According to a Reddit user with the nickname "blackmetalbear", a lot of unusual things have happened in his life. This story is one of those.
“I come from a military family and therefore we have never lived in one place for a long time, wandering around the country. Because of this, I did not have permanent friends, but I had a feeling of social anxiety.
This story happened when we lived in the countryside in Newfoundland (Canada), I was then 14 years old. Of course, I had no friends, and because of this, life was gray and inconspicuous.
We lived on a plot of land with a small river, behind which there was a large and completely dense forest, in which I saw a bunch of things, more suitable for horror films. This is without mentioning a huge swamp and an abandoned house in the middle of the thicket.
It was the end of August and my parents were preoccupied with an incomprehensible noise and screams that were heard for several weeks from the garden by the river. They also saw light sources there and thought it was a crowd of teenagers who wanted to get into our garage and steal their father's beer supplies.
I myself have heard these screams several times, mainly in the evening, and I also heard screams coming from behind the river from the side of the forest. I did not see anything special in this, many local children went to this forest, and I, because of my anxiety, could not get to know them.
But one day I could not resist and decided to go to the forest and get acquainted with these children. I walked along the dirt road and soon met a boy there who said his name was Jack. He was 1-2 years younger than me, slightly shorter and his clothes looked very outdated. When he saw me, he was surprised, but then we said “Hello” to each other and established a dialogue.
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I told him that I heard the children screaming in the forest and that I was curious about what they were doing here. Then Jack told me to go after him so that he showed me their "project". We went into the thicket of the forest, to an area where I had never entered before. Soon two more boys joined us - one of my age named Elvis, and the other was two years older than me and his name was Louis. They, too, were wearing outdated clothes.
They told me that they were building their own tree house here and asked if I would like to help them in their work on it. I said that I certainly want to, because I wanted to make friends with them.
I will now describe their outdated clothing. She looked like she was from the 80s with bright neon colors and large shoulder pads. They wore large rubber boots on their feet.
At the same time, the children themselves looked perfectly impeccable - with clean faces, no acne, with neat hair, and there was not even a speck of dirt on their outdated clothes. At the same time, they said that they were friends, not brothers. For myself, I decided that they just have very caring parents.
The children were very friendly to me and we developed a good relationship with them. They never talked about their home life, but that didn't surprise me. We worked with them to build a tree house using planks, saws, ropes and nails. In two weeks we built a structure the size of a room in an apartment with an observation deck and a large table, and we were very proud of ourselves.
Once we were sitting inside at the table and talking about something, and I suddenly asked Elvis why I had not seen him before. The fact is that in our town there were only two schools, and the second was at the other end, so if he lives nearby, he had to go to the same school as me.
Elvis was surprised at my question and said that he thought the same about me. He convinced me that he went to the nearest school and talked about his classmates. I did the same. And in our stories, nothing coincided, although we were the same age.
Then I told them that I should go home to eat and asked if they would like to come with me, because my parents always cook a lot and would not refuse to share. And then they suddenly became hostile to me and from their speeches I understood that for some reason they flatly find themselves crossing the river.
Louis said that if you cross the river, it will lead to misfortune, but I generally did not understand why they did not want to. In the end, I just said that I could bring food for them and they agreed. Then I brought them a pie and we ate it together. They then apologized and said it was due to superstition, and I didn't think about it anymore.
Another week passed and I, as usual, went into the woods to the tree house. We played and talked, but today the children were somewhat depressed. Jack looked very ill, as if he had at least pneumonia, but when I asked him he replied that it was a common cold.
However, the other boys also looked bad. It's hard to find the right word, but they looked greasy and somehow sticky. Their hair was dirty, their skin glistened with sweat, and their clothes were filthy. At the same time, they always wore the same clothes, but this did not surprise me, there were many poor families in the city.
We sat in the house for another hour, and then we dispersed. Louis before that said that tomorrow we will meet again here, and Jack and Elvis by that time were coughing so hard, as if they had smoked a pack of cigarettes at a time.
At home, I finally told my parents that I was playing in the woods with local boys and they found it a little strange. But for me the most important thing was that I found myself as many as three friends.
By the way, it was by that day that the noise and screams from the direction of our garden finally stopped, as did the flashes of light from someone's flashlights.
The next day I came to the tree house with nails and an ax, there was something to be done on our roof. However, instead of a house, it was as if I was on a shipwreck. The walls of the house were torn down, the table was half destroyed, and the observation deck was also almost destroyed. And all this wooden structure looked like it had been rotting here for a couple of decades.
I decided that one of the other children learned about our "fortress" in the forest and destroyed it out of envy. So I stayed and waited for my friends to decide what to do next. But they never came that day. And the next day too. And a week later. I never saw these guys again.
I became sad and desperate to wait for them. I wanted to go to their houses, but I realized that I did not know anything about where they live, they always spoke only "on the hill".
My parents saw that I was sad and asked what had happened and I told them that my friends were no longer coming. They began to console me that maybe they simply did not want to be friends with me and that I did not need such friends then either. However, I was still sad for a very long time.
Now I am 29 years old and recently I told my wife and children about that tree house that I was building with my friends and how they suddenly disappeared. My kids immediately said that I was hanging out with ghost children. I thought it was a crazy theory, but my wife asked, “Has anyone else seen these children besides you?”. And I realized that no one had seen. My parents saw only flashlights and heard screams.
I also remembered that later at school I tried to find at least something about Elvis, Jack and Louis, and I did not find anything either. They never told me about their house, did not show it to me, and did not go anywhere with me from the forest. My wife told me that the story is completely creepy and that I can tell it on Reddit, which I did."
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In the comments to this story, it was suggested that the author could have fallen into a kind of "time capsule." The author mentioned to this that when he was in a clearing with a destroyed house, he saw the boards that he himself helped to put. That is, it really could be a jump in time.
However, another commentator wrote that they were still children of ghosts and that they were afraid of the river, because they once drowned in it. This could explain their anger at the mention of crossing the river, a sick appearance and a violent cough that opened up.