Project Strange

I left my flat in Leeds at 7 PM to drive to my parents' in Harrogate. It's a 45-minute drive I've done hundreds of times. I remember joining the A61 and then nothing — absolute blank — until I became aware of myself sitting in my parked car in a layby outside Ripon. My phone said 11:23 PM. The car was facing south, which is back towards Leeds. I had driven roughly 60 miles but had no memory of any of it. The fuel gauge had barely moved. My hands were shaking. There was a smell in the car I can only describe as burnt copper. Three weeks later I started having the same dream on repeat — a white room, a sound like cicadas, figures that are tall but wrong somehow. I've since been to a hypnotherapist. I don't want to share what came up until I've processed it more.

I know how this sounds. I am a structural engineer. I was inspecting the Silver Bridge replacement in Point Pleasant, WV — routine maintenance assessment — when I saw it perched on the upper chord of the truss at dusk. Humanoid, easily seven feet, wings folded against its back like a cloak. Red eyes, no question. It turned its head toward me with no body movement, held eye contact for what felt like ten seconds, then dropped off the edge and was gone. No sound of wings. I found stress fractures in the section directly below where it had been standing — fractures that were not in last year's report. I flagged them immediately. I am not a superstitious person. I do not know what I saw.

The following is a transcript of the final recorded transmission from research station Ouroboros-7, recovered from a waterproof hard drive found floating 340 nautical miles off the coast of Norway. The crew of three had been conducting deep-sea acoustic monitoring. The recording begins mid-sentence. [00:00] — ...the sound has changed again. Maren thinks it's geological but I've been running the spectral analysis for six hours and there is structure in it. Deliberate structure. Maren won't look at the printouts. [00:47] — We've lost contact with the surface relay. Maren says it's the weather. Jonas hasn't spoken since yesterday morning. He just sits at the hydrophone array with his headphones on. Whenever I try to take them off him he holds them against his ears and makes a sound I don't have a word for. [02:13] — I put my own headphones on tonight. Just for a second, just to understand what Jonas was hearing. I understand now. I wish I didn't. The sound is not geological. The sound is a question. It has been asking the same question for a very long time. I think tonight it finally received an answer. [03:58] — [sound of water] [no further transmission]

I was driving westbound on the M8 near Bathgate at around 11:40 PM when my passenger grabbed my arm and told me to look up. A massive triangular craft — completely silent — was moving slowly overhead at maybe 500 feet. Three white lights at each corner and a dim red pulse in the centre. It was enormous, easily the size of a football pitch. We pulled over. A car behind us did the same. The craft drifted northwest and disappeared behind the Bathgate Hills in under two minutes. No sound at any point. My dashcam was running but the footage came out as a dark smear — you can see the lights but nothing definitive. I filed a report with the CAA the next morning. They acknowledged receipt but I never heard back.

The maps started appearing in my letterbox every Tuesday. No postage. No return address. Just a folded sheet of paper, hand-drawn in ink so fine it might have been made with a single hair. Each one depicted a place that did not exist — coastlines bent the wrong way, rivers that flowed uphill in the legend, cities named things like Veth and Carrow-on-the-Seam. I began to notice details that repeated across different maps. The same lighthouse appearing in different geographies. The same small boat, always anchored offshore, always empty. On the eighth map, I found a street I recognised. My street. My house, faithfully rendered, with one difference: a door on the side of the building that has never existed. That night I went outside with a torch and put my hand against the brickwork where the door should be. The mortar was warm. And something on the other side knocked back.

When I was sixteen, my dad bought an old camcorder at a garage sale. It was one of those bulky models from the early 2000s. The seller said it still worked, but he looked strangely relieved when Dad handed over the money. At the time, I thought nothing of it. The tape inside was already half full. Most of the footage was boring family videos. Birthdays. Christmas. A dog chasing a sprinkler. Then there was the final recording. The timestamp read: **October 14th, 2007 - 2:13 AM** The camera was pointed out of a bedroom window. The person holding it was breathing heavily. Outside was a dark field illuminated only by moonlight. A woman's voice whispered: > "It's back." The camera zoomed toward a distant tree line. At first I couldn't see anything. Then I noticed a figure standing among the trees. It was tall. Far too tall. Even at that distance it appeared nearly as high as the lower branches. The camera shook. The woman whispered again. > "Don't move." The figure stepped forward. The image became grainy. For a moment it vanished in the static. Then it was closer. Not walking. Closer. As if several seconds had simply disappeared from the recording. The woman gasped. The figure now stood halfway across the field. Its limbs were impossibly long. Its head tilted at an angle no human neck should allow. Then the footage ended. No fade. No explanation. Just black. I became obsessed with the tape. I spent weeks trying to find out where it had been recorded. Eventually I discovered a clue. A road sign briefly appeared in an earlier family video. A small town three hours from where I lived. The next weekend I drove there. I found the house. Or at least what remained of it. The property had burned down years earlier. Only the foundation remained. An elderly man mowing a nearby lawn told me the story. A woman and her daughter had lived there. One night both vanished. No bodies were ever found. The police searched for weeks. Nothing. The man pointed toward the field behind the property. Then he said something that made my skin crawl. > "Funny thing was..." He stopped mowing. > "People kept reporting someone standing out there after they disappeared." I laughed nervously. He didn't. > "Always at night." I left soon after. That should have been the end of it. It wasn't. A month later I digitized the tape. I wanted to preserve it before it degraded further. The software extracted every frame individually. While reviewing them, I noticed something strange. The figure wasn't only in the final recording. It appeared throughout the tape. Hidden. Watching. In a birthday video it stood outside a kitchen window. In another clip it was reflected in a television screen. Always distant. Always partially obscured. No one in the videos ever seemed to notice it. I checked the timestamps. The earliest appearance occurred nearly four years before the final recording. It had been there the entire time. Watching the family. Getting closer. I couldn't sleep after that. Every night I found myself staring through my bedroom window. Partly because I was scared. Partly because I felt ridiculous. Then one night I saw something. A person standing near the edge of the woods behind my house. Too far away to identify. Too dark to see clearly. I convinced myself it was a tree. The next night it was closer. The night after that, closer still. I stopped looking. I closed the curtains. I deleted the footage. I threw the camcorder away. That was six years ago. I haven't seen the figure since. At least I don't think I have. But sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and find my phone unlocked. The camera app is open. And there are new photos in my gallery. Pictures taken while I was asleep. Pictures of my room. Pictures of my bed. Pictures from the corner of the ceiling. As if someone is standing up there. Watching. Getting closer. The worst part? Last week I looked through the latest photo. Zoomed into the reflection in my bedroom window. Outside, standing in the darkness beyond the glass... ...was a figure. And this time it wasn't looking at me. It was looking directly at the camera.

This isn't a story but I wanted to welcome the new folks who are taking part in creating the largest community driven source of knowledge. We want to build a space for sightings of the unexplained, the creepy, and the fascinating. We also have a space for folks who go out in the field to investigate. Under the Investigation menu. You can list your team, the equipment, and what you found so other people can get amongst it! Lastly, we have fictional stories. If you have a great campfire story or something along those lines, share it here so other people can have trouble sleeping at night! 😱 Thank you all again - Proph