When I was twelve I attended the sleepover birthday party of a friend of mine who lived on a large, wooded lot. I had not known her for very long, so I had never been to her house before. The house was two stories tall with a large, finished basement. From the back it appeared three stories, though the entrance to the basement was underneath a large second-story back porch. The house was set close to the road with a large, sprawling slope down to the edge of the woods. About a hundred years into the woods was a treefort. It was not built up into a tree, but rather against a tree. Built about six or seven feet off the ground, it consisted of a closed center room with a porch running all the way around it, a wooden ladder on one side, and a plastic slide on the other which no one had used in years.

About 10:30 at night, my friend suggested that instead of sleeping the basement, we go and sleep in the treefort. She had done it before and said it was alright with her parents. Being my little 12-year-old self I was not so sure about the idea, but I didn't want to seem a baby so I took my sleeping bag and pillow and followed them out into the woods. Once we got to the treefort I realized that it wasn't so bad since we could still see the house. We settled into the center room in a circle and turned on a lantern we had brought with us. I think there were six of us. It was very crowded. We sat around telling Most Embarassing Moment stories for a long time and laughing very loudly. After a while, though, I started to get a weird feeling in our gut, like someone was listening to us, and we were disturbing them with our laughing.

It was about 11:15 (an estimate based on the time we ended back up in the house) when we heard the first noise. It was a sort of scuffling. We all froze and stopped laughing. Then it came again. There was something at the bottom of the slide! We couldn't see the slide from the inside room, but we could feel the treefort vibrating. It happened a third time, but then it stopped. One girl, the party host, got up after a few seconds and started to grab the lantern, but all at once the noise came again. It sounded like the thing was coming up the slide. We all screamed at once and scrambled towards the center of the room, knocking over each other and ending up in a bit of a tangle on the floor. When we quieted down we heard footsteps in the leaves, headed towards the house. It sounded like it was running on two feet, and the hostess, laughing suddenly, shouted out her older sister's name. Consoling ourselves with the idea that it was a prank, we grabbed our things and started to leave, but one girl tripped over herself, and at the sudden noise we burst out running, jumping off the ladder instead of climbing. We had our pillows, but we had left our sleeping bags and the lantern in the treehouse. We ran up the slope and towards the house, going up the stairs to the deck instead of into the basement. The door was unlocked, thankfully, and we hurried all the way upstairs to the host's bedroom. Once we got up there we heard her dog start barking. She barked for about ten straight minutes before running around to the front of the house and stopping. It was about 11:25.

We had to go back down to the basement to get our overnight bags eventually, but we carefully avoided the windows. We hurried back upstairs. Most of the girls fell asleep, but me and two others went downstairs to get some snacks. We looked down to the woods. The lantern was still on. We never went to sleep - we stayed up playing Final Fantasy in the basement (after closing all the curtains and locking the door). At about 7:00 the other girls started coming down, and we decided to all go out together and get our things from the treefort. When we stepped outside we immediately noticed how quiet it was. We couldn't hear a thing. The host's dog was fast asleep by the steps to the back porch. We got to the woods and on the way into them we noticed that there were no footprints, no disturbances from whatever it was running last night. The biggest surprise came when we got to the treefort. The lantern was off, knocked over, but when we checked the batteries it was in perfect working order. Also, one rung of the ladder was hanging off, partially broken. We hurried back to the house and never spoke of it.

I never went into those woods again, since me and the girl started going to different schools a year later and didn't talk much. But once in that year we knew each other she said that her little sister complained of seeing something at the window while she was in the basement with a friend in the middle of the night. I never came up with a good guess as to what it was, but I don't believe it was human.