Post by cannonlongshot on Nov 9, 2016 21:56:17 GMT
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Statement of Ann Wardle, regarding an encounter at the Chestnut Centre in Hope Valley, the Peak District. Statement written down by subject on 08/07/2015.
Statement 0150708 begins:
Okay, so, this took place about a year ago, right? It was just after my second year of university, and I’d just got together with my current boyfriend. Can I write his name? I don’t think he’d like to be named, actually. Anyway, he lives near the Peak District, so I made the trip up from Nottingham, where I was going my degree, to see him, and meet his family. It was terrifying, but they were actually really nice people, and I couldn’t have gotten along better with them. He told me as much, of course, but finding out we shared plenty of interests put my mind at ease.
One of these interests was nature, and there’s an animal sanctuary in Hope Valley, about an hour's drive away. It was about a full day's activity, so we packed some lunches and set off. There was me, my boyfriend and his parents, because his siblings couldn’t make it for some reason.
I won’t bore you with details about most of the early part of the journey, but I just have to say - it was all normal. There weren’t any zombie deer, or were-pine martens wandering around, just a normal sanctuary, with otters, polecats, all the usual stuff.
When we got to the bird section, we slowed down a bit. I’ve always loved owls - I think my eighth birthday party was at one of those places where you watch one snatch scraps of meat out of the air, while a guy in a cap tells you all sorts of facts about birds of prey. Anyway, even though I could tell most of them by name, I spent about five minutes just staring at them. Owls never look happy in captivity, and I think they’re too proud for it to suit them, really, but since I’d been living in the city for the best part of a year, I just had to take them all in. I was recording it using my phone, too - I brought a memory stick with the pictures on. I don’t know if you need it, but I want to know that I’ve given you everything I can so you can find out what’s happening to me, yeah?
Anyway, we’d just passed the barn owls, and I was scrolling back on my phone to see if it had been a good shot of them, and the image just cut out. At first I thought I’d hit the sleep switch, but it didn’t wake up when I tried to turn it on. I had been on well over 50% battery, but the phone just died in my hands. This was disappointing, because I was ready to send the pictures to my father once we got back to wifi, but I resigned myself to only having the first half of our trip.
We carried on around the centre, and I kept checking whether my phone would turn on. Once we got to the otters - I think it was the otters? - it responded. It had 53% charge left. I was confused, but since the brand of phone is… eccentric sometimes, I didn’t think much more. I excused myself from the group, and ran back to get a quick snap of each of the owls I’d missed.
I’d just got a shot of the barn owls, when I noticed a cage that I hadn’t noticed before, maybe because of the angle it was at behind a tree and slightly off the main path. This cage was noticeably different from the others. It was older, with vertical bars instead of a wire mesh, and inside it was a bird I didn’t recognise at all. It looked more like a falcon than an owl, all wiry muscle and a long neck.
This creature (I'm not going to call it an owl, because it was not an owl, even if it was surrounded by others) was that it was in this old cage on its own. There were bones scattered around the enclosure, and the droppings on its floor made it look like it hadn't been cleaned out for some time. As I approached the cage it looked up at me with these eyes that weren't the yellow, or brown, or amber, or whatever colour you're thinking of. These eyes were a dark blue, almost black, with crimson streaks, the colour of the night sky just as dawn peaks over the horizon. Of all the birds I had seen there, this was the only one that seemed intelligent, and I had the strangest sensation that it actively wanted out.
Despite everything, I was still worried about this thing, wondering if it was separate deliberately or if it had wandered in and got trapped, and I made a note to ask a member of staff about it. I snapped a quick picture, and ran back to find my boyfriends family. It was only once I got back that I realised my phone had cut out again.
The rest of the day went normally until... Well, this is the bit that makes me sound like a lunatic. I was driving home from the Peak District later that week - not back to Nottingham, but further north, to the village my parents live in - and it was just getting to dusk. I glanced down from the road for a second to turn on the headlights and the next thing I know the loudest, most sudden BANG I've ever heard caused me to grab the wheel again.
My driving instructor once told me you'd know when something hit your windshield, and she wasn't wrong. I pulled over into the hard shoulder and took a look at the damage. It wasn't a crack, like you might see from a stone, but a spiderweb impact crater from an object that must have been a couple of inches across. At the centre was a sticky red residue, and I remember thinking some poor rat must have been caught by the wheel of the driver ahead of me and flung upwards. I called my dad, shaking, and he asked me how bad the damage was, and told me to calm down for five minutes before driving home in the leftmost lane. I ended up getting it fixed a couple of days after arriving home, but it took me a while before I was comfortable driving on motorways again.
Again, you probably don't think that's too weird, do you? Well that's not the end of it. A month after I move back to uni, my dad finds a dead vole in the water tank in the loft. I found three rats in my back garden, dropped on my doorstep. Once I even found a field mouse in my room. It was quite dead, and didn't have any external wounds, but by this point I'd noticed something was going on and called for my flatmate to come and collect it. God knows what she must have thought, because I'm normally fine with any animal, but I spun her some tale about not liking dead ones and she seemed satisfied. This is still going on, and… I know it’s this bird, all right? And I need to know if you’ve seen anything like this before.
STATEMENT ENDS
Archivist’s Notes: We haven’t as best I can tell. Follow up with Ms. Wardle has her claiming that she still occasionally finds vermin corpses in strange locations. Confirmation bias is a powerful thing, I suppose. In any case, I’ve left instructions for her to be contacted if we ever see any similar cases.
As promised, she left a flash drive containing all the pictures she took that day. Each one is easily paired with a description that has also been photographed, displayed near the enclosure, apart from one, towards the end. This picture shows some kind of owl, with no visible signposting of the cage. It is scrawny, and not of a species able to be identified, and appears, unlike every other subject, to be looking directly at the camera. It’s unsettling, but I can hardly call it unnatural.
END NOTES
Statement of Ann Wardle, regarding an encounter at the Chestnut Centre in Hope Valley, the Peak District. Statement written down by subject on 08/07/2015.
Statement 0150708 begins:
Okay, so, this took place about a year ago, right? It was just after my second year of university, and I’d just got together with my current boyfriend. Can I write his name? I don’t think he’d like to be named, actually. Anyway, he lives near the Peak District, so I made the trip up from Nottingham, where I was going my degree, to see him, and meet his family. It was terrifying, but they were actually really nice people, and I couldn’t have gotten along better with them. He told me as much, of course, but finding out we shared plenty of interests put my mind at ease.
One of these interests was nature, and there’s an animal sanctuary in Hope Valley, about an hour's drive away. It was about a full day's activity, so we packed some lunches and set off. There was me, my boyfriend and his parents, because his siblings couldn’t make it for some reason.
I won’t bore you with details about most of the early part of the journey, but I just have to say - it was all normal. There weren’t any zombie deer, or were-pine martens wandering around, just a normal sanctuary, with otters, polecats, all the usual stuff.
When we got to the bird section, we slowed down a bit. I’ve always loved owls - I think my eighth birthday party was at one of those places where you watch one snatch scraps of meat out of the air, while a guy in a cap tells you all sorts of facts about birds of prey. Anyway, even though I could tell most of them by name, I spent about five minutes just staring at them. Owls never look happy in captivity, and I think they’re too proud for it to suit them, really, but since I’d been living in the city for the best part of a year, I just had to take them all in. I was recording it using my phone, too - I brought a memory stick with the pictures on. I don’t know if you need it, but I want to know that I’ve given you everything I can so you can find out what’s happening to me, yeah?
Anyway, we’d just passed the barn owls, and I was scrolling back on my phone to see if it had been a good shot of them, and the image just cut out. At first I thought I’d hit the sleep switch, but it didn’t wake up when I tried to turn it on. I had been on well over 50% battery, but the phone just died in my hands. This was disappointing, because I was ready to send the pictures to my father once we got back to wifi, but I resigned myself to only having the first half of our trip.
We carried on around the centre, and I kept checking whether my phone would turn on. Once we got to the otters - I think it was the otters? - it responded. It had 53% charge left. I was confused, but since the brand of phone is… eccentric sometimes, I didn’t think much more. I excused myself from the group, and ran back to get a quick snap of each of the owls I’d missed.
I’d just got a shot of the barn owls, when I noticed a cage that I hadn’t noticed before, maybe because of the angle it was at behind a tree and slightly off the main path. This cage was noticeably different from the others. It was older, with vertical bars instead of a wire mesh, and inside it was a bird I didn’t recognise at all. It looked more like a falcon than an owl, all wiry muscle and a long neck.
This creature (I'm not going to call it an owl, because it was not an owl, even if it was surrounded by others) was that it was in this old cage on its own. There were bones scattered around the enclosure, and the droppings on its floor made it look like it hadn't been cleaned out for some time. As I approached the cage it looked up at me with these eyes that weren't the yellow, or brown, or amber, or whatever colour you're thinking of. These eyes were a dark blue, almost black, with crimson streaks, the colour of the night sky just as dawn peaks over the horizon. Of all the birds I had seen there, this was the only one that seemed intelligent, and I had the strangest sensation that it actively wanted out.
Despite everything, I was still worried about this thing, wondering if it was separate deliberately or if it had wandered in and got trapped, and I made a note to ask a member of staff about it. I snapped a quick picture, and ran back to find my boyfriends family. It was only once I got back that I realised my phone had cut out again.
The rest of the day went normally until... Well, this is the bit that makes me sound like a lunatic. I was driving home from the Peak District later that week - not back to Nottingham, but further north, to the village my parents live in - and it was just getting to dusk. I glanced down from the road for a second to turn on the headlights and the next thing I know the loudest, most sudden BANG I've ever heard caused me to grab the wheel again.
My driving instructor once told me you'd know when something hit your windshield, and she wasn't wrong. I pulled over into the hard shoulder and took a look at the damage. It wasn't a crack, like you might see from a stone, but a spiderweb impact crater from an object that must have been a couple of inches across. At the centre was a sticky red residue, and I remember thinking some poor rat must have been caught by the wheel of the driver ahead of me and flung upwards. I called my dad, shaking, and he asked me how bad the damage was, and told me to calm down for five minutes before driving home in the leftmost lane. I ended up getting it fixed a couple of days after arriving home, but it took me a while before I was comfortable driving on motorways again.
Again, you probably don't think that's too weird, do you? Well that's not the end of it. A month after I move back to uni, my dad finds a dead vole in the water tank in the loft. I found three rats in my back garden, dropped on my doorstep. Once I even found a field mouse in my room. It was quite dead, and didn't have any external wounds, but by this point I'd noticed something was going on and called for my flatmate to come and collect it. God knows what she must have thought, because I'm normally fine with any animal, but I spun her some tale about not liking dead ones and she seemed satisfied. This is still going on, and… I know it’s this bird, all right? And I need to know if you’ve seen anything like this before.
STATEMENT ENDS
Archivist’s Notes: We haven’t as best I can tell. Follow up with Ms. Wardle has her claiming that she still occasionally finds vermin corpses in strange locations. Confirmation bias is a powerful thing, I suppose. In any case, I’ve left instructions for her to be contacted if we ever see any similar cases.
As promised, she left a flash drive containing all the pictures she took that day. Each one is easily paired with a description that has also been photographed, displayed near the enclosure, apart from one, towards the end. This picture shows some kind of owl, with no visible signposting of the cage. It is scrawny, and not of a species able to be identified, and appears, unlike every other subject, to be looking directly at the camera. It’s unsettling, but I can hardly call it unnatural.
END NOTES