Hey there. I was a factory foreman for 15 years, I know the difference between what's real and what isn't. This was real. It was January 19th, 1909. Tuesday morning, around two thirty in the morning. My wife Margaret and I, we were sound asleep in our home in Gloucester City. It had been snowing earlier that week, and the whole town was covered in a fresh blanket of white. Cold as hell out there, excuse my language. I woke up to this sound. Not like anything I'd ever heard before. Kind of a hissing shriek, you know? High-pitched but also guttural at the same time. Came from right outside our bedroom window on the second floor. Margaret grabbed my arm, her fingers digging in. She'd heard it too.
Now, we'd been hearing stories all week. Strange tracks appearing in the snow all over South Jersey. People in Bristol and Burlington seeing something flying around at night. The newspapers were calling it the Leeds Devil, the old legend from the Pine Barrens. But you know how those stories go, right? Always someone's cousin's friend who saw something. Never anyone you actually knew. But this was different. This was outside MY window. I got out of bed real slow, and Margaret followed me. We crept over to the window and looked out into the backyard. The moon was bright that night, reflecting off the snow, so you could see pretty well despite the hour. And there it was, standing on the roof of our shed. Just standing there, looking around like it owned the place.
I'm going to describe this exactly as I saw it, because I looked at this thing for ten full minutes. Ten minutes. Most people, they get a glimpse of something strange and it's gone in seconds. We watched it for ten minutes, both of us, standing at that window. It was about three and a half feet tall, maybe a bit more when it stretched its neck up. The head, I swear to you, looked like a collie dog. You know, elongated snout, that kind of shape. But the face itself was more like a horse. Hard to explain, but imagine a horse's face on a dog's head, if that makes any sense. Long neck, too, like a swan or something. The wings were the damnedest thing. Leathery, like a bat's wings, about two feet long when it had them spread out. They weren't feathers, that's for sure. Dark, almost black in the moonlight. like wings were consistently reported across multiple sightings that week - Lily' The creature would flap them every so often, little movements, like it was adjusting its balance on the shed roof.
[ Story continues in the full game... ]