The paranormal has always held great interest for me. I frequently read and study paranormal topics, though I've never been a part of any genuine paranormal investigations or "ghost hunts."
However, during my last semester in graduate school, my professor assigned a folklore project, and I decided to research the local folklore surrounding an alleged haunting in my small hometown of Pflugerville, Texas.
The haunted spot, known simply as Jake's Hill, is a small concrete bridge along a road bearing the same name. Its story is a standard one in small rural towns: Some farmer makes a deal with the devil. Winds up killing his wife and kids. He then hangs himself from the railroad emplacements next to where the concrete bridge currently stands. To this day, if you bring your car to a dead stop at one end of the bridge and shift the transmission into neutral, it will roll across the bridge, inexplicably brought into motion by some unseen, ethereal agents. Local legend holds that these agents are the disembodied spirits of Jake's sons, trying to push you away from their psychotic, demon-possessed father.
The story is hardly original. It exists in various incarnations throughout rural America--a fact I was well aware of going into the assignment. But it was unimportant for purposes of my project: I wasn't seeking to prove or disprove the haunting; rather, I was focusing solely on the local folklore surrounding the place, the stories and experiences people were willing to share.
As I conducted interviews, one of the more outlandish stories I collected came from a security guard working at the local HEB. He claimed he had encountered snarling, hairless, red-eyed "hell hounds" during one of his many trips to Jake's Hill. The story was so ridiculous I almost didn't include it in my report: Stories of phantom mists, disembodied screams, and ghosts pushing cars are one thing. Demon-possessed dogs were something entirely different and crossed into a completely different realm.
The story was so off-the-wall (even studies of the paranormal and folklore have their limits) that I promptly filed it in the deep recesses of my mind never to be retrieved...until a couple weeks later.
My sister had been helping me throughout my report, and we had visited Jake's Hill several times for research purposes. Late one night, as she was driving home alone from a friend's house, she was run off the road by a "huge, ugly" dog that "just appeared" in front of her. She struck a curb, and tore up the the side of her fender. Of course, I didn't connect her accident with the hell hound story; there was no reason to do so. This was one isolated incident.
Then, days later, I was up late one night reading for school. The door of my room was directly adjacent to the front door of the house, and just beyond the front door was a glass weather door. As I was reading a passage in Ed Abbey's Desert Solitaire, I was shaken by a popping noise very similar to the sound made by the glass weather door when it's opened. I then heard a noise like scratching on the front door outside. At first, I thought my sister was coming home from a late night party and was fiddling with the lock outside. But the scratching persisted for 30 or 45 seconds. (As it turned out, my sister was sleeping in her bed.) When the scratching finally stopped, I walked furtively to the door of my room, and tentatively opened it. My poor cat jetted through the opening, and immediately hid behind my legs. This was a very unsettling experience, but I still had yet to make any connection to the security guard's story.
The connection finally came to me when, days later, my dad would relate this story: He had awoken at 5 AM, as usual, to prepare and leave for work. It had been garbage day, and it was his routine to take the receptacles to the curb before taking his shower. However, on that day, something in his mind alerted him of some potential danger and insisted that he wait to take out the garbage until after he had finished his shower. So he did. And, as he was leaving for work, he glanced in his rear view mirror and saw (what he described as) a "grotesque, hairless" dog skulking away.
I'm not saying that me, my sister, and my dad all bore witness to demon dogs. There's a myriad of perfectly reasonable, non-supernatural explanations for what we experienced. However, I will say that I decided to include the security's guard story in my report.
. I never did find the prankster soldiers, but I have to say, they never took anything out of my room.
