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Something touched my hair in the dark

A stargazer in a backyard hammock saw two identical flashes in the same spot in the sky. Seconds later, something seemed to run its fingers through their hair, and the dark filled with whispering and clicking.

A very remote property in Arizona · A clear night, stargazing from a backyard hammock · 2 min read

I'm 6'4", 210, and do not scare easily at all.

This happened somewhere in rural Arizona, in a place so remote and quiet that at night you can hear a rabbit moving through a bush a football field away. There's no light pollution at all, and the person who wrote this is a keen stargazer who spends a lot of evenings looking up.

That night they were lying in a hammock in the backyard with headphones in, watching the stars, when a single bright white flash went off in the sky, like a camera flash. No tail, no streak. Maybe a meteor coming straight at them, they thought. Then, about 15 seconds later, the exact same flash in the exact same spot. In all their years of stargazing they'd never seen anything like it.

A moment later, something touched their head. It felt like a hand, almost inspecting their hair, and then it gave one lock at the back of their head a gentle tug. It all happened in a split second. Our stargazer, who is six foot four, 210 pounds and says they don't scare easily, sat bolt upright and pulled out the headphones, assuming their girlfriend was trying to get their attention.

She wasn't there. Instead, in that dead-quiet yard, there was a sound that's hard to describe: something like whispering, mixed with clicking.

Then the fear hit. Not ordinary fright but an overwhelming, irrational terror, the kind that pins you in place. They had always imagined that if anything like this ever happened, they'd keep their cool and try to communicate. That went right out the window. The only comparison they could come up with was how a trapped coyote must feel.

They couldn't say they really saw anything. The closest they can get is something like shadow people, there and not there at the edge of things.

After a few moments, still frozen, they managed to squeeze out a few words: "Okay... please be cool, guys." (Not exactly a world-class ambassador, they joked afterward.) The whispering and clicking stopped, but the feeling of being watched did not.

Then a big gust of wind came out of nowhere, and the feeling went with it, all at once. They went straight inside, still shaking, and wrote it all down while it was fresh, completely sure that something had happened out there.

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