Your True Tales
October 2004 – Page 13

The Hooded Figure
by Chris

In the fall of 1981, I was enrolled at a college in my hometown. Five or six of my friends and I were walking around campus laughing and generally having a good time together. As daylight started to fade, one friend, "Mark," suggested we walk to an empty and rundown dorm that was scheduled to be torn down so a new one could be built. We were looking for something scary to do since it was Halloween.

We decided to walk through the dorm with its broken windows and graffiti-covered walls. We weren't there long. After a few "boos" and grabbing of ankles, we left. Someone then suggested walking to a small cemetery at the edge of campus. A rusty, worn, chain-link fence encircled the few graves of past college faculty and their relatives. It wasn't long before I felt... "something." I didn't feel this nervousness at the dorm. I didn't say anything to anyone. I just waited for what, I had no idea, and just a few minutes later I heard the crunch and rhythm of footsteps shuffling through the leaves on the ground. Some of the others heard it and we all looked in the direction of the footsteps, and when we didn't see anyone, we assumed it was another friend trying to scare us.

We laughed, at first, and the footsteps continued. No one commented again about the footsteps, but every couple of minutes I would look down the length of the fence. I squinted my eyes, trying to bring into focus the figure of our visitor, but I couldn't see anyone, even as the crunch of leaves got louder, got closer.

Then, to the left of my vision, coming from the dark edge of the woods, I saw it. Vague in shape, it was definitely cloaked in black head to foot. It seemed to move in spurts of speed and I saw it, in spurts of speed, and then, as though time fast-forwarded, it would be ahead of my speed of sight – closer to me than before until it stopped at the corner post of the fence. I blinked my eyes a few times, thinking my contacts were the problem, but they weren't.

The figure changed shape from a thin, tall form as it turned to its left and faced us, cloaked and hooded, though no sight of arms nor flesh – no eyes to look at for familiarity. No shape of feet, even though the hem stopped inches above the leaves and grass. I looked at my friends, but they were talking to each other. I looked back and the figure was moving just as it had before. It was at this point that I wheeled away from the whole affair and without saying a word ran uphill to the first lighted building I came to.

I felt someone running beside me. I turned to look and was relieved when I saw one of my friends. We stopped running and asked each other what we saw, and we both said the same words, saw the same vision. Since that night, I have seen my friend often. We live on the same street, but didn't know it. Except for one occasion a couple of years after that Halloween, we have never talked about what we saw that night. I've never seen the cloaked stranger since then.

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