Beatrice Cobb and the Thing in the Shadows
Filed December 2, 1953 · Recorded by Ada Merrick, Institute Founder
She ran the post office. She dealt in facts. She went the long way home all that winter.
The Testimony
I want it on the record that I did not believe in any of this. I ran the post office in Hollowfield for eight years. I weighed packages and I verified addresses and when the old men in the lobby got going about things in the woods I went back to sorting.
That December was wet. It got dark at three in the afternoon and stayed that way.
I closed up on the second at about half past eleven and walked home the way I always did, past the mill. The loading dock is lit all night. I was not looking at it. I was thinking about a parcel that should have come in on the Tuesday and had not.
There was something standing on the dock.
I took it for a man. That is what I told myself and I kept telling myself it for about four seconds, and then I stopped, because the arms were too long and the head was held at an angle a man's head does not go to. It was standing among the crates and it was not doing anything at all.
My chest went tight and my breathing went shallow before I had finished deciding what I was looking at, which is the part I still do not like.
I did not stop walking. I went on at the same pace and I watched it the whole way and it never moved. There was a sound underneath everything, too low to call a sound. I felt it behind my eyes.
I did not sleep that night. I was not frightened, I was furious with myself for being the sort of woman who gets spooked walking home. But I knew it had not been a man and I knew it had not been an animal, and by two in the morning I had four pages written out because I could not put it down.
Three nights later I went the same way at the same time. I told myself I was proving it had been the yard lights.
It was there. It was closer. Off the dock by then, on the gravel.
You see more the second time. The skin was darker than skin goes, nearly black, with a mottled pattern through it that broke up the shape of it against the machinery. The light came off it wrong. There was hair, or something lying the way hair lies, and it moved when there was no wind.
The same low sound. I got a sense of small movements at the sides of my vision and when I looked straight at them there was nothing there.
It made no noise and it did not come any closer. It watched me go past.
I took the long way after that, in the rain, for a fortnight.
The thing I could not shake was the feeling. I never saw it clearly again, but I would be in the market and know something was at the edge of the room, and turn, and there would be the Nelsons buying flour. The feeling stayed anyway.
By the middle of the month I was not sleeping properly and I had told nobody. What was I going to say. I run the post office.
Then Ada Merrick came in for stamps and stopped before she paid and looked at me.
"You've seen something," she said. She did not ask it.
I do not know why I told her. She did not laugh and she did not tell me I was tired. She listened all the way to the end, and then she told me about the exercise book, four years of other people's accounts written down and kept, and she said she was calling a meeting of everybody whose name was in it, upstairs at Pruitt's, and would I come.
I did not decide until the night itself. By then it had gone down to something I could carry, a hum you learn to work through.
Documentation Notes
Investigator: Ada Merrick
I have recorded Miss Cobb's account as she gave it and read it back to her twice at her own request. Nothing here is mine.
What is unusual about this file is not the sighting. Accounts of a tall upright figure have come out of this valley since 1904 and most of them come from men working timber, which is the reason the county has never taken one of them seriously. Miss Cobb keeps the post office and is known to everybody in Hollowfield as a person who does not exaggerate.
She wrote four pages the same night, before it was a story she had told anyone. That is the whole reason this file is worth what it is worth, and it is now what the Institute asks of every member. Two things in those pages she put down without appearing to think they mattered:
The dogs in the mill yard did not bark.
She could hear the river, which on any ordinary night the machinery covers.
Neither detail serves the account. A person inventing this would not think to include them, and Miss Cobb did not include them on purpose. She wrote down what was there.
On the second sighting. She went back. I want that in the file because it is the part she is least comfortable with. She did not go looking for it, she went looking for the ordinary explanation, and she is annoyed with herself for both the going and the not finding.
On the sense of being watched. She reports this stopped after she began working with us. I record that she reports it. I do not know what it means and I am not going to write down a guess, because a guess in this file becomes a fact in the next one.
What the Institute does not know: what she saw, whether the two sightings were the same thing, and whether anything followed her at all after the second of December.
Filing. Class III. Two sightings by one witness with no physical trace is not corroboration, but the 1923 account from the mine workings and the 1936 account from the Kessler place describe the same posture and the same silence, and neither of those witnesses knew her.
The creature in this account is catalogued in the field guide, and can be photographed in the app.