Heya, I've been sitting on this for years now. Almost two decades. And I know how it sounds, believe me, I know. But I'm an artist. I observe things for a living. I notice details other people miss. And what I saw that day on the Musconetcong River was not my imagination. It wasn't a trick of the light. It was real. It was biological. And it was looking right at me. So here's what happened. It was around 2006, give or take. I was out fly fishing with my boss on the Musconetcong River near Hackettstown, New Jersey. Now, the weather had been bad for several days before that. Heavy rains. We probably shouldn't have even been out there, honestly. The river looked smooth on the surface, but the current underneath was exceptionally strong. I'm talking about digging my heels into the gravel, leaning backward, and the river was still kicking me along pretty good. Sketchy navigating, to say the least.
Now, you gotta understand something about me. I've always been privy to the paranormal. Shadow people, ghosts, whatever. I've seen things my whole life. You just kind of accept it after a while. You see something weird, you go 'okay' and you move on. That's just how I've always been. But what I encountered that day was different. This wasn't spirit. This wasn't a ghost or an apparition. This was a biological, living creature. And it disappeared into thin air almost as soon as I saw it. I was chest-high in the river. My boss was about fifty yards behind me, doing his own thing. The sky was white and heavy, overcast from all that bad weather. Mid-afternoon. And that's when I caught movement out of the corner of my eye to my left. Just a flicker of something. Now, this stretch of the Musconetcong is unusual. The west bank borders Route 46, which is a local highway congested with stores and traffic. But the east bank, where we were fishing, that borders fields and farmland. The bank on the rural side sloped up pretty high, maybe ten feet or so. There was a strip of trees separating the river from the fields beyond, but every so often there'd be a gap, a path about twenty yards wide that allowed clear access to the water.
When I turned to look, the creature was in one of those gaps. Moving back up the bank towards the fields. Looking back at me over its left shoulder. About fifteen to twenty yards away from where I was standing in the water. A grasshopper thigh. That's what I saw first. But bending forward like a human's would. Then the whole form. Tall, maybe seven feet, I don't know how to say it exactly. Humanoid. Definitely humanoid. But with these insect qualities. Gangly and knobby, like the joints were all wrong, but you could still sense the power in it. This thing was built. to eight feet tall with elongated limbs is specific - Neil' And the head. Triangular, just like a praying mantis. Huge, slanted black eyes that caught the light even through whatever was making it hard to see. Because it was nearly transparent. Fading. Like a ghost apparition, clear but see-through. And it was fading fast, adjusting to its background.
[ Story continues in the full game... ]