Your True Tales
June 2008 - Page 3
Walking Tree
by John T.
All my life I've seen strange things and been a bit strange myself. Later on, I tried to get used to it and thought it can't get any more peculiar until one evening two weeks ago when I saw, of all things, a tree walk and cross the street.
This summer, I chose to make something out of the break rather than just hang around with my friends or shoot rodents in a warehouse with an air gun, so I called up my aunt in Philippines for a summer job, since she's both an administrator and stockholder in a private hospital there. When I arrived, she assigned me to process and encode medical records into a server for at least a dollar per file. I thought it'd be fun knowing people and what sort of stuff people get sick with in another country. I had no Idea how boring it would be. Each day, boxes of files get sent to me and almost every time it's almost the same stuff, old people and old people disorders or tourists with tourist mishaps.
After a dull day's work, I went to turn in for the night, but the climate gave me a hard time sleeping even past midnight. I thought some music would help me get some sleep but I realized I left my Ipod in my workplace. I borrowed a motorcycle and went to the office. On the way there, I would pass a few houses and empty lots before the highway, and it was unbelievably cold for a tropical country. After getting to the hospital and getting my stuff, I decided to take the same route back to avoid getting lost.
After getting off the highway, I rounded a corner into some empty lots where I saw a huge silhouette near a streetlight. I turned on the high beams to see if it wasn't a cow or the one of the neighbor's horses, but to my surprise it was a tree on the side of the road. When I got closer, I saw that is was sort of moving in a wobbling motion to the other side of the road. At this point, I thought I was dreaming, but I knew I was awake since I wasn't driving a fish or something. The closer I got to it, I kept slowing down so I'd get a good look at it.
When I got around 15 yards from it, I saw that it had long flowing leaves that reflected moonlight, like it was glowing, Its branches were willowy, but smooth, like a snake and moved slowly. Its trunk was narrow like a human waist and bent in sharp angles, but had a reddish hue to it. I stopped a little closer to it and saw that it seemed to move on its roots like those octopi would on their tentacles from the Discovery Channel. When it reached the other side of the road, it looked like it slowly sank into the dirt. When it was almost halfway into the ground, it slowly faded into the shadows.
I tried to turn the headlight to it, but I had to tilt the bike a bit, but when I did, it was just gone. The encounter gave me the creeps, and I choose never to drive late at night until I got home. I kept this to myself until lately when I told my aunt a bit about it. She thought it was just a joke until I told her about the long reflective leaves. She recounted about seeing something glittering like a school of moonfish pass under a streetlight at a distance. It was either she was humoring me... or the strange stuff runs in the family.
< Previous story | Next story >
|
Do you have a paranormal tale to tell? |
