Real Encounters

*Blood Covered Stranger*

When I was around 16 I spent almost the entire summer at my best friends house. She lived alone with her mom, who worked as a nurse and often slept at the hospital, so we had the house to ourselves a lot. This night was one of those times.

Someone began pounding on her front door around 2am. During the summer it wasn't unusual for our friends to ask us to come hang out in the park or whatever in the middle of the night, so we figured that it was one of them trying to be funny. My friend called out for them to come in. The door didn't open; a sound came from the other side like someone rattling the doorknob, and then there was an awful, chilling kind of moan that still makes me shiver when I think about it.

I had been really creeped out and I wanted us to go into her bedroom and wait until they went away, but my best friend isn't easily scared. She had rolled her eyes and went to pull open the door, saying something about how they were going to wake up her neighbors.

When the door opened, however, no one familiar was on the other side of it. Standing in her hallway was a man covered in dark red blood. It was on his face, his hands, his arms, it stained his clothes. It was everywhere. She'd screamed and scrambled to get away from him and the man had collapsed in her doorway on her carpet.

Both of us were screeching at this point. I'm not proud of it, but when I saw the blood on the man and realized that the sound of the rattling doorknob had been because his hands were too slick to grasp it and turn properly, I vomited. Something about that really did it for me. Some time during all of this my friend had called the police and they arrived shortly after with an ambulance. The relatively short amount of time we were stuck in her living room trying to look at anything but the horrible scene felt like it lasted for years.

Later, we found out that the man lived right down the street from her. Apparently he'd taken too much of a hallucinogenic and had a bad trip. He'd apparently looked in the mirror in his bathroom during the trip and had seen himself covered in something or had seen something wrong with his skin, because he then began trying to scratch his skin off, gouging himself in the process.

To this day we don't know why he chose my friends house to go to or what happened to him after that (he either died or moved away, his apartment was for sale shortly after and we never saw him again), but I will never forget that horrifying experience.