I hadn't talked about this experience in more than a decade. The girl I was with at the time is long gone, and life is a lot different from what it used to be. But recently I've had a few friends ask me if I have ever had any "strange" experiences. I have had a few, and this is one of them. I decided to go ahead and post it here, so that I can direct my online friends to the page rather than re-hashing the story over and over again. If anyone has any questions, perhaps having had a similar experience, feel free to contact me.
I was in my late teens, still living at home, on a Summer day. My girlfriend and I went out for a walk barefoot around the suburban neighborhood. It was getting later in the day, but not dark or even “shadowy” yet. My house was a split-ranch like every other in the neighborhood, and sat on a bit of a hill on about the same size lot as everyone else. Coming down the street I had line of sight to it, though it was just around a corner. Not an intersection, just a 90 degree turn. I could see it over the bit of hill that was a neighbor's front yard on the inside of the turn, or the right side, where my house would be on the left just around the turn.
Anyway, we were walking slowly and chit-chatting about nothing in particular really. Just about how nice the day was after the heat-wave had broken. I can still remember the warm pavement under my bare feet. Looking up ahead, I saw something on the turn, from a distance of maybe 50-yards I'm guessing. It looked like an oil slick on the street, like someone had ruptured a vital component to their vehicle. My next-door neighbors (who's house did not come into view until one rounded the turn) usually had an old car or two that they were tinkering with at any given time, and beat up their cars pretty well too. I was good friends with the whole family, and knew that one of my buddies had just gotten another car recently, so I figured it was him who left the slick all over the road, and actually said something along those lines to my girlfriend. “’X’ must have lost his oilpan.” There wasn't a break in our step, or any eerie inclination that anything unusual was about to happen.
As I said, sunny day, meaningless conversation, and a very casual pace to our stroll. Not the setting for anything bizarre whatsoever. As we got closer, obviously I was looking at this "oil slick" ahead of us. The first inclination that I had that something was odd, was that this stain in the road was darker than oil. Black, and did not glimmer with wetness like the sheen of fresh oil, nor was there any texture to the blotch. By this point we had gotten quite close to it. Before I could process the thought really, the truly bizarre event unfolded.
The dark spot moved. Like something coming up out of the ground. Like a man pulling himself up out of a manhole where there was none. There was form, but no depth. I could see the arms, the shoulders, pull of this thing pull itself up out of the hole that it seemed to be made of. By the time it got to its feet, there was no mark left on the pavement. It was short, 4 and a half feet tall maybe. Other than the outline, there were no distinguishable features. The head was little more than a bump between broad, shaggy shoulders. It paused in a stance of forward intent. Imagine the shadow of a little troll warrior, with his head hung low, wearing shaggy furs, and a shape indicative of massive upper-body strength. No other features though, no face or anything, just the 2D profile, yet somehow it did seem to have depth almost, since it didn't really have edges either, like even a shadow does. I guess it's just really hard to explain what a completely black 3D shadow looks like.
So it pulls itself out, gives a little hop, and pauses for a second as I see the shoulders move up and down once or twice as if it is breathing heavily. It emits no sound. Then it steps forward, quickly. Not a charge or a run, but as if with direct purpose. Almost like stomping forward, right at us. This all happened in less than five seconds I would say, and we were only steps away from the "stain" when it moved. It took four, maybe five steps directly at us.
Now here's where it gets really weird. My girlfriend and I spun in and let go of eachother's hand, as it seemed to be going between us. But it didn't go exactly between us. It was slightly more toward me, but it actually moved through both of us. I was instantly nauseous and cold. It's almost impossible to explain what it felt like. Imagine you actually had the sense of feeling in all of your internal organs, and then imagine what it would feel like if they were all packed with cold clay. That's sort of what it felt like. My girlfriend only got clipped on the side and limbs. She wasn't nauseous, just cold. As we spun and this thing moved through us, it stepped down, back into the ground, as if desceding down hidden stairs, and completely disappeared.
We looked at eachother, the shock settling in. My brain raced to make sense of it. I was sure I was dreaming for a second. No, I could clearly remember everything about the day, nothing ethereal in my surroundings. I must have been hallucinating? I don't know what was more scary, the event itself or the looking into my girlfriend's eyes and sharing a mutual realization that this did just happen to us. You can’t even imagine. My brain was already working overtime to explain it away, but the hop of that was lost, when we said to eachother without any words, “Oh my god, yes, that really did just happen.”
We barely made it to my house, just so weak and drained of energy. We briefly tried to explain to my mother what had happened before passing out on the living room floor. We slept through the rest of the day, that night, through the next day, and into the following night, without even bothering to drag ourselves to bed upstairs that I remember, though we did finally wake up in bed, with a lot more explaining to do to my mother.
For a few days we talked about it with eachother. Trying to understand and accept that this really had happened to us as much as trying to figure out exactly what had happened to us. Then as days turned into weeks, life went on, and we completely forgot about it. There was nothing there to ground the memory in reality I suppose. But then one day, about a year later walking down the same street, the memory came rushing back to us at the same time. I trembled, her eyes welled up, and we swore to eachother to never forget again.
"It's unfortunate that that happened and she didn't get to fly home, but it makes me feel a little safer," said Emily Protine. 
