The Crow, the Slasher and the Saw

Mark once enjoyed a simple life. He works on a dairy farm in California, and his life could've likely been called ordinary until one fateful night in August of 2019. On this fateful night, he was working late into the small hours of the morning - it was roughly 3:15am - when he heard some strange voices coming from behind the hay-barn. Wandering over to check for early-morning intruders, he would eventually stumble onto something so much stranger and potentially far more deadly than he could've anticipated.

## The Butcher's Block

He was the only one working overnight in the dairy. The site was very large, and so the bright lights provided by the dairy building itself were not nearly enough to cover the entire grounds of the facility, meaning that the majority of it was pitch black. Seeing as he was the only worker on duty, he was technically meant to be in charge of everything that had to be constantly happening on the busy farm - and so he was trying his best to make his rounds while presumably fighting off the tide of night shift fatigue. He was stood at the back of the dairy, where the truck used to transport the cattle's feed was parked. He was just about to board the vehicle and feed the cows when he heard what sounded like voices behind the nearby hay barn. Intrigued, he quickly followed the voices to behind the barn but found no obvious source for the noise. Confused but probably just wanting to get on with his shift, he went back to the feed truck. Like some kind of highly abnormal comedy routine, he heard the voices again soon afterwards - and just like before, he went to the hay-barn and saw nothing. Deciding that the voices were probably not planning on stopping any time soon, he clambered into the feed loader and waited for the voices to resume their suspicious chatter so that he could turn on the headlights of the vehicle and catch the perpetrators in the act. It was now 3:35am and he set his alarm for eight minutes. He would find the meddlesome intruders and then go for his break when the timer went off.

However, it was then that the night took a spectacularly bizarre turn. Mark suddenly found himself in a room with a door in front of him - and before he even had time to comprehend the sudden change in location the door flew open and a man holding a knife ran at him. The would-be killer was described as having no '*facial expression... no nothing*'. Whether this means he was literally faceless or whether he just had a psychopathic deadpan look is unclear. Presumably shocked and terrified, Mark thought fast and sidestepped the clumsy attack - at which point the knifeman fell to the floor and remained completely still. It was as if he had suddenly died. Mark stood over his attacker and noticed that he wasn't even breathing. Baffled, Mark didn't have much time to consider his situation before another door in the wall opened up and two more '*beings*' stepped out.

One of these beings was a very tall man with the face of a crow, or perhaps just a mask that resembled one - and the other was something quite unlike anything seen before in ufology. It appeared to be a man with a '*contorted*' face that looked to be '*smiling and twisted*'. The contorted man was wearing a business suit with an unbuttoned shirt - and it was this strange-looking character that next darted towards Mark and grabbed his wrists. As the entity managed to pull the terrified farmer closer to it, its unbuttoned shirt fell open and revealed a circular saw-blade in its chest - which was spinning rapidly as if it had been turned on. The creature was trying to pull Mark onto the blade. Panicking, Mark fought back - grabbing the being's hands and forcing it to the ground. Once it was on the ground, it suddenly seemed to die just like the slasher had done just minutes beforehand. Now stood among two bodies, the presumably-panting Mark looked up at the crow being. The avian enigma said nothing - turning around and walking back through the door from whence it came. As it closed the door, Mark suddenly found himself back in the feed truck.

He was covered in sweat and he had handprints on his wrists which he said were '*extremely hot*'. There had been no heater in the truck, and so his greatly elevated temperature made no sense to him. Terrified and disorientated, he left the truck and ran back into the dairy - feeling as if something was breathing down his neck the entire time. When he got back into the dairy, his heart presumably sank as he plunged further into insane confusion. Only five minutes had elapsed. He had set his timer for eight minutes and there were three left. He would eventually conclude that he had had an '*altercation with demonic forces*'.

## Nearly Missing?

It is interesting (and frightening) to think about what sort of story we might be telling today if Mark had proven unable to fight off the murderous entities he encountered in the bizarre room. He would've presumably just been listed among those who had vanished under utterly inexplicable circumstances. I want to tell a story in which the potential abductee seemingly didn't make it back home. It was apparently first reported in a popular Venezuelan newspaper known as *El Tiempo* by the reporter Segundo Peña. It was a nice Summer's day in the early 1970s, and an unnamed but apparently prominent professor at the University of the Andes in Mérida, Venezuela was walking across the university parking lot. He stopped at least once to chat to one of his students before getting into his car. He noticed that some students were waving at him, and so he waved back before closing the car door and falling off the face of the earth. He was never seen again and the car never drove away. According to Segundo Peña, the professor (whose name has been excluded out of respect for his family) has now been missing for over 40 years.

This story is unlike the *Vanishing Hippies of Stonehenge* and the *Disappearance of Martha Wright* in that it can't be debunked with a simple Google search. However, this does not mean that it really happened. The newspaper in which it was allegedly reported definitely exists, as does the university worked at by the vanished professor. Segundo Peña himself probably exists, but the language barrier has prevented me from tracking down an online profile conclusively belonging to the man. The unnamed nature of the supposed professor and undated nature of the alleged occurrence casts doubt on the reality of the event however. My two sources for this story are *Listverse* and an article on the rather dodgy website *MessageToEagle.com* - but despite this it still stands out as an intriguing and sobering story of someone who allegedly disappeared without a trace under seemingly impossible circumstances, and due to the extremely scant nature of information surrounding it, it is basically impossible to easily debunk.

I wonder if Mark's story would be listed somewhere on one of these strange websites if he had failed to fight off the slasher and the axeblade man. I wonder if this is something like what happens to Missing 411 victims as well? Maybe they're taken someplace else by mysterious entities and then just simply murdered? That's a scary thought...

## Source

*Monsters Among Us Podcast* - Season 8, Episode 5