DavidRavenMoon
anonymous anomalous
Hello everyone, my name is David, and I'm new here. I'm 51, and I've been having very odd experiences since I was a young child. My older brother (who is now 62) has also had odd experiences, some of which coincide with mine, even though we had them separately, and at separate times. I'll elaborate on those at another time.
Not all my experiences have anything to do with UFO's, and actually most don't, but they all seem related somehow.
So here's one of them. This was in about 1969-70, and I was in Middle School (Jr High). This would make me about 12-13. I grew up in Orange, NJ, and on the next corner from where my house was is a brook (either known as Wigwam brook or Second River). It's a small brook, but has steep cement walls because it floods when it rains heavy.
So it was probably late February/March, and there was still some snow on the ground what was starting to melt... so you have patches of snow, and soggy ground. I was hanging out with 6 other boys, two of them were close friends, Jerry and John, and the rest were friends of John. I've known Jerry since I was about 4. I can't remember exactly who the rest were. So we were sitting on my front porch, I think it was about 8-9PM. I know it was already dark. The sky was overcast that day, and I noticed lights moving in the clouds that seemed very odd. It was like a headlight from a car or landing lights on a plane, but it was going back and forth. So I point this out to my friends and we are sitting there watching this and wondering what it was.
Now this is where things start getting weird. We think we could see something that the lights are attached to... it was a brownish colored shape, tapered on either end, and the lights were on the end, and maybe some in the middle. That part is sketchy. We could see an outline in the clouds. We all came to the conclusion that it was a flying saucer (people didn't say UFO back then), and then we decided it was heading for the train tracks up the street, and seemed to be descending. I don't know why we thought that... even a few days later it seemed odd. But we all agreed it was landing. This was the old Erie-Lackawanna freight line that had been defunct for a few years. On my street the train tracks were a block way, but on the next block they ran alongside the brook.
So we decide to all go take a walk and see what this thing was. As I said we thought we saw it going down... I say "thought" because we were all kind of confused about it. It was sort of dream like.. things weren't making any sense. I'm not sure if that's because we were seeing something we didn't understand, or something else was going on. But everything was odd feeling, kind of not real.
So we gathered a bunch of sticks and things... I remember two of us had these aluminum poles from a tent, and maybe an old Army MP billy club. We must have looked like a mob of angry townspeople going after the troll! All we needed was torches. So we walked up the street directly in front of my house and then made a right at the next corner. The train tracks crossed that street. On the other side of that street was an area where the tracks ran along side the brook. It was dark back there because it was behind some empty factory buildings on the right (US Radium factory), and on the left was the brook, and then the backs of houses on another street. It was overgrown with bushes and stuff since the train didn't run anymore.
So we start walking along the tracks and we see this object maybe 50 feet away. It was very dark back there, but we can make out an outline that looked like the thing in the sky. I thought it looked like the typical saucer shape, but it didn't have a dome or anything on top. It appeared to be sitting very close to the ground, or directly on the ground. It was very dark. Looked maybe 15 to 20 feet in diameter.
So now we are all looking at this thing, and wondering what it is... of course we are all thinking it's a flying saucer. We are scared sh!tless! We are trying to get the nerve up to walk back there (we should have taken flash lights, but it was very impromptu) and just then I hear a splash in the brook to my left. The walls of the brook are probably 12 feet high, and the water level is only a couple of inches. It runs up the middle of the cement part. My friends used to go down there and walk along the water. Since this was right by where the street crossed over the brook, the water was slightly deeper and wider, and there was a mud "island" in the middle. So I hear a splash and look down in the brook. I can see this area because of a street light a few feet away. What I saw was two creatures, about 4 feet high. They were very dark, and appeared to be covered with black fur. They had very large round glowing green eyes. I couldn't make out a face... just the two big eyes looking at me. Larger than human eyes. I really couldn't see any surface details on them at all. Just shaggy black stuff. They were posturing as if they were leaning over to look at us and didn't want to be detected. One creature was slightly behind the other. They had their arms raised slightly like someone trying to walk quietly would.
My heart dropped to my feet, and I said something to my friends, who then looked down in the brook, but they were gone. But at least two of the guys said "what was that down there?" Then someone said "where's Jerry?".. he was gone, so in a panic we hauled ass up the street as fast as we could!
We made the left onto the street that faces my house, and there on his front steps was Jerry, out of breath and white as a ghost! So we asked him what happened and he said that he felt something touch his arm, and turned to see a dark hairy creature with large glowing green eyes, and then turned and ran home as fast as he could. He didn't see them in the brook and had left right before we saw them.
We were all very shaken up about this and didn't tell anyone. So the next day John and I went for a walk to the area, in the daylight. Back in the wooded area was a large circle melted in the snow... right down to the soil. Down in the brook, where the mud was, were a number of very odd prints. We also saw these in the snow. They looked like this: ( ) Sort of like hoof prints open in the front and back. They were small, about 2.5 to 3 inches from front to back, and they were more-or-less one in front of the other. Not staggered like human foot prints.
So I went home to see if my dad had plaster or something so I could make a cast of it. I found some kind of plaster that was a funny pinkish tan color, and mixed some up in a coffee can and went back up the street to the site. I poured some in a couple of the prints in the snow.
I went back the next day, with my friend John, and the plaster had dried, but had been broken into pieces. I probably said "who the heck would do that?" John had some stupid answer that "there's these kids who walk on the tracks breaking plaster in the snow with sticks" ... yeah John... OK. So I figured he did it. I don't know if he was trying to remove it from the snow, or just broke it for what ever stupid reason he had. He was flaky like that. I was very disappointed.
As the years past, I started to doubt the UFO part of the experience... just because it seemed to be so very vague. Like I couldn't remember much about that part. But I remembered the creatures very clearly.
Now, fast forward to about 1972. I was in High School and I had a girl friend that lived in West Orange, which was right up the street (right by the Thomas Edison laboratory). I never told her this story... I don't think I told anyone except my brother. Me and my friends didn't talk much about it, but we did acknowledge that it happened.
So one evening I'm walking Ruth home. It was about 10PM, and was sometime in the winter. We are walking along with me on the street side of the sidewalk. The brook wound around under part of the old Edison factory and under the street we were walking on (Lakeside Ave). Just as we passed the brook there was the sound of cracking ice. It was cold enough that while the water was free flowing in the middle, it iced up on either side. She looked down in the brook when she heard the noise, screamed and ran up the street!
I looked down and didn't see anything, except the ice was broken. So I chase after her and caught up to her at the next corner, where she had stopped. She was really freaking out. I calmed her down and asked what happened? She said she heard the noise, and then saw a small dark hairy thing with big glowing green eyes looking at her! I then told her the experience my friends and I had a couple of years earlier.
Now, we fast forward a few more years. I think it was about 1976-77. I'm still living in the same house, and Debbie, my girlfriend at the time, lived around the corner on the street that ran alongside the brook. I never told Deb about there incidences, but Debbie was no stranger to odd things. She would constantly have light bulbs burn out when she turned on the lamp, and once we were on a roof top of a 100+ year old building in town were she used to live, and were being pelted by small pebbles from out of a clear blue sky! We were three stories up, and it would have been hard for someone to throw them that high, plus when we looked over the edge, we didn't see anyone.
Back to the story... so one Saturday morning about 8am, my phone rings. I was still in bed. I answer it and it's Debbie, and she's hysterical. She had a large Belgium Shepherd dog, and he was barking in the background, and he was a very calm dog. So I get her to calm down and she said her dog started barking out the window... really making a lot of noise. They lived on one of the upper floors in a house that overlooked the brook, which was across the street (Gist Place). So she gets out of bed to see what he's barking at, and she sees across the street on top of a garage that is along side the brook (on the opposite bank in a backyard) something she described as a black hairy ape, like an orangutan, with large green eyes, and a pot belly like it was pregnant, on top of the garage roof. It grabbed ahold of a willow tree that hung into the brook, and slid down and ran towards the street overpass!
Now a few interesting tidbits... I was no stranger to flying saucer lore. I had been interested in them since as far back as I can remember (and not sure when that started or why), and I had read about the dark hairy "bellicose dwarfs" that were reported I think back in the 70's. So I assumed these were the same creatures. But later since they seemed to be appearing in the brook, and independent of any saucer sightings, I started to think maybe it was just some cryptozoological oddity. But my feeing had been that while they were clearly real creatures, they might not be living in the book, or even be in this reality all the time. I spent a lot of time in and around that brook, and never saw any signs of them. But when I was younger I had a recurring dream about that brook.. something was going on at night, and there were people with spotlights and stuff.
Also the site of what we thought was the UFO landing is where the former United States Radium factory is located. The building was still there, as were several next to it (my mom worked in a sequin factory next to the radium factory). All those buildings, and the tracks are gone, as part of a SuperFund project. There was old radioactive ore buried under the ground back there. They have since dug up all the old soil.
You can read about it here: Radium Girls.
(As an aside to that story... I used to have another recurring dream where I found a path that joined all the backyards in the neighborhood together.. after I moved from the area, the SuperFund took down a few houses and dug up the backyards.. Making it look just like that dream.)
The other interesting thing was years after that sighting, I was in the local library reading a book on UFO's. It was maybe 1976 or so. I don't recall the book, but it talked about a case in 1855 in Devonshire, England. This is commonly referred to as the "Devil at Devonshire".
The London Times wrote this at the time:
One of the illustrations in the book looked exactly like the prints that we saw that day!
There is an illustration at Wikipedia that shows them closed in the front, like a horseshoe, but the prints we saw, and the ones in the book were open in the front. (see below)
Of course I'm not saying the same "creature" made the prints, but when I saw them in the book it sent chills down my spine!
So that's one of my strange tales. I'm wondering if anyone else living in that part of NJ saw anything strange around that time.
For people who want to follow along, I've attached a small map showing our path. We started at A, and the first event happened at the X. The brook is in green. B and C are the places of the other two sightings by the girl friends.
Here's an illustration of the Devonshire tracks that looked a lot like what we saw.
Not all my experiences have anything to do with UFO's, and actually most don't, but they all seem related somehow.
So here's one of them. This was in about 1969-70, and I was in Middle School (Jr High). This would make me about 12-13. I grew up in Orange, NJ, and on the next corner from where my house was is a brook (either known as Wigwam brook or Second River). It's a small brook, but has steep cement walls because it floods when it rains heavy.
So it was probably late February/March, and there was still some snow on the ground what was starting to melt... so you have patches of snow, and soggy ground. I was hanging out with 6 other boys, two of them were close friends, Jerry and John, and the rest were friends of John. I've known Jerry since I was about 4. I can't remember exactly who the rest were. So we were sitting on my front porch, I think it was about 8-9PM. I know it was already dark. The sky was overcast that day, and I noticed lights moving in the clouds that seemed very odd. It was like a headlight from a car or landing lights on a plane, but it was going back and forth. So I point this out to my friends and we are sitting there watching this and wondering what it was.
Now this is where things start getting weird. We think we could see something that the lights are attached to... it was a brownish colored shape, tapered on either end, and the lights were on the end, and maybe some in the middle. That part is sketchy. We could see an outline in the clouds. We all came to the conclusion that it was a flying saucer (people didn't say UFO back then), and then we decided it was heading for the train tracks up the street, and seemed to be descending. I don't know why we thought that... even a few days later it seemed odd. But we all agreed it was landing. This was the old Erie-Lackawanna freight line that had been defunct for a few years. On my street the train tracks were a block way, but on the next block they ran alongside the brook.
So we decide to all go take a walk and see what this thing was. As I said we thought we saw it going down... I say "thought" because we were all kind of confused about it. It was sort of dream like.. things weren't making any sense. I'm not sure if that's because we were seeing something we didn't understand, or something else was going on. But everything was odd feeling, kind of not real.
So we gathered a bunch of sticks and things... I remember two of us had these aluminum poles from a tent, and maybe an old Army MP billy club. We must have looked like a mob of angry townspeople going after the troll! All we needed was torches. So we walked up the street directly in front of my house and then made a right at the next corner. The train tracks crossed that street. On the other side of that street was an area where the tracks ran along side the brook. It was dark back there because it was behind some empty factory buildings on the right (US Radium factory), and on the left was the brook, and then the backs of houses on another street. It was overgrown with bushes and stuff since the train didn't run anymore.
So we start walking along the tracks and we see this object maybe 50 feet away. It was very dark back there, but we can make out an outline that looked like the thing in the sky. I thought it looked like the typical saucer shape, but it didn't have a dome or anything on top. It appeared to be sitting very close to the ground, or directly on the ground. It was very dark. Looked maybe 15 to 20 feet in diameter.
So now we are all looking at this thing, and wondering what it is... of course we are all thinking it's a flying saucer. We are scared sh!tless! We are trying to get the nerve up to walk back there (we should have taken flash lights, but it was very impromptu) and just then I hear a splash in the brook to my left. The walls of the brook are probably 12 feet high, and the water level is only a couple of inches. It runs up the middle of the cement part. My friends used to go down there and walk along the water. Since this was right by where the street crossed over the brook, the water was slightly deeper and wider, and there was a mud "island" in the middle. So I hear a splash and look down in the brook. I can see this area because of a street light a few feet away. What I saw was two creatures, about 4 feet high. They were very dark, and appeared to be covered with black fur. They had very large round glowing green eyes. I couldn't make out a face... just the two big eyes looking at me. Larger than human eyes. I really couldn't see any surface details on them at all. Just shaggy black stuff. They were posturing as if they were leaning over to look at us and didn't want to be detected. One creature was slightly behind the other. They had their arms raised slightly like someone trying to walk quietly would.
My heart dropped to my feet, and I said something to my friends, who then looked down in the brook, but they were gone. But at least two of the guys said "what was that down there?" Then someone said "where's Jerry?".. he was gone, so in a panic we hauled ass up the street as fast as we could!
We made the left onto the street that faces my house, and there on his front steps was Jerry, out of breath and white as a ghost! So we asked him what happened and he said that he felt something touch his arm, and turned to see a dark hairy creature with large glowing green eyes, and then turned and ran home as fast as he could. He didn't see them in the brook and had left right before we saw them.
We were all very shaken up about this and didn't tell anyone. So the next day John and I went for a walk to the area, in the daylight. Back in the wooded area was a large circle melted in the snow... right down to the soil. Down in the brook, where the mud was, were a number of very odd prints. We also saw these in the snow. They looked like this: ( ) Sort of like hoof prints open in the front and back. They were small, about 2.5 to 3 inches from front to back, and they were more-or-less one in front of the other. Not staggered like human foot prints.
So I went home to see if my dad had plaster or something so I could make a cast of it. I found some kind of plaster that was a funny pinkish tan color, and mixed some up in a coffee can and went back up the street to the site. I poured some in a couple of the prints in the snow.
I went back the next day, with my friend John, and the plaster had dried, but had been broken into pieces. I probably said "who the heck would do that?" John had some stupid answer that "there's these kids who walk on the tracks breaking plaster in the snow with sticks" ... yeah John... OK. So I figured he did it. I don't know if he was trying to remove it from the snow, or just broke it for what ever stupid reason he had. He was flaky like that. I was very disappointed.
As the years past, I started to doubt the UFO part of the experience... just because it seemed to be so very vague. Like I couldn't remember much about that part. But I remembered the creatures very clearly.
Now, fast forward to about 1972. I was in High School and I had a girl friend that lived in West Orange, which was right up the street (right by the Thomas Edison laboratory). I never told her this story... I don't think I told anyone except my brother. Me and my friends didn't talk much about it, but we did acknowledge that it happened.
So one evening I'm walking Ruth home. It was about 10PM, and was sometime in the winter. We are walking along with me on the street side of the sidewalk. The brook wound around under part of the old Edison factory and under the street we were walking on (Lakeside Ave). Just as we passed the brook there was the sound of cracking ice. It was cold enough that while the water was free flowing in the middle, it iced up on either side. She looked down in the brook when she heard the noise, screamed and ran up the street!
I looked down and didn't see anything, except the ice was broken. So I chase after her and caught up to her at the next corner, where she had stopped. She was really freaking out. I calmed her down and asked what happened? She said she heard the noise, and then saw a small dark hairy thing with big glowing green eyes looking at her! I then told her the experience my friends and I had a couple of years earlier.
Now, we fast forward a few more years. I think it was about 1976-77. I'm still living in the same house, and Debbie, my girlfriend at the time, lived around the corner on the street that ran alongside the brook. I never told Deb about there incidences, but Debbie was no stranger to odd things. She would constantly have light bulbs burn out when she turned on the lamp, and once we were on a roof top of a 100+ year old building in town were she used to live, and were being pelted by small pebbles from out of a clear blue sky! We were three stories up, and it would have been hard for someone to throw them that high, plus when we looked over the edge, we didn't see anyone.
Back to the story... so one Saturday morning about 8am, my phone rings. I was still in bed. I answer it and it's Debbie, and she's hysterical. She had a large Belgium Shepherd dog, and he was barking in the background, and he was a very calm dog. So I get her to calm down and she said her dog started barking out the window... really making a lot of noise. They lived on one of the upper floors in a house that overlooked the brook, which was across the street (Gist Place). So she gets out of bed to see what he's barking at, and she sees across the street on top of a garage that is along side the brook (on the opposite bank in a backyard) something she described as a black hairy ape, like an orangutan, with large green eyes, and a pot belly like it was pregnant, on top of the garage roof. It grabbed ahold of a willow tree that hung into the brook, and slid down and ran towards the street overpass!
Now a few interesting tidbits... I was no stranger to flying saucer lore. I had been interested in them since as far back as I can remember (and not sure when that started or why), and I had read about the dark hairy "bellicose dwarfs" that were reported I think back in the 70's. So I assumed these were the same creatures. But later since they seemed to be appearing in the brook, and independent of any saucer sightings, I started to think maybe it was just some cryptozoological oddity. But my feeing had been that while they were clearly real creatures, they might not be living in the book, or even be in this reality all the time. I spent a lot of time in and around that brook, and never saw any signs of them. But when I was younger I had a recurring dream about that brook.. something was going on at night, and there were people with spotlights and stuff.
Also the site of what we thought was the UFO landing is where the former United States Radium factory is located. The building was still there, as were several next to it (my mom worked in a sequin factory next to the radium factory). All those buildings, and the tracks are gone, as part of a SuperFund project. There was old radioactive ore buried under the ground back there. They have since dug up all the old soil.
You can read about it here: Radium Girls.
(As an aside to that story... I used to have another recurring dream where I found a path that joined all the backyards in the neighborhood together.. after I moved from the area, the SuperFund took down a few houses and dug up the backyards.. Making it look just like that dream.)
The other interesting thing was years after that sighting, I was in the local library reading a book on UFO's. It was maybe 1976 or so. I don't recall the book, but it talked about a case in 1855 in Devonshire, England. This is commonly referred to as the "Devil at Devonshire".
The London Times wrote this at the time:
It appears that on Thursday night last there was a heavy fall of snow in the neighborhood of Exeter and the south of Devon. On the following morning, the inhabitants of the above towns were surprised at discovering the tracks of some strange and mysterious animal, endowed with the power of ubiquity, as the foot-prints were to be seen in all kinds of inaccessible places – on the tops of houses and narrow walls, in gardens and courtyards enclosed by high walls and palings, as well as in open fields. There was hardly a garden in Lympstone where the footprints were not observed.
The track appeared more like that of a biped than a quadruped, and the steps were generally eight inches in advance of each other. The impressions of the feet closely resembled that of a donkey's shoe, and measured from an inch and a half to two and a half inches across. Here and there it appeared as if cloven, but in the generality of the steps the shoe was continuous, and, from the snow in the center remaining entire, merely showing the outer crest of the foot, it must have been convex.
One of the illustrations in the book looked exactly like the prints that we saw that day!
There is an illustration at Wikipedia that shows them closed in the front, like a horseshoe, but the prints we saw, and the ones in the book were open in the front. (see below)
Of course I'm not saying the same "creature" made the prints, but when I saw them in the book it sent chills down my spine!
So that's one of my strange tales. I'm wondering if anyone else living in that part of NJ saw anything strange around that time.
For people who want to follow along, I've attached a small map showing our path. We started at A, and the first event happened at the X. The brook is in green. B and C are the places of the other two sightings by the girl friends.
Here's an illustration of the Devonshire tracks that looked a lot like what we saw.