods. We start to sprint back to the trailer.”

Sarah interrupts without breaking her stare into the darkness, “I pointed my light into the dark and saw something jerking itself through the woods. The jabbering was getting loud as fuck and we saw the light of the fire. I looked back and saw something coming out of the woods behind us.”

Rooster takes back over, “We ran as hard as humanly fucking possible to get back to camp.”

After they finish the story, we all talk through what happened and decide that it has to be someone trying to mess with us. We’re all freaking out and my other cousin, Junior, starts talking about how he went to school with a Native American kid that told him about a goat man or something like that. We try to get him to stop because the last thing we need is some spooky story, but he’s going on and on about how it's the goat man and how we're in HIS woods.

At the time, I had never heard of the goat man. But the year before I graduated from college, I had a roommate who was from the Menominee nation and one day I asked him about it. He summed it up as a man with the head of a goat that can shape shift and inserts itself among groups of people to terrorize them. It's supposed to be similar to the Wendigo and is bad mojo to talk about it and even worse to see it. But I didn't know this back when I was 16 and my cousin is saying, "The goat man is gonna get in and fucking get us!" The girls are all terrified and we’re all trying to figure out if it's just someone trying to screw with us or if it's some animal.

Then like nothing had happened, the smell goes away. To this day, I haven't experienced anything like it. Usually smells fade away gradually or become faint, but this smell was there one second and completely gone the next.

We wait around and after about an hour, around 9 or 10, we've calmed down enough to go back outside and stoke the fire. We chalk the weirdness up to someone trying to mess with us and decide to stay and camp instead of hiking out through the woods, assuming whoever it is will end up chasing us around anyhow.  

Nothing else weird happens and we decide to stay another night. All day and most of the next night, nothing happens. It’s about 1 in the morning and we’re around the fire getting drunk and telling ghost stories. Someone finishes a story and the smell comes back the strongest it’s been. One of the girls starts vomiting. I stand up and can feel the air being clammy.

“We should get inside,” I say. We all crowd into one of the bigger campers. A few people pace around the small space. “This isn't right. We should have just fucking left.” Tanner says. Junior keeps going on about how it's the goat man. Rooster tries to shut him up. All the while I'm just feeling that something is off and I can't figure out what it is.

We wait a long time and the smell is still super strong. We're all terrified and exhausted, huddled in this camper. We get some brats out of the fridge and cook them up on the stove for everyone, so no one has to go outside. We have 3 packs of 4 brats, 12 total. I give one to each person. After a while Junior gets up and goes over to the stove to get the last brat. He stares in the pot confused and says, “What the fuck, I thought there’d be one left.”

That's when Sarah just starts screaming, "Oh my god, oh shit, get out!" She's crying and shivering, and it dawns on Junior what was wrong. He and I both glance around the room and then I feel my heart sink into my gut. We all run out of there so hard that the door bangs loud against the outside of the camper. One of my cousin's friends asks us what the fuck was wrong. I start counting us and there is only 11.

Junior and I do the math 20 times and we are certain there had been 12 people on the camper. Since every one didn't know each other very well, no one had noticed the whole time there was an extra person. We were just screwing around, I wasn’t keeping perfect count on how much food we had but now looking back, I’m certain that someone else had been in the camper with us and that they had been there for at least an entire day eating with us. And when I try to figure out which one of us was the outsider, I can’t. I don't think anyone ever directly interacted with the other person or whatever it was. Sarah says that when she realized and was about to say something, the person sitting next to her grabbed her leg hard and leaned over and said something she couldn't understand into her ear.

We wait a long time. Sarah is praying incessantly at this point and we're all exhausted and sober. Finally, we all grab big sticks and go inside the camper and sweep the place. We count again, 11 people, and we lock the door. We huddle together and fall asleep.

When I wake up the sun is just peeking through the trees. Two thirds of the people are still asleep and the other third are packing up camp. Several of us, including me, are ready to get out of here but most the people think that we're just messing around and want to camp another night. I’m exhausted and just want to get out of the woods.  

Since everyone is undecided, we split up and the 4 that want to go can go but one of us has to stay because we have the keys to the campers and my uncles will lose their minds if we leave someone else in charge. I decide to let my cousins go and I stay behind. Junior, Rooster, Sarah, one of my other cousins, and Tanner head out. Tanner says he is going to go get a rifle and that he will be back. So there are just 7 of us left at this point and it is about 4 p.m. 

At around 5 Tanner still hasn't made it back and I’m getting really nervous. The only reason I stopped begging the others to go back was because he went to get a gun. At about 5:30 one of my other cousins says that Sarah is outside. We all look outside and, sure enough, she's standing by the fire pit with her back to the cabin. I'm thinking to myself, she was so scared, why would she come back. And then I get this nasty feeling in my gut. All day the coppery smell has been gone but now I smell just a twinge of it.

I say this to the rest of them and they all laugh at me and ask is this is a set-up to scare them. I ask them, “Why the fuck would I play like that?” One of the girls goes outside to get Sarah. She gets about halfway to her and stops cold. Sarah starts heaving. I don't know how to describe it. She starts convulsing, like someone with their back turned was laughing without actually making any sound. When I had that thought, I realized there was not a single sound in the whole woods. It was dead silent. It is late September, normally there would be birds or squirrels chattering. I yell out the door, “Come back in the fucking trailer right god damn now!”

The girl runs in and we lock the door. Sarah or whatever is outside stands there for another 20 minutes or so then the guy on watch turns to say that she's still there. Then there's a huge banging on the door. We all jump and scramble around the living room of the trailer. The banging is super loud.

My cousin is holding one of the girls and the other 2 are kind of giggling with nervous, crazy laughs. The two other guys and myself are losing it. Then we hear Tanner’s voice. He's screaming, "Let me the fuck in, stop fucking playing!" So we go over to the door and open it and he runs in with a rifle.

He said nothing weird happened in the woods but when we ask him who’s out by the fire he says that he had walked up to the campsite had seen a girl he didn’t recognize just standing there. When he got to the edge of the clearing she turned toward him with this slack-jawed look and just stared him down, slowly tracking him as he walked around the outside of the clearing towards the camp. He said it wasn't until he was almost halfway to the trailer that he realized she was getting closer to him. She had started off by the fire and without him even seeing her move she had been turning and inching closer. He said he sprinted the rest of the way to the trailer thinking it would be open. When he got to the door and it was locked he turned and the girl was about half the distance to the door.

He looks around the room and then gets super pale. He pulls me to the side and whispers in my ear, "You know there are only six of you in here right?" My stomach drops. It had been back inside the trailer while we were sorting out who was going where. It was right there with us all day. We look out the window and there is nobody out there. I ask everyone how many people were here earlier. Everybody says 7. Then I ask how many are here now. Everyone counts and realizes there were only 6, not including Tanner.

Tan brought back a couple boxes of ammo and his rifle and says that his cousin Reese is supposed to be coming down in a few hours and that in the morning we can all go back to his place and his cousin will drive us home. I feel a bit better knowing we can just shoot whatever it is if it comes back but Tanner and I make it clear that we could seriously be in danger because at the very least someone has been sneaking themselves into our camper without us knowing and mingling with us. Goat man or not, we aren't safe.

A little while later, my cousin gets into a huge argument with one of the girls because she accuses us of trying to prank them. My cousin keeps telling her that we aren’t those kinds of people, we wouldn’t do that. She asks how do we know the girl by the fire wasn't just Tanner in a wig. Or if it really is the goat man, how do we know that this is the real Tanner and that the goat man didn't just kill him in the woods and take his gun? One of the girls starts crying and says she wants to leave right now. We tell her that's not an option because none of us are walking through the woods in the middle of the night.

At this point the sun is starting to go down and the sky is getting cloudy. We eat something and turn on the radio for a while be we can't really get a station out there with anything decent so we turn it off. About that time, Reese shows up. He has one of those heavy duty lantern flashlights and another rifle. He walks up to the trailer and we whisper to Tan asking if he's sure that's his cousin and he says yes. The guy looks behind him and all around the camp. Then he walks in looking a little confused and glances at all of us. He says, "Where's your other little buddy at? I figured she would meet me up at the camper, is she a little slow or something?"

We ask Reese what he's talking about and he says he had come down the same trail as Tan had been using and ran into one of our buddies standing in the middle of the trail looking at him slack jawed. He had asked her a bunch of questions but all she did was just look at him and smile. He said he kept walking but she couldn't seem to keep up with him and kept falling behind. He asked if she was hurt but she just stared at him. He kept walking and had turned around a bend in the trail and when he turned back to check to see if she was keeping up the trail was empty. He assumed she took a short cut back to the camper. None of us know what to say. He pauses and asks, “What yall been cookin, it smelled like blood and hot pans all the way up the trail?”

We tell him the whole story. I expect him to say we are full of it but he just listens and then sits down on the couch in the living room. He says when she kept lagging behind him it kind of weirded him out so he tried to slow down and keep her in front of him. But no matter how slow he walked she always lagged behind. He said that the closer he got to camp, the stronger the smell got. Eventually it got really strong and he heard the girl say something in a low, quiet voice. He turned to ask her what she said and now she was really close to him. He went to reach out for her to grab her shoulder but he said he must have misjudged her distance because she was off to the side of where he put his hand. The whole time she was staring right at him.

At this point we know this is real unless Tan is one hellevan actor. They load up their rifles and we all sit around until about 11. To this day, whenever I think about this I really hope that it was just some huge prank that my cousins played on me and never told me the truth. At around 11 the smell of copper turns into a really nasty blood smell. Like cooking blood and singed hair. Tan and Reese get up and grab the rifles. There's a half-knocking, half-clawing at the door and then there's this voice, and it sounds like those Youtube videos of cats and dogs whose owners teach them how to talk. The voice says in this halting, bizarre tone, "Let me the fuck in. Stop fucking playing." I get cold chills down my entire body but we are all silent except for one of the girls who starts crying softly, closer to a whimper. 

The voice was undeniably unhuman. It didn't have the right cadence. I never realized until that moment that all people have a certain cadence when they talk, no matter what language. This voice didn't have that. Youtube those cats. That's what it sounded like outside the door. I’m scared and mad and yelling, “Who is it? Stop fucking around!” and it just keeps repeating, "Let me the fuck in."

The voice does that for another 15 minutes and then the smell goes away for a moment but for the next hour or so we hear brush crashing in the woods and every couple minutes it will come back to the door and say something until finally the smell totally fades.

It's around 2 in the morning and Reese stands up, opens the door, walks outside with his rifle in hand, and fires a shot into the air. “In the name of Jesus Christ, go the fuck away!” he says before he fires two more shots. Then from the woods near the creek across from the camper it sounds like something slowly jabbering and hooting. Then it starts screaming. It sounds almost like a woman and a cat in a bag screaming together. I’ve never heard anything like that. The brush over that way starts to shake and Reese fires into the tree line and backs up into the camper. We lock the door and listen to the screaming. Reese says he saw something come out of the bushes really low to the ground crawling towards the trailer. He shot at it but he’s not sure he hit anything.

That's how the rest of the night went. It screamed for the next 2 hours and the brush shook and crashed in the tree line.

Tan didn’t tell me this until two days later, after the whole thing was over. But that night but he was sitting in the chair watching the door with his rifle. He was nodding off after the screaming had stopped. He was almost asleep when he saw someone come out of the bathroom and then lay down in the middle of the floor and go to sleep. He just assumed it was one of us and he nodded off. Then he said he kind of realized something was wrong and while pretending to sleep he counted us. There were 9 people in the trailer. He didn't want to try and shoot the thing in the camper and hit one of us or have Reese wake up and start shooting everything in sight. He just stayed awake all night pretending to sleep. He said sometimes it would stand up and kind of do this weird jittery thing or heave like it was laughing. Then it would just lay back down.

The next morning, we woke up and I noticed Tan was a little jittery and was avoiding looking at all of us. We ate some breakfast, packed up, and started walking to his house. He stayed last in the camper and said he'd lock up and bring me my uncle's keys. He said to just start walking and he'd catch up. We got a little bit up the path and then he came running up and we just jogged back to his house and his cousin took us home.

When Tan had gone back to lock up he said that we had been too stupid to lock the window in the bathroom and it didn't have a screen on it. The window was open when he went in there. I'm guessing it had been doing that all along. It waited for us to fall asleep or slip up and then get in among us. Tan told me it walked with us all the way back to his house. Then it lagged to the back of the group, looked him dead in the eyes, and walked into the woods.