It was a mid-summer night and I had all four years of high school still ahead of me. I didn't work and I could basically do whatever I wanted in the summer. This called for a lot of sleepovers, especially with my best friend Greg. We usually slept at his house because he had the perfect man-cave - equipped with a big TV, two couches to crash on (post sugar-rush), an XBOX360, a laptop (for ChatRoulette and Omegle, of course), and a fridge. That's just about all our sleepovers consisted of, with one exception; 'Ding Dong Ditching'. This was the climax of each and every sleepover.

Unfortunately, with time, his parents developed a sixth sense and would somehow know whenever we left the house to do it at 3am. They'd wait until I left the next day and then they'd aggressively lecture him about how we aren't allowed to 'Ding Dong Ditch' anymore. After a few times of this happening, we had to drop the most exhilarating part of our sleepovers. Disappointing, but we had a plan. Alright, so there was basically your background info. Okay, Tyler, let's stop prolonging things and get into the actual story.

So, on this particular night, we decided to stay over my house instead. The plan was that we would sleep in my backyard, beneath my dad's tent. We could run an extension cord from the garage for the laptop, and we wouldn't have to worry about sneaking out of the house in the middle of the night to go outside. Perfect. We did our fair share of ChatRoulette-ing for the night, but finally 3am rolled around and we decided it was time to go out. Our mutual friend C.J. lived just under a half a mile down the street and around a slight bend. Our plan was to go harass his family by ringing their doorbell and then hiding in a previously planned location to watch for a reaction (the usual gig). We begin the excursion and it was silent outside. Not a car in sight, most houses didn't have a single light turned on, and we were just joking around. Just finishing 8th grade where we were the 'upperclassmen', we thought we were the coolest, toughest, and smartest kids around. We were making jokes like 'what if we see two other guys and we get into a fight... we'd definitely kick their asses' and we made other over-confident remarks like 'what if two beautiful girls crossed our path... we'd definitely invite them back to our tent and have ourselves a great night'. Basically just stupid, hypothetical situations that had about a lesser chance of happening than us getting struck by lightning on this warm, clear summer night. Anyways, we got about 3/4 of the way to his house and to our astonishment, we saw a girl and she's walking towards us! It wasn't the girl we had imagined in ours heads, though. This appeared to be a grown woman, presumably in her 40s, and she had her head down while she dragged one leg. I felt like I was in a movie. This person was about a 1/4 of a mile away and all we were able to see was her silhouette caused by the fading beam of light coming from a streetlight that was across the street from her. Thinking quickly and panicking, we look to our right and there is a white picket fence that is about 15 feet long at the edge of someone's yard, with trees and bushes by its sides. It wasn't the best hiding spot possible, but it sufficed for our unorthodox circumstance. We silently rushed over to it and crouched behind it. Luckily, she had never seen us and we were hidden pretty well. With our hearts beating out of our chests, Greg and I were forced to wait for her to pass us. Ding Dong Ditching C.J. Mellen's house was completely out of the picture at this point. We were in survival mode.

We were also in Tyngsboro MA, not Detroit MI. The logical explanation would be that she got shot or stabbed and was trying to get home, but Tyngsboro is not some 'rough city'. It's better described as a 'calm town', I'd say.

So she finally passed us and by a pure miracle, she hadn't noticed us. I couldn't really make anything out as she passed us because it was so dark, but Greg said she was holding a small black box. I have no idea what that means, but it's just another odd piece to this even odder story. So now we're trapped - this injured, demonized, undead, or [whatever other adjective you may have in mind] person who was luckily cruising at a rate of about 1 mph (the average human walking pace is 3.1 mph - thanks Google), was now in our way. So if we wanted to get back to my house ASAP and literally run away from our problem, that wasn't even possible. We waited about a half an hour, just for good measure, and then carefully headed back to my dad's house while strolling down the middle of the street to avoid the dark/wooded regions on either side of the road. We were both stupefied and in shock. We eventually made it back alive and stayed in the tent for about an hour or two until the emerging sunlight forced us back inside of the house. To this day, and I'm now mid-way through college, it remains one of the scariest events I've ever witnessed. It remains unexplained which adds to the mysteriousness aspect of it. Thanks for reading all the way through.