Eerie Encounters : Story of The Skinwalker Ranch

 In 1994, an unsuspecting family made up of Terry Sherman, Gwen Sherman and their kids purchased an abandoned ranch in the northeastern corner of Utah because of its low price. With the family’s main source of livelihood being cattle, they were excited to have this huge 500-acre property as it offered ample space for their cattle to roam around. Their newly purchased ranch, however, had a strange nickname and it was fondly called “The Skinwalker Ranch” by the Locals.

History

 Built between the late 1800s and the early 1900s, The Skinwalker Ranch was built upon a land cursed by the Navajo Tribe. The Utes (A Native American Tribe) had a habit of capturing and selling other native American tribes into slavery. So, when the Utes started rounding up the area where the Navajos lived, they were forced to move away from their land to escape enslavement. While fleeing away from their land, the Navajos cursed their own land with “The Skinwalkers Curse” to punish the Utes who had tormented them. The Skinwalker Ranch was built on this cursed piece of land. In line with legends, this curse would summon Skinwalkers and they would terrorize the people living on the cursed land.

 Within a few years after moving into the Ranch, the original owners started noticing strangely huge predatory animals doing eerie things on the property. These events led to the property being abandoned before the Shermans bought it.

An Eventful First day

 When the Shermans moved in, they fell in love with their house on the property despite noticing strange things in it. They noticed that every window in the house had a deadbolt and every door of the house had multiple locks on both sides. In the front and back sides of the house were huge pikes with massive chains that held guard dogs, attached to them. It appeared as if the previous owners were extremely paranoid about something and did their best to safeguard themselves from this “something”.

 On their very first day on the property, as the family were unloading things off their truck, Terry noticed a huge wolf calmly walking towards them from a tree line. Terry and his family were used to protecting their cattle from the predators around them and thus, instead of getting scared, they got hold of their weapons and prepared themselves to confront this wolf. As the wolf walked closer, Terry was astounded by the wolf’s size as it looked three times the size of the largest recorded wolf but despite its humongous size it appeared to be extremely calm and friendly.

  As the wolf walked closer and closer, the family were enchanted by it and went into a trance. The wolf calmly walked towards Terry’s father, started rubbing on him like a pet dog and started walking back. On its way back, it saw a calf peeking through the grills of its enclosure and immediately pounced on it. The mouth of the wolf was so big that it completely covered the calf’s head. The family were bought out of the trance by the calf’s shout and they immediately noticed a disgusting chemical odour around them. Terry’s father immediately fired at the wolf with his riffle but it did not seem to cause any harm to the wolf. To save the calf, Terry and his son started bludgeoning the wolf with the back side of an axe but it just didn’t budge and kept pulling the head of the calf as if it was trying to rip its head apart.

 As the family kept trying their best to ward off the wolf, it got bored of the calf and slowly walked away from the property as if nothing had happened. Out of rage, Terry fired at the wolf with his high-powered rifle but the animal kept walking as if the bullet did not even hit it. Instead of running back into the house, Terry and his son started following the wolf with their weapons. They decided to kill the massive creature as it posed a threat to their cattle but the footsteps of the wolf stopped at a muddy ground as if it had magically disappeared. Although startled by this event, the family convinced themselves saying it was just a wolf and tried to move on from the incident.

A Mild Dose of Peculiarity

 During the first week in the house, Gwen started to believe that something was medically wrong with her as she felt that she had serious issues with her memory. There were two main events that made her believe this. A couple of days after moving in, Gwen returned home after getting groceries for the house. After putting away the groceries, Gwen went to her room to change her clothes but when she returned back, she found the groceries back in bags. Gwen clearly recalled putting the groceries away but they were somehow back in the bags. Gwen was completely caught off guard by this event and despite thinking over it for over twenty minutes, couldn’t come up with an explanation.

 The same day, Gwen grabbed her towel and went into the bathroom to take a shower. After a really long shower, Gwen stepped out of the shower only to find her towel missing. When she stepped out of the bathroom after drying herself with another towel, she noticed the missing towel hanging in a closet on the other side of the house. It was not just Gwen going through these things as her husband Terry had something similar happen to him the same week.

  Terry was digging up holes with his digging device to make a new fence around the property. After digging up a few such holes, he left his equipment at the last dug hole and went back into the house to take a break. When Terry returned from his break, he noticed that his digging tool was missing. After completely searching the property, he finally found the 70-pound tool in a tree far away from the last dug hole. The heavy tool was hoisted up 70 feet on this tree. Terry was completely dumbfounded by this event and just like Gwen, he was not able to come up with a logical explanation for this.

 By the end of the first week at their new house, Terry started noticing bright lights on the far end of their property at night. Terry initially thought these lights were the headlights of the vehicles of lost drivers and did not pay much attention to them but as the lights kept appearing every night, he concluded that these were the torchlights of illegal hunters. So one night, Terry grew really frustrated with these supposed hunters and rushed towards these lights with his gun to confront them. As he went closer and closer to the lights, he noticed that they kept retreating away from him. After retreating for quite some distance, Terry saw these lights ascend into the night sky and disappear.

A Strange Flying Mass

 With the strange events continuing, the winter of 1994 arrived. While Terry was looking out for one of his cows that went stray on an extremely chilly winter night, he noticed its footprints near the tree line where the giant wolf had previously appeared. When he followed the trial, he found that it disappeared in the same muddy region where the footsteps of the giant wolf had disappeared previously. Before the winter ended, four more cows disappeared in a similar way.

 With his animals disappearing, Terry started patrolling his property at night to find out what was happening to his cattle. One night, Terry noticed a strangely shaped object with bright lights near the tree line. This object kept gently hovering 20 feet off the ground and its lights were focused on the ground as if it was scanning it. When Terry slightly moved to take a better look at this object, he accidentally broke a twig and it made an extremely minute sound. The moment this twig broke, the lights of this object turned off and within a few minutes, just like the lights Terry had seen before, it ascended into the sky and disappeared.

From Bad to Worse

 By the spring of 1995, things moved from bad to worse for Terry and his family. The disappearing cattle started reappearing in random locations after a random interval of time. Although these reappearing cows were alive, they had surgically precise cuts on them and some of their parts were missing. Also, the family started noticing strange humanoid figures with expressionless faces walking around their property at night. At times, these figures walked right to the windows and peeked into their house with their featureless faces thus, creeping out the family. 

 To keep themselves away from these figures, the family completely covered the windows and deadbolted them. Although they covered the windows to keep themselves hidden, they heard these figures scratch the windows and communicate within themselves in nonsensical language. These events became so predominant that the family could barely sleep at night. As a result, the grades of the kids plummeted and Gwen became delusional which lead to her losing her job at the bank.

The Appearance of Light Orbs

 One night, when Terry was sitting on his front porch with his rifle, he noticed an orange light orb appear in a distance. Terry lifted up his rifle and saw through its scope to get a magnified view of the orb. Through the scope, he saw multiple dark humanoid figures that roamed around his property at night, crawl out of this oval-shaped orb. In the middle of this orb, he saw something that resembled the blue sky. These humanoid figures crawled out of this orb and disappeared into the tree line. After all these figures crawled out, the orb disappeared.

 The next night onwards, Terry and his family started seeing blue orbs around their property at night and it emitted a strong sense of anxiousness. Tall featureless humanoid figures crawled out of these orbs and glued themselves to the windows of the house. Despite the obscurity piling up, the family persisted to stay in the house but they decided to leave the place when their three dogs were turned to ashes by one of these orbs.

Shermans Sell the Ranch

 One night, when one of these orbs appeared, the family’s three guard dogs started barking at it. The orb seemed to retreat from the dogs but the dogs kept chasing it and when it finally retreated into the forest, the dogs followed it. A few minutes later, Terry heard his dogs squeal in pain and after a few more minutes the sounds abruptly stopped. As the dogs did not return, Terry and his son headed out into the forest in search of their dogs the next day. Inside the forest, they saw three circular piles of ashes and these were the ashes of their dogs. This was the tipping point and the family decided to sell their property.

 A billionaire named Robert Bigelow who was obsessed with investigating the paranormal bought the Skinwalker Ranch from Terry after he heard the strange sounds surrounding it. Robert had a group of highly renowned sceptic scientists and researchers to investigate the paranormal and he made this ranch, the headquarters for his crew. Robert hired Terry as the manager of this Ranch and thus, despite selling it, Terry continued taking care of the Ranch.

Robert's Crew Wintnesses the Paranormal

 Robert’s crew did a complete search around the property to find logical explanations for Terry’s claims. Also, they did a thorough mental checkup on the family to make sure they were mentally stable. As they were not able to find any hallucinants or logical explanations for his claims and the tests proved that the family were mentally stable, the crew slowly started to believe that Terry and his wife were not making it up.

 One day while tagging the newly born calves, Terry and his wife Gwen saw the guard dog that accompanied them snarl at something. When they turned to see what it was snarling at, they saw a freshly tagged calf dissected with only its head and legs remaining. The calf was cut with surgical precision and there was no blood around the place. So, Terry and some of the researchers started scanning the property to find the case for the calf’s dissection and during their inspection, they found a huge humanoid wolf creature perched on a tree in the tree line. Terry immediately started firing at the figure and it disappeared into the forest leaving behind a disgusting chemical stench. This odour resembled the one left behind by the huge wolf that visited the property during Terry’s first day.

 One other night, while two of the researchers were walking around, they saw an orange orb and what they saw inside it matched exactly watched Terry told them. They saw dark humanoid creatures crawl out of it and run towards them. As the duo crouched down in fear, these creatures ran into the forest. These researchers ran back into the house in horror and they left Robert's crew the very next day.

 After studying the ranch for a really long time, Robert’s sceptic group of scientists confirmed that there was something indeed eerie about the property. They found that multiple things in the property were highly magnetised and they couldn’t figure out the reason behind it. Also, orbs, lights and obscure events were ever present on the property and the crew collected multiple video and photo evidence to support it. Many believe that this is the most trustworthy instance of paranormal activity.