Hello Folks,

I love reading your stories so I thought I would include one of my own. I am still not sure what happened at this house in Germany but I am very definitely sure that it happened.

My wife and I were married in April of 1972 and at the same time I was re-assigned to duty at Sembach Air Base, Sembach, Germany. By the winter of 1973 we had rented a beautiful old house from a wonderful couple named Karl and Alfreda Jakob. The house was located at #12 Muhlstrasse, Munchweiler, Germany. This was just a few miles from Sembach Air Base, and was generally located in the south of Germany, near Kaiserslautern. At the time we lived there the house was 160 years old. I am sorry that we lost touch with Karl and Alfreda. They were some of the nicest people I have ever known. As far as that goes, we were the only Americans living in this village and the people there were top notch and we lived a quiet existence.

Our first child, a boy, was born while we lived there. His coming seemed to manifest a presence that my wife and I were really not aware of. There had been a few noises and such but we really didn't think much about it. Sometimes it would feel as though we were being watched. As our son grew through the first months of life there were many occurrences and this is only one of them. As time goes by I will relate stories that happened in the house but the one I tell now concerns something without.

The baby was about six or seven months old. As babies of that age sometimes do, he was crying and seemed to want to. My wife was letting him cry it out for a little while. He was in our bedroom in the crib. Our bedroom was on the back side of the house. There was a small walkway beside the house and a concrete wall. The back yard was on the side of a hill and the ground was at a level at the top of that wall, just about even with the bedroom window. The walkway was less than two feet wide. The house had upstairs bedrooms but we hardly ever used them.

From the backyard one had to go down some steps beside our bedroom and then open an arched door in an eight foot high brick wall to reach the front yard. We were blessed to have grass and this was the outside passage front to back. The arched door was wrought iron covered with plexiglass and had a iron dead bolt that latched it. Once in the front yard, there was a wrought iron fence at the street and the yard itself was about two and a half feet higher than the street and the fence was about four feet high. Our neighbors to the right were the last house before the trail up to the woods and the back side of both our houses was open to the fields.

My landlady had instructed us that it was very important that we close and lock the wooden shutters over all the windows and lock the deadbolt in the outside gate every night.

It was after dark, around nine o'clock this evening when the baby was crying when we heard something in the backyard, outside our bedroom window. Whatever it was, it was making an eerie sound, mimicking the baby crying. Whatever it was, it was big. We could hear it drawing breath into its lungs and wailing with a sound that would chill you right up the spine. Standing in the back yard by the window put it just about two feet away from the shutters.

I had no gun, being a foreigner in Germany. The thing both frightened and angered me. We listened to it for about ten or fifteen minutes. I finally decided that I would take out my bowie knife, throw open the shutters, and attack it. My yelling at it through the open window and through the wooden shutters had no effect on it. We then decided that giving it access to the house in this fashion was not a good idea.

I then thought that I would go out the front (since we had no back door) and go around the house and take on the brute. My wife didn't want me to go but I found out later that she just didn't want to be in the house alone. Like I said, the thing was big -- by its sound. Its wail was a high sound, almost a scream. And in between screams and wails we could hear low guttural growls similar to that of a lion or big cat.

I finally exclaimed, "I'm going out. We need some relief. I grabbed my knife and headed for the front door. I also took a hiking staff with a metallic pointed end. It took two full turns of the giant skeleton key to get the door open. By this time I had redirected my fear to an attack attitude and was prepared to jolt the damn thing like it was doing to us.

Just as I opened the front door I could see the thing coming out from beside our house. It looked like a wolf. It was jet black and had long, coarse looking fur. It was just over three feet high at the shoulder. It glanced at me and ran across the front yard (about forty or fifty feet) and leapt over the wrought iron fence. As it landed on the sidewalk it ook off at a run and disappeared past my neighbors house and up the track to the woods.

I walked around the house and into the back yard. The wrought iron door stood agape. To this day I have yet to figure out how the thing opened that iron dead bolt latch!

G. Hopkins
celmicro@dorite.use.com

 
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