My father tells this story every so often, and when my grandfather was alive, he told it too, wide eyed and with a bit of a quiver in his voice.
When my father was very young he went fishing with his mother and father on the Piscasaw Creek in Boone County, Illinois. Boone County is a vast and lonely tract, made up of wide fields of corn and deep forests. Distant farmsteads can only be reached by rutted gravel roads, and small towns are infrequent and far apart.
My father and his parents parked their car in a field by the creek, built a campfire and had supper. My grandfather kept on fishing long after the sun had gone down, and as the evening wore on the air grew still and silent. Suddenly, a high-pitched whistling sound came from somewhere across the creek. My grandfather couldn’t figure out what it was, and when he tried to describe it later all he could say was that it didn’t sound like a bird or a human. The sound was shrill and long and loud, and as it continued, the tall brush on the other side of the creek began to crack and shake, as if a gale force wind or a very large figure was rushing through it towards them.
My father doesn’t remember much of this, only the intense fear he saw in his parents’ faces as they picked him up and ran for their car. They drove away as fast as they could, leaving the fire and all of their cooking gear to whatever it was that was out there. In the morning they returned to find everything where they had left it. Nothing had been disturbed.
The scary part of this story is that a few days later it was reported in the news that a body had been found viciously stabbed to death not far from where my father and his parents had been fishing. Both my father and grandfather were hazy on whether the killer was ever caught, but the possibility that it could have been they who were attacked still sends shivers down my spine. And if the murderer was human, how did he make such strange noises?
When I was a young boy my father took me camping on his uncle’s farm on a tributary that feeds into Piscasaw Creek. It was a fun and uneventful trip, but I had a hard time sleeping at night, listening to the gurgling creek outside our tent and straining to hear any whistling or rustling in the darkness.