11. Each chicken had a hole in their back and they were completely hollowed out.

When I was 11, I lived by the woods. My family and I had lived in this old house on the outskirts of a small rundown town for a couple years at this point but I never got used to the woods at night. It was the sounds. There were plenty of things about that area that were genuinely creepy, like: just across the gravel from our house was a small family cemetery with graves that date back before America was officially America. There was a bog that often swallowed entire deer (my German shepherd would bring back so many death trophies and my step dad nearly died from pneumonia when he fell in and got stuck up to his waist). There were only two other houses for miles and one was a hog confinement (their screams at night sound almost human). All these things and more were reason enough to be a little spooked at night outside but it was this one incident in particular that still gives me chills.

Since I lived out in the country, I had to get up really early to commute to school. We had some animals but I wouldn’t say we were farmers. We had horses, dogs, cats, and chickens. More chores as a kid were to feed and water the animals before and after school. After school was fine but before school…I dreaded it.

Since it was always really early it was still very dark out, especially in the winter. The chicken hutches were kept several yards away from the house and were right on the edge of the woods that surrounded our house. I would put on a headlamp and grab a bucket for water and another for feed from the shed. I remember vividly that it was on a particularly still winter morning. Pitch black and not a thing stirring. And as I got closer to the hutches…to the woods, I realized something. It was too quiet. Every morning, or any time of day for that matter, you could hear the chickens clucking or softly cooing. Not this time. It was dead quiet. As I got closer I felt very unnerved and my young mind would always race with the thoughts of what could be in the woods (I grew up loving those Scary Stories books- the illustrations were so fucked up). It was always a battle to push those thoughts and images from my mind. I came around the corner slowly, hearing only the soft crunch of the snow beneath my boots. And that’s when I saw them. The chickens were stalk still, face down, silent. The beam of light cast from my headlamp passed over each and every one of them. I could see small flecks of blood on some of the wood frame. Only a little though. And this is the weird part. When I got closer to get a better look, I could see that each chicken had a hole in their back and they were completely hollowed out. Clean. There was no sign of a struggle, hardly any blood which is incredible considering they were opened and emptied and the strangest thing of all was all the latches were still locked. There were no holes in the chicken wire and now other points of entry. It would have been easier to point blame at some animal if there was a hole in the hutches or something (there are foxes and coyotes in the area) but there was nothing. Not a trace. I was petrified, or at least I definitely when I heard something shift in the woods behind me, and I mean RIGHT behind me.

But it must have been my own boots because when I had the courage to turn around, there was nothing.

I still think about it every once and a while and wonder. It’s the sounds from those woods that I can’t identify that worry me.