I not only saw one of these creepy things, I actually carved my name in it. At the time I didn't know what the damn thing was, but I was with my girlfriend so it seemed only natural that I should carve Harald + Stephanie on to it.
The year was 1967, in Chipwhich Califoria, a small beach town just south of San Diego. I was home from college for the summer working at the AnP. Stephanie came into the store to pick up a few things for her mother. She asked me if I'd heard about the dead guy washed up on the beach.
Being college educated I felt it my duty to put her straight on the facts. The body was identified as a Mr. Herman Dail from San Diego. The police said he had been in the water a long time. Stephanie was all big brown dough eyes when I boldly suggested we stroll down there after I got off work.
There wasn't much to see and a lot of people were hanging around the site so we wandered down the beach to find a more secluded area. I was angling for a little private tutoring in the art of smooching. That's when Stephanie notice a towering green thing sticking out of a car parked next to the beach...
...I had just I finished my love inspired carving when two black vans pulled up. The vans just sat there with the motors running and head lights shining on us. We couldn't see inside the vans because the windows were blacked out, but it sure felt like we were being looked at very hard. Stephanie gave me a nervous nudge so I helped her slide off the car. We turned and walked away. It made me feel like a big coward, which put a damper on the rest of our date. I decided to go back on my own the next day and see what was up.
I wasn't really surprised the car was gone. What was weird is that there were no tire tracks in the sand. In fact the whole area looked like it had been raked clean and there was the smell of ammonia in the air.
The next day I received an anonymous envelope with a photograph of me and Stephanie climbing off the roof of the car. There was no note inside, but the message was clear. The people the black vans knew who we were, where we lived and bad things would happen if we talked about what we had seen.
So we didn't talk. In fact Stephanie and I didn't even talked to each other about what happened. We went out a few more times, and then I went back to college. We didn't write, we didn't call. We intentionally lost touch with each other.
Now, I'm an old fart with multiple health issues and a very boring life watching TV and eating incurably bland food. I hated that town, with it's self righteous packs of mothers and the stodgy retired military dads always telling me what I should or shouldn't do. We lived not far from the beach, but I had an ear condition that my Mom said would kill me if I got salt water inside my ear, so I didn't hang out at the beach much and never learned how to swim. That's about as nostalgic as I get...
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