Posted: 25 Aug 2021 10:11 AM PDT

A First Nations man told his grandson about an incident where he encountered a ‘winged alien’ in a tree. After shooting the being, and watching it fall, there was never any trace of it found.

“My grandfather was a real badass. He was born in Alberta, Canada during the early ’30s, and raised his three brothers on a reservation from the time he was 9. This was after his parents left for British Columbia with their only daughter, promised to return, and none of the boys ever saw them again. To make ends meet, he learned carpentry and worked as a laborer, and bare knuckle boxed against older men for extra cash. He learned how to track and hunt, and always came home with something to eat when work was scarce. When he was 14, he put the second oldest brother in charge of the household, left the rez in search of his parents and a better life, and never went back. That was the last time he saw any of his family members.

He spent several months riding the rails, befriending some transients while using his fighting skills to defend himself against others. He eventually made his way to Vancouver, the last known whereabouts of his parents and sister, and started working in a pulp mill. At 17, he met my grandmother, and the two eventually married, leading to him giving up his search for his family. They bought some land, and he spent his free time building several houses, which still stand today. One of those sat on the land he bought with my grandmother, which included acres of wooded area. On this land, my grandparents kept horses and small farm animals for eggs and meat.

My aunt was born in the early ’50s, and then my mother came along right before the end of the decade. As far as I’ve heard, nothing bad or strange really happened until my mom found an old Ouija board and played with it by herself. But, I don’t know if that has any relation to this story. My mother was around 8 when she was riding her horse through the wooded part of their acreage, when the horse stopped dead in its tracks. My mom tried to spur it on, but it was frozen in fear, and all of a sudden she smelled something like rotting garbage and meat. She pulled back on the reins and the horse instantly turned and took off back towards the house, almost knocking her off its back several times along the way.

Afterwards, that horse was never the same. It would try to kick her, and if she got on it, it would fall backwards, trying to crush her beneath it. Once, it started acting like its old self again, letting her climb onto it. But once she did, it ran towards the road and stopped abruptly, bucking her forward into the path of an oncoming car. My grandpa saw it happen and put a shotgun to its head, and the horse just kept breathing heavily and staring straight ahead. My mother barely missed being run over by a car that saw the horse coming and managed to swerve out of the way, and my grandmother begged my grandfather not to shoot the horse. He finally decided to give it away when he saw my mother wasn’t badly injured. That same horse fell on the next person to ride it, breaking her collarbone, and the father did what my grandpa said he should’ve done the first time.

After that, animals started going missing, and one of the hunting dogs was injured by something during an attack at night. My grandpa set out some traps and stayed in the hayloft above the barn with a shotgun and rifle beside him, and slept out there for several nights. He figured it was foxes, or maybe coyotes or wolves, or even a desperate bear, which is what he attributed the smell in the woods to and the horse’s reason for losing its mind. But nothing came the entire time he slept out there, and eventually he figured it had moved on to easier prey or died.

The day after he stopped sleeping in the barn, my mom was out near the tree line playing with the injured dog as it was healing. Out of nowhere, the dog started sniffing the air, then positioned itself between my mom and the trees, growling and barking. My grandpa heard the noise and came out, stopped in his tracks, and called back to my grandmother to bring his rifle, then whistled for the dogs. My grandma came out, handed him his gun, then asked what was going on. As the dogs all started to react like the first one, my grandfather pointed to one of the treetops, which looked longer and thicker than those around it, but it was very slightly moving.

It was at least six feet tall, he told me later on when he’d retell the story, but probably a good bit taller. He took aim and fired just as he saw a pair of wings start to open up. Whatever was up there was watching them, but he beat it to the punch. It was a kill shot, directly in the chest with a high powered rifle, and he instantly started running forward with all of the dogs following him as the thing plummeted to the ground, the breaking of tree branches wholly unmistakable. When he reached the impact point, he raised his rifle again and commanded the dogs forward to flush it out, but they all just stood in the spot and kept spinning around, trying to catch a scent that seemingly disappeared.

A pile of broken branches lay in an obvious landing spot, but beyond that there was no proof that anything had happened. No body, no blood, no trail. It had either disappeared or gone straight back up the way it came. He searched those woods for several days but never found a sign of what that thing was, and they didn’t see it or experience issues with the animals after that.

Decades later, when he was dying, he kept talking about how he saw something. In his delirium, he referred to it as an alien, but said it was coming back for him. I’ve never seen that man scared of anything in my life, but there was actual panic and fear in his voice. A few nights before he died, he had already been too weak to stand on his own for several days, and my grandmother awoke to the sound of a gunshot. She ran outside, fearing the worst, and saw my grandpa lowering his rifle, staring at something in the distance. She took the gun away and helped him back inside, and that was it.

I don’t know if whatever it was actually did come back for him, or if it was a hallucination of an old memory, but I’d like to think he went out with a final f*ck-you to the thing that tried to torment his family all those years ago.” ST

Phantoms & Monsters