So I figured that, since Halloween is coming, it’s time to share our real-world encounters with the supernatural.
I’m going to tell you about the night I visited the shack.
It was a dark and stormy night…
Actually, my story doesn’t begin on a dark and stormy night, but it does begin, of all times, on the day before Halloween. My grandfather, who owned a 3,000 acre wheat farm in northern Montana, died of a heart attack on that day as he stepped out of his Crown Vic to check the mail. He had driven to the post office (19 miles away!), and when he pulled up to the building he stepped out of the car and promptly died.
I was ten years old. My family lived in Oregon and my both my parents were working professionals. However, nobody could be found to run the farm, so eventually my parents packed us up and moved to Montana to live at the farm until a buyer could be found. We ended up staying there about 9 months, so we were there the end of that winter and part of the next.
Let me paint the picture for you. This land was big and extremely flat. This is the Great Plains, after all. The land was divided into “sections”, or large squares of land a mile on each side that made up a grid that stretched across the prairie. Between each section were dirt tracks called section lines that allowed farmers access to their fields. The main road, a properly maintained two-lane road, ran laser-line straight on a North-South line.
The main farmhouse sat on the west side of one of these sections, against the main road. It was a modern farmhouse, built in the late 50’s. However the original homestead cabin, an old shack from the early 1900’s, remained on the property a mile due east of the “new” farmhouse. The kitchen of the main farmhouse faced east, with the old shack visible in the distance.
So. A section of land, in a perfect square a mile long on each side, with wide Jeep roads on each side. A modern house on the west side and an abandoned shack on the east. Running through this section of land in a more-or-less N-S direction was a sort of seasonal creek, that had over the years eroded itself into an oversized ditch perhaps 20 or 30 feet deep and 100 feet wide, with the sides at a shallow enough angle that the section lines simply followed the property line, going down one side and back up the other.
So one night in October, after supper, my dad and I are in the living room and my mom is in the kitchen. Suddenly she yells for my dad to come into the kitchen. We go in there and lo and behold, there is a light coming from the old shack! WTF?? Of course, this is winter in Montana, and it had been snowing off and on for days. My dad didn’t know what was going on, but I remember him saying he thought it was a hunter. The light looked distinctly like a Coleman lantern, not an electric light. There were lots of pronghorn in the area, and lots of hunters. Since it was already dark, dad figured that hunter had gotten lost and holed up in what shelter he could find.
Not wanting a death on his hands, dad decides to grab the guy from the shack. There was an old beat-up Ford pickup that he used in the snow, so dad puts on his wellies and a parka, asks if I want to come along (of course I did), and we head out.
Now, remember all access to the farmland is on the section lines, which form a grid. So we have to drive due south half a mile or so, turn east for a mile, then back north for half a mile. Not a big deal. The light in the window of the shack, while a fair distance away, remained clearly visible through the first half of the trip.
But… we had to navigate down the banks of the creek and back up the other side. As we did, the light from the shack disappeared behind the edge of the wide ditch. When we crested the other side a few moments later… nothing. No light, nothing. Pure blackness past the sweep of the headlights.
Dad navigates the pickup to the next section line, barely visible in the dark and the snow, and turns toward the shack. A minute or two later, the shack comes into the beam of the pickup’s headlights.
There was nothing there. No pickup, no ATV, nothing. Dad grabs a big MagLite from behind the seat, orders me to stay put, and hops out, slamming the door behind him. He stood there for a moment. It was completely silent, I remember the ticking coming from under the pickup as it began to cool in the snow. Suddenly dad lets out a couple of hollers and heads toward the shack, maybe 100 feet away.
He stops well short of it before beginning to circle around the building, the beam of the flashlight skimming across the snow and occasionally up to the blackened window openings of the shack. He does this for several minutes; I remember the beam swinging back and forth in this sort of rhythmic pattern… never stopping, just back and forth, over and over in the dark.
For some reason, at the time I thought it was funny. I remember it snowing, perhaps it had been snowing the whole time I never noticed or perhaps it had just started. If it had been snowing it wasn’t heavy. But as dad was circling the building it began to snow harder, the flashlight beam picking up the flakes. That’s what I remember, the flakes of snow falling through the beam of that big MagLite. After making a couple of circles around the shack, he walked up and peeked in the windows, the light flashing through the old building. It is a small building, maybe 25 feet to a side.
Eventually dad came back, hopped back in the pickup, and sat. I asked him what had happened, but he muttered for me to be quiet without answering my question. We headed back home, following the tracks in the snow we had just made a few minutes before. The darkness seemed even deeper, more repressing than it had on the drive to the shack.
When we got back to the house dad told me to head to my room and close the door. I did so, but left the door open a bit. As I sat on the floor with some Legos, I heard him talking to my mom.
He said he had walked around the building, and it was clear the snow was completely undisturbed. When he approached the building and looked inside, he said the floor was covered in dust and broken bits of junk, and it was obvious nobody had set foot in there in many years.
It was dark that night, a deep dark that that only comes with a heavy snow. And it was storming, in a sense. No wind or other scary Hollywood extremes, but a heavy snow that began while dad I looked for a lost hunter that turned out to simply not exist.
To this day I ask myself if three people shared the exact same hallucination. I don’t think we did.
Two years ago my cousin went back and visited that old farm, now with new owners. One afternoon she, her husband, and her kids visited the shack and spent a while looking around and exploring it. She took the picture linked above, which I later copied off her Facebook page. He husband had likewise posted pictures from that day, but during the time they spent in the shack, he only took one photo: an old shoe… decades old and covered in dust. I later asked him why he took that particular pic, and he couldn’t give me a reason, he said he felt he “had to”.
I’m not convinced he was in control when he took that picture.