Midnight Sounds

Well, when I was about 14, which would be in '92, my mom got remarried to a guy who lived in a red cabin just off of the Elkhorn River in Waterloo, NE. When we moved in there, the place was basically a dump: no electricity, no running water, no carpet or paint. Just a bunch of old furniture, and a wood stove for heat in the summer. Well, we eventually fixed the place up, but that doesn't pertain to this story. When we first lived there, I slept on the floor in a sleeping bag, because I didn't have a bed yet. I have a cat, named Putty (Putchum, but she doesn't like to be called that) and she would sleep on my chest at night. I had a bad habit of staying up really late writing or drawing by lamplight, but that all stopped on the night that I heard strange sounds coming from everywhere at once. The first night, I was laying on the floor, thinking about starting at a new school, Putty laying on my chest. I was absently stroking her back, when she suddenly perked her head up and stared fixedly at the wall behind me. She didn't move a muscle, blink, or hardly breath. I turned my head, being somewhat superstitious anyway, but saw nothing. But I didn't dismiss that she saw something, because it is known that animals are more sensitive to electromagnetic forces and such than humans are. Well she sat like that for at least 15 minutes, when I heard what sounded like rapid gunfire, shouting, and , believe it or not, army drums. It sounded like I was in the middle of the Civil War, with thick cotton stuffed in my ears, for the sound was all around, loud, yet muffled. After a few minutes it stopped, and I eventually went to sleep. Over the following month or so, I continued to hear noises every night, yet no one lived near us, the closest house being 1/4 mile away with a levy between us. I have heard war, what seemed like ballroom chatter with soft music intermixed, and most unnerving of all, a small child's voice that said simply, and I quote "toot, toot". My cat continued to stare at empty space when these noises were manifesting themselves, and I just lay there, listening, trying to understand what I was hearing. I finally said something to my mom about it, and she just looked at me, then said "S--t, I thought I was just going "nucking futs"". Then one day I was in the driveway, a long gravel path that led to another gravel road, when I heard, plain as day, a car coming down the road. From where I was, I could only see about 20 feet up the road before my view was cut off by the cabin. I stood there waiting to see who it was, but I never saw a car. The sound of crunching gravel continued down the road, slowed at our gate, then came straight toward me. I just stood there, not believing what I heard, and the sound stopped right at my feet. Well, I ran into the house and told my mom and stepdad, and he said that I was not the first person to experience the "ghost car".

The only other thing to happen was when my brother, who is 3 years older than I, was spending the night (he lived with my dad). We were recording music off the radio onto some brand-new tapes. We filled up one side, by which time it was almost 12:30, and we rewound it to listen to it. But it was completely blank. I know the tape was not damaged, because we had rewound it earlier to make sure it was recording at the right volume. But still no music. We fast forwarded it, and when we hit play, after about 5 seconds of blank, a single word: "help". Very short, mans voice, deep, with a touch of reverb. We both kinda jumped and looked at each other. We rewound it to hear it again, but it was gone. We rewound the whole tape, and were going to listen to the whole thing to see if there was any more, but the music we recorded earlier was all we heard. First it wasn't there, with a solitary word in it's place, then it was. Well, my mom found a picture of Jesus Christ and a gold coloured metal cross with 4 rubies on it that had been my grandmothers, and hung them on the wall about a week later. After she did that, the noises stopped, and we never heard them again. I don't know what we heard, how or why, but I would stake my life that it was not natural.