The true story of the cut-out black stick man
This was wrote by a couple that saw one!
Have you ever seen something so far outside your normal, everyday experiences you are at a loss to explain what you saw? What follows is a true story—in that nothing is made up, though I cannot vouch for what is real, or a waking dream—of an extraordinary encounter with an apparently alien presence in urban surroundings.
In the early hours of a weekday morning when I was living in London as a student back in the early 1990s, I was walking back from a friend’s house with another friend, Sue. She and myself had spent the whole night talking and revising with a group of other students. No drugs or alcohol had been involved other than tea and coffee—I must make this clear, because the story I am telling may lead you to wonder, and you’d be wrong to think that we were under any influence other than being tired.
Sue lived some way away, so I offered to let her crash over at my place until later in the day.
Dawn was just breaking as we turned onto my street. We were very tired and didn’t say much to each other until I spotted a man walking up towards us on the same path, some distance away. I didn’t think anything of it; in a city like London, people are up and about at all hours and besides, weren’t we? He could have been a milkman, a refuse collector, a night-shift worker heading home. We walked towards the man. He walked towards us. My home was between us and the man. I began to feel uneasy. I still, to this day, don’t know why I said what I did but I turned to Sue, and the following conversation took place in frightened whispers:
“Sue, you see that man?”
“Yes.”
“Well, this is going to sound weird… He isn’t a man, is he?”
“No. Did I just say that?”
“You did. And he isn’t.”
The figure we had taken to be a man had changed, as if a glamour had been lifted, or had failed. What we saw was humanoid in shape, about five feet tall and with very long arms but short legs. It was a black silhouette, very thin-looking. I’ve often described it since as being similar to the stick man which is often used on bathroom doors to tell you that you’re entering the men’s room. And when I say black, I mean black – no light, no shade, nothing but a void. It was as if someone had taken a cookie cutter and had shaped a hole in reality in the shape of something almost, but not quite, human.
The creature seemed to be, well, I’ve used the word ‘lolloping’ before now, which I’m not sure is really a word but is nevertheless a good description for the dancing jolly steps it was taking as it walked. It stopped. Both Sue and I felt the creature had realised we could see it for what it really was rather than whatever we were supposed to see. It turned, or seemed to turn, ever so slightly and it was then we could see the creature wasn’t three-dimensional. It was flat, so much so that turning made parts of it vanish from before our eyes until it turned back to fully face us once more.
We freaked. We ran without discussion. I got my key out and fumbled with the front door of my home, which was a big Victorian house converted into flats. I lived on the middle floor with my then-partner, also a student. Sue, behind me, urged me to hurry up. We were both terrified. I got the door unlocked, we dashed inside, closed and locked it. We ran up the stairs and hid round the corner, like little children peeping at the big front door. It had two big glass panels through which we could see the front garden.
The black stick man approached the door and we could see its dark shape pressing up against the glass. Neither of us breathed.
The creature looked—I say looked, it had no eyes, it just seemed to look—through first one pane, then the other. It waited for what felt like an eternity before vanishing. One second it was there, the next it wasn’t. It was a few minutes before either Sue or I could find the will to move and get ourselves into my living room to discuss what we had seen. We knew whatever it was, it was alien—either from ‘up there’ or ‘sideways’ but definitely not of the world we knew and felt comfortable with.
Perhaps the fact that dawn was breaking was significant. Maybe our having gone all night without sleep left us open to senses not usually engaged, so that we could see things ‘not there’, or maybe it was a shared hallucination—but if it was, there’s no explanation of how two people can share an hallucination, or why. I don’t buy into the hallucination theory and not because I don’t want it said I imagined the creature; as a writer, I inhabit the imagination more frequently than most, and feel no shame about saying so. The imagination is a wonderful thing but this being was not imagined. It was real, after a fashion. It was something unexplained, some aspect of the natural world, the universe, revealed to us most likely through a conjunction of environmental and other factors: the time, the place, the weather, our lack of sleep and perhaps a host of variables unknown to us.
Was the being friendly? I don’t think so. Quite the opposite. Our instinct to run and hide was primal. The creature had affected us emotionally throughout the encounter. We not only experienced great fear but felt the being had been arrogant, superior in attitude and angry that its glamour had been seen through or had failed to operate. It was over ten years later, through a forum post I made on the Fortean Times website, that I discovered our experience was not unique, that there have been similar sightings of this creature all over the world.
spicycauldron.com/2010/02/24/the-terrible-true-story-of-the-cut-out-black-stick-man/
Happy New Years Everybody!!!
