Archive 74 The Hogman

my reputation, and safer for my machio old manhood. But that's before I stumbled on your YouTube channel, where I listened to everyday, person after person tell their strange encounter stories. I also listened to you, and I heard no judgment, no matter how strange the story was, and I appreciated that. So for the first time, I feel like I can tell this story in a safe place. My only hope is that you would be as kind to me as you are to the others who have trust you with

their story. Well, dude, of course, I'm nice to everybody. What are you talking about, love, I'm so appreciative that people send these to me, and I would never be anything but nice to anyone who sends a story. But let's move on with a story. We're about to get into the meat of it. I was in the United States Army with a high security clearance. I was base station in the center of the United States, but every two to three years my unit would have a field

training exercise in Germany. We secured and monitored specific communications that supported this and many other exercises. The monotonous side of this mission was to find a remote location, usually on top of a hill or a higher elevation, sit quietly and listen, monitor and secure communications. Wurzburg is a city sitting smack in the center of Germany. We were giving grit coordinates that nestled us deep in a forest

that surrounded Wurzburg. We had finished prepping for one of our many stays high on somebody's mountain when the host battalion treated us all to a free movie pass at the base theater. After that, we'd set our eyes on a pizza parlor right outside the gate of what we

called our sister battalion in Germany. A German pizza parlor would be interesting, being that we all swore that we wouldn't need anything American while we were there, and that the seven of us who always stuck together would get totally submerged in the economy We barely managed to squeeze out a pizza order in between the mingle conversation, where everybody talked and laughed at the same time, mostly about

the movie that we were privileged to have seen. Complements of the hosting Army battalion impersonations of scenes of an American werewolf in London dominated any other noise that tried to manifest outside the pizza parlor conversation. I left the table to visit the men's room, making a beeline past the counter where the owner sat on the opposite side. Even though I was headed towards him, he needed to

wave me to come over anyway. After sufficient but awkward nods of hello, he started right in with the conversation, You're about to enjoy the finest gypsy pizza in Germany. He bragged. The word gypsy struck me so oddly that I guess it registered on my face. We never used the word gypsy in America. It wasn't part of our culture, so when he said it, I bet I cocked my head sideways like a dog hearing sirens. The owner met

my awkward pause. You're new here, aren't you, well, I replied yes, and gave the abbreviated story of why we were here now? I ended with is it that obvious? He dipped the corners up his mouth with a simultaneous side nod of his head and eyes, which pointed out toward our loud group. I would have noticed you all anyway, he said, running his fingers through his black beard. He was gently poking at our ruckus as he stayed his

nod towards our rambuctious crew. Americans laughed so loudly at things that they don't understand, he said, just before I could get out, Well, what do you mean by that? I was cut off as the owner leaned in. I'm especially surprised that you're among the laughing, he said more, with a half whisper and a half mumble. At that moment, goosebumps put me on pause. What could he have have

meant by that? I thought to myself. He must have sensed a deficit in my understanding by my gaze, because he tagged on another question that was formed as if he'd read my mind. You are a Hebrew, right, and then he waited for an answer. I had hoped his question rhetorical, but it wasn't. He was genuine in his inquiry and sat there frozen until I squeezed out an answer. Well, yeah, I responded, after a dozen or so thoughts rifle through my mind. He was coming from a historic perspective that

was not normally shared in American history. The American educational system did not subscribe to the true history of the American Hebrew. In the US, they just called us black people, no backstory other than slavery. The gypsy pizza man knew better. Next he called me Hebrew, which to me meant he knew a thing or two about the Bible, but possibly told from a different vantage point, perhaps the Egyptian perspective. Yanking me back into the conversation, he went on, you're

familiar with the story of Moses in Egypt, right. He was in rapid fire mode with his questions. I nodded, thinking I could follow his lead. Hebrew slaves, he said, I tagged on his proof I was with him, but he responded quickly, No, No, that's not our story. That's his story. Our story tells that working class Hebrew worked

right alongside the working class Egyptians. We had to work for the pharaoh, just like your ancestors had to, and the Hebrews were blessed by their God, and the Lord yielded to them, and that made it easy for all of us. And when Pharaoh relented and allowed the Hebrew to leave, we were devastated. Guess who was left to keep up with the quotas it would take to hold Egypt together. My ancestors wanted to know part of that,

and most of them fled with Moses. When they saw the giant light floating over the crowd Moses was leading, it scared them to death. We had taken on many of the Hebrew followings, but it was then that my ancestors realized that was not our God, that was the Hebrew God, and we had no covenant with him. We would rather realize that the Hebrew were running to a wilderness that had been made safe for them by their God.

So my ancestors decided to run west through Libya towards Gibraltar, through what we would soon find out was an unsafe and cursed wilderness. As my ancestors ran for their lives to get to Morocco, everything that would have been menacing to the Hebrew seemed to be sucked out of their wilderness and placed into the wilderness my people ran to and everything attacked us. I mean everything. When my people arrived,

the Moroccans wanted no part of us. They allowed us to pass through their land only so my people clawed their way through more cursed wilderness to Europe. And in that wilderness were bats, lions, ravens, bears and boar. Even giant hyena looking wolves were there. And all these creatures attacked us, and in the process of this horror, they changed us. By the time my ancestors made it through the wilderness, they had seen every creeping thing in the forest.

Some were half beast and half man. As the gipsy man stared off into another place, a stabbing twinge in my bladder suddenly reminded me that I needed to get to the men's room. As I leaned to slide off of my stool, the owner grabbed me. As he loosened his grip, he whispered loudly, pardon me for not finding fun in your werewolf movie. Well. I finished in the restroom, rinsed off my hands, and left, hoping for a chance to hide behind some distraction that would allow me to

slither out the front door of the pizza parlor. Looking everywhere except where I was going. I banked right nearly smashed into the owner's daughter. She just about threw her pizza pan to the ceiling. I caught the pan before things looked noticeably crazy and handed it back to her with an awkward silence. And then she said, my dad's

left for the night. He's not feeling well. Well. I left the place quickly, and as I rounded the corner of the pizza parlor and headed straight for the base gate, I reflected on how shaken I still was from the Gypsy story. I left with an eerie sense about it. He was saying that all these stories about werewolves, vampires, bats, and all these weird creatures in the forest, mountains and caves could have stemmed from what happened to his ancestors. Well, I tried to shake it off, but a voice in

my head kept pondering, what if this is true. Furthermore, I had left my friends in that place without a word. It would seem odd to them, but I would come up with something the next day, but I needed to get free of that place. The next morning came, We ate our breakfast and we're in our little three vehicle convoy. Before we started burping up the taste of sausage and coffee. Our goal was to be discreet in our intended destination

Through the city. We weave through other combat units that were also getting a head start on their missions, and soon we were at the location that we would set up our position on a hill dismount rang the orders of our platoon sergeant. We worked like a fine tune, freshly oil machine that knew how to park our trucks back to back, drive our ground rides in, erect our antenna, and get our temps up, fire up the potbellies, and get our ao set with all the creature comforts a

soldier needs for a ten to fifteen day mission. After several days, we'd fallen into a nice routine, hot breakfast and coffee at morning shift. Change hot tar for me, which was black coffee and a cocoa pack from my MREs. We always had good conversations, led by the usual uneventful knight's reports. The shifts easily blended into each other. Our platoon sergeant's policy was I ain't gonna push if everybody keeps up being effective, had nice rewards, and everything was cool.

A friend and I came off a shift and decided to walk off some of the dense biscuits and sausage we had for breakfast. We had developed a little ritual

of walking through Wurzburg's strangely immaculate forest after breakfast. Now I say immaculate because, just like the old World War two story stated, you could tell the forest was all newly replanted after it was either burnt or mowed down as we fought to push back the enemy of that war, and when it was over, the United States ended up being responsible and designated to plant new forests all over Germany, and we did it as a token of our American

sense of humor. We replanted those trees all right. They were in straight rows and columns. The vast forests looked like a great, big old army formation, And if you looked up back or sideways, it is pristine and tightly organized. But if you make a one to eighth turn in any direction, everything gets random and you can get lost in a hurry. With all the trees being in straight lines and identical, as we walked, the silence was louder than any big bang we'd ever heard or made in

any forest we'd been in. But The silence was quickly ripped by the sound of a single twig snapping just off in the distance. We both halted our steps and looked down the same row of trees. It was a pig, a big, fat pig, carefully circling a tree and pawing or hooking at the base of the tree. We watched for a long half minute. When my partner reached up and grabbed his rifle. I looked at him right oddly,

thinking what are you going to do with that? The military had only issued us blanks for this training exercise. The only thing he could do was make a pop. Well before I could say a thing, my buddy had shouldered his weapon, pointing it right down the column in the direction of the pig, and pop, Just like I thought, he let off a blank round. The pig lifted its head and focused on us immediately and charged in our direction. I heard two more pops from my friend's rifle, and

the pig kept charging. I wasn't worried at that point. This thing was so fat I doubted it could make it to us before it was spent of energy. I shook my head as it huffed its way towards us. The closer the creature got, the better I could see its true size. And then I instantly upgraded this thing from a pig to a hog. And it was not slowing one bit. This thing's picking up speed, I said. Before my buddy could answer, the hog made a move

that neither of us were ready for. It pulled its front legs off the ground and began running on its hind legs. It was now running like a big barrel chested, well fed man. The freak of a roar it began to bellow shook me to my core. It sounded both far away and close at the same time. Furthermore, I could feel it in my chest, and my eyes shook in their sockets, and it was as if the sound made waves in the air that were invisible to us.

And then the creature jumped space. It skipped time. It was way off in the distance and closing fast, and in an instant it was fifty feet in front of us, and it was time for us to make a move. I snapped out of the astounded days and I tried to move in any direction away from this thing, and my body felt as though my blood had been and replaced by molasses. Heart beating in my ears and heaving for oxygen and trying to get my legs to move. It was a nightmare. All the trees in the forest

had gone unnoticed until I needed one. Now I headed for the nearest, while somehow finding the ability to yell to my body to do the same, and he was a few seconds behind me and snapping out of his days, now a few branches high and out of reach of this beast. To my horror, I saw my friend having trouble grabbing the lowest branch on his tree. Go to the next tree. Damn it, I yelled as tears rolled down my face, knowing I was about to watch this

thing devour my friend. The slow motion effects set in as I watched him dash to the next tree and find a knot low on the trunk, where he perfectly planted his foot and sprung to the lowest branch. He swung his legs up into the fork of the trunk, lifting him himself out of the reach of the monster. The demon hog planted its front hoofs and the dirt and missed my friend at the last possible second. Dirt was vaulted into the air, much like when a grenade explodes.

He had made it into the tree just in time. The beast roared and stomped wildly around the base of the tree, kicking clouds of moist soil into the air covering the lower bark. This thing was boiling mad as it circled the tree, looking for a way to get higher, but now seeing that it couldn't reach the man above, it fell back on all fours and stomped around more,

still looking up at my buddy with hate. It made several attempts to leap onto the trunk and climb, only to missus mark by a few feet and slide back to earth. Each try up the tree produced a roar again and again, and the sound was like two creatures screaming at once, with low and high pitched tones, perfectly sink, almost as if the voices were harmonized. After several tries, I noticed the marks left in the bark, as if

it were dragging its claws as it fell. This prompted me to focus in on its front legs, looking for the claws. The claws were there, but they were at the end of human looking hands. I hung there, staring in silence as everything faded into a hum. All I heard was the wail in between the heavy, dense huffing sound it made every time it attempted to leap off the ground at my buddy. Stranger still was that this

hogman was covered in thick gray mud or clay. Through the cracks in the clay, I swear I saw blue denim like this thing had on jeans or overalls underneath its fur. It screamed and clawed at my body up in that tree with such terrible hate that I thought it would never stop. Its hate was offensive and demonic. The roars and screams from the demon took the oxygen out of the air, and I slowly closed my eyes

and tightened my grip on the tree trunk. My face was chafed from hugging the tree so tightly, and I knew my face was bleeding, and its roars had a low, steady hum that nauseated me. I couldn't move. This thing had me immobilized, but I needed to see if my friend was okay. But my head would not turn and my eyes would not open. Hey, man, are you all right? My buddy's voice broke the silence. I was able to open my eyes and see the sun now directly over

our heads. It had to be near midday. Now. To my surprise, my buddy was standing on the ground below me. He was talking to me. Where did that thing go? I asked, with a disturbed look at me. He said, I don't know. I think I passed out. When I came to it was gone. I released my dear bathgrip on the jagged bark to come down, but my muscles were locked into place and cramped when I moved. I finally made it to the ground below. How long was I up there, I asked, a little longer than me.

I guess who knows how long we've been here. Let's get out of here before that thing comes back, my buddy said. We hobbled our way back to camp. Just before we entered camp, and my buddy stopped me and asked if we were going to say anything about the events of that day. I quickly told him that I wasn't going to say a word. The fellows met us with a good ribbing as we entered the camp. Well, where the hell have you love birds been? One of them asked, Well, I guess love birds don't need no sleep.

Another cracked. They all chuckle, Everyone except the two of us in our platoon. Sergeant, he glared at us, waiting for the stale lives to dry off. Y'all gonna get enough venturing far enough out in these woods, he said, looking down his nose at us. There's a lot of blood in them hills and plenty of haunts. Well, he was damn right. We sounded off in unison, yes, Sergeant. As we moved our way past him into the tent and to our cots, we didn't say a thing to

each other. We got out of our bedus and climbed in our sleeping bags and crashed with the rest of the night crew. We never talked about what happened. That agreement was made without a whole lot of words. Only a slight glance to each other was all it took for us both to remain tight lipped about this whole thing, and as a matter of fact, we never really ever conversed about it again. There were no more walks after breakfast.

I hope my friend is okay wherever he is. I personally hope that telling you will put an end to the nights that I wake up having sweats with biceps and hamstrings boiling, and that hum vibrating in my chest and ringing in my ears.