Giant of Pennsylvania

When I first learned about Mel Dixon and his giant, I knew I had to hear the story for myself. I traveled to western Pennsylvania and begged Mel to tell me the tale. After I heard his remarkable story, I knew there was no better way to tell it than in Mel’s own words.

“I’ve been out in these woods my whole life. Everybody talks about the old stories and the bad stuff like Mother Meade and her monsters, but when I go out, I see what I want to see. If I’m hunting doe, I look for doe. And if I see something that ain’t quite right, I don’t go and make a big fuss about it ‘cause that’s not what I’m looking for. There’s a way you can see and not see if you want to.

“Now, I’ll tell you the story ‘cause you came a long way for it, but it really wasn’t nothing. I go out in these woods a lot, not just for hunting. I walk out to the Quarter to clear my mind and do my thinking.

“This time back three years, I went walking. This was fall and the leaves had turned and were falling. Some of the trees in the Quarter were bare, but not all.

“It was nice and quiet. There weren’t a lot of noises in the Quarter to start, but the only thing I heard that day was the leaves crunching when I walked on them.

“I come up this ridge and was looking out over the valley. I saw some trees moving down there and I thought the wind must be picking up. Thought there must be a storm coming.

“Then I see a tree go down and it went down real fast, not like it fell but like it was pulled. Anyway, I didn’t think much about it ‘cept I ought to be careful of dead trees coming down.

“I started heading down the other side of the ridge. It was after lunch and the light was starting to go already. I was making my way down through the trees there where they all stand real close together and the ground is pretty much bare.

“It was getting dark what with the all the shadows, but there was some sun cutting around the trees ‘cause it was low in the sky.

“I come around a turn in the path and I can see down the hill a pretty good way from where I was walking. There’s rows and rows of trees, almost like they was lined up.

“I’m looking at the trees and there’s a little ray of sun across a couple of them and I keep looking and walking and looking and I notice that something ain’t quite right and that’s why I keep looking even though I can’t figure out what’s wrong.

“There’s three trees in a row and they look pretty much the same: skinny with old brown bark, no lower branches to speak of. I’m looking at the middle tree and it looks like it has some roots on its trunk and I figure that’s what looked out of place. Then I said to myself, ‘Heck, that ain’t a root, that’s a hand.’

“Well, it was like a big old hand – bigger than a man’s – across the tree trunk. I thought something was standing behind the tree, but the hand was the same color as the tree.

“I was still walking all this time. I don’t think it occurred to me that I ought to stop and turn around and go home another way. I just didn’t know what I was seeing but, at the time, it didn’t strike me as dangerous.

“I come down the path and I’m getting closer to the tree, wondering if it’s a carving or some weird tree bark. I get about a stone’s throw from the tree before I look up and see what’s on top of the tree.

“Well, now I said it was dark so I couldn’t make it out at first, but I looked and I thought I saw something looking back at me. There were eyes – two eyes – in the tree and when I studied it, I could see the whole face.

“Now I stopped walking for sure. The whole woods were dead quiet and it seemed to me like everything was just waiting on me.

“I looked up at this face in the tree and I could see the head and some scraggly hair and then the shoulders and the arms and at least one hand. You couldn’t tell it until you looked hard at the thing, and then there it was.

“He was about twenty feet tall at least. He was awful skinny but then again he was pretending to be a tree. I mean, even his skin was like bark, old and tough-looking. He was lean, I would say. And when I looked in his eyes, you could tell he was scared and he was hungry.

“Well, I figured I spooked him as much as he did me. When he saw that I had made him, he just turned around and walked off.

“It all lasted no more than a few seconds. I see him and he sees me and then there he goes, as tall as a house and old as the hills, not making a sound as he walked away.

“I lost sight of him pretty quick ‘cause he blended in with the trees so much. I guess that’s how he hides out here. Sometimes I wonder how many people have walked by him, maybe right under him, and not even knew he was there. I wonder how many times I did, too.

“Now of course the people around here like to say that these woods – Broome’s Quarter – is where old Mother Meade and her babies hid out. They say every one of her babies was born a monster and even though it was hundreds of years ago, they’re still out there.

“Well, I don’t know about monsters or the old stories. But what I do know is that there’s a giant alive in these hills and he’s hungry and you won’t see him before he sees you.”

Read more about Mother Meade's monster children here.

A giant walks!

Next week on Scary True: Too tall to be a man; too small to be a god. The "Giant of Pennsylvania" is on the move!
And check out this week's UFO story, "The Occupant."

The Occupant

Life on Earth is sometimes so strange that there’s no need to imagine what sorts of things might exist in other parts of the universe. But when someone says, “I saw them,” and we get that glimpse beyond our own little world, it can be a profound affirmation of the resiliency and ingenuity of life and evolution. Sometimes, however, it can be a terrifying reminder that although they may look very different, people are the same everywhere.

Rebecca was a helicopter pilot working out of San Jose in the late ‘90s. “If you ever heard the traffic report on the radio,” she says, “that was me in my chopper, over the freeway.”

Rebecca loved her job and the sense of freedom that flying affords. “Of course, being above the traffic and not in the traffic was a great way to spend the day,” Rebecca tells me.

There was one particular day, however, when Rebecca’s job made her feel very afraid and very vulnerable. It was late in the year and as the evening traffic wound down, the sun set. “A big shadow was creeping up from the east,” Rebecca recalls, “and soon all the lights way down below me came on.”

Rebecca was waiting to give her final radio report before heading home. “I was over 280, west of San Jose,” Rebecca remembers, “when I saw this real bright light off to the north.”

To Rebecca’s north lay San Francisco International Airport and numerous regional airports. Rebecca assumed that she was seeing some plane off its flight path. As she continued to hover over the freeway, the light grew brighter as if it was heading straight towards her.

“I thought some idiot was way too low and coming right at me,” Rebecca tells me. “So, I got out of the way.”

Rebecca moved off to north west, well out of any plane’s path. To her surprise, however, the light turned in her direction. “It changed direction faster than a plane could,” Rebecca says. “So I thought it must be another chopper, maybe Coast Guard.”

Rebecca was now positioned between the light and the Pacific Ocean, so she moved south this time in order to let what she thought was a Coast Guard helicopter head out to sea. As she did, the light turned again toward her.

“That was when I really thought about the light and how it looked,” Rebecca tells me. Rebecca realized the light was not like any plane or helicopter she had ever seen. “The light wasn’t like a spotlight, or running lights, it was more like a big bright furnace, like a fire in the sky.”

All Rebecca could do was to wait and watch as the light came closer. As it grew more and more defined, Rebecca grew more and more concerned.

“It’s coming at me, getting closer and closer,” Rebecca remembers, “and I keep thinking it must be right in front of me and then it still gets closer. I realized this thing was gigantic.”

Rebecca estimates that the strange object was at least three football fields in length. It nearly filled the helicopter’s canopy, blocking the view of the freeway, the city, and the hills beyond.

“I thought it was one big light, but it was made up of lots of little lights,” Rebecca recalls, “like looking at a thousand headlights all coming at me.”

The lights finally stopped as they got as close to Rebecca’s helicopter as they could. Rebecca could now see that the lights were part of what she could only call a space craft.

“I don’t know how to describe it because it’s like it didn’t fit the specs for something that should be flying. It was just crazy.” Rebecca tells me. “It’s like whoever designed this thing didn’t have two arms and two eyes, wasn’t human.”

The strange craft sat motionless in the air while Rebecca’s helicopter bobbed. Rebecca didn’t know what to expect: the object’s movements were aggressive, but now she found herself overawed by its presence and unable to respond.

“It was like looking into a giant eye,” Rebecca remembers, “like a giant insect eye and it was staring right back.”

Suddenly the lights just in front of Rebecca’s helicopter began to dim. They quickly seemed to slide away, leaving a black patch almost in the strange object’s center.

Another light appeared, this one much softer than before. Rebecca could not see the source of the light, only that it defined a deep rectangular space. She suddenly realized that she was looking at a window or a porthole lit from the inside.

Rebecca noticed that the silhouette of the window’s lower edge was uneven. The light inside was growing brighter and she saw that the bottom of the window was filled with faces, faces that were all staring right at her.

“They were weird-looking with big black eyes,” Rebecca recalls, “but they were unmistakably children, human kids.”

Nearly two dozen children peeked at Rebecca from the bottom of the craft’s window. They stared with blank, black eyes but Rebecca could read nothing in their expressionless faces.

“They seemed like normal kids, except for the eyes,” Rebecca remembers. “They were different – different skin colors, different heights – but they all had black hair.”

The stand-off continued for only a few moments before the interior light began to dim. As it did, Rebecca saw something that she could never forget.

Behind the children, another figure approached the window. Rebecca understood the craft’s impossible design because now she could see the creature that had built it.

“It came up and at first I didn’t know I was even looking at a living thing,” Rebecca recalls. “It was tall and purple and kind of barrel-shaped with a weird starfish-like head, I guess. And it had wings like combs or fans behind it.”

Rebecca cannot say if what she saw was an animal or a plant or something that belonged to another, unknown category. It towered over the children and waved a set of branching tentacles in the air.

The interior light quickly went out and Rebecca stared into darkness. Her sense of position was overwhelmed but she suddenly realized that the craft was moving again. “It was coming right at me again,” Rebecca says. “It was about to smack right into me.”

As Rebecca braced for the impact, she saw the lights of the strange craft pass around her helicopter without damage. “It’s like I passed right through it,” Rebecca remembers. “Like it wasn’t solid, it was just light.”

The lights passed and receded in the distance. Rebecca was left alone in the dark in her helicopter. As she looked around to get her bearings, she discovered that she was no longer above the freeway outside of San Jose but some miles distant, over the Pacific Ocean.

“I got back home quick,” Rebecca tells me. “I almost got fired ‘cause I never did the traffic report.” Rebecca’s supervisor would later tell her that repeated calls to her helicopter went unanswered and even a radar check by the local airport came up empty.

What did Rebecca see? If it was a UFO, where did it come from? If it did come from another planet, why was carrying human children? Were these children kidnapped or were they produced by some other means? The answers to these questions are unsettling at best, unutterable at worst. The only thing we can be sure of is that, although visitors to our planet may be disturbing to behold, they share with humanity some very inhuman qualities.

Welcome our space brothers!

Next week on Scary True: What does an alien look like? Bug-eyes? Tentacles? Five spatial dimensions? No words can describe "The Occupant."
And check out this week's Midnighters story, "The Midnighters: Black Dog."

The Midnighters: Black Dog

For over thirty years, Jerry worked as a police officer in Pittsburgh. In his time on the force, Jerry had seen some bad things, some worse things, and some downright evil things. Cleaning up when people got mad or got crazy was part of the job, but there were other things that Jerry saw, things that most people never see, things that prowl the night, things that refuse to die.

I interviewed Jerry several times in 2002. The following incident is just one of the many stories Jerry shared in hours of audio recordings. I have transcribed them just as they were told to me by Jerry.

“I remember this happened back in the ‘60s, I’m thinking it was ‘65 or so. Frank and me – that’s my partner, Frank – we were cruising down Penn Ave in Lawrenceville and it must’ve been almost midnight when we get a call about a dog.

“Now, Frank and me, we weren’t the captain’s golden boys any way you cut it, but we were cops – beat cops – and we weren’t no dogcatchers.

“Dispatch says they need us to go over to this house and keep things under control just until the dogcatcher gets there. They were having trouble finding him on account of he wasn’t at his regular bar.

“Well, we’re pretty steamed about it, but we go over quick as we can ‘cause dispatch says there’s a little girl involved. They ain’t ordering up any ambulance so we know she ain’t hurt, but we don’t want things to get outta hand.

“Nice little place just off Butler. Teenage girl answers the door and says she’s the babysitter. The mother is a widower, works nights at the hospital. So, this babysitter’s scared outta her wits, going on about a dog nearly bit her arm off. I’m like, I don’t see no dog, and she says it’s in the basement.

“Frank and me, we ain’t gonna down in the basement, we’re just gonna wait. So, I ask the babysitter, Where’s this girl you’re supposed to be watching, and she says, Down in the basement.

“Well, Frank is ready to haul the babysitter into the station, he’s so mad, but now we gotta go down there. The babysitter swears the little girl ain’t hurt or nothing but we don’t exactly trust her judgment on stuff anymore.

“So, Frank and me, we don’t know if we go down guns drawn or not. What if we shoot and hit that kid? Frank says it might be too late for the kid, but that dog has gotta be put down.

“We open the door and look down the steps, right? There’s a smell down there not like a dog exactly, but like a dead dog that’s on fire or something. Real rank stuff.

“We start going down those steps and I’m wishing I got the flashlight outta the trunk. I can hear a soft crying just like a little girl and it’s sad to hear but it means she’s still alive, right?

“Frank finally finds the light switch and we see her, this little girl in her jammies, sitting in the middle of the basement floor, all red-faced and crying. Frank goes to take a look at her while I’m covering his back and checking the shadows for this dog.

“Frank is talking to the girl – her name’s Val – and telling her it’s all right, asking if she’s hurt and tell us what the heck happened. Well, she doesn’t have a scratch on her and she finally calms down a bit and spills her guts.

“She says the babysitter tried to get rid of her dog or something and then it tried to bite the sitter. Now Frank and me, we’re thinking, this sitter is a nutjob for calling the police and letting this kid sit in the basement. Then I hear this scratching in the corner.

“I put my gun away and I’m all like, Here poochie, and laughing, and then I see these red eyes in the corner, right? And they’re not where a little dog’s eyes oughta be, they’re like five feet up the wall.

“Frank sees it, too, and he starts to draw his weapon, but he stops, I don’t know why. This thing starts to growl and it sounds like a bulldozer taking the house down above us.

“I do what I was trained to do and I point my freakin’ gun at it. Well, that was a dumb thing to do and what happened was this thing barked and right away my gun gets slapped out of my hand and it goes flying into the corner. Now, I didn’t see nothing even hit my hand, but something did just the same.

“Frank asks Val what she calls her pet, and she says, Spot. Cute kid, right? Anyway, Frank asks her where Spot came from. Did her mommy bring Spot home from the store?

“Val says, Oh no, mommy doesn’t know about Spot, mommy hates dogs and all this. And Frank asks again where did she find him and she says that he just followed her home from the park a few days ago.

“And Frank says, Which park? And she says the big one down the block with all the stones in it. Frank rolls his eyes and says, That ain’t a park, sweetie, that’s a cemetery!

“Well, poor little Val don’t know what that means but the Allegheny Cemetery is just a stone’s throw away and that sucker’s huge. Been there forever, too. Nice place for a walk.

“Frank explains to Val how Spot needs to go home, right? She gets it ‘cause she don’t want trouble from her mom and the cops at the same time.

“We all go up the steps and Val calls Spot out. The sitter is long gone and Frank and me, we’re just looking in from the next room, being all non-threatening like they say and everything.

“So, as this thing comes up from the basement, it looks like somebody turned the lights off. It was like a dog – dog-shaped – and it was big, right? But it seemed like it made the place darker just by being there, like it was sucking up all the light. It was so black you couldn’t look right at it, you could see it but you couldn’t at the same time.

“And lemme tell you, this thing’s head was huge but all you could really fix on was these giant red eyes – they were almost glowing like they were on fire.

“It came up to the kitchen with Val and it’s padding through the rooms as Val leads it to the back door and it’s not making a sound as it goes. It was like watching a shadow just slide away out the door.

“So, there we all go: two cops following a little girl in her pajamas and a giant dog down the street in the middle of the night. That’s my life, I guess.

“We get to the cemetery gates and Val goes through the motions of trying to get this thing to go, to leave, and it’s just as hard for a monster ghost dog as it is for a real one, I guess. Finally, this thing turns toward the cemetery and, of course, walks right through the gates like they wasn’t there and it disappears.

“Val’s kinda shook up but I think she’ll be fine. Now when we get back to the house, we find the dogcatcher, guy by the name of McNulty, drunk on the stoop. We tell him to go home but he’s riled up on account of being called out so late, so we tell him the story just to mess with him.

“This guy, McNulty, he cusses and spits, then he apologizes to Val, then spits again. He says, That damn dog don’t belong to you little girl, belongs to Satan himself. I seen him, too, on nights like this.

“Then Frank goes, I bet you see a lot of things when you’re looking up out of a bottle. Well, we sent that guy home but we had to wait for Val’s mom to show up. We told her how a dog got into the house and scared off the sitter and of course she bought the whole thing.

“That black dog, though, Frank puts it down in his files as a harbinger, and they say a harbinger means something else is coming, something bigger and badder.”

Don't go in the basement!

Next week on Scary True: There's a monster on the loose and it's up to the Midnighters to put it down in "The Midnighters: Black Dog."
And check out this week's vampire story "The Boy in the Well."

The Boy in the Well

Every generation of a family takes a little from the one that preceded it: hair and eye color, the shape of a nose, or the way a face can show surprise or sadness. Sometimes those pieces come together in surprising ways, and a distinctive gesture or the eyes of a long-dead relative suddenly return in the face of a newborn baby. In this way, each generation is a return of the dead, a haunting of the living family by the dead one, a reminder that a family’s roots can run very deep.

Chris writes to tell me about the summer of 1985, the summer he lost his best friend, Chris. Eric and Chris had been friends since the second grade, inseparable playmates when they were young and, as they grew older, teenagers looking for anything to relieve the boredom of suburban Maryland.

“That summer was our last summer before high school started,” Eric tells me. “We didn’t have any real plans, but we knew we were going to start some trouble.”

No mailbox was safe from Chris’s baseball bat and no robin or starling could out-fly Eric’s BB gun. The summer was quickly turned into a catalog of venial crimes and acts of petty vandalism. 

Even this, however, was not enough to completely alleviate the boredom that seemed to haunt Eric and Chris. “It was around the middle of summer that we went up to the old Kocher place,” Eric tells me, “to find the ghost that was supposed to be up there.”

The boys had heard the stories all their lives. They were told in the margins of a teenager’s circumscribed life: heard in the bleachers after the game, passed around at sleepovers and bus rides, whispered in the shadows at the video game arcade.

“It went like this: there was this family that used to live there, the Kochers, and the son got sick and the dad thought it was something like a curse,” Eric tells me. “So, he kills his son but then the whole family gets sick and they all die because the son comes back and kills them all. And the son was supposed to be buried in the back yard, in the well.”

Legend had it that the son’s ghost walked the countryside at night and haunted the shell of the old Kocher homestead. He could be seen, it was said, on certain nights but no one could say exactly which nights. He was chalk-white and moaned in despair, or he was covered in dirt and blood and growled like a dog.

Whatever the description, one detail that all storytellers agreed upon was that the Kocher place wasn’t just creepy, it was haunted by the past, by an act so evil that it seemed the very land the house was built upon could not forgive it.

“Chris said we ought to go up some night and check it out,” Eric tells me. “Like a dumb-ass, I said, Why not tonight?” And Eric later said that Chris smiled wide at his friend’s invitation.

Eric had a permit, so they drove up in his family’s old station wagon, arriving just before midnight. They parked at the end of a dirt road and walked the rest of the way through trees and bushes guided by the light of the full moon and the boys’ cigarette lighters.

At the top of a small rise lay the old Kocher place, or what was left of it. Intentional neglect had collapsed the walls and roof, while generations of kids like Chris and Eric had gnawed away at what was left.

A weathered square was all that remained of the home’s foundation. Weeds and small trees had long ago claimed the interior, and only the imagination could describe the house that had stood in the spot a hundred years before.

Eric and Chris paused at the foundation’s edge. It lay like a giant tombstone, seeming to mark some boundary, but its power and its purpose were elusive, suggesting a house, a murder, a ghost, a story.

Chris produced two cans of beer from his coat pocket and gently rested his right foot on a foundation stone. Eric got out his pack of cigarettes and shared them with Chris. The boys drank and smoked, conversing quietly in the vacant face of night.

They waited. They waited for a sound like a snarl or a smell like a corpse or the sight of a see-through, floating sheet or something they didn’t know what.

“We were just hanging out for a while, teasing each other about how lame it was,” Eric recalls, “and then Chris says, Where’s the well?”

In the dark, it was hard to make out anything past the little clearing where the foundation stood, but as the boys searched the perimeter, they found a small hole. “We were looking for a big thing, like the kind of well you might see in a cartoon, I guess,” Eric tells me. “This thing was just a hole lined with bricks. It was pretty small, too.”

Having almost stumbled on top of the well, the boys stood uncomfortably close to its rim. Eric felt an out of place chill in the summer night air. Chris wondered aloud if the small hole at their feet was even big enough to fit a boy’s body. Eric didn’t answer.

Chris continued his speculations and Eric sensed a strange fascination with the Kocher place, with the old legend, and with the murder of the little boy. “I asked him flat out, I said, Why are you so concerned with it,” Eric recalls, “and I guess there was something about my tone, something set him off, like I was accusing him of something and then he told me why.”

Chris revealed to his friend that the Kocher place wasn’t just some old house, not to him. Chris’s grandfather had married a woman named Mary Koch, shortened from Kocher after the events that wiped out her Great Uncle’s doomed family. The boy buried in the well is my cousin, Eric told Chris, and blood will have blood. 

“Then we heard something scratching,” Eric remembers, “and it sounds like it might be coming from inside the well.”

A sound like clawing began to rise from the old well, from the ground beneath the boys’ feet. Chris looked at Eric and Eric looked at Chris. Their fear was a kind of excitement, an anticipation that their world was about to change, maybe not for the better, but at least it would be a change.

“It was getting louder, this scratching sound,” Eric tells me, “because whatever it was was crawling up the well, it was coming up from below.”

The boys began to back up and Eric tripped and fell on the rough ground. The sound was getting louder. “I was hoping and praying it was just a raccoon,” Eric tells me.

Instead he saw a lean dark figure quietly emerge from the well. Rotted clothes covered its body and strings of black hair obscured the face. It crawled on the wet grass with stick-like hands, its head turning from side to side to taste the air.

It was the size of a boy, so young and small, and now Eric wondered how it had fit inside the hole. 

Eric was still on the ground, clambering backward over rocks and fallen branches while Chris stood still, seemingly transfixed by the strange sight.

The figure – the boy – stopped and turned its head upwards to look at Chris. Eric got to feet and ran, screaming at Chris to do the same. But, before he ran blindly into the dark forest, Eric saw the bestial face, the blood red eyes, and the hideous fangs that marked the boy as something more terrifying, more deadly than the ghost of a murdered child he had expected was ahunting this place.

“It was a damn vampire,” Eric tells me. “We went to look for a ghost, but we found a freakin’ vampire!”

After an hour of being lost in the woods, Eric got back to the car and found that Chris was not there. “I thought he must be lost, too,” Eric remembers. “I figured I’d lock the doors and have to wait for him.”

Just before dawn, Eric saw a dark figure emerge from the trees. It was Chris. Eric stopped and stared at his friend for a moment before unlocking the door.

“The ride home was quiet,” Eric tells me. “When I asked what happened, Chris said it was just a raccoon.” But as Eric glanced at his friend sitting beside him in the dark car, it seemed to Eric that the strange mark on his neck could have been dirt or a scratch from a tree branch or something else.

“I didn’t see Chris much after that,” Eric tells me. “He seemed different. He started hanging out with a different crowd. And then his mom got sick and she died.”

Eric ended up in a vocational school and now operates his own heating and cooling business. Chris’s life took a darker path. He disappeared for a time after his mother’s death and people said he had gotten into drugs and moved away or was in jail or was dead. “No one seems to know for sure where he went or what happened to him,” Eric tells me. “I guess he’s kind of like those ghost stories now.”

Maybe all that remains of Chris is a legend, something people tell each other to give a scare, to teach a lesson, or just keep the boredom at bay for one more night.

It won't stay buried!

Next week on Scary True: A little legend tripping leads to  secrets unearthed and bodies unburied! Blood will have blood! Come and play with "The Boy in the Well."