The Slave Barns

Ilive in Central Illinois and south of my town in the country are what are referred to as "The Slave Barns". Slaves were actually kept there are treated badly and as you can imagine, many died while in these barns. But of course, that was a long time ago.

When my father was in high school, he and some friends were dared to camp out at the barns which are located deep in the woods, they accepted. The reason for this dare was it was rumored to be haunted yet no one knew for sure. Now, where the barns are located in the woods, you would have to have a flashlight or some sort of light source to even get to where they were and there was only a 3-foot wide path leading to where they were. As the guys were sitting around a fire, talking, they started to hear things. Like people crying and moaning like they were in some sort of pain. And loud cracks like a whipping or beating. They had a camera with them and they had been taking pictures of themselves fooling around. After they heard the noises, they all got really freaked out and took off with a flashlight to where their cars were alongside the road. They were all so scared, they just left everything where it was and the next day they planned to return to get their stuff.

The next day when they arrived back to the spot where they were, their camp had been destroyed, shredded and cut. There was nothing left that was any good to keep. So, once again, they just left scared out of their minds.

A couple weeks later, they still had no clue what had happened and still don't to this day. They developed the roll of film that had the pictures that they had taken that night before the incident. All the photos were white and you couldn't tell what had been photographed. It was dark out and there was no reason why they should have turned out like that. That still remains un-explained.

That event happened in the 70's and this is MY story:

Everyone knows about the things that happened there in the earlier years from stories from their parents, my friends and I were extremely curious as to what was really going on there so we decided one night to see for ourselves. It was in the middle of the summer, July I think and it was a hot and humid night. We parked along the road and got out off the car and turned on our flashlights to find the narrow path that led to our destination. When we got further into the woods closer to the barns there weren't as many trees, but it was getting chillier the farther we went. The first thing we noticed when we got to the barns was the foul odor that seemed to come from nowhere. We were just looking around, shining our flashlights in various spots to see what was there. There was nothing out of the ordinary at first, just the smell. There were 7 of us there that night. We decided to split up and look through the barns. I was with two other guys and the other group was a guy and three girls. We split and went our own ways. My group entered a large barn. What was weird was the hay lofts. They had new boards as steps and they hay was wet yet there hadn't been rain for weeks. BUT we never looked to see what was making them wet. We were getting scared and we got out of the building. We started hollering for the others saying that we wanted to leave. No one answered. Out of nowhere, we heard them screaming "It's rising!! It's Rising!!!" as they came running out of another barn. They never stopped running till they got out of the woods and near the car. But when we got to the car, we noticed something. My windshield had been busted in the rear of the car. It looked as though it had had a rock thrown through it yet there was no glass inside the car. We just got in the car and got the heck out of there. It was quite a ways back to town and for most of the ride, we were all too scared to talk about what had happened. Finally I asked "what was "rising"?" One of the girls said there was a black cross made of sticks that looked as if it was nailed to a wall in the barn. But when they looked at it more, it wasn't nailed to anything, it was floating in mid-air and started rising up before them.

We never talked much about that night. And we still don't. We'll never know just exactly what it was that was there that night.