by stormbreath

winternight 07/16/12 (Mon) 03:34:59 #30028654

Hi. I've been dealing with some things lately, and I need to get help, or maybe just an opinion about weird stuff that used to happen in my life when I was growing up. I'm not sure, but I have the gut feeling that there's something spooky going on with them, and Parawatch is one of the biggest sites for this sort of thing.
My family used to own a cabin in the woods when I was growing up. The name of the place was Wolf Hollow. It's in the middle of nowhere, and a few hours drive away from home. It's been in our family for years, one of those things that was handed down for generations, until it ended up in my father's hands.
The other thing that's been passed down from father to child in our family — or at least used to be — is my dad's old job. My family used to be known as premier dog breeders, some of the best. Our kennel produced tons of show dogs, and they were always regarded as some of the best in the country.
Looking back on these two things, I'm pretty sure that they're connected, and strongly too, but there's no firm evidence for it. There's some odd things that happened around it. The first of the creepy things.
The first is that the cabin had a wolf problem: a big one. It was always something that we were aware of when we went up there for vacations, and you could generally hear the howling from nearby in the woods at night. The pack that lived up there must have been big, and I was always scared of it. Dad was never too worried, even for our own sake.
I guess there was some truth to it since the wolves never came too close to the cabin. I would go out into the woods a lot, and I would always see evidence of them, like wolf prints, or hear their calls, but not once did I ever actually see any of them. So I acted normally up there for the most part, trusting my dad when he said to not be afraid.
The other major tie goes deeper than "my dad worked with canines and there was some weird canine stuff going on up there". It's something that I didn't think much of as a kid, I just thought it was all normal growing up, it was what I was used to. My dad would occasionally take puppies up to the cabin with us, and ... I don't know.
They wouldn't come home with us.

winternight 07/16/12 (Mon) 03:37:37 #13735919

Dad at the cabin, with Pepper in the middle.

The biggest dog story that I have to tell regarding Wolf Hollow is about my own dog: Pepper. She was a golden retriever, and my parents got her for me when she was a puppy and I was a toddler. I wasn't fully responsible for taking care of her at first, but she was my dog. My younger brother and older sister had their personal dogs too, but Pepper was mine.
I really, really loved that dog.
In 1990, when I was eleven, we drove up to the cabin with Pepper and my sibling's dogs. No puppies this time. It was just supposed to be a regular getaway up to the cabin, and we were going to stay for the week.
I spent the first few days running around with Pepper and having a great time with her. Initially, she was right beside me the entire time, when I went on hikes, or fishing, or anything that I was doing. We really got along, the two of us. There was a bond between us, the kind you just can't shake.
But she disappeared three days in. I turned around one day on the trails and she was gone, vanished without a trace. I yelled out to her, but nothing called back to me. We got out onto the trails and searched for hours, endlessly for the rest of the week that we were out there, calling out for her. The other dogs joined in on the search, but we didn't find anything, ever.
Until the last day, just as we were getting ready to leave. We were loading up the cars, and then Pepper comes bounding out of the forest, charging us down. I ran up to her and grabbed her. It was bizarre. Everything about her seemed fine, nothing was wrong. She didn't even seem any skinnier or hungrier than normal — like someone had been taking care of her out there. I was crying happy, seeing her again.
Then my dad put his hand on my shoulder and told me to get into the car. I walked away, and as I walked away, I looked back to see him holding Pepper's head in his hands, staring deep into her eyes. She was looking right back at him.
I got into the car, and didn't look back again after that. My dad got into the car a few minutes later without Pepper, and we drove home in silence. I didn't ask any questions.
Dad came into my room that night and said he was sorry. He said he couldn't tell me anything about what happened, not until I was older. When I asked what that meant, he said it would have to wait a few years, but soon enough I would find out everything. He promised.

winternight 07/16/12 (Mon) 03:41:17 #53810196

He died when I was fifteen.
They got a new dam at the shelter for breeding, a bit of an older girl. By all accounts, she was a gentle dog without any history of violence or aggression in her life. My dad had picked her out in particular for her traits, and it seemed like a good deal.
He walked past her one day, and she absolutely snapped. She leaped up and ripped his throat out, mauled him to death in seconds. My dad's employees got him away from her — she didn't attack anyone else, only him — and got him to the hospital as quickly as they could, but it was too late for him. He was declared dead on arrival.
The dam didn't attack anyone else, and just sat calmly waiting around. The shelter was at a loss as to why she would lash out like that, but city policy said that any dog that even bit somebody should be put down. Killing a fully grown man? Obviously, they had to do her in. But the autopsy didn't find any reason either: no rabies, no neurological conditions they could identify, nothing. No reason at all.
My mom had no connection to my dad's business and didn't want it after the fact. Me and my siblings were supposed to take control of it when we grew older, but my dad had never taught us anything related to it, and we were too young to start control now. The idea was that we would get veterinary degrees before taking control, and that was years away for any of us.
So the dog breeding got sold to my one of my dad's employees, and passed out of the family. Everything went way down after that, but I hear that small businesses tend to suffer after a change in owners, when they've been owned and operated by a single person for a long time. I think it closed a few years after the accident.
As for the cabin, we stopped going. It was always more of my dad's thing, and while my mom liked it on the whole, she was scared of it, especially without my dad around to ease her worries. Besides, he was the one who knew everything about camping, and we would have been lost without him.

winternight 07/16/12 (Mon) 03:45:49 #01823333

My mom had held on to the cabin after all these years, it turns out. She died about a month ago (cancer), and my siblings and I got the cabin after all that. We were all surprised that it was still around, and hadn't been sold off, but I suppose it makes sense that mom never wanted to give it away, even after letting it sit around for over a decade.
As for us, however, we decided we didn't want to hold onto it. We'd already given up on one family tradition with the dog breeding, and looking back on the cabin, it's a spooky place, what with the wolves and everything. We'd sell it and split the profits between the three of us, which seemed like the best plan.
I live the closest to the cabin (my siblings moved a few states away), so it was up to me to give the place a checkup. I drove out there last Friday, and to my surprise, the cabin was actually doing pretty fine for the most part. It had taken a beating, but it was alright.
Nothing had changed about the wolves, so I didn't sleep easy Friday or Saturday. But like the past, I didn't see any wolves come near the cabin. They sounded close, as always, but they kept to themselves, out of sight.
On the final day, after I packed up the car but before I went to drive away, I went on a hike around one of the loops by the cabin. It was a short hike, only about an hour. It's one of my favorite trails, one that I used to hike all the time when I was younger, but I hadn't gotten around to hiking yet.
I was gone for probably just over an hour, but what I saw when I got back to the cabin shook me to my core. All around the cabin there were wolf tracks, but they stopped about ten feet away from the cabin itself, forming a circle around it. And lining that circle were collars. Hundreds of collars, small ones. For puppies.
I nearly lost my shit right then, but what really did me in was what waited for me at my car. Slung around the driver's side mirror was a larger collar, this one for a grown dog. It seemed familiar at first, but I couldn't place it until I got closer and inspected the dog tag:

P E P P E R

I left immediately and drove straight home. I have the collar that was on the door in front of me right now, and it's absolutely the same collar that she used to have when I was growing up. It's got our old address on it, my parents old phone number, everything. The exact same.
... I don't think I ever want to go back to Wolf Hollow again.