Missing Time
When I was a boy I used to live in this little town outside Casa Grande, Arizona. Well, when I say small town, what I actually mean is five houses in the middle of nowhere in the desert, with a water tower and a separate generator that ran the electricity for everyone. The houses on either side of mine were owned by grandparents on my mom’s side and an uncle on my mom’s side. The two other houses across from us were owned by friends of our family who didn’t want to live in town and wanted to be off the grid. As kids back then we didn’t have electronics or video games like the kids of today do. Hell, we didn’t even have a television. What we did have was an open empty desert, our imaginations, and of course each other, which would consist of me, a sister, four cousins, and three friends; four boys and five girls. Often we would play out from early in the morning to late in the evening. We would venture far out into the desert landscape playing whatever our imaginations could make up. Back then we didn’t have to worry about anyone trying to kidnap us or hurt us in any way. We got to be kids. Nothing out of the ordinary went on for many years we were out there. All that changed when I was fourteen years old. One summer night, three of my cousins and I were out in the desert not too far from the houses. We had started a small bonfire and were sitting around late into the evening talking and telling stories. As the night wore on, each one of my cousins tired and went back to their homes. Sometimes a friend would come and sit a while but by eleven in the evening it was just I sitting there watching the embers die out. As I was about to get up and call it a night I noticed something strange glowing in the sky. It was a bright light that was just stationary in the sky. At first, it appeared to be a little bright orb far away. There were no stars out that night as the clouds had settled in reminding us that the monsoon was near. So this light stood out. I do not know why even to this day, but for some reason, I started walking towards it. Maybe I was curious, maybe I felt like it was calling me. Either way, I started to walk towards it. After walking a few yards I stopped and looked at the time on my light up wristwatch. It was 11:15 pm. I looked at the orb to see that it had gotten bigger. Or, more precisely, gotten closer. I watched as it started to move around. At first, it was small movements, like it was swaying. Then it started to move really fast as if it was being spun around on a string. Then it shot straight up, stopped, shot out away from me, stopped, shot back to where it was before it started moving, stopped, then it made a flash, like a camera flash. Then it shot straight up and disappeared. Now, from my point of view, this all happened in a matter of seconds. It was really quick. I looked back at my watch. It was 2:27 am. I stood there confused. Why was it so late? That much time couldn’t have passed. I looked back at where the embers were. They were out. I went back to my house. As I entered the door, my mom was sitting on the couch. When she saw me walk in she jumped up and ran to me, giving me a big hug. When she pulled away from me I looked at her eyes. I could tell she’d been crying. She asked where I was the whole time. I told her what happened and what I saw. She looked at me for a bit before asking me again where I went off to for so long. I tried to tell her that I was standing near the fire and that I thought it was still 11 pm. My dad went out and looked around, then walked over to my uncle’s house. When he came back he said that my cousin had seen me by the fire around 11 pm but when he looked a few minutes later I was gone. He assumed I went back to my house and went to bed. The next few months went by without further incident. One night though in September of the same year I saw the lights, I was awoken by noise coming from the kitchen. I assumed it was one of my parents or my sister and proceeded to go back to bed. As I was on the verge of sleep I heard a creaking noise. I recognized this as my bedroom door opening so I lifted my head to look. At the time my brain did not register what I saw right away but with the power of hindsight I knew what I saw was what I thought it to be. There, peeking around the corner of the door, was this creature, small and humanoid in shape, with a large teardrop-shaped head and large black almond-shaped eyes. It looked at me. I looked at it. As quickly as it had peeked it disappeared. I went back to sleep. Nose bleeds would come out of nowhere frequently at random times the following months and I would continue to see what I thought at first was a single creature. That all changed that winter. It was Christmas Eve and I hadn’t seen it in a few weeks so I wasn’t on alert. I had family and friends over and we all had the traditional dinner. That night we built a bonfire where we normally would and sat around drinking snuck out alcohol and whatnot. We started telling scary stories and it came to my turn. I started telling what I have been seeing. The first thing out of my cousin’s mouth was ‘aliens’. They all laughed. I didn’t. That was my thought as well and I told them that the night I had supposedly disappeared might be linked since I don’t remember ever leaving that spot. I suggested that I might have been abducted by aliens and that’s why I was gone. They all laughed again. I didn’t. Seeing my serious demeanor, my female friend, Susan, asked if I had seen it recently. I had not. Not in a few weeks as previously mentioned. I told her I would see in looking in at me from my bedroom door or see it very briefly around the house at night. I caught it looking in from my parents’ bedroom window once. The sightings were always quick. As soon as I had noticed it would disappear. I chased it once when I had seen it outside on a moonlit night. It was peeking around the side of the house so I quickly ran to it. When I got there it was gone. The side of the house is bare of any sort of debris or anything it could hide behind. It simply vanished. All my cousins and friends then came up with the idea of camping out by the house that night. Though it was cold, they wanted to see if it came back. Though our parents protested at first due to the cold, they ultimately let us. We got our tents and set up camp around the bonfire. We put our tents really close together. We stayed up late into the night until it was just Susan and I that were left awake. She sat next to me and we covered up in a thick blanket and looked at the dying fire. I’m not sure what happened but somehow I turned to her to see if she wanted to call it a night and she kissed me. Being a teenager this sent my hormones into overdrive. We kissed a few minutes when we heard a rustling nearby. I quickly turned in the direction of the noise. There, standing near the dead brush, was the creature. I thought she saw it too because she gasped. I looked to her, only to find her looking in a different direction. There, off to the side of where our tents were, were two more of them. As quickly as we had seen them, they disappeared. She was shaken, as expected. At first, she was talking about just going back home but then looked out to her house. It was dark. The fire by now was almost out. She then turned to me and said she didn’t want to sleep by herself. We went to my tent. We fell asleep. She had stated to me that she hadn’t seen anything since that night. She also stated that she must have been a little too drunk and was letting my stories get to her. I didn’t argue with her. I know we saw them. And I continued to for many years. Then I left home for college. We both attended the same university. During my four years, I did not see them at all. Even after graduation, I hadn’t seen them. She and I would eventually get together and marry. We had a child. A girl. We named her Michelle, after her grandmother. Things were looking up for us. Michelle was five years old when she first started telling us about the little monsters that would be in her room. She said they would look at her from the closet or they’d be hiding somewhere around the house peering out at us. I became a little worried as to what she meant. She couldn’t really describe them other than they were small and they were monsters. Susan would write it off as a child’s imagination at first. At least until Michelle saw me watching a movie called Paul. When she saw the alien on the screen she exclaimed very loud “that’s them! That’s the little monsters!” Susan started to freak a little when she found out. We asked her if they ever tried to touch her or talk to her and she’d say no. She said all they do is look at us. Then one day out of the blue as we were sitting in her room playing tea party, as she is serving Susan and I pretend tea, she looked at me with the most serious expression a five-year-old can make and said “they said they don’t want me or mommy. They just want you” and sat down to drink her pretend tea. Susan shot me a glance and asked Michelle who told her that. She replied with “the little monsters.” That was last year. She is now six and doesn’t see them anymore, or at least she says she doesn’t. Susan was afraid to be alone sometimes because every once in a while she would see something out the corner of her eye, and when she’d look it would be gone. We moved into a house in the desert, not too close to people but yet not too far away. Susan likes the privacy, but has gotten two pit bulls for added safety measures. Plus she’s not as on edge when she’s alone now. I know, moving in the middle of the desert given what we’ve been through may not seem like a good idea, but with the way people are these days she wanted some isolation. Plus, if what Michelle said was true, they have nothing to fear. I do. After reading up and chatting with others who have had missing time and been abducted, it has opened up in my mind that maybe I was taken during that missing time I experienced those years back. A fellow missing timer suggested I try hypnosis to see if I can recover any of that time. Though I’m afraid of what I might find, I also want to know what happened during that time. Recently I have been witnessing strange lights in the skies above my property. Some I can explain after a while, like the drones that the border patrol uses, or at least that I’ve been told they use, and small planes. But others are not so easy to explain. There also have been strange noises coming out of the desert at night that aren’t the local wildlife I’ve grown accustomed to. Though I haven’t seen anything yet I get the feeling something will show itself. The nose bleeds have started up again as well. They come out of nowhere and they usually come around the time the lights appear in the sky. I’ve also been seeing strange flashes, light a camera flash, around places at random and even during the day. I might go get that hypnosis done soon before I end up disappearing for good this time. Only time will tell. Credit: Seth Raziel This story was submitted to Creepypasta.com by a fellow reader. To submit your own creepypasta tale for consideration and publication to this site, visit our submissions page today. Copyright Statement: Unless explicitly stated, all stories published on Creepypasta.com are the property of (and under copyright to) their respective authors, and may not be narrated or performed under any circumstance.