The Time I Saw a Demon Boar

My daughter is always bugging me to tell and re-tell the adventure stories of my life, especially the scary or paranormal ones. Since it’s nearing Halloween I figured I’d give it a shot and write down one of my old favorites; the time my friends and I encountered what looked like the giant demon boar god from the Japanese anime movie Princess Mononoke.

Out late at night, being teenage ne’er-do-wells (more like sometimes-do-wells because we were mostly good), we would drive around listening to music and cracking jokes while occasionally pulling pranks, exploring, and generally just being kids with no girlfriends.

One night at about 2am we were driving down one of the back roads of our town and had to stop and make a pit-stop on the side of the road, as we were all suffering from bladders full of large Slurpee. This was not an uncommon occurrence in our town, let alone for us. Suddenly, while making the usual jokes and shoving each other around, one of our party looked at something in the distance across the fields and exclaimed “What in the f*** is THAT?!”

As we all turned to look at what “THAT” was we saw it; down the old back-road to the T junction with a single street lamp in the distance, running across the field under the moonlight and illuminated by the lamp in the background was, for lack of better terms, the giant demon boar.

For years we’d called it “the giant cockroach” and “the werewolf thing”, names we’d come up with to explain it to people before really having an apt comparison to make to it, before we’d come to the consensus that the thing it most resembled was the creature from the popular anime movie.

Anyway, not long after seeing it galloping across the plain, it turned toward us and started advancing, much to our mutual shock and terror. For years we’d all fantasized about coming face to face with something apparently supernatural, lots of “If that happened, I’d totally….” stories that lead to trumped up tales of our own imagined badassery. It turns out though that in the face of such a thing, we did what most kids and sane people would have, we hauled our butts out of there!

Faster than you’d think a group of sugar-high teens could normally do, we coordinated ourselves back into the car in our appropriate seats at record time, and I hit the key and floored it in my amazing little white Hyundai Pony, which I’d lovingly named “The Millennium Falcon” after the popular Star Wars spaceship.

VROOM! The Pony’s 4 cylinders came to life as we sped to our safety, catching sparks off the muffler on the well-travelled dip in the road we’d regularly use in that area to do jumps and “get air” in the small car.

We ended up heading straight home after that, chatting incessantly about what it was we just experienced, how we should have stayed, or gone back and tried to get a better look at what it was. Find any kind of proof. But alas, we just stayed home for the rest of the night and ended up chatting into the wee hours of the morning before we all passed out.

I’ve driven that road many times over the years since, at all times of day (and even a few at night) and haven’t ever seen again the strange sight we witnessed that night. Part of me has always regretted not sticking around to get a better look at whatever it was, but most of me is glad we erred on the side of caution.