Reed Music

Eyes open, MMers!

It's that time of year, and we thought we'd pass on a curious story we had sent to us here, at Malevolent Maine. This one involves those swampy, marshy places that seem to pop up all over the place for the few months of mud season, sorry, Spring, but are gone by summer. Here's, Terry from Newfield:

"Those little swampy spots have always freaked me out, ever since I was a kid. My old man told me there were water moccasins in the water and quicksand. He told me about a kid he knew when he was a boy who got stuck in a quicksand pit and died. But that's not what freaks me out. That's just common sense. No, it's the reeds that gives me the willies."

That's right: the reeds. Terry recounts how as a boy he was out playing near one of those swampy patches that formed along the river behind his grandparents' house. He was staying well back from the actual water, remembering the lessons his dad taught him, when he sense something watching him. He looked to the reeds, thinking that would be a great place for someone, or something, to hide, but he couldn't see anything.

That's when he heard it. High-pitched, thin flute-like sounds floated faintly towards him. His first thought was that it was the sounds of the reeds blowing in the wind. But there was no wind; it was a totally calm day. Terry went back to whatever he was doing. Soon he heard it again, coming from another cluster of reeds. Again, he felt like he was being watched.

"It was like being stalked."

"It was like a song," Terry told us. "But not. It was like a madman's idea of what a song should be. It was like one of those backwards played song."

The song kept fading and coming back, always from a different cluster of reeds. It lasted for maybe twenty minutes, and the entire time Terry continued to feel like he was being watched. Finally, he ran back to the house.

He thought nothing of it until ten years later when he was out fishing along a marshy stretch of river. "I heard it again. Same weirdo music, same feeling of being watched." Terry heard it a third time when he was out hunting when he was forty-five. He never saw anything, but the overwhelming sense of danger always made him leave the area quickly. 

"It was like being stalked," Terry said. "Like one of those lion shows on tv. Except I wasn't the lion, I was the deer or whatever. And that music... I've never heard anything like it. It's... it's hard to even explain, but it didn't sound like it came from this world. Like it was something from another world or whatever."

And here's the part that really freaked us out, MMers. 

"It doesn't make any sense, but that weird flute music... it sounded like a growl."

What was hiding in the reeds?

Stay safe out there Maine!