I'm still not sure what or who it was that my wife (then girlfriend) and I saw on that dark and eerie September night. We had spent a nice Saturday evening in 2003 at a low-key birthday party for a dear friend in Tualatin, Oregon, and were driving home to Portland in the early hours of that following Sunday morning. My wife had limited her drinking and cut it off a few hours early, knowing she would be the driver that night. I had a few beers, but by the drive home I was sober and in a good state of mind. Knowing we were both in a sober and sound state of mind is what makes what we saw that much more confusing and upsetting.
We were coming up on the I-5 freeway from Tualatin, probably about a mile from the ramp, when my wife saw a pair of headlights coming up on us from behind at a pretty fast rate. The road was otherwise vacant of other traffic. Immediately she assumed it was a cop, so she mentioned it to me. I turned and saw the lighnts and told her to get over one lane to the left. By now the lights were caught up to us and as we switched lanes the car sped up to pass.
Just before the lane divided and forked off into the on ramp, the car caught up parallel to us. I heard my wife say in a trembling voice, "What the heck is that?" I turned to look in the direction she was looking. What I saw still terrifies to this day.
The car was small and in the shape of an old VW bug (but I cannot confirm that it was a VW). The driver wore a tiny top hat over his dreadlock hair. His head was turned a complete 90 degrees to the right, as if swiveling on his neck and looking straight at us with no regard for the road. His face is what frightened us the most. He was smiling at us, but his mouth -- his smile -- was not at all normal. It was huge. Distorted. It looked like something out of a bad horror film.
As those few seconds passed that we drove next to him, his smile grew... and grew... and grew until the parting of his lips exposed his small sharp teeth. His eyes also changed, but I could not explain in words exactly how... or into what they changed.
We were silent. I don't remember any noise. Not even the road under our tires, the CD playing in our stereo, or the words of shock I KNOW were leaving our mouths. I do remember, however, that those few seconds seemed to last a long, long time. Everything slowed down and I felt as though I stared at his grin for minutes, hours, or who knows how long.
Then, as the road divided and we headed down the ramp to the freeway, he turned his head back to face forward and I felt as though a daze or weight or even maybe a curse just suddenly lifted and all things turned back to normal. I watched behind us for as long as I could see the tail lights of that car. They quickly faded, and that's when our terror set in.
Do we call the police? Will he somehow find us at our home? What was he? Was that real? Are we okay mentally? Who do we ask for help? Do we need help? Was that the devil? And most important, what the hell just happened to us?
The rest of the drive home was spent watching to make sure we were not being followed. We spoke about it, but both avoided talking too much and becoming overwhelmingly terrified. we got home without being followed and didn't speak of it for days, maybe weeks. But when the day came that we did finally talk about that night, the terror of what we saw became very true and real after comparing our experiences to confirm what had happened and what we had seen.
Now it is a story we have no understanding of. It's something we speak of very rarely and almost never to other people. This is the first time our story has been told completely and totally for others to read. I guess my motivation for this telling is to hopefully connect with others who have either experienced the same thing or have knowledge concerning what happened to us.
