My name is Jordan, and I’ve seen some crazy stuff in my life, but not as horrifying as what I’m about to tell you.
There is a small town, located in Pennsylvania called Osceola Mills. It is about 5 miles to the next town which is Philipsburg and everything seems at least decent in that town, but the same cannot be said for Osceola Mills. My friends and I would occasionally go down to the basketball court that is by the public pool which is only open during summers from 1:00 in the afternoon until roughly around 7:45 PM, and two baseball fields. We would always play pickup games, hang out, relax, but never do anything illegal surprisingly. I would always meet with my friends after we got past the metal detectors that our school has due to the constant threats of shooting it up. I talked to one of my friends about playing basketball after school but sadly he turned me down because he had to go with his mother to the DMV to get his junior learners permit. I asked some of my other friends but they all turned me down as well. “Looks like I’m going at it alone today,” I thought to myself.
When I got home from school, I had some Geometry and Chemistry homework about Postulates and Ionization energy that kind of complicated work, at least in my opinion. I waited about an hour and a half when my step father got home, he looked more… distressed than what I could remember. I asked him how his day was and he just gave me an inaudible grunt. I again asked him the same question and he just yelled and told me to “Get out of here”. I was highly confused, one because he never acted like this for the six years that I’ve known him and second, he was clearly holding something in his pocket. I could see the outline of whatever it was but still couldn’t quite make the conclusion of what it could be. I just brushed it off thinking that he might’ve just had a bad day and was just irritated at the slightest of things. I told him I was going to the court and he did not respond, he was just out in the kitchen, at the dining table just staring at the ultrasound photo of my little brother. I put on my shoes and threw on a sweatshirt because it was around the middle of fall at this point.
Everything was pretty normal, nobody was there as usual, I could hear the sound of a leaf blower in the distance, and of course cars going past the road. It hit about 6 PM and daylight saving didn’t kick in until the weekend so it was still pretty light out. It was around 6:30 that I could see a somewhat tall man, around 6′, wearing a black hoodie, black jeans, black boots, I thought to myself, “Oh boy, I hope this kid doesn’t ask for a pickup game or something.” He did walk down the little asphalt road to the basketball court and he sat on the wooden, run down bench that was on the sidelines. I was practicing lay-ups when he started clapping. I was confused to why he was clapping at a simple lay-up but decided not to say anything on the matter. About a half an hour later he just got up and left. I was relieved because I had a gut feeling that this guy was watching my every move.
I checked my phone later and the time said 7. “Ok, maybe another half an hour then I’ll head home,” I thought to myself aloud. That’s when I heard something odd, it sounded like laughter, not like joyful laughter more like… manical laughter. It was coming from under the bridge. The court had a bridge right beside the main road and the asphalt road that went across a creek that was heavily polluted due to a coal mine explosion. I look down to see of course, the man in all black, eating away at a raccoon that he must have just killed judging by the blood on his hands or that could be from him eating the raccoon with his hands, either way I was getting paranoid. “I thought he left” I said quietly to myself. Just then, like the idiot I am, I drop my ball due to the frightfulness that was building inside of me. He turned his head slowly to about half way then quickly the other half until he was looking at me dead in the eyes. His eyes were bloodshot and he had an untrimmed beard that looked very horrible. He started getting up slowly and meanwhile, slowly starting to have a manical grin on his face.
I took off and went the stupidest way I think I could have, to the old, abandoned school. This place was sketchy but in the haunted way, I hated every inch of that place yet here I was getting ready to hide there. Instead of going into the school because I knew it would have a lock on it, I hid in the tree line. I saw him running and he got to the door, started banging like crazy on it until he finally gave up after what felt like hours. I saw him walking the opposite direction so I followed but I was in the woods trying to make as little noise as possible. I wanted to know where this guy lived so I’d know an address to tell the police.
He eventually reached what looked like an abandoned trailer, but I saw him going through the woods, I made sure to stay out of sight. He kept going deeper into the woods when he finally came to what looked like an altar made of stone. It had a goats head impaled onto a sharp rock that was the top piece of the altar. He spoke to about four other men or women that were there and I couldn’t hear at first so I moved in a little closer, being as careful as possible not to make a noise. I could make out him saying, “I’m sorry, I could not get the sacrifice we needed to complete the ritual.” I was petrified at this point.
I sprinted as fast as I could out of those woods, and I could hear one of the men scream, “Get that boy.” I sprinted all the way home and when I got there my step father seemed to have snapped out of whatever sort of trance he was in. He asked me where my ball was but I just said that I overshot a half court shot and it went into the creek. The next day I told all my friends about it in school and we all agreed to go to the same place where I found that altar, and upon arriving there, we found no altar, no goats head, nothing. All we found was a diary with all the pages ripped out of it except one, and it said, “Life’s a gift, isn’t it Jordan? Well… we don’t believe in that philosophy, we will be seeing you again very soon.”