Haunted: A Collection of Scary Short Stories

Skinwalker Nights

Growing up we all heard stories and legends about spirits and tons of different creatures that are supposed to roam the deserts of the southwestern part of the United States. And of course, we all grew up believing these to be just that: stories and legends. I mean really, what the hell: A spider woman? Not to be confused with Spider-woman or Spider-man for that matter. We have a legend about a spider woman. Yeah, I know. Just thinking about that story makes my internal eyes roll, but there is one legendary creature that always found a way to haunt my childhood dreams and imagination called a yee naaldlooshii. I know what you're thinking, "what the hell is that?" Well this creature, the yee naaldlooshi, would be none other than the skinwalker.

I know, it sounds stupid, but really skinwalkers are pretty terrifying. As the legend tells, a skinwalker was a medicine man or woman who turned to the dark and became a witch. To make this transition from tribal healer to witch, the individual would have to complete a trial of dark activities, one of these being that they have to kill a close member of their own family. Yikes, right? Once the evil rituals were completed the medicine man/woman would become a skinwalker and would have the ability to shape shift into any animal of their choosing or even worse, anyone of their choosing.

A lot of my non-native friends that know my ancestral background will ask me about skinwalkers, even if they know the Navajo never talk about it and for the most part, it is forbidden to speak about it, a taboo if you will. Well, long story short is that a skinwalker can do more than just scare the hell out of you, they can poison or even kill a person.

The thought of this always made me sleep with a light on for a few nights when I was growing up and from time to time just the mention of the word would make me paranoid and I would listen extra hard when night would come and I was sleeping alone. I mean, as an adult I got over this in a day or two, but that's still scary as hell to even think about it. Luckily for me, I had never encountered a skinwalker before that point. I thought maybe it was because my Navajo blood had been too diluted with European that maybe I flew under the radar for a skinwalker. Maybe I had told myself this so much as a kid that I just started to believe it and so that I could sleep better at night when I thought I heard something knocking on my window from outside.

I guess you could call me a kind of "part-time Indian" and not like Sherman Alexie's part-time Indian. I'm like, a quarter Navajo on my mom's side, then like German and English from my dad's. So sure, I can say my native blood has been watered down and I should look less appealing to these things that frolic in the desert, or at least I could have said that if what had happened to me didn't happen.

I'm sorry, I should elaborate. What happened was that I came face to face with a skinwalker, I looked him in the eye and got so close to him, dangerously close at that and this happened twice. You would have thought that after the first time I'd have known better and if they would have been similar encounters I would have. But these two separate events were different from each there, the first time was a classic skinwalker sighting, but the second is the one that still haunts me years after it had happened.

In 2012 I was 17 years old and I lived with my parents right outside of Phoenix. I was a run of the mill teen boy, hated going to high school, loved to sleep and to drink Mountain Dew while I screamed at my Xbox anytime I got killed in Call of Duty, you know, normal shit. Anyway, I was coming home from work on a Friday night at about 11:30 and I was driving down interstate 17 from Phoenix to my home in Cave Creek. I was about 15 minutes out of the city and vast open desert opened up on both sides of the interstate, then I saw something sitting in the road about 100 feet in front of me that I hadn't seen before then. I slowed down and approached what looked like a massive coyote sitting in the road and I eventually came to a stop. My headlights shined on the animal like they were a stage light and the coyote was about to perform some dance or magic trick like they did in old movies; I expected it to move out of the way, but it didn't. I just sat there and its eyes met mine, my blood went cold when I made eye contact with it. It didn't have eyes of a coyote, no, it had human eyes. Then I noticed the rest of the creature's features...