Don't Go Outside After Dark in Rural Arizona | Skinwalker Story

Just Creepy: Scary Stories

A couple moves to a remote ranch in northeastern Arizona, only to encounter a terrifying entity that mimics human voices and animal forms. A

Key takeaways

• The entity uses sophisticated mimicry, specifically imitating Ashley and Linus to lure them into danger.
• Previous owner Will Harlan was forced into assisted living after hearing his deceased wife's voice.

Main topics

• Skinwalker encounters
• Voice mimicry horror

Notable quotes

The hide. It uses most.

Conclusion

A harrowing exploration of how supernatural mimicry can erode the boun

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:22) I've started writing this more than once, and every time I get to the end, I close the document and tell myself I'm done with it. The problem is that putting it away hasn't made any of it easier to live with. If anything, the details have gotten sharper. I can still walk through that house in my head. I know which floorboard dipped outside the bathroom, which kitchen cabinet wouldn't stay shut, and how the bedroom door felt when I turned the lock on our last night there. I'm going to be vague about the exact location. The ranch was in northeastern Arizona, a little over an hour from St. John's and not far from the New Mexico line. If you've spent time in that part of the state, you know how empty it can get once you're off the main roads. There are stretches of pale grass, red dirt, and low juniper that seem to go on forever. A house can be visible from miles away and still take half an hour to reach. because the roads bend around washes and old fence lines. My wife Ashley and I bought the place as a fresh start. That's the simple version, at least. The longer version is that we'd spent 11 years in the Phoenix area doing what we thought we were supposed to do. I worked as a site supervisor for a commercial contractor. Ashley handled insurance claims from home. We had a decent townhouse, two dependable vehicles, and enough money coming in that neither of us felt entitled to complain. We were also tired all the time, barely saw each other during the week, and had reached the point where every conversation about the future sounded the same. We'd talked for years about getting out of the city. We wanted land, quiet, and a house we could improve together. I knew construction and could handle most repairs. Ashley could keep her job as long as we had stable internet. We weren't planning to become cattle ranchers or live off the grid. We just wanted a smaller life that felt like ours. The property was being sold through a family trust at a price low enough to make me suspicious. It was 76 acres with a two-bedroom ranch house, a metal workshop, old corrals, a private well, and a stock tank. The listing images showed a rough place, but nothing I couldn't fix. The roof was only six years old. The electrical panel had been updated. The well report looked good. Most of the value was in the land, and even if we hated living there, I was convinced we could clean it up and sell it without losing much. We visited twice before making an offer. Both visits were in the middle of the day. The seller's agent, Regina Booth, met us at the gate. and left as soon as we finished looking around. She told us the owner, Will Harlan, had gone into assisted living after a fall. His adult children lived out of state and wanted the property sold as it stood. When Ashley asked why the house had been empty for almost 18 months, Regina said the family had been arguing about what to do with it. That made sense at the time. There were things I noticed during those visits that bothered me later. The inside latches on several windows were new, even though the windows themselves were old. The back door had two slide bolts in addition to the deadbolt. A narrow bedroom window had screws driven into the frame, so it could only open about three inches. The workshop doors could be secured from inside with a heavy steel bar. I took all of that as evidence that Will had been careful about security after getting older. The only truly odd thing was the well house. It was a squat block building about 120 yards east of the house, close to the stock tank. The wooden door had been covered on the inside with sheet metal, and someone had bolted a thick latch across it. I asked Regina whether there had been problems with theft or vandalism. She said she didn't know. When I opened the door, I found the pressure tank, the pump controls, some cracked hoses, and an empty plastic chair facing the entrance. Nothing else. We closed in late September and moved in four days later. Our first load was in a rented box truck. Ashley drove her SUV behind me, and we reached the turnoff a little after four in the afternoon. The last twelve miles were dirt. Recent rain had cut shallow channels across the road, so I kept the truck slow and watched for soft ground. About three miles from the ranch, a coyote stepped into the road. I saw coyotes regularly around Phoenix, especially near new developments, and this one didn't look right even at a distance. It was too tall through the shoulders and too heavy in the chest. Its coat was a dirty mix of gray and tan, with thin patches along both sides. One ear stood straight while the other leaned outward. I slowed because I expected it to cross. It stopped in the center of the road and faced the truck. There was plenty of room for it to run. Open land stretched away on both sides, broken only by brush and fence posts. It didn't move until I was close enough to see the darker hair around its muzzle. Then it walked toward me. I hit the horn. The animal flinched but kept coming. It reached the front of the truck, moved to the driver's side, and stood just beyond the mirror. From the cab, I couldn't see its body, only the tips of its ears. I remember locking the door. which made no sense. A coyote couldn't open it. Ashley called me. I answered through the truck's speakers, and before I could say anything, she asked what was wrong with that animal. Her SUV was stopped about 30 feet behind me. I told her it was probably sick and to keep her windows up. The coyote walked between our vehicles. Ashley made a sound into the phone, and I checked the mirror in time to see the animal stop beside her driver's door. Its back came almost even with the bottom of her window. She later swore it raised its head and looked directly at her, not with the quick, nervous attention of a wild animal, but with the fixed interest of someone trying to see who was behind tinted glass. I eased the truck forward. Once there was space between us, Ashley followed. The coyote didn't chase us. It remained in the road until the dust hit it. We talked about it while unloading. I said it might have been fed by someone and lost its fear of vehicles. Ashley thought it had mange. Neither explanation accounted for its size, but there was too much work to do, and the ranch felt different now that it belonged to us. We were excited. That mattered more than a strange animal on the road. The house sat on a low rise inside a wire fence. The front door faced south toward the driveway and the old corrals. A covered porch ran along that side. Inside, the living room took up the front half of the original house. The kitchen was to the right, with a mudroom beyond it, and an exterior door that opened east toward the workshop and well house. A short hallway ran north from the living room. The bathroom was on the left, the spare room was on the right, and our bedroom was at the end. It was a simple layout, small enough that you could stand in the kitchen and hear someone moving in any other room. We unloaded until sunset. The air cooled fast once the light dropped behind the ridge. We were carrying the last boxes into the mudroom when Ashley stopped beside the truck and looked toward the stock tank. The coyote was standing there. It was about three miles from where we'd seen it on the road, so there was no reason it couldn't have reached the ranch ahead of us. What bothered me was its position. It wasn't drinking. It stood on the concrete rim of the tank with all four feet close together and its head raised toward the house. I grabbed a length of scrap wood from the truck bed and walked past the workshop. I didn't plan to get close. I only wanted to make it leave before darkness settled in. When I was about 60 yards away, I shouted and struck the wood against a fence post. The coyote turned its head toward me. Its body stayed still. I shouted again. It stepped down from the tank, but it didn't run. It moved behind the wellhouse and disappeared. There was no sensible reason for me to follow it, so naturally that's what I did. I circled wide, watching the brush beyond the building. The door to the wellhouse was shut. Nothing moved near the stock tank. I went another twenty yards and found a place where the grass had been pressed flat, but the ground was hard and held no clear prints. Ashley called from the porch and asked me to come back. There was an edge in her voice I hadn't heard earlier. By the time I reached her, she'd turned on every exterior light that worked. We ate sandwiches at the kitchen counter because the table was still in pieces. Every few minutes, one of us looked through the windows. We didn't see the coyote again that evening. The first night was quiet until sometime after two. I woke because the mattress shifted. Ashley was sitting up beside me, looking toward the bedroom window. The blinds were closed, and the room was dark except for the small green light on the power strip near the dresser. She asked if I'd heard it. I hadn't. I listened for a while and heard only wind moving along the roof edge. Ashley said there had been a short cry outside, close to the window. She thought it might have been a rabbit. We both lay back down. Less than a minute later, it came again. It sounded like a person taking one sharp breath through a badly blocked nose. There was no word in it. The sound came from low against the wall, directly below the window. I reached for the lamp. and the noise stopped before I switched it on. I got dressed, took a flashlight, and went outside through the front door. Ashley stayed on the porch with her phone. We had service through a booster mounted on the roof, but it was unreliable and often took several attempts to place a call. The dirt below the bedroom window was bare. I found no animal, no mark in the screen, and no sign that anything had leaned against the wall. The only thing that seemed out of place was the smell. It reminded me of wet fur sealed in a hot shed. it was strongest near the corner of the house and faded after a few seconds i checked the yard the underside of the porch and the space behind our vehicles nothing was there When I came back inside, Ashley had already locked the front door. We laughed about how quickly we'd become nervous country people. I made a joke about buying motion lights, and she told me to add them to the growing list. We slept with the lamp on. The next morning was bright and ordinary. That pattern became important. Almost everything that happened at the ranch was followed by a perfectly normal morning. In daylight, The distances looked manageable, the house looked solid, and our fear from the night before seemed embarrassing. For the first week, we worked from breakfast until dark. I repaired a leak in the kitchen, replaced rotted porch boards, and cleared years of junk from the workshop. Ashley set up her office in the spare room and arranged for a better internet connection. We drove into St. John's twice for lumber and groceries. Each trip took most of an afternoon, which made us more determined to plan ahead and stay home. We saw the coyote every day. Sometimes it stood near the stock tank. Sometimes it sat outside the south fence beyond the corrals. Once, I spotted it lying in a patch of dirt at the top of a shallow ridge north of the house. It was always far enough away that I couldn't get a good look through my binoculars. When I tried, it lowered its head or moved behind brush. It didn't act sick. It never staggered, scratched, or appeared weak. It also didn't hunt. We watched rabbits cross open ground within yards of it. The coyote barely turned its head. On our sixth morning, Ashley found the garbage can on its side behind the mudroom. The lid was still clamped shut. There were pale scratches along one handle, too straight and evenly spaced to have come from teeth. I assumed the coyote had hooked the handle with a paw. Ashley asked why it would drag an unopened can three feet and leave it. I set the can upright and tied it to the fence. That afternoon, I drove metal posts around the nearest section of yard and patched gaps in the wire. The fence wasn't meant to stop predators, but I thought making our immediate space harder to enter might discourage the animal. While I worked, it appeared on the far side of the corrals and sat down. I threw a rock toward it. The rock landed several yards short. The coyote looked at the place where it struck. then looked back at me. I threw another. This one passed close enough that the animal should have bolted. Instead, it lowered its front half toward the ground while keeping its rear legs straight. At first, I thought it was stretching. Then it raised one front paw and touched the top of its muzzle. The movement was quick, but it looked too controlled. It reminded me of someone covering a smile. I know how that sounds. I've replayed it enough times to find other explanations. Maybe it was scratching its nose. Maybe the angle made a normal motion look wrong. At the time, all I knew was that I didn't want to be in the open with it anymore. I backed toward the porch without turning around. The coyote stayed where it was until I went inside. Ashley saw my face and asked what happened. I told her the animal had moved strangely. I left out the part about its paw. Saying it aloud would have made it sound worse, and I was still trying to be the practical one. That night, we heard it circling the house. We never heard an animal walking. What gave it away was the motion light. I had mounted a temporary unit above the mudroom door, and its glow came through the edge of our bedroom blinds. It switched on, went dark after 30 seconds, then switched on again at the far corner, where the sensor could barely reach. This happened five times over the next hour. I watched from the living room with the porch light off. Each time the sensor came on, the yard was empty. On the fifth pass, something moved beyond the wire near the workshop. I saw a long gray body for no more than a second. It crossed from right to left, without any rise or fall through its back. The motion was so smooth that I couldn't tell whether it was running. Around midnight, the activity stopped. The next morning, the wellhouse door was open. I was certain I'd latched it two days earlier. The metal bar hung against the doorframe, undamaged. Inside, the plastic chair had been moved from the back wall and placed directly in front of the pressure tank. Its seat faced the house. Ashley stood in the doorway while I checked the pump equipment. Nothing was broken. We hadn't stored anything valuable inside. The dust on the floor had been disturbed, but between our boots and old mouse marks, I couldn't make sense of it. I carried the chair outside and left it beside the building. Then I shut the door, fastened the latch, and looped a padlock through it. When we returned that evening after another supply run, the chair was back inside. The padlock was still closed. I checked the walls and the small vent near the roof. the vent opening was less than eight inches wide and covered with wire mesh one corner of the mesh had pulled free but no animal the size of that coyote could have fit through it even if it had it couldn't have lifted a full-sized chair and set it upright Ashley didn't want me to open the door again. I did anyway. The chair sat close to the pressure tank, facing the house exactly as before. A greasy smear marked the top edge of its backrest. I locked the well house and took the chair with me. I put it in the workshop behind the barred doors. That was the first time Ashley said we should consider leaving. I wish I could tell you I agreed. Instead, I gave her the list of reasons we couldn't make that decision after one strange week. We'd put almost all our savings into the down payment and repairs. Her new internet equipment was scheduled to be installed. The townhouse was already rented to someone else. We had nowhere to go except a hotel, and there still wasn't anything we could explain to another person without sounding ridiculous. The truth is that I was embarrassed. I had pushed harder for the ranch than Ashley had. I'd said I could make the place safe and comfortable. Leaving because of a coyote in a moved chair felt like admitting that I'd uprooted our lives for a mistake. Ashley didn't argue. She asked me to put better locks on the windows and promised she'd tell me if she saw or heard anything else. For the next four days, nothing happened. We didn't see the coyote. The motion light stayed off. The wellhouse remained locked. By the end of the fourth day, I was convinced someone had entered the property while we were in town and played a stupid trick with the chair. It wasn't a good explanation, but it was human, and human problems could be handled. I installed two more lights and reinforced the back gate. I also bought a 12-gauge shotgun. I'd owned guns before, but we'd sold them when we moved into the townhouse. I told Ashley it was for coyotes and rattlesnakes. She knew I didn't need a shotgun for a rattlesnake, but she didn't call me on it. The first voice came the following evening. I was in the workshop putting shelves along the west wall. Ashley was inside finishing work. The workshop doors were open, and I could see the kitchen light through the mudroom window. It was a little after seven. The sun had set, but the western sky still held enough light to make out the corrals and the line of the driveway. Ashley called my name from behind the workshop. She sounded annoyed, not frightened. She said, Linus, can you come help me with this? I set down the drill and walked toward the rear corner. There was nothing unusual about hearing her. We'd both been moving between the house and workshop all day. I reached the corner and looked toward the well house. No one was there. The voice came again, farther out this time. Linus, can you come help me with this? It used the same rhythm, the same amount of irritation, and the same slight break in Ashley's voice after my name. The sentence wasn't similar. It was exact. I didn't answer. I moved sideways until I could see the mudroom window. Ashley stood inside at the kitchen counter, facing away from me. A second later, she turned and saw me through the glass. She smiled and lifted one hand. From the dark ground beyond the wellhouse, her voice called my name a third time. This time it sounded pleased. I backed into the workshop and pulled both doors shut. The steel bar dropped into its brackets with a clang that felt much too loud. I stood there for several seconds with my hand on the bar, listening. The voice didn't come again. I called Ashley and told her not to open the mudroom door. She could see the workshop from the kitchen. and I asked her to turn on the yard lights before I came out. When they came on, I ran the 30 yards to the house with the drill still clipped to my belt. Ashley met me inside with the shotgun. It wasn't loaded, and she was holding it by the middle as though she'd forgotten what it was for. I locked the door and checked every room before telling her what I'd heard. The sentence bothered her more than the voice. She had said those exact words to me that afternoon when she was trying to move a heavy box in the spare room. She remembered because I'd asked her to wait until I finished fixing a section of fence, and we'd had a minor argument about it. She had used that same annoyed tone. No one else had been close enough to hear her. We stood at the kitchen window for nearly an hour. The yard lights covered the open space between the house and workshop, but the well house was beyond them. Nothing crossed the light. I wanted to believe a person had been outside. A neighbor. A trespasser. Anyone. It would have required someone to hide near the house during the afternoon, listen to us talk, and then wait behind the workshop after dark. That was disturbing, but it was possible. What I couldn't explain was how that person had copied Ashley so perfectly. It wasn't an impression. It wasn't someone with a similar voice. It had been my wife. We made rules that night. Neither of us would go outside after sunset alone. If one of us heard the other calling from a place we couldn't see, we'd use our phones instead of answering. The mudroom and front doors would stay locked even during the day. We loaded the shotgun and kept it in the bedroom closet. The rules made us feel better for about 12 hours. The next afternoon, Ashley drove into town for an appointment related to our internet service. I stayed at the ranch to finish the workshop shelves. I kept the doors open because the day was warm, but I checked the yard every few minutes. Around 2, I heard the kitchen door close. It was a solid sound, followed by the rattle of the loose glass in the mudroom window. I assumed Ashley had returned early. I called out that I was in the workshop and continued measuring a board. She didn't answer. I walked outside. Her SUV wasn't in the driveway. The mudroom door was closed. I'd locked it after she left and had the only spare key in my