These stories have to do with the "hooded entities" that many others have also encountered. The only major difference is that I live very far from the U.S., in Finland, Scandinavia. I'm 21 and still don't quite know what I've seen and felt.
In spring (about March-April) 2003, I visited my grandfather who lives in an old cottage near the city Salo. The cottage belongs to a farming family/literature society that was established in the mid-18th century. The oldest barns were built in 1849-1855. This is about as south of Finland you can get, so the coast is only 1 km from his yard. The cottage lies beside an old side road that is surrounded by an old overgrown forest with sporadic clearings.
Well, I was minding my own business, making some structure by using rocks and sticks from the ground, not far from his cottage, maybe 10-15 yards. I was outside on my own. The grownups were inside drinking coffee. It was daylight, about 2 p.m.
As I was crouching down, I suddenly felt a "presence", nothing intimidating, but I felt strange and sort of "froze up". As the feeling grew stronger, I felt a buzzing sound. I did not hear anything. As looked up, a head, covered in what resembled an old, dirty potato sack, floated from behind a tree, passed me by 3 feet in front of my eyes, stopped, and then continued behind another tree where it simply vanished.
The strange buzz continued a while and I sat still in total shock, not believing my eyes. I did not see a body, no arms or legs and no torso, only the head. No visible face, only pitch dark "contours" of a skull and two looming eyes emitting a sort of glow. Whatever it was, I know I saw it, and it was not normal.
I did not speak about it to anyone for many years. The spooky part continues in mid-winter 2005 when I was angry because my mother had said no to my request. (I have no recollection of what it may have been; anything from candy to a pellet gun.) Again, we were at the same forest and my grandpa's cottage, This time I lunged into the forest, deciding to walk as far as I possibly could. The snow was more than ankle deep and the weather clear, but a bit snow came falling down. It was light outdoors, so I could see perfectly in front of me.
I had walked about a mile along the clearing of some old tractor ditch when the very same "presence" summoned again. I knew it was familiar, but I was startled when I started to hear the muffled sound of stepping in the hardened snow, mimicking me, but a much more heavy sound. As I looked up, I saw the snow flying up at decisive intervals, about two feet from each other, exactly across the path I was making, but about 20 feet in front of me.
I thought it was a mouse puffing up the snow as it was digging through, so I started to walk faster to get a glimpse of the creature. When I got about 8-10 feet away, the snow (that still had been puffing up at the same rate as earlier) stopped. This was when I really got freaked out as I noticed that the muffled sound of walking also stopped.
When I reached the last small pile of "puffed" snow, I saw footprints a real sturdy boot or clog clearly had made the phenomenon altogether. I gasped for air and ran back at the cottage -- sprinted back actually.
When I came down to the cottage, my mom and grandpa noticed that I was shocked and asked what had happened. The only thing I could say was, "I saw something...."
A few years later, in 2009, we visited my grandpa again (not a rarity; we often visit him with no strange situations). Two of my uncles also were there. I think it was my grandfather's birthday; that would make it 8 February. One of my uncles is very religious, and the other one is highly spiritual, so "ghosts and demons" are nothing new to them.
While we talked about all kinds of things, my grandpa suddenly turned to the older of my uncles and said, "You know, I've been hearing those sounds again, that knocking and hissing."
I did not have a clue what he talked about, so I just listened to them. My uncle responded, "So, do you still think it's out there?"
"Don't know. Maybe. But I ain't seen it."
I got curious and asked what they were talking about. Then my uncle told me the following. His words:
"Well, me and Kate (his girlfriend) came over here last week. We came to the house and Leo [my grandpa] greeted us as usual, but I was only on the porch when Kate said that she had forgotten her cell phone in the car. So I went after it. I had the car parked by the old tree stump (about 15-16 meters away) and I got this strange feeling I was watched.
"And as I sat in the car, I began feeling ill, like I was about to throw up, and then I heard some humming noise behind the car. Well, I got out, locked the door, and turning around I saw it...""Saw what?"
"This... thing. About a metre (3'5") tall figure, staring at me, in the middle of the road, just... making some sound, sounded like... chanting."
"What did it look like?"
"It was... bulky.. had no apparent face, and had some king of hooded poncho over itself. Brown."
Now I startled. I hadn't talked about my sighting to anyone, ever, and now my uncle was describing that same "thing" that I saw.
"And the eyes. It's hard to explain... they were there... but still not. They just hung inside the hood. It had its hand covered by that poncho thing, but it had nothing on its feet. It was like bird claws, only more mass to them, and the skin on the feet was like... rat tail skin or something."
I was panicking and stopped him to tell what I saw many years earlier. He was stunned when I could cite details about the figure and that "presence" I had felt. My grandad added that he had been hearing strange sounds all around the premises and someone had been knocking on doors and windows the past weeks. He said he hadn't seen anything out there, but he knew something was watching him.
"Well, what did you do? Did you get scared?" I asked my uncle.
"No. Not scared. It didn't scare me. I just calmly prayed to the Lord and shouted to the being to go away from here. The sound it made got stronger a while, and it seemed to move around a bit. Then I just walked indoors, not looking at it at all. Told the whole deal to Kate and Leo here, and they went out they only heard some sound, but did not see anything."
Now three years later, I, my uncle, grandfather or anyone we know haven't seen anything strange outside my grandfather's cottage. Strange noises still occur regularly, especially in the morning hours. My uncle questioned the priest in his parish about what he knew about the beings, and he told my uncle that he had heard about someone who had seen a white horse running on the fields, then wrapping itself around their car and, not bound by laws of physics, following the car until suddenly running into the forest.
What we really got freaked about was that the priest knew about pagans that had worshiped their gods around the area my grandad lives, and they sacrificed children in some occult rituals at the very end of the 19th century along the coastline. The whole story is true.
