Field Man - SCP Foundation

When I was little - I, that is Crackles, not an unnamed creepypasta protagonist - I went on a lot of road trips with my dad and my brother, almost always to Idaho to visit family. We passed by a lot of fields. Sometimes they had wheat, others had corn, others were littered with bales of hay. On occasion we'd see herds of cows. But the fields that just looked like several empty acres of dirt often baffled me. Were they not being used anymore? Were they freshly planted, with no new plants visible yet? Did nobody own them?

One summer, when I was eight years old, we were driving through Iowa along Interstate 80. One of those empty dirt fields caught my attention, not because it was particularly fascinating, but because there was a man in a brown coat standing in it with his back to the road. As our car passed by, I noticed he was turning slowly so that he was always facing away from me. I watched him until the car dipped over a little hill and he - and his dirt field - disappeared.

I asked Dad if he saw that. The 'field man'. He didn't. My brother hadn't either, as he'd been asleep since Illinois. I'm not certain if it was real, a very vivid dream, or a half-remembered bit from a film seen many years ago. Memories of small children can easily lie.

Sometimes, nearly ten years later, I find myself driving along Interstate 5 and looking out for the field man.